"I told Gary not to go near this story," his source replies, in an emotional voice. "[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]. Gary Webb, 64, Oroville, Wash., died Oct. 30, 2021. Gary Numan's superfan wife had 'body lift' and exploding breasts Emma Lee Webb, age 75, of Crossett, AR passed away Monday February 27, 2023, in her home surrounded by her family. That was just the way he was.". In the final few months of his life, Bell says, Webb became increasingly withdrawn. I remain astounded by the editorial decisions they made.". But they underestimated the paradigm shifting power of the internet, and the intelligence of Webb, who not only listed the explosive story online . . 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. 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. Webb is best known for his "Dark Alliance" series, which appeared in The Mercury News in 1996. That wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been willing to stand up and risk it all.". The coroner's staff concluded that the second shot hit an artery.[70]. [37], In 2013, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, said of the newspaper's coverage "As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope, and we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. "As a PhD student, McCoy went to Vietnam and built an absolutely damning case about the CIA's involvement with trafficking heroin. "He was sleeping more, he hated to get up in the morning, he started having a lot of motorcycle. [3], Webb was born in Corona, California. Watkins and Debbie (John) Foutch; grandchildren, Makenzie and Ashlynn Fogg. Webb 'Suicide' Looking More Like Murder - rense.com Webb began to shift from cynicism to curiosity. Look at the way the US press reports on Iraq. Taken during the London Open House 2014 event. By the autumn of 1997, on medication for clinical depression, he was given leave of absence from the paper. [41], When the Los Angeles Times series appeared, Ceppos again wrote to defend the original series. 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. In 1997 Ceppos was awarded the US Society of Professional Journalists' National Ethics Award. The story had little immediate impact. 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. In February last year he was laid off by the State Legislature. "[55] In June 1997, The Mercury News told Webb it was transferring him from the paper's Sacramento bureau and offered him a choice between working at the main offices in San Jose under closer editorial supervision, or spot reporting in Cupertino; both locations were long commutes from his home in Sacramento. 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. I felt she really trashed me. Within weeks, the site was attracting up to 1.3m hits per day. Webb, Bell explains, had written four letters explaining what he was about to do - one to her, one to each of their three children - and mailed them immediately before he killed himself. He became an investigator for the California State Legislature, published a book based on the "Dark Alliance" series in 1998, and did freelance investigative reporting. Gary Webb Was Right | HuffPost Latest News He is survived by his loving wife, Wendie, of Elgin; grandmother, Eileen Carrier of Elgin;. A January 1997 article in American Journalism Review noted that a 1994 series Webb wrote had also been the subject of a Mercury News internal review that criticized Webb's reporting. Gary Webb - Spartacus Educational But Ian Webbknows all too well the emotions that come with that experience. [17] The Mercury News's coverage of the earthquake won its staff the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting in 1990. 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 response from the American press took two months to arrive. Webb made his early reputation as a reporter with the Plain Dealer before going on to fame and turmoil at the San Jose Mercury News. The story was picked up by black talk-radio stations. Then, in August the same year, the first of three instalments of "Dark Alliance" appeared. But the biggest loss he had was the writing. And it ruined that reporter's career. Gary Webb on the CIA's Role in the 1980s LA Crack Epidemic - Citizen Truth 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. This did not happen in Webb's case. OR was he like Epstein? George Webb and Paul Cottrell have begun a weekly series on CoronaVirus now, Mondays at 5PM, EST on paul Cottrell's Rumble Channel. "If there was an eye to the storm," Katz wrote, "if there was a mastermind behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw most responsible for flooding LA's streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick. font-size: 34px; 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. Save 50% with early-bird passes. 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. "Which was that, if he wanted a future within the political establishment of the United States, then he should concentrate on other aspects of life.". 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. Views on Webb's journalism have been polarized. On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and split his helmet open. When Webb's body was discovered last December, Bell says, this last item had been dumped in the trash. A revised version was published in 1999 that incorporated Webb's response to the CIA and Justice Department reports. 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. Shortly before I left for Sacramento, Moreira, who knew Webb, had shown me unbroadcast footage which shows the French reporter making a phone call to a media commentator in the US, asking him about Webb's death. When his medical insurance expired, he stopped taking his antidepressants. The complete lack of desire to ask the difficult questions makes me want to scream. Special Reports - Cocaine, Conspiracy Theories And The Cia In - PBS 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. "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". "The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post", he stated. He was found dead on Friday morning in what the police said was an apparent suicide. Webb may indeed be physically dead, but his research is more alive today than ever before, and continues to haunt the shadow government and snowball into a monster that will undoubtedly have its eventual revenge. Ross was a major drug dealer in Los Angeles. After the series's publication, the Northern California branch of the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996. This support "was not directed by anyone within the Contra movement who had an association with the CIA," and the Committee found "no evidence that the CIA or the Intelligence Community was aware of these individuals support. In interviews after leaving The Mercury News, Webb described the 1997 controversy as media manipulation. Her husband began his career on The Kentucky Post, and rapidly proved himself to be the sort of character who can be a secretive agency's worst nightmare: a full-blooded provocateur who liked to put the hours in at the library. 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. A passing motorist - a heavily tattooed young man - gave him a lift home, then returned and stole the motorcycle, which police recovered from him three days after Webb's death. The series ran from October 2022, 1996, and was researched by a team of 17 reporters. The series revolves around the first crack epidemic and its impact on the culture of the city. The consensus, insofar as one exists, is that he probably overstated both the amount of drug money made by Ross and Blandn, and the percentage of those profits diverted to the Contras. The passing of Gary ends more than 50 years with his best friend and loving wife, Marilyn J. 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". Vivian Corrie, a part of his liver in a life-threatening operation. Cooper Webb Wife Name Revealed. Like the CIA and Justice Department reports, it also found that neither Blandn, Meneses, nor Ross were associated with the CIA. In a long review of the series' claims in The Baltimore Sun, Weinberg said "I think the critics have been far too harsh. The claim that the drug ring of Meneses-Blandn-Ross sparked the "crack explosion" has been perhaps the most criticized part of the series. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress. "He thought I was being cowardly. Going to the CIA to ask if they've ever profited from drug sales in Los Angeles, I suggested to Kornbluh, is rather like asking Fagin if he has ever picked a pocket. "I had to warn Gary that what he was looking at was probably true, but that he would run very big risks," Parry recalls. 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 and the Iran-Contra-Cocaine Connection | WilderUtopia How Kill the Messenger Will Vindicate Investigative Journalist Gary Webb 'It's just good vibes': Cooper Webb, Eli Tomac in tight Supercross Gary Hays Webb, 78, passed away on Monday May 9, 2022, at ThedaCare Regional Medical Center, Neenah. In May 1997, after an internal review, Ceppos stated that, although the story was right on many important points, there were shortcomings in the writing, editing and production of the series. The drugs went to South Central LA. "Gary was 18 and I was 16 when we first met and started dating in Indianapolis," said Sue Stokes. "He definitely was depressed. Sheriff: Fatal Blue Grass house fire rule 'undetermined, but accidental' Gary Webb was born on August 31, 1955 in Corona, California, USA. But as his ex-wife told the . An investigative journalist, Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Gary Webb's "Approach Split" in the atrium of 20 Triton Street London. } When Ross discovered the market for crack in Los Angeles, he began buying cocaine from Blandn. The character reporter Irene Abe is said by fans of the show to be a stand in character for the real life Gary Webb. Gary was born May 5, 1954, to his parents Worley and Margaret Webb, who preceded him in death as well as his brother, David Webb. By: E&P Staff The death of investigative reporter Gary Webb has been confirmed as a suicide, according to a coroner's statement. He went into the bedroom, and picked up a .38 that had belonged to his father. When I first heard the news, I tell Bell, I was inclined to believe the conspiracy theories that still proliferate on the internet, suggesting that Webb had been assassinated - either by one of the drug dealers he'd met while writing Dark Alliance, or by the intelligence services who were supposed to police them. It was published in 1998 as Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. [20] The website artwork showed the silhouette of a man smoking a crack pipe superimposed over the CIA seal. Dark Alliance: Gary Webb, Christian Rummel: 9781522694397: Amazon.com "You sound very scared," Moreira remarks. [9], Webb's first major investigative work appeared in 1980, when the Cincinnati Post published "The Coal Connection," a seventeen-part series by Webb and Post reporter Thomas Scheffey. Gary is survived by his wife of 48 years, Beverly Webb; children Margaret . "[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." After introducing the three, the first article discussed primarily Blandn and Meneses, and their relationship with the Contras and the CIA. The "Dark Alliance" series remains controversial. Return of the messenger: How Jeremy Renner's new film Kill The So, this is not something you really make a career out of, nor would you want to. Blandn and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. By a fortunate coincidence of timing, the report was released on a day when the Monica Lewinsky scandal dominated every front page in the country. He made that very clear. "Like enjoy it.". .article-native-ad svg { What he found, he wrote later, "nearly knocked me off my chair". 1) It presented only one interpretation of conflicting evidence and in one case "did not include information that contradicted a central assertion of the series." Born January 3rd, 1943 in Montreal, Quebec, he was the son of the late John Douglas Webb and the late Jeannie (Penny) Hardie Penman. Carey ultimately decided that there were problems with several parts of the story and wrote a draft article incorporating his findings. She said the paper wanted to make up for what it had done in the past. [5], After high school, Webb attended an Indianapolis community college on a scholarship until his family moved to Cincinnati. Occupation: Machine Operators, Assemblers, and Inspectors Occupations. } in Central America", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gary_Webb&oldid=1138520387, This page was last edited on 10 February 2023, at 03:36. Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . Work with a bunch of drug dealers to run guns? Herhold: Thinking back on journalist Gary Webb and the CIA border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; Gary Webb | American journalist | Britannica By the late spring of 1996, Webb was ready to publish. [32], The New York Times published two articles on the series in mid-October, both written by reporter Tim Golden.