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Gary Webb was an American investigative journalist who reported how the CIA flooded the small Black neighbourhood of South Central, LA with crack cocaine in order to finance a coup in Nicaragua. He was found dead with 2 bullets in the head. His death was ruled a suicide
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In 1996, the San Jose Mercury News paper published a 3-part, year-long investigation by employee Gary Webb titled Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion. Webb's exposé revealed that rebels in Nicaragua were trafficking cocaine to the U.S. to fund their campaign
Webb reported that this secret flow of drugs and money, was directly linked to the subsequent explosion of crack cocaine abuse and addiction that devastated California’s Black neighborhoods.
During his investigation, Webb discovered that in the early 1980s a San Francisco drug syndicate which had ties with a U.S Congress and CIA-backed Nicaraguan rebel group called the FDN, sold cocaine to "Freeway" Ricky Ross, a cocaine dealer in Los Angeles
Ricky Ross was a small-time, but prolific cocaine dealer who soon attracted the attention of Oscar Danilo Blandon, a Nicaraguan drug dealer with ties to counter-revolutionary Contras, a band of mercenaries and former landowners trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua
Even though cocaine was too expensive for the Black people in South Central, Ross made it work. He distilled the powder into a highly addictive cheap rock form and sold it to the Crips and Bloods gangs. This is how he caught the attention of the Nicaraguans
Ross and Blandon made millions of dollars. Blandon and his Nicaraguan contacts shipped the cocaine into the U.S. through Miami and then out to Ross. Webb contended that the CIA knew about this and turned a blind eye while Black communities were devastated by the crack epidemic
When Webb's story broke, the CIA panicked as they saw this as a major PR disaster, however, according to an internal memo, they were relieved when they watched as the media came to their rescue by savagely and relentlessly attacking Gary Webb
Naturally, Webb was quickly dismissed and ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist and The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times in a rare show of unity put out strongly-worded articles condemning Webb and his report
Media houses spent far more time trying to poke holes in the story than on following up on the elephant in the room: the involvement of U.S.-backed proxy forces in bringing crack cocaine to Black communities
The Los Angeles Times assigned 17 reporters to pick apart Webb’s reporting, referred to as the "get Gary Webb team". Saying "We’re going to take away that guy’s Pulitzer". (Webb had won a Pulitzer Prize for another story in 1989)
Within 2 months of the publication of Gary Webb's story, the L.A. Times devoted more words to dismantling it than than the entire story itself had!
The CIA watched and collaborated where it could with media houses who wanted to challenge Webb’s reporting. According to the CIA itself:
"In order to help a journalist working on a story that would undermine the allegations, [the CIA] was able to deny any affiliation of a particular individual - which is a rare exception to the general policy that CIA does not comment on any individual’s alleged CIA ties"
Because of the Washington Post‘s national reputation, its articles were copied by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a 'firestorm of reaction' against the San Jose Mercury News, Webb's employer
Critical media coverage of the series ("balanced reporting") far outnumbered any supportive stories, a trend the CIA credited to the Post, The New York Times, "and especially the Los Angeles Times." Webb’s editors began to distance themselves from their reporter...
The Mercury News told Webb it wasn't happy with his reporting and that he was being transferred from the paper's Sacramento offices to another branch. He was unhappy with the new assignments and resigned from the paper in November 1997
In his 2002 book, Into the Buzzsaw. Webb said before the CIA story "I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been...
"And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been...."
"The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job, the truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress."
