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Webb had become, as somebody put it, "radioactive". It concluded, however, that these problems were "a far cry from the type of broad manipulation and corruption of the federal criminal justice system suggested by the original allegations.". When he was engaged, he worked hard. He was a writer, known for Kill the Messenger (2014), Filming in Georgia (2015) and Crack in America (2015). It was good that his story forced those reports to come out, but part of what made that happen was based on misleading information. Ricky Donnell "Freeway Rick" Ross (born January 26, 1960) is an American author and convicted drug trafficker best known for the drug empire he established in Los Angeles, California, in the early to mid 1980s. Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff". Maxine Waters found a govt employee ran the South Central LA drug ring & The DOJ removed that section of the report : r/conspiracy 3 yr. ago Posted by shylock92008 [60], The House Intelligence Committee issued its report in February 2000. Join iconic brands and world-class marketing leaders at Brandweek to unlock powerful insights and impact-driven strategies. When they married, she was aged just 21. [72] A New York Times profile of Webb in June 1997 noted that two of his series written for the Cleveland Plain Dealer had resulted in lawsuits that the paper had settled. A 1985 series, "Doctoring the Truth," uncovered problems in the State Medical Board[12] and led to an Ohio House investigation which resulted in major revisions to the state Medical Practice Act. The third article, by Mitchell and Fulwood, covered the effects of crack on African-Americans and how it affected their reaction to some of the rumors that arose after the "Dark Alliance" series. [11], In 1983, Webb moved to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he continued doing investigative work. In a 2013 article in the LA Weekly, Schou wrote that Webb was "vindicated by a 1998 CIA Inspector General report, which revealed that for more than a decade the agency had covered up a business relationship it had with Nicaraguan drug dealers like Blandn. The legendary civil-rights activist Dick Gregory was arrested while he protested outside the CIA's headquarters; Gregory began referring to the organisation as "Crack in America". The attack on Gary Webb and his series in the San Jose Mercury News remains one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist's competence in living memory . margin-top: 10px; that the "federal government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack that coursed through black neighborhoods in the 1980s"). A secret deal allowed drugs to go unreported by the DCI. Webb established incontrovertible links * between Ricky Ross and Blandn who, two years later, would betray Ross to the authorities. He was born at Emmanuel Hospital in. "They had him writing obituaries," she said. American racer Cooper Webb is married to his wife named Mariah Williams Webb. But they underestimated the paradigm shifting power of the internet, and the intelligence of Webb, who not only listed the explosive story online . Ross was also released early after cooperating in an investigation of police corruption, but was rearrested a few months later in a sting operation arranged with Blandn's help. California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein also took note and wrote to CIA director John Deutch and Attorney General Janet Reno, asking for investigations into the articles' allegations. Attend in Miami or virtually, Sept. 1114. LOS ANGELES, Dec. 12 - Gary Webb, a reporter who won national attention with a series of articles, later discredited, linking the Central Intelligence Agency to the spread of crack . "Look at what happened to Gary Webb. Gary Hays Webb, 78, passed away on Monday May 9, 2022, at ThedaCare Regional Medical Center, Neenah. OR was he like Epstein? He received his medical degree from American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine and has been in practice for more than. Webb's then-wife Sue remembers coming home from the shops and finding her. . [61] According to the report, it used Webb's reporting and writing as "key resources in focusing and refining the investigation." It reads: "There should be no fetters on reporters, nor must they tamper with the truth, but give light so the people will find their own way." Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . ". A passing motorist - a heavily tattooed young man - gave him a lift home, then returned and stole the motorcycle, which police recovered from him three days after Webb's death. Gary Stephen Webb(August 31, 1955 - December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist. He died on December 10, 2004 in Carmichael, California, USA. But, Ceppos wrote, the series "did not meet our standards" in four areas. In 2004, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb was found dead from an apparent suicide, as Democracy Now! Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. In a three-part series published in the San Jose Mercury News, "Dark Alliance," Webb alleges that not only was the CIA aware cocaine sold in the U.S. during the 1980s was funding the Nicaraguan Contras, they were complicit in its distribution. I remain astounded by the editorial decisions they made.". I felt weak and distressed; the whole thing was so fresh. The first detailed article on the series's claims appeared in The Washington Post in early October. He crashed and shredded his clothes, face and body on a barbed-wire fence." [10] The series, which examined the murder of a coal company president with ties to organized crime, won the national Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for reporting from a small newspaper. [40] Ceppos also asked reporter Pete Carey to write a critique of the series for publication in The Mercury News, and had the controversial website artwork changed. I mean - please.". As a result, some major US newspapers ignored its findings completely, while others relegated a brief summary to their inside pages. Talking about his wife, Mariah Webb is a nurse who also educates about essential products . Like the CIA and Justice Department reports, it also found that neither Blandn, Meneses, nor Ross were associated with the CIA. "Looking back," she says, "I think Gary had been obsessed with suicide for some time. Webb, one of the boldest and most outstanding reporters of his generation, was the journalist who, in 1996, established the connection between the CIA and major drug dealers in Los Angeles, some of whose profits had been channelled to fund the Contra guerrilla movement in Nicaragua. The second volume, "The Contra Story," was issued in a classified version on April 27, 1998, and in an unclassified version on October 8, 1998. WEBB, Mr. Gary Lee, our beloved son, husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle went home with his heavenly Father Monday, August 29, 2011 at University of Michigan Hospital. [66] Gary Webb's painstaking investigation and the incindiary conclusions he drew from it were based mostly on public records, as detailed in the "notes on sources" section in "Dark Alliance", including: undercover audio tapes, declassified government documents from the CIA, DEA, FBI, L.A. Sheriff's Department, files from the Iran-Contra . [33] Golden also referred to the controversy over Webb's contacts with Ross's lawyer. Nick Schou, a journalist who wrote a 2006 biography of Webb, has claimed that this was the most important error in the series. GARY WEBB: His wife's office was burglarized. At that time, Webb (pictured) was best known for the controversial three-part CIA 1996 expose he wrote the San Jose Mercury News called "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the . "He rang me up that day. The Los Angeles Times and other major papers published articles suggesting the "Dark Alliance" claims were overstated and, in November 1996, Jerome Ceppos, the executive editor at Mercury News, wrote about being "in the eye of the storm". The consensus, insofar as one exists, is that he probably overstated both the amount of drug money made by Ross and Blandn, and the percentage of those profits diverted to the Contras. Parry, the first reporter to write about the US authorities' drug-running on behalf of the Contras, had survived a campaign by the White House to discredit first his story, then his reputation. Calling the Post's overall focus "misplaced", Overholser expressed regret that the paper had not taken the opportunity to re-examine whether the CIA had overlooked Contra involvement in drug smuggling, "a subject The Post and the public had given short shrift. When I first heard the news, I tell Bell, I was inclined to believe the conspiracy theories that still proliferate on the internet, suggesting that Webb had been assassinated - either by one of the drug dealers he'd met while writing Dark Alliance, or by the intelligence services who were supposed to police them. Begun 1996, the divorce and battle over cash of Grammy winner Jimmy Webb age 75, father of six, wed 22 years to Patsy, 64, daughter of late actor Barry Sullivan is getting longer. And it was ignored by the US media, for all of those reasons. Look at the way the US press reports on Iraq. When Ross discovered the market for crack in Los Angeles, he began buying cocaine from Blandn. Jeff Leen, assistant managing editor for investigative reporting at The Washington Post, wrote in a 2014 opinion page article that "the report found no CIA relationship with the drug ring Webb had written about." "He thought I was being cowardly. "Gary was 18 and I was 16 when we first met and started dating in Indianapolis," said Sue Stokes. Gary Webb became, quite unfairly, the victim of one of the most extraordinary examples of piling on by the mainstream press, ever.". After Ceppos' column, The Mercury News spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story. [9], Webb's first major investigative work appeared in 1980, when the Cincinnati Post published "The Coal Connection," a seventeen-part series by Webb and Post reporter Thomas Scheffey. But the biggest loss he had was the writing. "Do not quote me. Webb may indeed be physically dead, but his research is more alive today than ever before, and continues to haunt the shadow government and snowball into a monster that will undoubtedly have its eventual revenge. Why bring up old white people atrocities against black people now? An investigative journalist, Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. "They tried to make us look like crazies," says Blum. padding-bottom: 20px; The room is decorated with his trophies: a Pulitzer prize hangs next to his HL Mencken award; also on the wall is a framed advertisement for The Kentucky Post. But while calling the flaws in the series "unforgivably careless journalism," Overholser also criticized the Post's refusal to print Ceppos' letter defending the series and sharply criticized the Post's coverage of the story. Eli Tomac on track during Media Day at Daytona International Speedway, Friday, March 3, 2023. "It was like someone had made a terrible noise, or a terrible smell, in a small room," recalls Jonathan Winer, Kerry's chief senate staff investigator . Baca claimed that a drug dealer with close links to the CIA had framed her boyfriend, who was also in the cocaine business. Webb, Gary Gary T. Webb, age 67, of Hamilton, Michigan, passed away peacefully surrounded by his loving family Thursday, November 11, 2021. The CIA Inspector-General's report was issued in two volumes. At the commemorative service for Webb, held at the Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento, Bell read out the letter Webb had written to his son Eric, now 17. He is survived by his loving wife, Wendie, of Elgin; grandmother, Eileen Carrier of Elgin;. "I am scared," the voice replies. The other article, citing interviews with current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials, questioned the importance of the drug dealers discussed in the series, both in the crack cocaine trade and in supporting the Nicaraguan Contras' fight against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. [65], Within "The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On" essay Webb stated he believed there was an active "collusion between the press and the powerful" to report freely on inconsequential matters, "but when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff We begin to see the limits of our freedoms". 4) The series "created impressions that were open to misinterpretation" through "imprecise language and graphics. E&P Staff. 3) The series oversimplified how the crack epidemic grew. A series of expose articles in the San Jose Mercury-News by reporter Gary Webb told tales of a drug triangle during the 1980s that linked CIA officials in Central America, a San Francisco drug . [16] As part of The Mercury News team that covered the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Webb and his colleague Pete Carey wrote a story examining the causes of the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct. }. He concluded, "How did these shortcomings occur? "I believe that Americans, as a nation, are mainly concerned with living their happy little lives. [71] "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said. His. [60], It found nothing to support the claim that "the drug trafficking activities of Blandn and Meneses were motivated by any commitment to support the Contra cause or Contra activities undertaken by CIA." He cites the case of Alfred McCoy, now Professor of South East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin. Some might consider it an inappropriate assignment for a man with responsibilities. Gary Webb's wife, Sue Webb (now Sue Stokes), said that he had been depressed for years due to his inability to get hired at a daily newspaper. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. He wrote that the series likely "oversimplified" the crack epidemic in America and the supposed "critical role" the dealers written about in the series played in it. "The second bullet," adds Bell, who has worked for more than 20 years in the area of respiratory therapy, "struck his carotid artery. They were outraged by the series's charges.[27]. Occupation: Machine Operators, Assemblers, and Inspectors Occupations. The series revolves around the first crack epidemic and its impact on the culture of the city. "To get back at his editors?". Webb strongly disagreed with Ceppos's column and, in interviews, was harshly critical of the paper's handling of the story. He made that very clear. Emma Lee Webb, age 75, of Crossett, AR passed away Monday February 27, 2023, in her home surrounded by her family. Gary Webb was at his desk in the Mercury News's Sacramento office, in July 1995, when he received a message to call Coral Baca, a Hispanic woman from the San Francisco Bay area, allegedly connected to a Colombian drug cartel. Snowfall is an American crime drama television series set in Los Angeles in 1983. Am J Mens Health, 2018 Mar 1:1557988318758788. doi: 10.1177/1557988318758788. "But Gary thought that if something was true, it should be told. The story they printed was just awful. When facts didn't fit his theory, he tended to shove them to the sidelines. By the late spring of 1996, Webb was ready to publish. When she got indignant," she adds, "he went to meet her.". Webb, Bell explains, had written four letters explaining what he was about to do - one to her, one to each of their three children - and mailed them immediately before he killed himself. [67], Webb later moved to the State Assembly's Office of Majority Services. Unfortunately, the railroading of Gary Webb had begun and he was run over. This support "was not directed by anyone within the Contra movement who had an association with the CIA," and the Committee found "no evidence that the CIA or the Intelligence Community was aware of these individuals support. In a three-part expos, investigative journalist Gary Webb reported that a guerrilla army in Nicaragua had used crack cocaine sales in Los Angeles' black neighborhoods to fund an attempted coup of Nicaragua's socialist government in the 1980s and that the CIA had purposefully funded it. On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and split his helmet open. 'Dark Alliance' - both as journalism and as a book - is a convoluted narrative, but the crucial link it establishes is between the "agricultural salesman" Oscar Danilo Blandn, a Contra sympathiser with close CIA links, and his best customer, an LA drug dealer known as "Freeway" Ricky Ross. Webb, unlike Blum or Kerry, had to face his difficulties alone. Emma Lee Webb. It found that Blandn received permanent resident status "in a wholly improper manner" and that for some time the Department "was not certain whether to prosecute Meneses, or use him as a cooperating witness." And it ruined that reporter's career. "The cause of death was determined to be self . The review was conducted primarily by editor Jonathan Krim and reporter Pete Carey, who had written the paper's first published analysis of the series. He also had this inherent belief that the truth could not harm him. Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb How Kill the Messenger Will Vindicate Investigative Journalist Gary Webb Melinda Welsh September 29, 2014 This one has all the ingredients of a dreamed-up Hollywood. Call 911 for assistance. [41], When the Los Angeles Times series appeared, Ceppos again wrote to defend the original series. Cooper and Mariah were engaged before they finally tied the knot. Depressed, he became increasingly unpredictable in his behaviour and embarked on a series of affairs; he was divorced from Bell in 2000, though he remained close to her throughout his life and lived in a house in nearby Carmichael. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. Jack Blum, who was the lead investigator for Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, which produced a highly damning 1989 report on drug-smuggling in the guise of national security, is one of several commentators to have questioned aspects of Webb's original reporting. Because Blandn cooperated with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), he spent only 28 months in prison, became a paid government informant, and received permanent resident status. [36] McManus wrote that Blandn's and Meneses's contributions to Contra organizations were significantly less than the "millions" claimed in the series, and stated there was no evidence that the CIA had tried to protect them. He was the much-loved father of Lindsay (Stephen . Webb, according to Bell, was a man who, more than most, found that his mood and self-esteem fluctuated in accordance with his professional fortunes. A perceptive, engaging woman of 48, she has turned an adjoining study into a small shrine to her late husband, who would have celebrated his 50th birthday five weeks ago. His was the story of a man who gains information of wrongdoing, then, attempting to act in the public interest, seeks protection from his superiors, and the forces of law, and does not receive it. "By the end of his life he was just in a lot of pain," said Webb's ex-wife, Susan Bell. When it did, beginning with The Washington Post, it shocked Webb's critics as much as his many admirers. color: #ddd; But once the flak really started to fly, from the nation's grandest newspapers, Ceppos - having come under exactly what form of pressure it is difficult to know - printed a retraction which Webb dismissed as spineless. And he finallyyou know, they finally left the country. Gary Webb, (born August 31, 1955, Corona, California, U.S.died December 10, 2004, Carmichael, California), American investigative journalist who wrote a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 on connections between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S.-backed Contra army seeking to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist He was previously married to Sue Bell. While working at the legislature, Webb continued to do freelance investigative reporting, sometimes based on his investigative work. He said: 'No. The reports of the three federal investigations into the claims of "Dark Alliance" were not released until over a year after the series's publication. But the tragedy had a deeper meaning. "This is an appalling charge," says a tense-looking Deutch. .article-native-ad { Investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of stories in 1996 for the San Jose Mercury News that documented the US-government-backed Contra insurgents' drug pipeline into Los Angeles. Vivian Corrie, a part of his liver in a life-threatening operation. [56] He resigned from the paper in November 1997. The couple got married recently in November of 2020 after dating for some time. Gary Douglas Webb of Radnor, PA, passed away on October 19, 2021 Born January 3rd, 1943 in Montreal, Quebec, he was the son of the late John Douglas Webb and the late Jeannie (Penny) Hardie. If you work through friendly reporters on major newspapers, it comes off as The New York Times saying it and not a mouthpiece of the CIA. In 1996, the award-winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered CIA links to Los Angeles drug dealers. It also stated that the Contras may have acted with the knowledge and protection of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Webb worked for several newspapers including The Kentucky Post and Cleveland Plain Dealer. [73], On the other hand, many of the writers and editors who worked with him have had high praise for him. ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". After a local newspaper reported that Webb had died from multiple gunshots, the coroner's office received so many calls asking about Webb's death that Sacramento County Coroner Robert Lyons issued a statement confirming Webb had died by suicide. 71K views 8 years ago Gary Webb's son Ian talks about the film in which Jeremy Renner plays his late journalist father. [8] In 1979, Webb married Susan Bell; the couple eventually had three children. In 1986, Webb wrote an article saying that the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, Frank D. Celebrezze accepted contributions from groups with organized crime connections. [35] The second article, by McManus, was the longest of the series and dealt with the role of the Contras in the drug trade and CIA knowledge of drug activities by the Contras. She and Gary were married from 1979 to 2000 and had three children. Some editors regarded him as stubborn to the point of insolence. So he blew her off. Webb chose the second option. The article resulted in a lawsuit against Webb's paper which the plaintiffs won. According to Bell, Webb had been unhappy for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper. The first article, by Katz, developed a different picture of the origins of the crack trade than "Dark Alliance" had described, with more gangs and smugglers participating. "People told me that," she says. The first one, "The California Story," was issued in a classified version on December 17, 1997, and in an unclassified version on January 29, 1998. Much of the article highlighted the failure of law enforcement agencies to successfully prosecute them and stated that this was largely due to their Contra and CIA connections. In and out of work, he had a reputation for taking risks. On the last day Webb was alive, his motorbike broke down while he was moving to his mother's house. I felt she really trashed me. Two years later, he was promoted to Vice President of Knight Ridder, the Mercury News's parent company; he retired from this position last month. "The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post", he stated. To Read the Full Story Become an Adweek+ Subscriber. But ultimately, the responsibility was, and is, mine.". [4] When Webb's father retired from the Marines, the family settled in a suburb of Indianapolis, where Webb and his brother attended high school. The normal process is, or should be, that a reporter files a story and is robustly challenged by his paper's lawyers and editors - who, if satisfied that the report is accurate - publish, then defend the writer to the hilt. Webb's pieces were not dealing with nameless peasants slaughtered in some distant republic, but demonstrated a clear link between the CIA and the suppliers of the gangs delivering crack to the ghetto of Watts, in South Central Los Angeles. It was truthful. The Department of Justice Inspector-General's report was released on July 23, 1998. . "Gary didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. He stayed home, playing computer games, and began smoking cannabis heavily. "Ross," his report went on, dealt "on a scale never before conceived," with "a staggering turnover" of "50 to 100 kilos of cocaine a day". The response from the American press took two months to arrive. And yet, for all his Easy Rider tendencies, he was also a dedicated family man with an extraordinary appetite for researching minutiae. They failed because the climate was more sceptical then. [51], The editors met with Webb several times in February to discuss the results of the paper's internal review and eventually decided to print neither Carey's draft article nor the articles Webb had filed. Ceppos and Garcia have long since lost any taste for public discussion of "Dark Alliance".

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