Dispelling the Rumors: Gary Webb's Death Confirmed As Suicide The story they printed was just awful. In the final few months of his life, Bell says, Webb became increasingly withdrawn. margin: 0 45px; After Webb's death, a collection of his stories from before and after the "Dark Alliance" series was published. 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. Gary Webb - Wikipedia "Looking back," she says, "I think Gary had been obsessed with suicide for some time. [11], In 1983, Webb moved to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he continued doing investigative work. Because the gentile (european caucasian, lepers, fake jews) or white folks agenda has always been to destroy the black man, ever since pharaoh tried to murder Christ by murdering Hebrew babies, until now. 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. Ross was a major drug dealer in Los Angeles. Emma Lee Webb. Ceppos and Garcia have long since lost any taste for public discussion of "Dark Alliance". The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors. 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". Dec. 13, 2004. So he blew her off. 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.' During and immediately after the controversy over "Dark Alliance," Webb's earlier writing was examined closely. But, Ceppos wrote, the series "did not meet our standards" in four areas. Garry Webb wrote the 1996 "Dark Alliance" series for the San Jose. Webb established incontrovertible links * between Ricky Ross and Blandn who, two years later, would betray Ross to the authorities. I mean - please.". Corrie had primary biliary cirrhosis, a genetic liver disease that already had. On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; laid out a certificate for his cremation; and taped a note on the door telling movers, who were . "Like enjoy it.". The article resulted in a lawsuit against Webb's paper which the plaintiffs won. Webb put in a call to Robert Parry. To show this, the series focused on three men: Ricky Ross, Oscar Danilo Blandn, and Norwin Meneses. "[80], Not all writers agree that the Inspector-General's report supported the series's claims. "This is an appalling charge," says a tense-looking Deutch. [61] According to the report, it used Webb's reporting and writing as "key resources in focusing and refining the investigation." 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. They were outraged by the series's charges.[27]. Contemporary discussions of the series are discussed in the section on, Webb 2011, "Caltrans Ignored Elevated Freeway Safety. The link between drug-running and the Reagan regime's support for the right-wing terrorist group throughout the 1980s had been public knowledge for over a decade. Webb's experience came as no surprise to Jack Blum, senior prosecutor for the Kerry Committee. Gary Webb's family says his death was Suicide. He is from United States. GARY WEBB: His wife's office was burglarized. Gary Webb's wife, Sue Webb (now Sue Stokes), said that he had been depressed for years due to his inability to get hired at a daily newspaper. Born January 3rd, 1943 in Montreal, Quebec, he was the son of the late John Douglas Webb and the late Jeannie (Penny) Hardie Penman. 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. "I am scared," the voice replies. Emma Lee Webb, age 75, of Crossett, AR passed away Monday February 27, 2023, in her home surrounded by her family. "He had six in a short period of time." [32], The New York Times published two articles on the series in mid-October, both written by reporter Tim Golden. Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in, Please refresh your browser to be logged in, Extra 20% off selected fashion and sportswear at Very, Up to 20% off & extra perks with Booking.com Genius Membership, $6 off a $50+ order with this AliExpress discount code, 10% off selected orders over 100 - eBay discount code, Compare broadband packages side by side to find the best deal for you, Compare cheap broadband deals from providers with fastest speed in your area, All you need to know about fibre broadband, Best Apple iPhone Deals in the UK March 2023, Compare iPhone contract deals and get the best offer this March, Compare the best mobile phone deals from the top networks and brands. 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. Nick Schou, a journalist who wrote a 2006 biography of Webb, has claimed that this was the most important error in the series. [52] Webb was allowed to keep working on the story and made one more trip to Nicaragua in March. "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. 2) The series's estimate of the money involved was presented as fact instead of as an estimate. 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. What was new about Webb's reports, published under the title "Dark Alliance" in the Californian paper the San Jose Mercury News, was that for the first time it brought the story back home. He was preceded in death by his wife, Melody Webb; parents and three brothers, Albert, Duane and Ronald. Gary Webb's "Approach Split" in the atrium of 20 Triton Street London. It was good that his story forced those reports to come out, but part of what made that happen was based on misleading information. "Everyone got out and left the person who had made the noise - issued the report - alone. It also stated that the Contras may have acted with the knowledge and protection of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). "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". Webb became a staff reporter for the San Jose Mercury News in 1988. 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. GARY WEBB was an investigative reporter who focused on government and private sector corruption and who won more than thirty journalism awards. Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff". One time he called me and he said: 'I have this plan that will benefit us both.' Gary Webb: More Pieces In The Suicided Puzzle - Pt 1 - Rense [62], Examining the support that Meneses and Blandn gave to the local Contra organization in San Francisco, the report concluded that it was "not sufficient to finance the organization" and did not consist of "millions," contrary to the claims of the "Dark Alliance" series. Cooper Webb Wife Name Revealed. 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. Gary was born Sept. 4, 1947, to Percy and Pauline (Haas) Webb. According to Walt Bogdanich, a former colleague on the Plain Dealer who has won two Pulitzers and now works for The New York Times, Webb was the best retriever of information from public records he has ever seen. He also had this inherent belief that the truth could not harm him. Work with a bunch of drug dealers to run guns? The Death of Gary Webb - Beyond Chron 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. Chasing Corona - by George Webb ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". And the importance of exposing them. A jury awarded the plaintiffs over 13 million dollars and the case was later settled. Gary's family found that old, storied, ("priceless to us," as his ex-wife, Susan Bell, described it to me) CDROM among his possessions. In 1996, the award-winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered CIA links to Los Angeles drug dealers. 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. 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 says the CIA helped introduce poison into our children. Ceppos failed to reply to one phone message and six emails. 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. Herhold: Thinking back on journalist Gary Webb and the CIA "He definitely was depressed. Gary Webb and the Iran-Contra-Cocaine Connection | WilderUtopia ", Webb had already been cremated and his ashes scattered in the bay off Santa Cruz two weeks before. "[77], Webb's reporting in "Dark Alliance" remains controversial. Blandn and Meneses' high-volume supply of low-priced high-purity cocaine "allowed Ross to sew up the Los Angeles market and move on. [65], After leaving The Mercury News, Webb worked as an investigator for the California State Legislature. For instance, he published an article on racial profiling in traffic stops in Esquire magazine, in April 1999. Can these things possibly be? Gary Webb, MD, FRCPC, FACC - The Donohue Funeral Homes Inc. In addition, Gary left multiple suicide notes to family members which were confirmed to be in his own hand by them. Occupation: Machine Operators, Assemblers, and Inspectors Occupations. 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. ", The significant legacy of the Webb case, "the reason this whole affair remains so significant today," Blum says, "is this: the knowledge that, if one individual dares raise such serious issues, they risk confronting a tremendous apparatus that is prepared to whack them hard, and there is very little they can expect by way of support. This drug ring "opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles" and, as a result, "The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America."[23]. .article-native-ad svg { 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. 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. This did not happen in Webb's case. "He walked in one day," Bell recalls, "and said, 'You are not going to believe what I just found out.' . Gary Webb Obituary (1954 - 2021) - Dorr, MI - Grand Rapids Press Critics view the series' claims as inaccurate or overstated, while supporters point to the results of a later CIA investigation as vindicating the series. According to Schou, the investigation "confirmed key chunks of Webb's allegations." An investigative journalist, Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1997 Ceppos was awarded the US Society of Professional Journalists' National Ethics Award. Who Is Gary Webb's Wife? The couple got married recently in November of 2020 after dating for some time. 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. [41], When the Los Angeles Times series appeared, Ceppos again wrote to defend the original series. The Man Who Exposed The Crips, Bloods & CIA Connection to - YouTube Should these editors subsequently deem the story to have been fatally flawed, they take the consequences. We're well aware that they/it (the cia) did do it. "Back then. 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. Although it did find that both men were major drug dealers, "guilty of enriching themselves at the expense of countless drug users," and that they had contributed money to the Contra cause, "we did not find that their activities were responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in South Central Los Angeles, much less the rise of crack throughout the nation, or that they were a significant source of support for the Contras. I remain astounded by the editorial decisions they made.". Webb chose the second option. The series examined the origins of the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles and claimed that members of the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua had played a major role in creating the trade, using cocaine profits to finance their fight against the government in Nicaragua. Man Donates Liver To Ex-Wife - CBS News Attend in Miami or virtually, Sept. 1114. WRITTEN IN PAIN - Los Angeles Times That wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been willing to stand up and risk it all.". Gary is survived by his wife of 48 years, Beverly Webb; children Margaret . When he was engaged, he worked hard. 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." 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 . He was born August 27, 1968 in Saginaw, Michigan to Taylor Jr. and Loretta Webb. "The cause of death was determined to be self . Meneses, an established smuggler and a Contra supporter as well, taught Blandn how to smuggle and provided him with cocaine. A Celebration of Life will be . 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. He was the much-loved father of Lindsay (Stephen . But Webb had one huge blind side: He was fundamentally a man of passion, not of fairness. ", She pauses: "That said, he did sleep with a gun under his bed.". In interviews after leaving The Mercury News, Webb described the 1997 controversy as media manipulation. Webb undeniably made mistakes of detail and emphasis in the newspaper version of "Dark Alliance". [39] Carey's critique appeared in mid-October and went through several of the Post's criticisms of the series, including the importance of Blandn's drug ring in spreading crack, questions about Blandn's testimony in court, and how specific series allegations about CIA involvement had been, giving Webb's responses. 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. 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. By the autumn of 1997, on medication for clinical depression, he was given leave of absence from the paper. He was born June 18, 1943, in Appleton, son of the late Wilford and Helen (Hauskey) Webb. In 2004, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb was found dead from an apparent suicide, as Democracy Now! He was previously married to Sue Bell. Webb worked for several newspapers including The Kentucky Post and Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Exactly," replied Kornbluh, who - referring specifically to the LA Times, said he is "baffled as to how they could be so gullible. He was assigned to its Sacramento bureau, where he was allowed to choose most of his own stories. "People told me that," she says. . He made that very clear. 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. The reports rejected the series's main claims but were critical of some CIA and law enforcement actions. She kept crying about how terrible it all was - by which I mean that she was, physically, crying. Gary Webb, (born August 31, 1955, Corona, California, U.S.died December 10, 2004, Carmichael, California), American investigative journalist who wrote a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 on connections between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S.-backed Contra army seeking to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist [15], In 1988, Webb was recruited by the San Jose Mercury News, which was looking for an investigative reporter. 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." He leaves behind the love of his life and adoring wife of 41 years, Anne Michelle Phillips. Kill the Messenger True Story vs. Movie - Real Gary Webb "Do not quote me. Gary's story, however, is far from over and could never be killed by something as trivial as a material bullet. . The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges. Cooper and Mariah were engaged before they finally tied the knot. "[82], Kill the Messenger (2014) is based on Webb's book Dark Alliance and Nick Schou's biography of Webb. 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. "By the end of his life he was just in a lot of pain," said Webb's ex-wife, Susan Bell. It noted that Blandn and Meneses claimed to have donated money to Contra sympathizers in Los Angeles, but found no information to confirm that it was true or that the agency had heard of it. His corpse was discovered on the seventh anniversary of his resignation from the Mercury News. Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" Returns to the Internet - Narco News [67], Webb later moved to the State Assembly's Office of Majority Services. He kept saying that he would never get another job in journalism.". Webb, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist, exposed CIA drug trafficking operations in a series of books and reports for the San Jose Mercury News. Webb's pieces were not dealing with nameless peasants slaughtered in some distant republic, but demonstrated a clear link between the CIA and the suppliers of the gangs delivering crack to the ghetto of Watts, in South Central Los Angeles. [68], In August 2004, Webb joined the Sacramento News & Review, an alternative weekly newspaper, where he continued doing investigative writing. Gary Stephen Webb(August 31, 1955 - December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist. When it did, beginning with The Washington Post, it shocked Webb's critics as much as his many admirers. Snowfall is an American crime drama television series set in Los Angeles in 1983. Gary Webb famously died of two gun shot wounds to the head and - reddit Because Blandn cooperated with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), he spent only 28 months in prison, became a paid government informant, and received permanent resident status.