Gary Webb's "Approach Split" in the atrium of 20 Triton Street London. To show this, the series focused on three men: Ricky Ross, Oscar Danilo Blandn, and Norwin Meneses. Webb worked for several newspapers including The Kentucky Post and Cleveland Plain Dealer. [62], Examining the support that Meneses and Blandn gave to the local Contra organization in San Francisco, the report concluded that it was "not sufficient to finance the organization" and did not consist of "millions," contrary to the claims of the "Dark Alliance" series. 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. His career ended, his livelihood was destroyed and certain games were started to be . "It sounds crazy," says Bell, "but having his motorbike stolen was the last straw. "Look at what happened to Gary Webb. The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors. He stayed home, playing computer games, and began smoking cannabis heavily. 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. There has been speculation that he may have met with foul play because he had received two gunshot wounds to the head, The Sacramento Bee reported Wednesday. Webb's corpse was found in the bedroom, with two gunshot wounds to the head. He kept saying that he would never get another job in journalism.". "[64] Webb's longest response to the controversy was in "The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On," a chapter he contributed to an anthology of press criticism: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}, If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. Garcia responded by email but declined to speak on the record about the editing process of Webb's series. Some might consider it an inappropriate assignment for a man with responsibilities. Webb became a staff reporter for the San Jose Mercury News in 1988. "You do not understand the power of these people," he adds, referring to the US intelligence services. And the importance of exposing them. The third article discussed the social effects of the crack trade, noting that it had a disparate effect on African-Americans. Then, on 10 December, he resigned. He concluded, "How did these shortcomings occur? border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; It found that "the allegations contained in the original Mercury News articles were exaggerations of the actual facts." "To get back at his editors?". The series revolves around the first crack epidemic and its impact on the culture of the city. He was born August 27, 1968 in Saginaw, Michigan to Taylor Jr. and Loretta Webb. With Baca's encouragement, he started to investigate a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine dealer named Oscar Danilo Blandn. "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. Occupation: Machine Operators, Assemblers, and Inspectors Occupations. 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. Gary is survived by his loving wife of 41 years, Barbara; their son, Jeff; his nephew, Christopher (Stephanie) Webb; niece, Sara (Gary) Dugan; and . A revised version was published in 1999 that incorporated Webb's response to the CIA and Justice Department reports. "[78], While finding this part of the series unsupported, Schou said that some of the series's claims on CIA involvement are supported, writing that "The CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade." In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of stories exposing the connection between the CIA and the crack cocaine that was being sold in So. She acted opposite Dirk Bogarde in the groundbreaking film Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961), as the unsuspecting wife of a barrister who is a closet homosexual. But Ian Webbknows all too well the emotions that come with that experience. [71] When asked by local reporters about the possibility of two gunshots being a suicide, Lyons replied "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots, but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility." One of these was a 1986 raid on Blandn's drug organization by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which the article suggested had produced evidence of CIA ties to drug smuggling that was later suppressed. Webb joined the Mercury News in 1988, via the Cleveland Plain Dealer. But Webb had one huge blind side: He was fundamentally a man of passion, not of fairness. Taken during the London Open House 2014 event. The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges. His wife is Sue Webb (m. 1979-2000) Gary Webb Net Worth His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022. 3) The series oversimplified how the crack epidemic grew. She kept crying about how terrible it all was - by which I mean that she was, physically, crying. Garcia is deputy director of the John S Knight Fellowships in Journalism at Stanford University. [69], Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head. His father was a Marine sergeant, and the family moved frequently, as his career took him to new assignments. George Webb and Paul Cottrell have begun a weekly series on CoronaVirus now, Mondays at 5PM, EST on paul Cottrell's Rumble Channel. "But that," pointed out Blum, who is now a Washington attorney, "in no way - in no way - diminishes the wrongness of what these bastards did. Gary's story, however, is far from over and could never be killed by something as trivial as a material bullet. [29] Waters urged the CIA, the Department of Justice, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate. Gary Webb famously died of two gun shot wounds to the head and his death that was ruled a suicide, is the common sense notion that this was clearly assassination true? Gary Webb, friends say, was a far more combative character than either the Mercury News's executive editor Ceppos or page editor Garcia. 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. He placed his keys and ID cards on the kitchen table, together with a cremation certificate he had purchased for himself. [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. 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. Am J Mens Health, 2018 Mar 1:1557988318758788. doi: 10.1177/1557988318758788. By the late spring of 1996, Webb was ready to publish. Views on Webb's journalism have been polarized. ", She pauses: "That said, he did sleep with a gun under his bed.". He began his career working for newspapers in Kentucky and Ohio, winning numerous awards, and building a strong reputation for investigative writing. Corrie had primary biliary cirrhosis, a genetic liver disease that already had. Their explosive report, which appeared in 1989, was either ignored, or marginalised, by the American press. He was born Sept.10, 1957 in Willcox, Ariz. to RG Webb and Winnie Mae Shelton. "The second bullet," adds Bell, who has worked for more than 20 years in the area of respiratory therapy, "struck his carotid artery. 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. This did not happen in Webb's case. Should these editors subsequently deem the story to have been fatally flawed, they take the consequences. On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and split his helmet open. "He was crying. His corpse was discovered on the seventh anniversary of his resignation from the Mercury News. He cites the case of Alfred McCoy, now Professor of South East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin. "The first story he had to file was about a police horse which had died of constipation.". The link between drug-running and the Reagan regime's support for the right-wing terrorist group throughout the 1980s had been public knowledge for over a decade. ", "Reporter's suicide confirmed by coroner", "Repercussions From Flawed News Articles", "Herhold: Thinking back on journalist Gary Webb and the CIA", Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes for "Tawdry" Attacks, "Gary Webb was no journalism hero, despite what 'Kill the Messenger' says", "Jeremy Renner's 'Kill the Messenger' Gets Fall Release Date", The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department's Investigations and Prosecutions, United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, Report of Investigation Concerning Allegations of Connections Between CIA and The Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States, Central Intelligence Agency Office of the Inspector General, United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, "Secrecy, Conspiracy, and the Media During the CIA-Contra Affair", Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography, "Inside the Dark Alliance: Gary Webb on the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion", 'A NATURAL STORY': Tribute to 'Dark Alliance' and Journalist Gary Webb, San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, Archive of Gary Webb stories at Sacramento News and Review, "Frontline: Cocaine, Conspiracy Theories & the C.I.A. [52] Webb was allowed to keep working on the story and made one more trip to Nicaragua in March. "Gary didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. This emotive last phrase refers to Webb's experience in the immediate aftermath of publication of his three lengthy articles, in the summer of 1996. 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. Although he attended Northern Kentucky for four years, he did not finish his degree. Many writers discussing the series point to errors in it. 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. After Webb's death, a collection of his stories from before and after the "Dark Alliance" series was published. Gary's family found that old, storied, ("priceless to us," as his ex-wife, Susan Bell, described it to me) CDROM among his possessions. Film of this encounter survives. It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? n 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles under the title "Dark Alliance" for the suggesting a CIA connection between anti-government contras in Nicaragua and monies raised from. The response from the American press took two months to arrive. [20] The website artwork showed the silhouette of a man smoking a crack pipe superimposed over the CIA seal. Family (1) Look at the way the US press reports on Iraq. I first heard about Webb eight years ago, I tell Bell, from the Paris-based journalist Paul Moreira. I realise now he was thinking about suicide.". "Gary was 18 and I was 16 when we first met and started dating in Indianapolis," said Sue Stokes. "He told the guys with him he was fine," she recalls, "got back on the bike, then passed out, half an hour later. margin: 0 45px; Webb's then-wife Sue remembers coming home from the shops and finding her. [14] In 1984, Webb wrote a story titled Driving Off With Profits which claimed that the promoters of a race in Cleveland paid themselves nearly a million dollars from funds that should have gone to the city of Cleveland. Noting that most of the activities discussed in the report had nothing to do with the people Webb reported on, Kornbluh told Schou, "I can't say it's a vindication. It would have been our 25th wedding anniversary," Bell recalls. 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. 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. 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." When facts didn't fit his theory, he tended to shove them to the sidelines. 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. [50] By January, Webb filed drafts of four more articles based on his trip, but his editors concluded that the new articles would not help shore up the original series's claims. She said the paper wanted to make up for what it had done in the past. American racer Cooper Webb is married to his wife named Mariah Williams Webb. For instance, he published an article on racial profiling in traffic stops in Esquire magazine, in April 1999. that the "federal government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack that coursed through black neighborhoods in the 1980s"). "If I had one dream for you," he wrote, "it was that you would go into journalism and carry on the kind of work I did - fighting, with all your might, the oppression and bigotry and stupidity and greed that surrounds us. After the series's publication, the Northern California branch of the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996. [17] The Mercury News's coverage of the earthquake won its staff the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting in 1990. ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". The film broadened the debate which led to the decriminalisation of . According to Bell, Webb had been unhappy for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper. Age 43 years. [8] In 1979, Webb married Susan Bell; the couple eventually had three children. One of his last articles examined America's Army, a video game designed by the U.S. "Allow Gary Webb to be there [in the CIA investigation]," a heckler shouts. There is a CIA connection and I can demonstrate it.'". I believe that we fell short at every step of our process: in the writing, editing and production of our work. font-size: 34px; After Ceppos' column, The Mercury News spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story. GARY WEBB was an investigative reporter who focused on government and private sector corruption and who won more than thirty journalism awards. But the biggest loss he had was the writing. The first effect of the onslaught was to ease the pressure on the CIA. 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. 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. ", 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. If the antagonism of competing publications was predictable, what happened to Webb within his own newspaper was not. After the announcement of federal investigations into the claims made in the series, other newspapers began investigating, and several papers published articles suggesting the series' claims were overstated. While police were preparing the case against her boyfriend, Baca alleged, officers had disclosed documents which revealed that one of her lover's associates had been working for the Contras. Eli Tomac on track during Media Day at Daytona International Speedway, Friday, March 3, 2023. As it turned out," she adds, "that was not their intent.". This is why Webb's "Dark Alliance" series is an essential source, a primary text that every journalism student should study. 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. When they married, she was aged just 21. He said: 'No. "They had him writing obituaries," she said. His death was especially traumatic to the family since - as the coroner said - it could not be established whether he died instantly, or bled to death. He died by suicide on December 10, 2004. 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. Few reporters I've known could match his nose for an investigative story. In addition, Gary left multiple suicide notes to family members which were confirmed to be in his own hand by them.