For Gary Webb, this should have been "the Big One," the story that leads to the Pulitzer, fame and ...cont'd
—James Adams, The New York Times Book Review
Description
Gary Webb was a cherished friend of ours, and one of the best investigative reporters we've ever known. He attacked stories with a unique blend of zeal and skepticism. Gary had no axe to grind, and typically Gary himself didn't fully believe in his own stories until he'd finished them. If he could overcome his own skepticism then he'd done his job. Anything less than that would have been unworthy of him, and he was incapable of lowering his standards, although he must have been tempted sometimes. It is important to note that the objections to the "Dark Alliance" series were obscure and unsubstantiated, and that when the book Dark Alliance was published it was highly praised not only in the alternative press but also in the mainstream media-including several of the same publications, such as the Washington Post, that had earlier attacked Webb for sloppy journalism. That Gary was vilified on Page One of the New York Times and the Washington Post is something many people still remember. That both papers ultimately treated Webb's book with due respect is forgotten. That Webb's own newspaper distanced itself from the "Dark Alliance" story is remembered. That the Justice Department's formal internal investigation largely confirmed Webb's own conclusions is hardly mentioned. That Webb won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team reporting on the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake is another salient fact that hasn't been mentioned in many of the obituaries being published in newspapers across the country. Gary never got over having been betrayed by many of his own peers. He knew his work was deserving of their respect. He knew he was one of the best. It baffled him that other newspapers didn't pick up and run with the CIA-Contras-Crack Cocaine story after he'd busted it wide open. And it puzzled him that even after all his awards-even after newspapers of record wrote in their reviews of his book that it specifically put to rest the earlier allegations against him-he'd remained something of an outcast. Gary had a great time writing Dark Alliance. For awhile we had daily phone meetings to review drafts of the text chapter by chapter. The only time that was possible for Gary was at the end of his work day, so I'd call him at around 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time, which was 9:00 p.m. for me, and we'd go for two or three hours. For both of us this meant shutting doors on our families and after a couple weeks we were weary of spending our evenings this way. But that didn't change how fantastic our process was. Over and over Gary said what a joy it was to have an editor who kept asking him to write more, after all the years having to continually cut back his copy length for space considerations at the newspapers where he'd worked. And often when I queried him about a specific fact, I'd get back a fresh story and new characters that were riveting. Dark Alliance isn't a short book, but one thing I learned in those conversations was that in order to write it Gary had had to go so deeply into the worlds he was writing about that he'd found enough material for ten books, and that part of what made him so good was that he understood you've always got to get more material than you'll ever be able to use. Often newspaper writers have trouble transitioning to books. Gary was such a skilled writer on the page that he took to writing his first book with a natural ease and would have written many more. Seven Stories and FAIR will co-host a memorial celebration of Gary Webb's life and work in late January, date and place to be announced. - Daniel Simon, Publisher Seven Stories Press
Read Gary's introduction to Censored 1999.
Read Gary's timeline of the events in Dark Alliance.
Robert Parry on Gary. Jeff Cohen on Gary. Dark Alliance is a book that should be fiction, whose characters seem to come straight out of central casting: the international drug lord, Norwin Meneses; the Contra cocaine broker with an MBA in marketing, Danilo Blandon; and the illiterate teenager from the inner city who rises to become the king of crack, "Freeway" Ricky Ross. But unfortunately, these characters are real and their stories are true.
In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled "Dark Alliance," revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras.
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http://www.sevenstories.com/book/index.cfm/GCOI/58322100705890Gary Webb, RIP
No thanks to the L.A. Times
by Marc Cooper
Webb: Pursued truth at all costs.
(Photo by Larry Dalton)
First the L.A. Times helped kill off Gary Webb’s career. Then, eight years later, after Webb committed suicide this past weekend, the Times decided to give his corpse another kick or two, in a scandalous, self-serving and ultimately shameful obituary. It was the culmination of the long, inglorious saga of a major newspaper dropping the ball journalistically, and then extracting relentless revenge on an out-of-town reporter who embarrassed it.
Webb was the 49-year-old former Pulitzer-winning reporter who in 1996, while working for the San Jose Mercury News, touched off a national debate with a three-part series that linked the CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan Contras to a crack-dealing epidemic in Los Angeles and other American cities.
A cold panic set in at the L.A. Times when Webb’s so-called Dark Alliance story first appeared. Just two years before, the Times had published a long takeout on local crack dealer Rickey Ross and no mention was made of his possible link to and financing by CIA-backed Contras. Now the Times feared it was being scooped in its own backyard by a second-tier Bay Area paper.
The Times mustered an army of 25 reporters, led by Doyle McManus, to take down Webb’s reporting. It was, apparently, more important to the Times to defend its own inadequate reporting on the CIA-drug connection than it was to advance Webb’s important work (a charge consistently denied by the Times). The New York Times and the Washington Post also joined in on the public lynching of Webb. Webb’s own editor, Jerry Ceppos, also helped do him in, with a public mea culpa backing away from his own paper’s stories.
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http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/04/dissonance-cooper.php
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