Kill the Messenger (19 page)

Of the three major newspapers that criticized “Dark Alliance,” only the
Washington Post
later saw fit to question its own coverage. On November 10, 1996, a few weeks after the anti-Webb onslaught had subsided,
Washington Post
ombudsman Geneva Overholser excoriated Webb for “Dark Alliance's” shortcomings, but acknowledged the unseemliness of the mainstream media's feeding frenzy, which she deemed “misplaced.”

“A principal responsibility of the press is to protect the people from government excesses,” Overholser argued. “The
Post
(among others) showed more energy for protecting the CIA from someone else's journalistic excesses . . . Would that we had welcomed the surge of public interest as an occasion to return to a subject the
Post
and the public had
given short shrift. Alas, dismissing someone else's story as old news comes more naturally.”

A decade of hindsight, however, has softened the perspective of many of the journalists that attacked Gary Webb in print. Ironically, because his newspaper was the most aggressive in criticizing “Dark Alliance,” Leo Wolinsky of the
LA Times
says he wishes Webb had worked for him. “The truth is that, with a good editor, it would have been a great story,” Wolinsky says. “I could see that story in the
LA Times
in draft form; it just needed an editor who would ask the right questions. In some ways Gary got too much blame. He did exactly what you expect from a great investigative reporter.”

NINE

Mea Culpa

DESPITE THE BARRAGE
of criticism against “Dark Alliance” in the nation's largest and most respected newspapers, Gary Webb had every reason to think that his editors would stand by him. Executive editor Jerry Ceppos had defended Webb in interviews with the
New York Times, LA Times
, and
Washington Post
, and even had written a trenchant letter to the editor about the latter paper's coverage of his story.

When other reporters at the
Mercury News
who weren't happy about the controversy openly groused about Webb, Ceppos posted a memo on an editorial bulletin board asking them to keep their views to themselves. At a staff party at the paper, he had jauntily displayed his courage under fire by donning a military helmet.

Webb wanted to go on the offensive against his critics. He suggested stories about Walter Pincus' ties to the CIA and how the
LA Times
had known about the 1986 raids against the Blandon ring—and had even obtained information about the evidence seized in Ronald Lister's house—but had chosen not to report it. “The best way to shut them up is to put the rest of what we know in the paper and keep plowing ahead,” Webb later said he told Ceppos.

Yet it wasn't just Webb's credibility that was being questioned, but that of the
Mercury News
itself. Ceppos was in no mood to print stories attacking other newspapers. He wanted to print a written response to their criticism, but wasn't sure Webb was the man to do it. Instead, Ceppos appointed the paper's most experienced investigative reporter, Pete Carey, and an L.A. bureau reporter, Pamela Kramer, to write follow-up articles. Carey worked on his own from the paper's headquarters in San Jose, while Kramer and Webb teamed up for field assignments in Southern California. Ceppos also gave Webb permission to return to Central America to gather more evidence to bolster his story.

While Webb was in Costa Rica interviewing new sources, Carey and Kramer were writing follow-up stories about the controversy. “My role was to do the community follow-ups,” says Kramer, who later left the
Mercury News
to pursue a teaching career. “Clearly the response was stratospherically greater from the public than what the
Mercury
had prepared for. It ranged from legitimate community interest to people getting CIA signals in their heads. I got a lot of those calls because I was listed in the L.A. directory for the
Mercury News
.”

Kramer had seen Webb around the office when she
worked as an intern at the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, but had never spoken to him until she accompanied him on several reporting gigs in L.A. The pair interviewed the Sheriff's deputies who had raided the Blandon drug ring in 1986, and even knocked on the door of Lister's vacant Mission Viejo house. Kramer recalls that there was tin foil in all the windows.

“I was sent to team report, ostensibly for two reasons,” Kramer says. “One was that I had requested to work with an investigative reporter a year earlier, but also because I was a ‘solid person.' It was not that Dawn [Garcia] was casting any aspersions on Gary but she was saying because of the controversy that was surrounding him, they wanted a second set of eyes there. It was not that I was being a spy; it was team reporting. And it was cool. It was fun.”

Kramer's first impression of “Dark Alliance” was that the story made for breathtaking reading but seemed a bit grandiose—at least that's how she felt when she saw the phrase “crack-cocaine explosion” in the lead paragraph. But more to the point, she felt amazed that nobody had told her the story was in the works, given that she was the paper's L.A. correspondent. “This was in my backyard and I didn't know anything about it,” she says. “Nobody said anything about it.”

After one assignment in Los Angeles, Kramer drove Webb to the airport, so he could catch his flight to San Diego. While Webb retrieved his belongings from a locker, Kramer waited for him on the departures level. After ten minutes, Webb hadn't returned. “I was about to get out of the car and give ten bucks to this guy on a bench and give him a description of Gary,” Kramer says. At that moment, a police officer
knocked on her window. “The cop says, ‘Hey, is your name by any chance, Pam? There is a guy downstairs who's convinced you've been kidnapped.' ” As it turned out, Webb had gone downstairs to the arrivals lane. “He thought the CIA had me,” Kramer says.

Webb flew to Costa Rica, where he and freelancer Georg Hodel interviewed police and prosecutors about Meneses and his connection to contra activities there. Hodel located Carlos Cabezas, a contra pilot who claimed he had delivered millions of dollars in drug funds to the contras. Cabezas, whom DEA reports show was involved with Meneses' drug ring, claimed that he was taking orders from a CIA agent in Costa Rica named Ivan Gomez. Hodel also tracked down Enrique Miranda, who had testified against Meneses during the latter's trial in Nicaragua on drug charges. Miranda told Hodel that Meneses had long operated with CIA protection.

Back in California after the trip, Webb began typing up his findings, convinced that they would settle the question of Blandon and Meneses ties to the CIA once and for all. Besides the new information he had unearthed in California, Webb had 3,000 pages of records released by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department about the agency's 1986 raids on the Blandon-Ross network—documents that further bolstered his assertion that Blandon was still funding the contras with drug money several years after he and Meneses met CIA asset Enrique Bermudez in Honduras.

Webb felt jubilant. “We'd done it,” he later recalled. “I expected the editors to be besides themselves with joy.” Instead, nothing happened. “Aside from Dawn, no one called me to tell me they'd read the new stories,” Webb later
wrote. “No one called with questions. No one even suggested that we begin editing them.”

What Webb didn't know was that Pete Carey, whom Ceppos had assigned to investigate the controversy over “Dark Alliance” while Kramer was busy reporting on the black community's reaction, had spent weeks trying to advance Webb's story, and had come up empty handed. Carey's job was to do nothing short of vindicate “Dark Alliance” from the attacks it had suffered at the hands of the nation's most powerful newspapers.

In a recent interview, Carey said he got the assignment after approaching Ceppos in October 1996, at the height of the media's criticism of the story. “I remember walking into Jerry's office and saying, ‘Boy, we need to do a story on this,'” Carey says. “We are really taking a beating.” Carey convinced Ceppos it was imperative for the paper to acknowledge in print that the
Mercury News
had been subjected to unprecedented criticism by the nation's leading newspapers. “We owe it to our readers,” he told Ceppos.

When Ceppos gave Carey the job of investigating Webb's story, the idea was that if anybody could ferret out the truth, Carey could. After all, Carey had covered Iran contra for Knight Ridder News Service and knew the basic terrain of the story. If he found that Webb was right, Ceppos reasoned, perhaps the newspapers that attacked “Dark Alliance” would admit they had wrongly maligned the
Mercury News
.

But while Carey says he went into his investigation hoping to advance the story, he quickly determined it would not be easy. The first inkling Carey had that something was wrong was when he looked at Blandon's trial transcripts.
Webb had reported that Blandon's testimony showed he had been dealing drugs for the contras for “the better part of a decade.” Instead, Carey wasn't sure what the transcripts showed. “There were important, contradictory statements that didn't make it into the series,” Carey says. “It was kind of disheartening. I am a firm believer in telling the whole story, in laying out the weaknesses as well as the strengths. There was a lot of ambiguity.”

Ultimately, Carey came to roughly the same conclusion that the
Post
's Walter Pincus and other reporters who had examined Blandon's testimony had reached: by the time Blandon began dealing coke to “Freeway” Ricky Ross, he had broken with Meneses and was no longer sending cash to support the contras. While that was a reasonable conclusion, based on a fair reading of Blandon's testimony, it ignored the L.A. County Sheriff's Department's 1986 report saying Blandon's drug proceeds were still being funneled to the contras four years after Blandon started supplying Ross with coke.

When Carey confronted Webb about the contradiction in Blandon's testimony, he says Webb told him Blandon was lying when he tried to downplay the length of time he dealt drugs for the contras. But “Dark Alliance” had specifically asserted that Blandon had sent “millions” of dollars worth of drug funds to the contras, and Carey could find no proof for that claim. “This thing about millions of dollars—it looked like an error of exaggeration,” Carey says. “How could something like that get inflated? You start with two drug dealers who were completely untrustworthy. I mean, find me a drug dealer who doesn't claim he's in the CIA.”

Carey made scores of phone calls in the course of his investigation, including one to contra leader Adolfo Calero. “It's nice to finally hear from someone at the
Mercury News
,” Calero joked. Carey asked Calero about the photograph of him and Meneses together at a meeting in San Francisco. Calero said he didn't remember meeting Meneses, because he had been to countless contra fundraising meetings. Carey had less luck tracking down Ivan Gomez, the mysterious CIA agent Cabezas had said directed Meneses' drug pipeline. At one point, Carey heard that Gomez may have moved to Venezuela, but there were dozens of people with the same name living there.

Although Carey had no way of knowing it, the task was pointless. As the CIA would admit in its 1998 Inspector General report, Ivan Gomez was actually a pseudonym used by a CIA agent assigned to Costa Rica in the 1980s.

Carey could also find scant evidence to support the notion that Blandon's supply of coke to Ross had “fueled” L.A.'s crack epidemic, despite the fact that Ross was the city's most notorious crack dealer. Getting confirmation for that assertion was perhaps Carey's prime directive from his editor, Jonathan Krim. Carey called thirty cocaine experts, and none of them agreed that Ross had played a critical role in either crack cocaine's origins or its eventual spread throughout the country.

“What we were left with was a more nuanced view of what started the crack epidemic,” Carey says. “The three major premises of the story looked a little shaky. It seemed like a reasonable thing to set the record straight while not completely backing away from the story. You still had a fascinating story
about these two dealers peddling to Ross, the beginning of the crack epidemic at least in L.A. All this is impressive stuff, gripping narrative, but the rest lacked substantiation. That's great for a novel, but where's the evidence?”

In early February 1997, Dawn Garcia sent Webb a draft of the story Carey had written on the emergence of L.A.'s crack market. The story stated that Blandon, Meneses, and Ross could not have single-handedly started the crack-cocaine explosion. “The details of the trio's activities—who did what, and when—cannot change the overall story of the crack epidemic, which swept over several U.S. cities in the mid-1980s with the speed and destruction of a tidal wave,” Carey concluded.

Webb felt betrayed. “It was, astonishingly, a virtual repeat of the
LA Times
stories,” he later recalled. “I couldn't believe it. I respected Carey as a reporter—he and I had coauthored a story in 1989 that had won a Pulitzer Prize. But here it seemed he'd taken the official government explanation and swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.”

Over the next several weeks, Webb met with Carey, Garcia, Krim, and Ceppos, and argued about what the
Mercury News
should do with the result of Carey's investigation. In the end, they decided not to print Carey's story, opting instead for a high profile letter to readers written by Ceppos himself.