But the tragedy had a deeper meaning. After police brought the three passengers back to the station, the news had come: John Grachek died at the hospital. Unable to get work from any major US newspaper, he spent the four months before his death writing for * a free-sheet covering the Sacramento area. The series follows the stories of several characters whose lives are fated to intersect including CIA operative Teddy McDonald who helps to secure guns for the Contras. * The agency's response was to try to prevent him from getting his doctorate, then block his advancement in the academic world. A revised version was published in 1999 that incorporated Webb's response to the CIA and Justice Department reports. 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. 4) The series "created impressions that were open to misinterpretation" through "imprecise language and graphics. In city after city, local dealers either bought from Ross or got left behind."[24]. The hard-charging investigative reporter's career imploded in the wake of his much-criticized "Dark Alliance" series about the CIA and crack cocaine. Born January 3rd, 1943 in Montreal, Quebec, he was the son of the late John Douglas Webb and the late Jeannie (Penny) Hardie Penman. But his central thesis - that the CIA, having participated in narcotics trafficking in central America, had, at best, turned a blind eye to the activities of drug dealers in LA - has never been in question. Many writers discussing the series point to errors in it. When his body was found, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was on the DVD machine, and his favourite CD, Ian Hunter's live album Welcome to the Club, was in the CD player. And this is not a happy story - or," she adds, "a little one.". The first article in "Dark Alliance" that discussed the failure of law enforcement agencies to prosecute Blandn and Meneses had mentioned several cases. In February last year he was laid off by the State Legislature. With Baca's encouragement, he started to investigate a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine dealer named Oscar Danilo Blandn. "It was the worst day of my life." It also examined "how CIA handled and responded to information regarding allegations of drug trafficking" by people involved in Contra activities or support. [60], The House Intelligence Committee issued its report in February 2000. He is from United States. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. Leen, who covered the cocaine trade for the Miami Herald in the 1980s, rejects the claim that "because the report uncovered an agency mindset of indifference to drug-smuggling allegations", it vindicated Webb's reporting. 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. On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and split his helmet open. Every year since investigative journalist Gary Webb took his own life in 2004, I have marked the anniversary of that sad event by recalling the debt that American history owes to Webb for his. When removal men arrived, on the morning of 10 December 2004, they found a sign on his front door, which read: ''Please do not enter. Gary divorced from his wife in 2000, though the two remained close during his final years. [6], Webb first began writing for the student newspaper at his college in Indianapolis. The CIA Inspector-General's report was issued in two volumes. He said: 'No. By this stage, he was prepared to work as a jobbing reporter. During and immediately after the controversy over "Dark Alliance," Webb's earlier writing was examined closely. 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. So he blew her off. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress. Army. There were no offers. ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". "[62] It also found no evidence to support Webb's suggestion that several other drug smugglers mentioned in the series were associated with the CIA, or that anyone associated with the CIA or other intelligence agencies was involved in supplying or selling drugs in Los Angeles.[62]. Meneses, an established smuggler and a Contra supporter as well, taught Blandn how to smuggle and provided him with cocaine. He was no hero either. She and Gary were married from 1979 to 2000 and had three children. and Drugs Has a Life of Its Own", "Pivotal Figures of Newspaper Series May Be Only Bit Players", "Tracking the Genesis of the Crack Trade", "Examining Charges of CIA Role in Crack Sales", "History Fuels Outrage Over Crack Allegations", "Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes for "Tawdry" Attacks", "Mercury News Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos' Letter to the Washington Post", "Washington Post response to Mercury News Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos", "Despite critics, a good story Crack and the contras", "CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: Epilogue", "CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: Conclusions", United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, "Are You Sure You Want to Ruin Your Career? Webb, unlike Blum or Kerry, had to face his difficulties alone. 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. A jury awarded the plaintiffs over 13 million dollars and the case was later settled. Moreira - a senior news producer for Canal Plus - has established a reputation for courage and independence of mind in his own foreign reporting, and was recently described by Le Monde as "the Che Guevara of news media". There was no coffin, casket or tombstone. One instalment of the LA Times's 18,000-word rebuttal of Webb's piece, published in October 1996, sought to minimise the importance of his key witness, Ricky Ross. "Looking back," she says, "I think Gary had been obsessed with suicide for some time. The real Gary Webb talks about his 1996 story "Dark Alliance," which criticizes the CIA's involvement (or lack thereof) with regard to the cocaine coming into the U.S. during the 1980s. Working in San Jose would have meant daily contact with what Bell describes as "people he did not want to be with". He received his medical degree from American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine and has been in practice for more than 20 . [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. Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff". One of his last articles examined America's Army, a video game designed by the U.S. [56] He resigned from the paper in November 1997. The CIA denied the charges, and every major newspaper in the country . When Webb's body was discovered last December, Bell says, this last item had been dumped in the trash. Like Schou, Corn cites the inspector general's report, which he says "acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drugrunners (sic) while supporting the contras. After being reassigned to the Mercury News's office in Curpertino, where they had him writing death notices, Gary Webb resigned and fell into depression. Webb disagreed with this conclusion.[1][2]. [60], It found no information to support the claim that the agency interfered with law enforcement actions against Ross, Blandn or Meneses. Unto his romantic life, Gary married Gemma O'Neil in 1997. [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. It was also posted on The Mercury News website with additional information, including documents cited in the series and audio recordings of people quoted in the articles. The article discussed Webb's contacts with Ross's attorney and prosecution complaints of how Ross's defense had used Webb's series. The whole business, I suggested to Blum, has echoes of a classic Alfred Hitchcock plot. Webb, a former San Jose Mercury News reporter, was found dead in his Carmichael home Friday morning. [7] After transferring to Northern Kentucky, he entered its journalism program and wrote for the school paper, The Northerner. Webb came late to the. But as Krim told Webb's biographer Nick Schou, "The zeal that helped make Gary a relentless reporter was coupled with an inability to question himself, to entertain the notion that he might have erred. He also had this inherent belief that the truth could not harm him. [48] Despite the controversy that soon overtook the series, and the request of one board member to reconsider, the branch's board went ahead with the award in November. Gary Webb was a US Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who broke the story of the CIA involvement in the importation of cocaine into the U.S. He was born at Emmanuel Hospital in. According to Walt Bogdanich, a former colleague on the Plain Dealer who has won two Pulitzers and now works for The New York Times, Webb was the best retriever of information from public records he has ever seen. Numan's real name is Gary Anthony James Webb, and he was born on March 8, 1958. He celebrated his 62nd birthday in 2020. 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. The response from the American press took two months to arrive. WEBB, Gary T. - Age 55, of Goodrich, died Thursday, May 15, 2003 at his residence. It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? [71] "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said. 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 . 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. 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. Regarding issues raised in the series's shorter sidebar stories, it found that some in the government were "not eager" to have DEA agent Celerino Castillo "openly probe" activities at Ilopango Airport in El Salvador, where covert operations in support of the Contras were undertaken, and that the CIA had indeed intervened in a case involving smuggler Julio Zavala. Gary Webb was born in Corona, California, in 1955. His wife is Sue Webb (m. 1979-2000) Gary Webb Net Worth His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022. Snowfall is an American crime drama television series set in Los Angeles in 1983. Family (1) The collection, The Killing Game: Selected Stories from the Author of Dark Alliance, was edited by Webb's son, Eric. By the end of September, three federal investigations had been announced: an investigation into the CIA allegations conducted by CIA Inspector-General Frederick Hitz, an investigation into the law enforcement allegations by Justice Department Inspector-General Michael Bromwich, and a second investigation into the CIA by the House Intelligence Committee. 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. According to Corn, Webb "was wrong on some important details, but he was, in a way, closer to the truth than many of his establishment media critics who neglected the story of the real CIA-contra-cocaine connection." Webb conducted a year-long investigation during which he discovered that a San Francisco-based drug ring, which had ties to a CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan contra group called the FDN, sold cocaine to. Webb's continuing reporting also triggered a fourth investigation. Nick Schou, a journalist who wrote a 2006 biography of Webb, has claimed that this was the most important error in the series. He kept saying that he would never get another job in journalism.". Price placed Webb as the shooter. Who Is Gary Webb's Wife? "As a PhD student, McCoy went to Vietnam and built an absolutely damning case about the CIA's involvement with trafficking heroin. 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. "Do not quote me. Ceppos and Garcia have long since lost any taste for public discussion of "Dark Alliance". It found that "the allegations contained in the original Mercury News articles were exaggerations of the actual facts." Before his death, John Singleton maintained that Snowfall is its own account of how the crack epidemic began on the West Coast . 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