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When removal men arrived, on the morning of 10 December 2004, they found a sign on his front door, which read: ''Please do not enter. He died on December 10, 2004 in Carmichael, California, USA. That was just the way he was.". [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. Film of this encounter survives. Garcia is deputy director of the John S Knight Fellowships in Journalism at Stanford University. "[82], Kill the Messenger (2014) is based on Webb's book Dark Alliance and Nick Schou's biography of Webb. [13] Webb then moved to the paper's statehouse bureau, where he covered statewide issues and won numerous regional journalism awards. 'Dark Alliance' - both as journalism and as a book - is a convoluted narrative, but the crucial link it establishes is between the "agricultural salesman" Oscar Danilo Blandn, a Contra sympathiser with close CIA links, and his best customer, an LA drug dealer known as "Freeway" Ricky Ross. "Although Ross had become a millionaire by 1984," Katz now wrote, "the market was so huge by then that even a dealer of his stature could seem dwarfed How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level," he continues, "had nothing to do with Ross". .article-native-ad svg { By William Kennedy / Jan. 22, 2023 12:00 pm EST. [69], Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head. 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 . Webb began to shift from cynicism to curiosity. [48] Despite the controversy that soon overtook the series, and the request of one board member to reconsider, the branch's board went ahead with the award in November. Then, on 10 December, he resigned. He really did believe that," she says. 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. Gary was born May 5, 1954, to his parents Worley and Margaret Webb, who preceded him in death as well as his brother, David Webb. [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. [81], Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at George Washington University's National Security Archives, also does not agree that the report vindicated the series. "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 . 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. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. "Look at what happened to Gary Webb. The whole business, I suggested to Blum, has echoes of a classic Alfred Hitchcock plot. "Exactly," replied Kornbluh, who - referring specifically to the LA Times, said he is "baffled as to how they could be so gullible. 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. Work with a bunch of drug dealers to run guns? [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. As a result, some major US newspapers ignored its findings completely, while others relegated a brief summary to their inside pages. "They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. "The first story he had to file was about a police horse which had died of constipation.". [51] After discussions with Webb, the column was published on May 11, 1997.[53]. [15], In 1988, Webb was recruited by the San Jose Mercury News, which was looking for an investigative reporter. When I first heard the news, I tell Bell, I was inclined to believe the conspiracy theories that still proliferate on the internet, suggesting that Webb had been assassinated - either by one of the drug dealers he'd met while writing Dark Alliance, or by the intelligence services who were supposed to police them. 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. When he was engaged, he worked hard. Their explosive report, which appeared in 1989, was either ignored, or marginalised, by the American press. 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 didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. She acted opposite Dirk Bogarde in the groundbreaking film Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961), as the unsuspecting wife of a barrister who is a closet homosexual. 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. Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Gary Stephen Webb, Pulitzer prize-winning US investigative journalist, typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; he laid out a certificate for his cremation; he taped a note on the door telling movers - who were coming the next morning to move him out of his rental house near Sacramento - to "He told me, not long before he died, that he didn't want to get up in the mornings," she says. 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. We were dismissed as a bunch of nuts." Blandn and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. The collection, The Killing Game: Selected Stories from the Author of Dark Alliance, was edited by Webb's son, Eric. 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. Gary was preceded in death by his mother and father, Donna and James Webb of Carpentersville. A perceptive, engaging woman of 48, she has turned an adjoining study into a small shrine to her late husband, who would have celebrated his 50th birthday five weeks ago. Ross was also released early after cooperating in an investigation of police corruption, but was rearrested a few months later in a sting operation arranged with Blandn's help. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? He was born at Emmanuel Hospital in. Born January 3rd, 1943 in Montreal, Quebec, he was the son of the late John Douglas Webb and the late Jeannie (Penny) Hardie Penman. "I told Gary not to go near this story," his source replies, in an emotional voice. I mean - please.". [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. [33] Golden also referred to the controversy over Webb's contacts with Ross's lawyer. ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". 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.' The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department began its own investigation into the "Dark Alliance" claims.[30]. He had sold his house the week before his death because he was unable to afford the mortgage.[71]. Gary Douglas Webb of Radnor, PA, passed away on October 19, 2021 Born January 3rd, 1943 in Montreal, Quebec, he was the son of the late John Douglas Webb and the late Jeannie (Penny) Hardie. Gary Webb, Into the Buzzsaw, CH 13, Prometheus Books. 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. Within weeks, the site was attracting up to 1.3m hits per day. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. Webb's then-wife Sue remembers coming home from the shops and finding her. Gary E. Webb, a dedicated husband, dad, pappy, coach, mentor, teacher, supporter, hero, and best friend, was called home by the Lord while surrounded by family. 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. He began his career working for newspapers in Kentucky and Ohio, winning numerous awards, and building a strong reputation for investigative writing. He went into the bedroom, and picked up a .38 that had belonged to his father. It found that CIA officials ignored information about possible Contra drug dealing; that they continued to work with Contra supporters despite allegations that they were trafficking drugs, and further asserted that officials from the CIA instructed Drug Enforcement Agency officers to refrain from investigating alleged dealers connected with the Contras. 71K views 8 years ago Gary Webb's son Ian talks about the film in which Jeremy Renner plays his late journalist father. 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. Regarding issues raised in the series's shorter sidebar stories, it found that some in the government were "not eager" to have DEA agent Celerino Castillo "openly probe" activities at Ilopango Airport in El Salvador, where covert operations in support of the Contras were undertaken, and that the CIA had indeed intervened in a case involving smuggler Julio Zavala. Gary is survived by his loving wife of 41 years, Barbara; their son, Jeff; his nephew, Christopher (Stephanie) Webb; niece, Sara (Gary) Dugan; and . He then transferred to nearby Northern Kentucky University. So, how much is Gary Webb worth at the age of 49 years old? Emma Lee Webb. "Gary Webb was left to fend for himself. Attorneys' Offices. While police were preparing the case against her boyfriend, Baca alleged, officers had disclosed documents which revealed that one of her lover's associates had been working for the Contras. He concluded, "How did these shortcomings occur? 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. border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; "For the better part of a decade," it began, "a San Francisco drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funnelled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the US Central Intelligence Agency.". When Gary originally broke this mind blowing story, the arrogant authority's assumed they could simply ignore him and hope he'd go away. This did not happen in Webb's case. Despite some hyped phrasing, "Dark Alliance" appears to be praiseworthy investigative reporting."[47]. [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. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California." 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. Webb's series was published on the Mercury News's fledgling website, but it wasn't exactly an instant sensation. 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. 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 sounds crazy," says Bell, "but having his motorbike stolen was the last straw. 4) The series "created impressions that were open to misinterpretation" through "imprecise language and graphics. Although he attended Northern Kentucky for four years, he did not finish his degree. [66] It found that "the allegations contained in the original Mercury News articles were exaggerations of the actual facts." A time of fellowship and remembrance is scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, March 6, 2019, at Lake Ridge Chapel and Memorial Designers. [61] According to the report, it used Webb's reporting and writing as "key resources in focusing and refining the investigation." On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and split his helmet open. . There was no coffin, casket or tombstone. He made that very clear. His victory in the event last year gave him . color:rgb(46,179,178); The response from the American press took two months to arrive. 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." font-weight:500; Depressed, he became increasingly unpredictable in his behaviour and embarked on a series of affairs; he was divorced from Bell in 2000, though he remained close to her throughout his life and lived in a house in nearby Carmichael. Gary Stephen Webb(August 31, 1955 - December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist. 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.

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