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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. 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. I realise now he was thinking about suicide.". Do something else with your life," the voice urges. [69], Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head. "Gary Webb was left to fend for himself. George Webb and Paul Cottrell have begun a weekly series on CoronaVirus now, Mondays at 5PM, EST on paul Cottrell's Rumble Channel. 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. Dec. 13, 2004. 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. 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. It was just more than he could take.". GARY WEBB was an investigative reporter who focused on government and private sector corruption and who won more than thirty journalism awards. The CIA admits used the media to ruin his career. Webb worked for several newspapers including The Kentucky Post and Cleveland Plain Dealer. "[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." 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.' It was also posted on The Mercury News website with additional information, including documents cited in the series and audio recordings of people quoted in the articles. The series revolves around the first crack epidemic and its impact on the culture of the city. "I had to warn Gary that what he was looking at was probably true, but that he would run very big risks," Parry recalls. In 1986, Webb wrote an article saying that the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, Frank D. Celebrezze accepted contributions from groups with organized crime connections. Gary Douglas Webb of Radnor, PA, passed away on October 19, 2021. In addition, Gary left multiple suicide notes to family members which were confirmed to be in his own hand by them. Webb, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist, exposed CIA drug trafficking operations in a series of books and reports for the San Jose Mercury News. The Open Mic: A Few Words with Cinematographer Ian Webb Gary was born Sept. 4, 1947, to Percy and Pauline (Haas) Webb. 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. [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. Taken during the London Open House 2014 event. Gary Webb, friends say, was a far more combative character than either the Mercury News's executive editor Ceppos or page editor Garcia. margin-bottom: 20px; ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". Gary Webb was at his desk in the Mercury News's Sacramento office, in July 1995, when he received a message to call Coral Baca, a Hispanic woman from the San Francisco Bay area, allegedly connected to a Colombian drug cartel. Gary Webb | American journalist | Britannica Why Journalist Gary Webb Died - LewRockwell font-weight:500; By the autumn of 1997, on medication for clinical depression, he was given leave of absence from the paper. [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. Am J Mens Health, 2018 Mar 1:1557988318758788. doi: 10.1177/1557988318758788. He was preceded in death by his wife, Melody Webb; parents and three brothers, Albert, Duane and Ronald. [61] According to the report, it used Webb's reporting and writing as "key resources in focusing and refining the investigation." "He definitely was depressed. The Man Who Exposed The Crips, Bloods & CIA Connection to - YouTube Ceppos failed to reply to one phone message and six emails. Jimmy Webb's battle with ex-wife Patsy Sullivan continues - New York Post When Ross discovered the market for crack in Los Angeles, he began buying cocaine from Blandn. "They tried to make us look like crazies," says Blum. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department began its own investigation into the "Dark Alliance" claims.[30]. 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. It was good that his story forced those reports to come out, but part of what made that happen was based on misleading information. A secret deal allowed drugs to go unreported by the DCI. Blandn and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. 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 . 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 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 . It also examined "how CIA handled and responded to information regarding allegations of drug trafficking" by people involved in Contra activities or support. Webb resigned from The Mercury News in December 1997. After introducing the three, the first article discussed primarily Blandn and Meneses, and their relationship with the Contras and the CIA. Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . By this stage, he was prepared to work as a jobbing reporter. It also stated that the Contras may have acted with the knowledge and protection of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. The passing of Gary ends more than 50 years with his best friend and loving wife, Marilyn J. Ricky Ross (drug trafficker) - Wikipedia [34], The Los Angeles Times devoted the most space to the story, publishing a three-part series called "The Cocaine Trail." Talking about his wife, Mariah Webb is a nurse who also educates about essential products . How Gary Webb Linked The CIA To The Crack Epidemic - All That's Interesting 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. 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 . Gary Webb and the Iran-Contra-Cocaine Connection | WilderUtopia The film broadened the debate which led to the decriminalisation of . I felt weak and distressed; the whole thing was so fresh. . He also stated "the series presented dangerous ideas" by suggesting "crimes of state had been committed" (i.e. Gary Webb | Obituary | The Daily Item Actor Jeremy Renner portrays Webb.[83]. Part of what makes OConnors article so compelling are the candid thoughts of Webbs former wife Sue Stokes. Osborn, Barbara Bliss (MarchApril 1998). My wife has kept me grounded for . "He walked in one day," Bell recalls, "and said, 'You are not going to believe what I just found out.' [81], Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at George Washington University's National Security Archives, also does not agree that the report vindicated the series. "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. Contemporary discussions of the series are discussed in the section on, Webb 2011, "Caltrans Ignored Elevated Freeway Safety. They failed because the climate was more sceptical then. He went into the bedroom, and picked up a .38 that had belonged to his father. "Do you think that a part of him did this out of revenge?" The drugs went to South Central LA. Much of the article highlighted the failure of law enforcement agencies to successfully prosecute them and stated that this was largely due to their Contra and CIA connections. Gary is survived by his loving wife of 41 years, Barbara; their son, Jeff; his nephew, Christopher (Stephanie) Webb; niece, Sara (Gary) Dugan; and . His former wife, her voice lowered to a whisper, explains that Webb missed with the first shot (which exited through his left cheek). I ask Bell. "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 . Call 911 for assistance. When he was engaged, he worked hard. Gary's family found that old, storied, ("priceless to us," as his ex-wife, Susan Bell, described it to me) CDROM among his possessions. "He started having motorcycle crashes," Bell says. ", The report called several of its findings "troubling." When it did, beginning with The Washington Post, it shocked Webb's critics as much as his many admirers. In an unprecedented move, the then CIA director John Deutch was dispatched to address community leaders in the Watts district of LA. Maxine Waters found a govt employee ran the South Central LA drug ring & The DOJ removed that section of the report : r/conspiracy 3 yr. ago Posted by shylock92008 Webb began to shift from cynicism to curiosity. Instead, he found work in 1978 as a reporter at the Kentucky Post, a local paper affiliated with the larger Cincinnati Post. What he found, he wrote later, "nearly knocked me off my chair". One article, dealing mostly with the response of the Los Angeles Black community to the stories, described the series's evidence as "thin". Cooper and Mariah were engaged before they finally tied the knot. Webb was an assertive figure who drove fast cars and powerful motorcycles, hung heavy metal posters in his office and, at certain times in his life, smoked a fair amount of cannabis. Celebrezze eventually sued the Plain Dealer and won an undisclosed out of court settlement. 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. He was born June 18, 1943, in Appleton, son of the late Wilford and Helen (Hauskey) Webb. Corrie had primary biliary cirrhosis, a genetic liver disease that already had. "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". "[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 : Murdered For Exposing The Truth - Educate Inspire Change After examining the investigations and prosecutions of the main figures in the series, Blandn, Meneses and Ross, it concluded that "Although the investigations suffered from various problems of communication and coordination, their successes and failures were determined by the normal dynamics that affect the success of scores of investigations of high-level drug traffickers These factors, rather than anything as spectacular as a systematic effort by the CIA or any other intelligence agency to protect the drug trafficking activities of Contra supporters, determined what occurred in the cases we examined. line-height:1.5; Webb strongly disagreed with Ceppos's column and, in interviews, was harshly critical of the paper's handling of the story. [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. An investigative journalist, Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Sue remarried two years ago. He was previously married to Sue Bell. [8] In 1979, Webb married Susan Bell; the couple eventually had three children. margin: 0 45px; A 1985 series, "Doctoring the Truth," uncovered problems in the State Medical Board[12] and led to an Ohio House investigation which resulted in major revisions to the state Medical Practice Act. 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." Hired by the San Jose Mercury News, Webb contributed to the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. 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". He was born at Emmanuel Hospital in. He really did believe that," she says. 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." His career ended, his livelihood was destroyed and certain games were started to be . Relationships with other women ended badly. Nick Schou, a journalist who wrote a 2006 biography of Webb, has claimed that this was the most important error in the series. 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. 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. For two years, Blum and Kerry supervised the interrogation of dozens of witnesses who described CIA-related drug deals in central America. He was laid off in February 2004 when Assembly Member Fabian Nez was elected Speaker. [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. Webb's then-wife Sue remembers coming home from the shops and finding her. The complete lack of desire to ask the difficult questions makes me want to scream. Gary Webb, MD, FRCPC, FACC - The Donohue Funeral Homes Inc. Gary Webb (Investigative Journalist) Wiki, Biography, Age, Wife, Family 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. In interviews after leaving The Mercury News, Webb described the 1997 controversy as media manipulation. His own paper, the Mercury News, criticized the series in 1997 without providing many specifics. It was accurate. Carey ultimately decided that there were problems with several parts of the story and wrote a draft article incorporating his findings. The CIA Inspector General's report, commissioned in response to the allegations in "Dark Alliance", was published in the autumn of 1998. 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 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. She kept crying about how terrible it all was - by which I mean that she was, physically, crying. } By Sam Stanton Bee Staff Writer Published 2:15 am PST Wednesday, December 15, 2004. . Webb, Gary Gary T. Webb, age 67, of Hamilton, Michigan, passed away peacefully surrounded by his loving family Thursday, November 11, 2021. The story was picked up by black talk-radio stations. And it was ignored by the US media, for all of those reasons. News coverage noted that there were widespread rumors on the Internet at the time that Webb had been killed as retribution for his "Dark Alliance" series, published eight years before. 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. 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. Gary Webb Obituary (2011) - Saginaw, MI - Saginaw News on MLive.com Evidence Begins To Indicate Gary Webb Was Murdered - BSNEWS Their explosive report, which appeared in 1989, was either ignored, or marginalised, by the American press. The "Dark Alliance" series remains controversial. 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. He cites the case of Alfred McCoy, now Professor of South East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin. Webb, unlike Blum or Kerry, had to face his difficulties alone. I remain astounded by the editorial decisions they made.". With hindsight, Bell says, "the signs were there. Born January 3rd, 1943 in Montreal, Quebec, he was the son of the late John Douglas Webb and the late Jeannie (Penny) Hardie Penman. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. Gary Webb (304) 778-2546: Jamie Webb (304) 778-2546: Status: Homeowner. 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. }. Both sides were left angry and disappointed. When he was engaged, he worked hard. 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. "Everyone got out and left the person who had made the noise - issued the report - alone. He also defended the series in interviews with all three papers. GARY WEBB: His wife's office was burglarized. He began his career working for newspapers in Kentucky and Ohio, winning numerous awards, and building a strong reputation for investigative writing. It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? Save 50% with early-bird passes. He accepted Christ at an early age. His victory in the event last year gave him . 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." Garry Webb wrote the 1996 "Dark Alliance" series for the San Jose. Susan Bell: a shameful secret history - The Independent 4) The series "created impressions that were open to misinterpretation" through "imprecise language and graphics. He is survived by his loving wife, Wendie, of Elgin; grandmother, Eileen Carrier of Elgin;. A flood of inquiries about Gary Webb's shooting death prompts statement. Man Donates Liver To Ex-Wife - CBS News When he told me, I said it sounded crazy. [44], Ceppos' column drew editorial responses from both The New York Times and The Washington Post.