In interviews after leaving The Mercury News, Webb described the 1997 controversy as media manipulation. The article discussed Webb's contacts with Ross's attorney and prosecution complaints of how Ross's defense had used Webb's series. 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. [57], The report covered actions by Department of Justice employees in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the DEA, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and U.S. Webb disagreed with this conclusion.[1][2]. "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said. Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . "As a PhD student, McCoy went to Vietnam and built an absolutely damning case about the CIA's involvement with trafficking heroin. Webb was put under pressure most certainly from the CIA under John Deutch for his reporting. What was new about Webb's reports, published under the title "Dark Alliance" in the Californian paper the San Jose Mercury News, was that for the first time it brought the story back home. Snowfall is an American crime drama television series set in Los Angeles in 1983. [8] In 1979, Webb married Susan Bell; the couple eventually had three children. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting for a series of stories on the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct during northern California's 1989 earthquake. We are in the living room of Bell's house just outside Sacramento, California. 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. He made that very clear. Dr. Gary A. Webb is a geriatrician in Marco Island, Florida. "The first story he had to file was about a police horse which had died of constipation.". And yet, for all his Easy Rider tendencies, he was also a dedicated family man with an extraordinary appetite for researching minutiae. [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. 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, 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 third article discussed the social effects of the crack trade, noting that it had a disparate effect on African-Americans. "Gary was 18 and I was 16 when we first met and started dating in Indianapolis," said Sue Stokes. By 1997, Bell tells me, Webb - whose 30-year career had earned him more awards than there is room for in her study - had been reassigned to the Mercury News's office in Cupertino. He died on December 10, 2004 in Carmichael, California, USA. 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. gary webb obituary WEBB, Gary W. Age 67, passed away Monday, March 27, 2017 in the home he built in Madison Township. 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. Gary was born Sept. 4, 1947, to Percy and Pauline (Haas) Webb. 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. "He told me, not long before he died, that he didn't want to get up in the mornings," she says. It found that "the allegations contained in the original Mercury News articles were exaggerations of the actual facts." [71], After Webb's death, a collection of his stories from before and after the "Dark Alliance" series was published. Tara Becker-Gray Lee News Network Jan 17, 2019 0 1 of 2 C. Webb The body found at a house fire at 13308 95th Ave. in rural Blue Grass on Thursday night has been identified as Cynthia Webb, 59.. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. 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. To pay off his mounting debts, Webb sold the Carmichael property, where he was living alone, and arranged to move in with his mother. According to the report, the Inspector-General's office (OIG) examined all information the agency had "relating to CIA knowledge of drug trafficking allegations in regard to any person directly or indirectly involved in Contra activities." It also examined "how CIA handled and responded to information regarding allegations of drug trafficking" by people involved in Contra activities or support. If the antagonism of competing publications was predictable, what happened to Webb within his own newspaper was not. "You sound very scared," Moreira remarks. "It was terrible," said Price. Kill the Messenger, a movie starring Jeremy Renner, just opened, about the life and death of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb, who committed suicide in 2004. According to the report's "Epilogue," the report was completed in December 1997 but was not released because the DEA was still attempting to use Danilo Blandn in an investigation of international drug dealers and was concerned that the report would affect the viability of the investigation. 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. in Central America", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gary_Webb&oldid=1149653447, This page was last edited on 13 April 2023, at 15:41. The story was picked up by black talk-radio stations. [citation needed], Views on Webb's journalism have been polarized. 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. [67], Webb later moved to the State Assembly's Office of Majority Services. Gary Webb became, quite unfairly, the victim of one of the most extraordinary examples of piling on by the mainstream press, ever.". "Looking back," she says, "I think Gary had been obsessed with suicide for some time. He was taken to hospital by air ambulance. The series revolves around the first crack epidemic and its impact on the culture of the city. In the six years he worked at its Sacramento office, he won the HL Mencken award, for a story exposing corruption in California's drug enforcement agency, and his Pulitzer prize - won jointly, as part of a Mercury News team covering the 1990 Loma Prieta earthquake. Webb's ex wife, Susan Bell told reporters that she believed Webb had died by suicide. Webb, whose plans to become a journalist had begun when he was 13, but never included equine death notices, resigned from the Mercury News a few months later. [39] Carey's critique appeared in mid-October and went through several of the Post's criticisms of the series, including the importance of Blandn's drug ring in spreading crack, questions about Blandn's testimony in court, and how specific series allegations about CIA involvement had been, giving Webb's responses. And it was ignored by the US media, for all of those reasons. Few reporters I've known could match his nose for an investigative story. [31] In their front-page article, reporters Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus wrote that "available information" did not support the series's claims and that "the rise of crack" was "a broad-based phenomenon" driven in numerous places by diverse players. 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". Webb undeniably made mistakes of detail and emphasis in the newspaper version of "Dark Alliance". His wife, Gemma, was a member of the Sidcup fan club. Sacramento Bee The Sacramento County Coroner's Office issued a statement Tuesday after receiving calls about investigative journalist Gary Webb's death being caused by more than one wound . 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." [3], Webb was born in Corona, California. [68], In August 2004, Webb joined the Sacramento News & Review, an alternative weekly newspaper, where he continued doing investigative writing. "It was the worst day of my life." "[82], Kill the Messenger (2014) is based on Webb's book Dark Alliance and Nick Schou's biography of Webb. The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. The Real Housewives of Atlanta The Bachelor Sister Wives 90 Day Fiance Wife Swap The Amazing Race Australia Married at First Sight The Real Housewives of Dallas My 600-lb Life Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Gary Stephen Webb (August 31, 1955 - December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist. When Webb wrote another story on the raid evidence in early October, it received wide attention in Los Angeles. Webb's research took a year, in the course of which he received death threats. Celebrity. That wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been willing to stand up and risk it all.". 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 passing of Gary ends more than 50 years with his best friend and loving wife, Marilyn J. 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. He was the journalist who wrote a famous-or infamous-1996 series for the San Jose Mercury News that maintained a CIA-supported drug ring based in Los Angeles had triggered the. [54] Editors at the paper, on the other hand, felt that Webb had failed to tell them about information that contradicted the series's claims and that he "responded to concerns not with reasoned argument, but with accusations of us selling him out. After introducing the three, the first article discussed primarily Blandn and Meneses, and their relationship with the Contras and the CIA. 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." Webb followed up Baca's leads at the California State Library, examining Congressional records and FBI reports. It was truthful. 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." "That's right," says Blum. 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. ", The significant legacy of the Webb case, "the reason this whole affair remains so significant today," Blum says, "is this: the knowledge that, if one individual dares raise such serious issues, they risk confronting a tremendous apparatus that is prepared to whack them hard, and there is very little they can expect by way of support. By the late spring of 1996, Webb was ready to publish. [66] ", Many of these are in the series archive at. He was laid off in February 2004 when Assembly Member Fabian Nez was elected Speaker. 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. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California." The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors. But Webb had one huge blind side: He was fundamentally a man of passion, not of fairness. [19] The series was published in The Mercury News in three parts, from Sunday, 18 August 1996 to 20 August 1996, with a first long article and one or two shorter articles appearing each day. The first article in "Dark Alliance" that discussed the failure of law enforcement agencies to prosecute Blandn and Meneses had mentioned several cases. [18], Webb began researching "Dark Alliance" in July 1995. 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. Gary Webb was born on August 31, 1955 in Corona, California, USA. In the column, Ceppos defended parts of the article, writing that the series had "solidly documented" that the drug ring described in the series did have connections with the Contras and did sell large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles. 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. Webb had become, as somebody put it, "radioactive". [71] "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said. According to Schou, the investigation "confirmed key chunks of Webb's allegations." [11], In 1983, Webb moved to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he continued doing investigative work. 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? Walter Bogdanich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who worked with Webb on The Plain Dealer, told American Journalism Review editor Susan Paterno "He was brilliant; he knew more about public records than anybody I've ever known. According to a description of Webb's injuries in the Los Angeles Times, he shot himself with a .38 revolver, which he placed near his right ear. He was born January 28, 1950 in Middletown, OH to Paul and Dorothy (Hawkins) Webb. I mean - please.". Gary Webb's Ex-Wife Set to Attend New York Premiere By Richard Horgan October 8, 2014 Cleveland Plain Dealer film critic Clint O'Connor had a solid feature the other day about Kill the. The hard-charging investigative reporter's career imploded in the wake of his much-criticized "Dark Alliance" series about the CIA and crack cocaine. The article resulted in a lawsuit against Webb's paper which the plaintiffs won. Then, on 10 December, he resigned. 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