He was a former member of Bethlehem . 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". "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 . He celebrated his 62nd birthday in 2020. The article resulted in a lawsuit against Webb's paper which the plaintiffs won. [44], Ceppos' column drew editorial responses from both The New York Times and The Washington Post. 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 told the guys with him he was fine," she recalls, "got back on the bike, then passed out, half an hour later. "It was terrible," said Price. By this stage, he was prepared to work as a jobbing reporter. ", In contrast, the series received support from Steve Weinberg, a former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors. In addition, Gary left multiple suicide notes to family members which were confirmed to be in his own hand by them. "Gary was given the choice of relocating either to San Jose," says Bell, "or to Cupertino". Webb was put under pressure most certainly from the CIA under John Deutch for his reporting. He was assigned to its Sacramento bureau, where he was allowed to choose most of his own stories. It was an amazing scoop - but one that would ruin his career and drive him to suicide. [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. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. In a 2013 article in the LA Weekly, Schou wrote that Webb was "vindicated by a 1998 CIA Inspector General report, which revealed that for more than a decade the agency had covered up a business relationship it had with Nicaraguan drug dealers like Blandn. "Do not quote me. Few reporters I've known could match his nose for an investigative story. He accepted Christ at an early age. Webb's condition exacerbated his natural recklessness. According to the report's "Epilogue," the report was completed in December 1997 but was not released because the DEA was still attempting to use Danilo Blandn in an investigation of international drug dealers and was concerned that the report would affect the viability of the investigation. It was written by Jesse Katz, the same reporter who, less than two years earlier, had described Ross's conglomerate as "the Wal-Mart of crack dealing". His corpse was discovered on the seventh anniversary of his resignation from the Mercury News. So, how much is Gary Webb worth at the age of 49 years old? . After a lengthy battle with cancer, Beth Webb, wife of Pastor Gary Webb at Grace Polaris Church, Westerville, Ohio, was released from her earthly suffering and passed into the presence of Jesus on Wednesday afternoon. "He was sleeping more, he hated to get up in the morning, he started having a lot of motorcycle. He kept saying that he would never get another job in journalism.". Did Gary Webb really stray from his wife? So he blew her off. Jeremy Renner plays Gary Webb in "Kill the Messenger." (Chuck Zlotnick/Focus Features) Webb resigned and wrote a book defending his reporting. The reports rejected the series's main claims but were critical of some CIA and law enforcement actions. "The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post", he stated. Look at the way the US press reports on Iraq. The real Gary Webb talks about his 1996 story "Dark Alliance," which criticizes the CIA's involvement (or lack thereof) with regard to the cocaine coming into the U.S. during the 1980s. Before his death, John Singleton maintained that Snowfall is its own account of how the crack epidemic began on the West Coast . The CIA Inspector-General's report was issued in two volumes. Many writers discussing the series point to errors in it. If he could have chosen his own epitaph, it might have been a line from the letter he posted to Bell, immediately before he killed himself: "I do not regret," Webb told her, "anything that I have written." According to Bell, Webb had been unhappy for some time . [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." Numan's real name is Gary Anthony James Webb, and he was born on March 8, 1958. "As a PhD student, McCoy went to Vietnam and built an absolutely damning case about the CIA's involvement with trafficking heroin. 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. 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. "He definitely was depressed. 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. 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. His was the story of a man who gains information of wrongdoing, then, attempting to act in the public interest, seeks protection from his superiors, and the forces of law, and does not receive it. It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? The story was picked up by black talk-radio stations. And he finallyyou know, they finally left the country. Survivors include his wife, Karla Webb; their children, Kimberly Ware and husband, Kyle, Laci Higgins and husband, Wesley, Kenna Logan and Heath Webb and . Then, in August the same year, the first of three instalments of "Dark Alliance" appeared. Burial will follow at Flint Memorial Park. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. "To get back at his editors?". After divorcing his wife, being unable to obtain work from newspapers and facing increasing debts, Gary was forced to sell his home. 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. 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. [31] In their front-page article, reporters Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus wrote that "available information" did not support the series's claims and that "the rise of crack" was "a broad-based phenomenon" driven in numerous places by diverse players. It concluded, however, that these problems were "a far cry from the type of broad manipulation and corruption of the federal criminal justice system suggested by the original allegations.". A man who was wrongfully arrested and sent to prison on remand has been awarded 100,000 in compensation from Police Scotland. 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." Here's the section from Wikipedia: Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head. Do something else with your life," the voice urges. Webb's experience came as no surprise to Jack Blum, senior prosecutor for the Kerry Committee. "I am scared," the voice replies. His father was a British Airways bus driver based at Heathrow Airport, and his mother Beryl later ran his fan club at the height of his fame. "I think the behaviour of the media in all of this has been amazing," says Bell. "Back then. Carey ultimately decided that there were problems with several parts of the story and wrote a draft article incorporating his findings. As a result, some major US newspapers ignored its findings completely, while others relegated a brief summary to their inside pages. Army. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting for a series of stories on the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct during northern California's 1989 earthquake. "They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. 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." There were no offers. [34], The Los Angeles Times devoted the most space to the story, publishing a three-part series called "The Cocaine Trail." "People told me that," she says. It reads: "There should be no fetters on reporters, nor must they tamper with the truth, but give light so the people will find their own way." In August 1996, Gary Webb published in the San Jose Mercury News a 20,000 word, three-part series entitled "Dark Alliance".The articles detailed the nexus between a California coke kingpin, CIA officials and assets and the Nicaraguan Contra army, whose . 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 review was conducted primarily by editor Jonathan Krim and reporter Pete Carey, who had written the paper's first published analysis of the series. Webb joined the Mercury News in 1988, via the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He really did believe that," she says. Such a case normally would have sparked little notice. He is from United States. She and Gary were married from 1979 to 2000 and had three children. After the publication of "Dark Alliance," The Mercury News continued to pursue the story, publishing follow-ups to the original series for the next three months. His series of articles - which prompted the distinguished reporter and former Newsweek Washington correspondent Robert Parry to describe Webb as "an American hero" - incited fury among the African-American community, many of whom took his investigation as proof that the White House saw crack as a way of bringing genocide to the ghetto. Bell and her children helped Webb prepare 50 packages containing cuttings and his CV which they sent out to newspapers all over the US. "It was the worst day of my life." ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". He was taken to hospital by air ambulance. He was laid off in February 2004 when Assembly Member Fabian Nez was elected Speaker. "The first story he had to file was about a police horse which had died of constipation.". It would have been our 25th wedding anniversary," Bell recalls. "It sounds crazy," says Bell, "but having his motorbike stolen was the last straw. His behavior became increasingly unpredictable and he embarked on a series of affairs, eventually divorcing from his wife Sue in 2000. . [51], The editors met with Webb several times in February to discuss the results of the paper's internal review and eventually decided to print neither Carey's draft article nor the articles Webb had filed. 2) The series's estimate of the money involved was presented as fact instead of as an estimate. 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. [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. Webb put in a call to Robert Parry. "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. [32], The New York Times published two articles on the series in mid-October, both written by reporter Tim Golden. On the last day Webb was alive, his motorbike broke down while he was moving to his mother's house. The first effect of the onslaught was to ease the pressure on the CIA. Webb, a former San Jose Mercury News reporter, was found dead in his Carmichael home Friday morning. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. Film of this encounter survives. [15], In 1988, Webb was recruited by the San Jose Mercury News, which was looking for an investigative reporter. Family (1) [20] The website artwork showed the silhouette of a man smoking a crack pipe superimposed over the CIA seal. He had a tight circle that included almost no one from the Mercury News, says his former wife, Susan Bell, and a sensitive side he rarely showed outside the bounds of his close friends and family. "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. 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. 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. When Gary originally broke this mind blowing story, the arrogant authority's assumed they could simply ignore him and hope he'd go away. [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. [35] The second article, by McManus, was the longest of the series and dealt with the role of the Contras in the drug trade and CIA knowledge of drug activities by the Contras. He was no hero either. "[75], Jonathan Krim, The Mercury News editor who recruited Webb from The Plain Dealer and who supervised The Mercury News internal review of "Dark Alliance," told AJR editor Paterno that Webb "had all the qualities you'd want in a reporter: curious, dogged, a very high sense of wanting to expose wrongdoing and to hold private and public officials accountable." "Gary was 18 and I was 16 when we first met and started dating in Indianapolis," said Sue Stokes. (Strawser) Webb. Dr. Gary A. Webb is a geriatrician in Marco Island, Florida. "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. 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. After being reassigned to the Mercury News's office in Curpertino, where they had him writing death notices, Gary Webb resigned and fell into depression. Webb took a modestly paid, low-profile job as an investigator with the California State Legislature. 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. [29] Waters urged the CIA, the Department of Justice, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate. During and immediately after the controversy over "Dark Alliance," Webb's earlier writing was examined closely. 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. The series ran from October 2022, 1996, and was researched by a team of 17 reporters. [65], Within "The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On" essay Webb stated he believed there was an active "collusion between the press and the powerful" to report freely on inconsequential matters, "but when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff We begin to see the limits of our freedoms". 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. In the final few months of his life, Bell says, Webb became increasingly withdrawn. Critics view the series' claims as inaccurate or overstated, while supporters point to the results of a later CIA investigation as vindicating the series. Video courtesy of documentary FREEWAY: CRACK IN THE SYSTEM premiering on Al Jazeera America in early 2015. [16] As part of The Mercury News team that covered the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Webb and his colleague Pete Carey wrote a story examining the causes of the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct. "Gary didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. 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. 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. GARY WEBB: His wife's office was burglarized. Almost. 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. A jury awarded the plaintiffs over 13 million dollars and the case was later settled. "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 sums up the story in his last major interview just days before his death. In interviews after leaving The Mercury News, Webb described the 1997 controversy as media manipulation. "The second bullet," adds Bell, who has worked for more than 20 years in the area of respiratory therapy, "struck his carotid artery. 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