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} 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. "To get back at his editors?". The claim that the drug ring of Meneses-Blandn-Ross sparked the "crack explosion" has been perhaps the most criticized part of the series. To show this, the series focused on three men: Ricky Ross, Oscar Danilo Blandn, and Norwin Meneses. Gary Stephen Webb was a Pulitzer prize winning American investigative reporter who exposed cocaine trafficking by the CIA.He wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, which initially backed his articles but later dropped him.Webb was put under pressure most certainly from the CIA under John Deutch for his reporting. Dr. Gary A. Webb is a geriatrician in Marco Island, Florida. His erstwhile editors on the Mercury News, meanwhile, saw their careers thrive. 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. His corpse was discovered on the seventh anniversary of his resignation from the Mercury News. [51] After discussions with Webb, the column was published on May 11, 1997.[53]. [69], Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head. Few reporters I've known could match his nose for an investigative story. Two years later, he was promoted to Vice President of Knight Ridder, the Mercury News's parent company; he retired from this position last month. [61] According to the report, it used Webb's reporting and writing as "key resources in focusing and refining the investigation." 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. 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.. There has been speculation that he may have met with foul play because he had received two gunshot wounds to the head, The Sacramento Bee reported Wednesday. "[77], Webb's reporting in "Dark Alliance" remains controversial. And "we really didn't do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of tawdry exercise. [63]Dark Alliance was a 1998 Pen/Newman's Own First Amendment Award Finalist, 1998 San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, 1999 Bay Area Book Reviewers Award Finalist, and 1999 Firecracker Alternative Booksellers Award Winner in the Politics category. I mean - please.". Osborn, Barbara Bliss (MarchApril 1998). When his body was found, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was on the DVD machine, and his favourite CD, Ian Hunter's live album Welcome to the Club, was in the CD player. So, this is not something you really make a career out of, nor would you want to. "[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." Blandn and Meneses' high-volume supply of low-priced high-purity cocaine "allowed Ross to sew up the Los Angeles market and move on. "It sounds crazy," says Bell, "but having his motorbike stolen was the last straw. When she got indignant," she adds, "he went to meet her.". Corrie had primary biliary cirrhosis, a genetic liver disease that already had. She said the paper wanted to make up for what it had done in the past. Webb's experience came as no surprise to Jack Blum, senior prosecutor for the Kerry Committee. There is a CIA connection and I can demonstrate it.'". 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. Asking why crack became so prevalent in the Black community of Los Angeles, the article credited Blandn, referring to him as "the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California. Age 43 years. .article-native-ad svg { When Ross discovered the market for crack in Los Angeles, he began buying cocaine from Blandn. Ceppos failed to reply to one phone message and six emails. Webb's corpse was found in the bedroom, with two gunshot wounds to the head. Gary was born Sept. 4, 1947, to Percy and Pauline (Haas) Webb. [8] In 1979, Webb married Susan Bell; the couple eventually had three children. Am J Mens Health, 2018 Mar 1:1557988318758788. doi: 10.1177/1557988318758788. 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." The complete lack of desire to ask the difficult questions makes me want to scream. One of these was a 1986 raid on Blandn's drug organization by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which the article suggested had produced evidence of CIA ties to drug smuggling that was later suppressed. 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. Tomac is used to good feelings when it comes to Daytona. The story had little immediate impact. 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. Unable to get work from any major US newspaper, he spent the four months before his death writing for * a free-sheet covering the Sacramento area. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress. Then, on 10 December, he resigned. The CIA Inspector-General's report was issued in two volumes. Webb, whose plans to become a journalist had begun when he was 13, but never included equine death notices, resigned from the Mercury News a few months later. Webb came home and put his belongings in order, dropping his Kentucky Post poster in the bin. Contemporary discussions of the series are discussed in the section on, Webb 2011, "Caltrans Ignored Elevated Freeway Safety. He is survived by his loving wife, Wendie, of Elgin; grandmother, Eileen Carrier of Elgin;. Baca claimed that a drug dealer with close links to the CIA had framed her boyfriend, who was also in the cocaine business. He was the much-loved father of Lindsay (Stephen . 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". That wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been willing to stand up and risk it all.". "[2], Ceppos noted that Webb did not agree with these conclusions. After Webb's death, a collection of his stories from before and after the "Dark Alliance" series was published. A flood of inquiries about Gary Webb's shooting death prompts statement. .article-native-ad strong { Then, in August the same year, the first of three instalments of "Dark Alliance" appeared. Gary Hays (304) 778-7090: Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Webb became a staff reporter for the San Jose Mercury News in 1988. Webb resigned from The Mercury News in December 1997. It was accurate. [19] The series was published in The Mercury News in three parts, from Sunday, 18 August 1996 to 20 August 1996, with a first long article and one or two shorter articles appearing each day. One time he called me and he said: 'I have this plan that will benefit us both.' Webb undeniably made mistakes of detail and emphasis in the newspaper version of "Dark Alliance". For two years, Blum and Kerry supervised the interrogation of dozens of witnesses who described CIA-related drug deals in central America. Working in San Jose would have meant daily contact with what Bell describes as "people he did not want to be with". 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. Gary Webb's family says his death was Suicide. Cooper Webb Wife Name Revealed. Ceppos initially defended Webb, and reportedly showed up at an in-house party wearing a military helmet. 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. 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. After Ceppos' column, The Mercury News spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story. [65], After leaving The Mercury News, Webb worked as an investigator for the California State Legislature. The article resulted in a lawsuit against Webb's paper which the plaintiffs won. I have also followed up on key topics raised by Paul Cottrell will leading industry experts like Dr. Peter McCollough on the Tommy Carrigan Show, weekly in 2021 and 2022. And this is not a happy story - or," she adds, "a little one.". The first detailed article on the series's claims appeared in The Washington Post in early October. color: #ddd; But while calling the flaws in the series "unforgivably careless journalism," Overholser also criticized the Post's refusal to print Ceppos' letter defending the series and sharply criticized the Post's coverage of the story. Webb, Gary Gary T. Webb, age 67, of Hamilton, Michigan, passed away peacefully surrounded by his loving family Thursday, November 11, 2021. "And to an extent, they succeeded.". padding-left: 10px!important; 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. [45], The Post's response came from the paper's ombudsman, Geneva Overholser. The response from the American press took two months to arrive. Born January 3rd, 1943 in Montreal, Quebec, he was the son of the late John Douglas Webb and the late Jeannie (Penny) Hardie Penman. 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. 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. He died by suicide on December 10, 2004. Occupation: Machine Operators, Assemblers, and Inspectors Occupations. He also defended the series in interviews with all three papers. A Celebration of Life will be . [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. Gary was preceded in death by his mother and father, Donna and James Webb of Carpentersville. And yet, for all his Easy Rider tendencies, he was also a dedicated family man with an extraordinary appetite for researching minutiae. "He was crying. 71K views 8 years ago Gary Webb's son Ian talks about the film in which Jeremy Renner plays his late journalist father. Ceppos and Garcia have long since lost any taste for public discussion of "Dark Alliance". Meneses, an established smuggler and a Contra supporter as well, taught Blandn how to smuggle and provided him with cocaine. "Everyone got out and left the person who had made the noise - issued the report - alone. Jack Blum, who was the lead investigator for Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, which produced a highly damning 1989 report on drug-smuggling in the guise of national security, is one of several commentators to have questioned aspects of Webb's original reporting. Gary's documentation is awesome and his work ethic is unbelievable. When Webb's body was discovered last December, Bell says, this last item had been dumped in the trash. He said: 'No. } The reports of the three federal investigations into the claims of "Dark Alliance" were not released until over a year after the series's publication. "Report on Alleged Involvement: Findings" 43. [71] "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said. Calling the Post's overall focus "misplaced", Overholser expressed regret that the paper had not taken the opportunity to re-examine whether the CIA had overlooked Contra involvement in drug smuggling, "a subject The Post and the public had given short shrift. Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff". 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. Unfortunately, the railroading of Gary Webb had begun and he was run over. 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. Webb moved his wife and two young children to a suburb and continued a tradition he had started in Cleveland, restoring their small house with the help of how-to books, installing wainscoting and custom tile, new cabinets and gardens, while putting in overtime at the paper. "Gary didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. So, how much is Gary Webb worth at the age of 49 years old? Like Schou, Corn cites the inspector general's report, which he says "acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drugrunners (sic) while supporting the contras. Webb strongly disagreed with Ceppos's column and, in interviews, was harshly critical of the paper's handling of the story. He was sentenced to life in prison, though the sentence was shortened on appeal and Ross was released in 2009. The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges. American racer Cooper Webb is married to his wife named Mariah Williams Webb. [20] The website artwork showed the silhouette of a man smoking a crack pipe superimposed over the CIA seal. It found that "the allegations contained in the original Mercury News articles were exaggerations of the actual facts." He is from United States. [67], Webb later moved to the State Assembly's Office of Majority Services. 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. During and immediately after the controversy over "Dark Alliance," Webb's earlier writing was examined closely. 2) The series's estimate of the money involved was presented as fact instead of as an estimate. But they underestimated the paradigm shifting power of the internet, and the intelligence of Webb, who not only listed the explosive story online . 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. [60], It found no information to support the claim that the agency interfered with law enforcement actions against Ross, Blandn or Meneses. Vivian Corrie, a part of his liver in a life-threatening operation. 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." Gary Webb, friends say, was a far more combative character than either the Mercury News's executive editor Ceppos or page editor Garcia. [46] Overholser was harshly critical of the series, "reported by a seemingly hotheaded fellow willing to have people leap to conclusions his reporting couldn't back up." and Drugs Has a Life of Its Own", "Pivotal Figures of Newspaper Series May Be Only Bit Players", "Tracking the Genesis of the Crack Trade", "Examining Charges of CIA Role in Crack Sales", "History Fuels Outrage Over Crack Allegations", "Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes for "Tawdry" Attacks", "Mercury News Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos' Letter to the Washington Post", "Washington Post response to Mercury News Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos", "Despite critics, a good story Crack and the contras", "CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: Epilogue", "CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: Conclusions", United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, "Are You Sure You Want to Ruin Your Career?