"Back then. [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. Webb joined the Mercury News in 1988, via the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "It sounds crazy," says Bell, "but having his motorbike stolen was the last straw. I ask Bell. Unfortunately, the railroading of Gary Webb had begun and he was run over. "Do you think that a part of him did this out of revenge?" 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. Webb is best known for his "Dark Alliance" series, which appeared in The Mercury News in 1996. Gary Douglas Webb of Radnor, PA, passed away on October 19, 2021. "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. When Webb pressed the Mercury News to allow him to investigate the LA connection further, his own newspaper issued a retraction which earned its editor, Jerry Ceppos, wide praise from rival publications, but effectively disowned Webb, who then suffered the kind of corporate lynching that reporters are usually expected to dispense rather than endure. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. If the antagonism of competing publications was predictable, what happened to Webb within his own newspaper was not. He was born Sept.10, 1957 in Willcox, Ariz. to RG Webb and Winnie Mae Shelton. Tomac is used to good feelings when it comes to Daytona. By the autumn of 1997, on medication for clinical depression, he was given leave of absence from the paper. Cooper and Mariah were engaged before they finally tied the knot. The Open Mic: A Few Words with Cinematographer Ian Webb To Read the Full Story Become an Adweek+ Subscriber. "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 . Lynn Rd, Ranger WV - Rehold Address Directory I'm glad that I didn't dissuade him, because it was important to get the truth out but for Gary Webb, there was a very high price to pay." *, 'Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion' is published in the UK by Seven Stories Press, priced 11.99, Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Snowfall is an American crime drama television series set in Los Angeles in 1983. Occupation: Machine Operators, Assemblers, and Inspectors Occupations. Gary E. Webb, a dedicated husband, dad, pappy, coach, mentor, teacher, supporter, hero, and best friend, was called home by the Lord while surrounded by family. 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. Bell and her children helped Webb prepare 50 packages containing cuttings and his CV which they sent out to newspapers all over the US. line-height:1.5; "Gary was 18 and I was 16 when we first met and started dating in Indianapolis," said Sue Stokes. He is the oldest son of Pulitzer Prize-winninginvestigative journalist Gary Webb, the subject of the 2014 film "Kill the Messenger," starring Hollywood heavyweight Jeremy Renner. This is why Webb's "Dark Alliance" series is an essential source, a primary text that every journalism student should study. Gary Webb - Wikispooks 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. 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.. Gary was preceded in death by his mother and father, Donna and James Webb of Carpentersville. But the report was correct. Gary Webb, friends say, was a far more combative character than either the Mercury News's executive editor Ceppos or page editor Garcia. [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." We were dismissed as a bunch of nuts." Gary Webb | Okanogan Valley Gazette-Tribune Can these things possibly be? 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. Webb put in a call to Robert Parry. In interviews after leaving The Mercury News, Webb described the 1997 controversy as media manipulation. 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. [5], After high school, Webb attended an Indianapolis community college on a scholarship until his family moved to Cincinnati. [11], In 1983, Webb moved to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he continued doing investigative work. When it did, beginning with The Washington Post, it shocked Webb's critics as much as his many admirers. 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. GARY WEBB: His wife's office was burglarized. Shortly before his death, his motorcycle had been stolen (it was recovered by his family after his death). "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. The film broadened the debate which led to the decriminalisation of . 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. 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." [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. "He was sleeping more, he hated to get up in the morning, he started having a lot of motorcycle. After his resignation from The Mercury News, Webb expanded the "Dark Alliance" series into a book that responded to the criticism of the series and described his experiences writing the story and dealing with the controversy. . This did not happen in Webb's case. When he told me, I said it sounded crazy. Blandn and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. "[72] California Representative Maxine Waters, who was Webb's strongest supporter in Congress after the "Dark Alliance" controversy broke, issued a statement after Webb's death calling him "one of the finest investigative journalists that our country has ever seen. Gary Webb and the Iran-Contra-Cocaine Connection | WilderUtopia Eli Tomac on track during Media Day at Daytona International Speedway, Friday, March 3, 2023. Gary Webb's Ex-Wife Set to Attend New York Premiere - Adweek Pictured as a teenage fan: Gary Numan with Gemma, his now wife, getting his autograph in 1985 years before they got together Gary was 600,000 in debt, and on the verge of going under in. Some might consider it an inappropriate assignment for a man with responsibilities. The Department of Justice Inspector-General's report was released on July 23, 1998. Webb resigned from The Mercury News in December 1997. The third article discussed the social effects of the crack trade, noting that it had a disparate effect on African-Americans. 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". 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. In February last year he was laid off by the State Legislature. Gary Webb became, quite unfairly, the victim of one of the most extraordinary examples of piling on by the mainstream press, ever.". } By the time Webb began researching Dark Alliance, Bell was 38 and they had three children. Vivian Corrie, a part of his liver in a life-threatening operation. Instead, he found work in 1978 as a reporter at the Kentucky Post, a local paper affiliated with the larger Cincinnati Post. [34], The Los Angeles Times devoted the most space to the story, publishing a three-part series called "The Cocaine Trail." "By the end of his life he was just in a lot of pain," said Webb's ex-wife, Susan Bell. Their explosive report, which appeared in 1989, was either ignored, or marginalised, by the American press. He told me: 'If I can't do what I want to do, what's the point?' 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 . Dec. 13, 2004. A revised version was published in 1999 that incorporated Webb's response to the CIA and Justice Department reports. [22], The lede of the first article set out the series' basic claims: "For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency." "The cause of death was determined to be self . It was good that his story forced those reports to come out, but part of what made that happen was based on misleading information. Evidence Begins To Indicate Gary Webb Was Murdered - BSNEWS 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. Webb's then-wife Sue remembers coming home from the shops and finding her. . He made that very clear. "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". "[58], It also concluded that "the claims that Blandn and Meneses were responsible for introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and spreading the crack epidemic throughout the country were unsupported." For two years, Blum and Kerry supervised the interrogation of dozens of witnesses who described CIA-related drug deals in central America. "He thought I was being cowardly. [67], Webb later moved to the State Assembly's Office of Majority Services. Gary Webb - Wikipedia "They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. Webb's research took a year, in the course of which he received death threats. 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 . There were no offers. 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. 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 series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges. [41], When the Los Angeles Times series appeared, Ceppos again wrote to defend the original series. Gary Webb Was Right | HuffPost Latest News "Although Ross had become a millionaire by 1984," Katz now wrote, "the market was so huge by then that even a dealer of his stature could seem dwarfed How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level," he continues, "had nothing to do with Ross". Eighteen Years Ago Today, Journalist Gary Webb Was Murdered After With Baca's encouragement, he started to investigate a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine dealer named Oscar Danilo Blandn. 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". George Webb and Paul Cottrell have begun a weekly series on CoronaVirus now, Mondays at 5PM, EST on paul Cottrell's Rumble Channel. The story they printed was just awful. He accepted Christ at an early age. 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. "He definitely was depressed. His assignments included investigating racial profiling by the California Highway Patrol and charges that the Oracle Corporation had received a no-bid contract award of $95 million in 2001. Webb disagreed with this conclusion.[1][2]. Save 50% with early-bird passes. border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; Even 10 years after his tragic death, the media refuse to let him rest. The reports rejected the series's main claims but were critical of some CIA and law enforcement actions. [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. Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . Attend in Miami or virtually, Sept. 1114. But Ian Webbknows all too well the emotions that come with that experience. With hindsight, Bell says, "the signs were there. 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. Kill the Messenger True Story vs. Movie - Real Gary Webb Meneses, an established smuggler and a Contra supporter as well, taught Blandn how to smuggle and provided him with cocaine. ". . He placed his keys and ID cards on the kitchen table, together with a cremation certificate he had purchased for himself. Gary Webb Obituary (2011) - Saginaw, MI - Saginaw News on MLive.com He died on December 10, 2004 in Carmichael, California, USA. By this stage, he was prepared to work as a jobbing reporter. 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." [71] "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said. Dispelling the Rumors: Gary Webb's Death Confirmed As Suicide He died by suicide on December 10, 2004. 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 CIA Inspector-General's report was issued in two volumes. An editorial in the Times, while criticizing the series for making "unsubstantiated charges", conceded that it did find "drug-smuggling and dealing by Nicaraguans with at least tentative connections to the Contras" and called for further investigation. He was a writer, known for Kill the Messenger (2014), Filming in Georgia (2015) and Crack in America (2015). [29] Waters urged the CIA, the Department of Justice, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate. [26] Other papers were slow to pick up the story, but African Americans quickly took note, especially in South Central Los Angeles where the dealers discussed in the series had been active. Gary was born Sept. 4, 1947, to Percy and Pauline (Haas) Webb. Gary Hays Webb, 78, passed away on Monday May 9, 2022, at ThedaCare Regional Medical Center, Neenah. By William Kennedy / Jan. 22, 2023 12:00 pm EST. Who Is Gary Webb's Wife? 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. [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. It also examined "how CIA handled and responded to information regarding allegations of drug trafficking" by people involved in Contra activities or support. The first detailed article on the series's claims appeared in The Washington Post in early October. 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." It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? [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. Celebrezze eventually sued the Plain Dealer and won an undisclosed out of court settlement. [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. Ceppos initially defended Webb, and reportedly showed up at an in-house party wearing a military helmet. On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and split his helmet open. The coroner's staff concluded that the second shot hit an artery.[70]. Today, Narco News, with support from The Fund for Authentic Journalism, is pleased to announce that the Dark Alliance website has a new, and this time permanent, home at Narco News. 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." An investigative journalist, Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. 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. "I had to warn Gary that what he was looking at was probably true, but that he would run very big risks," Parry recalls. ", Webb had already been cremated and his ashes scattered in the bay off Santa Cruz two weeks before. 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. 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. Webb's reports prompted three official investigations, including one by the CIA itself which - astonishingly for an organisation rarely praised for its transparency - confirmed the substance of his findings (published at length in Webb's 1998 book, also entitled Dark Alliance). "Gary was given the choice of relocating either to San Jose," says Bell, "or to Cupertino". GARY WEBB OBITUARY Gary Frank Webb Sept. 27, 1944 - Oct. 23, 2022 Gary passed away peacefully of complications following cardiovascular surgery. Writing on the Los Angeles Times opinion page, Schou said, "Webb asserted, improbably, that the Blandn-Meneses-Ross drug ring opened 'the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles,' helping to 'spark a crack explosion in urban America.' He was born August 27, 1968 in Saginaw, Michigan to Taylor Jr. and Loretta Webb. After Ceppos' column, The Mercury News spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story. The article resulted in a lawsuit against Webb's paper which the plaintiffs won. Gary Webb - Biography - IMDb "[77], Webb's reporting in "Dark Alliance" remains controversial. Ricky Ross (drug trafficker) - Wikipedia He was found dead on Friday morning in what the police said was an apparent suicide. 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. Gary Webb sums up the story in his last major interview just days before his death. [56] He resigned from the paper in November 1997. 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. It found that "the allegations contained in the original Mercury News articles were exaggerations of the actual facts." There was no coffin, casket or tombstone. color: #ddd; I first heard about Webb eight years ago, I tell Bell, from the Paris-based journalist Paul Moreira. "I'd get discouraged," she said, "but I never really gave up hope." Back in 1997, SN&R brought the controversy about Gary Webb to readers with "Secrets and Lies," a cover story about why the mainstream media attacked . Gary Webb was a journalist of outsized talent. "This is an appalling charge," says a tense-looking Deutch. ", 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 Gary died," she says, "a reporter from the LA Times came here. The Mercury News reporter came under sustained attack from the weightier US newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and, especially, the Los Angeles Times, infuriated at being scooped, on its own patch, by what it saw as a small-town paper. ", The report called several of its findings "troubling." The complete lack of desire to ask the difficult questions makes me want to scream. "Look at what happened to Gary Webb. Gary-Webb TL, Walker EA, Realmuto L, Kamler A, Lukin J, Tyson W, Carrasquillo O, Weiss L. Translation of the National Diabetes Prevention Program to Engage Men in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods in New York City: A Description of Power Up for Health. Despite some hyped phrasing, "Dark Alliance" appears to be praiseworthy investigative reporting."[47]. Gary is survived by his loving wife of 41 years, Barbara; their son, Jeff; his nephew, Christopher (Stephanie) Webb; niece, Sara (Gary) Dugan; and . The follow-up reporting in the Los Angeles Times and other papers has been criticised for focusing on problems in the series rather than re-examining the earlier CIA-Contra claims. Views on Webb's journalism have been polarized. I believe that we fell short at every step of our process: in the writing, editing and production of our work. I remain astounded by the editorial decisions they made.". Last edited on 10 February 2023, at 03:36, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking, "To readers of our 'Dark Alliance' series", "America's 'crack' plague has roots in Nicaragua war", "War on drugs has unequal impact on black Americans", "Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Inquiry Findings", "The CIA and Crack: Evidence Is Lacking Of Alleged Plot", "Though Evidence Is Thin, Tale of C.I.A. ", In contrast, the series received support from Steve Weinberg, a former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors. * The agency's response was to try to prevent him from getting his doctorate, then block his advancement in the academic world. After the series's publication, the Northern California branch of the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996.