Kill the Messenger (17 page)

But just as Webb had highlighted the portions of Blandon's testimony that tended to show his illicit contra fundraising had lasted the “better part of a decade,” the
Post
article focused exclusively on statements Blandon made that tended to minimize how much cash actually went to the rebels. In using Blandon's testimony to undermine Webb's story, Pincus and Suro also did exactly what Webb got in
trouble for doing—basing broad conclusions on the testimony of a drug dealer. And in quoting anonymous law enforcement officials about the amount of cash that funded the rebels, the
Post
neglected to account for the 1986 L.A. County Sheriff's Department records cited by Webb, which clearly stated that Blandon was still dealing large amounts of cocaine that year and still sending the profits to the contras through a chain of banks in Florida.

Pincus and Suro also questioned Webb's ethics, citing his intervention in Ross'criminal trial. They interviewed Ceppos, and quoted him saying that while he “did not know” Webb had fed questions to Alan Fenster, Ross'attorney, he didn't see any ethical problems with such tactics. At first Ceppos was glad the
Post
was jumping on the story, but such questions provided the first inkling that the coverage wasn't going to be positive. It's possible Pincus and Suro got their tip on Webb's courtroom behavior from Post media critic Howard Kurtz, who a few days earlier, wrote the paper's first story questioning Webb's perceived one-sidedness by noting that, “[fr]rom the beginning, Webb appeared conscious of making news.” Specifically, Kurtz reported, Webb had written Ross a letter asserting that, “in terms of generating public interest,” it was best to publish the series “as near as possible to a newsworthy event—in this case, your sentencing.” By being the first reporter to question not just “Dark Alliance” but Webb's professional conduct and objectivity, Kurtz set the abrasive tone for future criticism.

“My initial impression of [Webb] was of a passionate journalist who worked hard and deeply believed in what he was doing,” Kurtz said in a recent interview. “ ‘Dark Alliance' clearly tapped into some strong sentiments in the black community, elements of which wanted to believe what Webb was
implying but could not prove. I think Webb did overreach with the series, even as he insisted he wasn't explicitly saying what the conspiracy theorists believed he was. But the
Mercury News
editors were also responsible in the way they packaged the series and for not asking tougher questions and engaging in more rigorous editing. The newspaper would later acknowledge its failure, but Webb never really did.”

At first, Webb's editors staunchly defended their star reporter. A few days after the
Post
article appeared, Ceppos sent an angry letter to the editor of the
Post
taking issue with the story's headline claiming “Dark Alliance” had alleged that the CIA had engaged in a “plot” with the drug dealers mentioned in the story. “While there is considerable circumstantial evidence of CIA involvement with the leaders of this drug ring, we never reached or reported any definitive conclusion on CIA involvement,” he argued. “We reported that men selling cocaine in Los Angeles met with people on the CIA payroll. We reported that the money raised was sent to a CIA-run operation. But we did not go further.”

Ceppos also tacked his letter to the
Post
to a bulletin board in the
Mercury News
, and attached another memo addressed to his staff that defended the series. “I'm not sure how many of us could sustain such a microscopic examination of our work and I believe Gary Webb deserves recognition for surviving unscathed,” Ceppos wrote. But the
Post
refused to run Ceppos letter. “I couldn't believe it,” Garcia says. “After running multiple critiques of ‘Dark Alliance,' some of them on the front page, why would the
Post
not run his letter?”

Meanwhile, Webb received a tip from a reader that he should check the
Mercury News
archives from February 18,
1967. Webb went to the paper's library and found a reprint of a
Post
story written by Pincus: “How I Traveled Abroad on CIA Subsidy.” In it, Pincus said a CIA recruiter approached him while he was a college student. The spook asked Pincus to spy on student groups at several international youth conferences in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Webb later wrote that he could hardly believe his eyes. The reporter who had been assigned to debunk his story—and who had the nerve to question his courtroom ethics—had collaborated with the CIA in spying operations? Webb could hardly contain his anger. “I'd certainly never spied on American citizens,” he fumed.

Webb began researching Pincus and discovered that in 1975, he had written an unfavorable review of
CIA Diary
, a tell-all expose about the agency by ex-agent Philip Agee. Pincus had also covered the Iran contra affair, and had penned a story claiming that Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was planning to indict Ronald Reagan, who at that point had just left office. In his memoirs,
Firewall
, Walsh claimed Pincus had been leaked that information in an attempt to discredit his investigation. “Of all the sideswipes that we suffered during this period, the false report that we were considering indicting the nation's still-admired former president hurt us the most,” Walsh said.

In a recent interview, Pincus didn't deny his past relationship with the CIA, but claimed the only thing the agency did for him was pay his travel expenses to a 1959 youth conference in Vienna. “But I got to know a lot of people—some were friends,” Pincus says. “I knew [former CIA director] George Tenet when he worked for John Heinz as a staffer on the [senate] intelligence committee, just as I knew
[Clinton Defense Secretary] Les Aspin when he was a young staffer for Bob McNamara. We were all young people in D.C. and went to a lot of dinners together.”

While he acknowledges that his investigation confirmed that Blandon and Meneses had met with CIA asset Enrique Bermudez in Honduras, Pincus says such a meeting proves nothing. “It's a big leap to say that therefore the CIA, through one of its people, was arranging for drug deals to make money,” he says. Pincus wouldn't have bothered responding to “Dark Alliance,” he adds, but had no choice after the Congressional Black Caucus, led by Congresswoman Maxine Waters, began to make “a lot of noise” about the story. “A lot of people do intelligence stories that we don't report, because they are wrong,” he says. “The thing that got me was the allegation that the CIA was responsible for bringing crack cocaine into South Central L.A.. That's off the wall.”

N
EXT TO JOIN
the fray was the
Los Angeles Times
. On October 20, 1996, the paper published the first installment of an exhaustive three-day series that in its sheer length dwarfed “Dark Alliance.” The first two days dealt directly with Webb's allegations while the final installment devoted countless speculative paragraphs to the question of whether African Americans were disproportionately likely to believe in conspiracy theories, something that did little to mend the paper's reputation for ignoring or belittling the concerns of the city's black population.

The
LA Times
also had to contend with the fact that
Webb had apparently scooped them on a story that had unfolded in the paper's own backyard. Editor Shelby Coffee III assigned more than two-dozen reporters to the story. The feeling among some disgruntled
LA Times
staffers was that their assignment wasn't to investigate “Dark Alliance,” but debunk it. One of them told
New Times LA
that he had been selected to join the “Get Gary Webb Team,” while another stated that a common remark among editors was, “We're going to take away this guy's Pulitzer.”

Leo Wolinsky, then metro editor of the
LA Times
, helped to manage the paper's response. Now the paper's managing editor, Wolinsky says he'll never forget when he first read “Dark Alliance.” “I remember having a knot in my stomach about it,” he says. “It was a huge story—that the CIA started the crack binge in South Central L.A. That is an amazing allegation, and here in our area, it was like a smack in the face. It appeared convincing; it didn't appear to be garbage. You can't ignore a story like that in your backyard.”

Leading the paper's response was Doyle McManus, the paper's Washington, D.C., bureau chief, who had covered the Iran contra scandal and had written several articles about the contras' alleged involvement with drug trafficking. McManus interviewed several CIA officials, including former CIA director Robert Gates, CIA agent Vincent Cannistraro, and current agency director John Deutch. Not surprisingly, all of them strongly denied that the agency had anything to do with drug smuggling. Like Pincus and Suro, McManus also failed to mention the 1986 Sheriff's department and DEA records Webb had cited in his story that flatly stated Blandon was still funding the
contras. “No solid evidence has emerged that either Meneses or Blandon contributed any money to the rebels after 1984,” he surmised.

In a recent interview, McManus said his first reaction upon reading “Dark Alliance” was that it demanded further reporting. “Some parts sounded poorly sourced, but other parts looked quite convincing, and all of it merited a serious follow-up on our part,” he says. “We had an obligation to do our own reporting and to tell our readers whatever we found. After further research, reporting, and interviews, I reached the conclusion that most of the elements of the story that had appeared new and significant on first reading were either not new, not significant, or not supported by real evidence.”

The most bizarre aspect of the paper's coverage was a story by
LA Times
reporter Jesse Katz, the same reporter who two years earlier had written that “Freeway” Ricky Ross was the biggest crack dealer in the history of Los Angeles. In 1994, Katz had estimated that at its peak, Ross' “coast-to-coast conglomerate” was selling a half-million crack rocks per day. “If there was an eye to the storm, if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was “Freeway” Rick,” Katz had written. “Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices, and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived.”

After Webb had revealed the source of much of that cocaine to be a Nicaraguan contra sympathizer who had funneled some of his profits to the CIA-backed rebels, Katz had a new take on Ross and his relative importance to the
crack plague. “The story of crack's genesis and evolution . . . is filled with a cast of interchangeable characters, from ruthless billionaires to strung-out curb dealers, none of whom is central to the drama,” Katz wrote.

Now a reporter with
Los Angeles Magazine
, Katz says he was working at the
LA Times
bureau in Houston when he received a telephone call telling him to fly back to Los Angeles to help write a response to “Dark Alliance.” It wasn't a task he particularly relished. “Is that something I wanted to do?” he asks. “No, it wasn't high on my list. There is something a little unseemly about having a major media institution dissect the work of another reporter.”

Katz had met Webb while covering “Freeway” Ricky Ross' trial in San Diego, but had left the courtroom shortly after it began to work on another assignment. His only story about the trial was a brief article mentioning that Ross' lawyers planned to introduce evidence that the CIA had been involved in supplying him with drugs. At first, Katz says he felt that Webb had scooped him. “Gary had great journalistic instincts and terrific sense of dedication and doggedness, and I admired his willingness to dig, obviously to his own peril,” Katz says. “But as I got sucked into this reviewing of his work and reviewing of my work and the whole crack epidemic, I began to feel there were parts of his series that were not as intellectually honest as they could have been or should have been.”

When asked to explain the incongruity between his own reporting on Ross' relative importance in the city's crack trade before and after “Dark Alliance,” Katz is somewhat at a loss for words. “I'm not sure I can answer that in a wholly
satisfying way,” he says. Referring to his 1994 story, Katz says he might have bought into the “mythology” surrounding Ross. “At the time, knowing people in the gang world and the drug enforcement world, he was the name that came up the most often and had a mythical quality,” he says.

While Katz says his later story was an attempt to point out that the crack plague would have happened with or without Ross, he stands by his original assertion that Ross was L.A.'s first true crack kingpin. “He was at the front end of the crack wave,” Katz says. “He was the first crack millionaire. He got rich doing this pretty much before everyone else in South Central got in on it.”

Katz adds that his involvement with the mainstream media's critique of “Dark Alliance” has left many observers with the mistaken impression that he's an apologist for the CIA. “I don't put anything past the CIA, or think the CIA is going to tell the truth about what it does,” he says. “They could be involved in any sort of thing. I know the
LA Times
wrote stories where the CIA was saying they didn't do anything. That wasn't my end of the coverage.”

Just as happened with the original
Post
story, Webb's editors also defended him against the
LA Times
when the paper directly attacked not just the story, but Webb himself, in print. “One story that went over the wire from the
LA Times
included a paragraph that stated as fact that Gary and Ricky Ross had a movie deal together,” says Garcia. “That was not true. What was true is that a movie agent had written up a movie deal contract, offered it to Ricky Ross and Gary—and Gary said no. That was sloppy reporting on the part of the
LA Times
. Just because Gary's name was printed
on a contract did not mean he signed a contract for a movie deal. I called the
LA Times
city desk and told them they had an error in the story; it took a lot of convincing before they agreed to write a correction.”