Kill the Messenger (9 page)

Other stories described Cornejo as a member of a major West Coast drug ring that imported millions of dollars worth of cocaine from Cali, Colombia to California. Webb agreed to meet Baca and check out her documents. She gave him a stack of DEA and FBI reports that Cornejo's lawyers had obtained through discovery. One of them was a February 3, 1994 transcript from the federal grand jury probe of Cornejo's drug ring. It contained testimony from the government's chief witness against him, a Nicaraguan exile and drug trafficker named Oscar Danilo Blandon.

Then a twenty-seven-year-old son of a family of property owners, Blandon had fled Nicaragua just weeks after the 1979 Sandinista Revolution. His family was part of the land-owning aristocracy that had prospered under the
dictatorship of the Somoza family. He had obtained a master's degree in marketing from a Colombian university in Bogota. Through his family's connections, he'd worked for the Somoza regime, providing U.S-supported food aid to the dictator's National Guard and administering a free-market rural development program aimed at increasing production among the commercial planters who had ruled the country with an iron grip for decades.

From the moment the Sandinistas seized power, civil war was inevitable in the tiny Central American country. The Sandinistas formed in the early 1960s as a tiny group of guerrillas inspired by the Cuban revolution, but their tenacious efforts to win power from a widely despised dictator gradually attracted broad-based support among Nicaraguans from all economic classes. After seizing power, however, many of the rebels' wealthy and middle-class supporters became disenchanted with the Sandinistas, their socially redistributive economic goals, and their professed admiration for Fidel Castro.

Blandon was just one of thousands of well-off Nicaraguans who fled the country for the United States, hoping to return someday to a “free” country, devoid of communist subversion. Like many exiles, Blandon also became active in supporting the Nicaraguan contras, a right-wing guerrilla army that aimed to restore “democracy” to Nicaragua. The contras had a powerful ally in the CIA, which was willing to work with just about any Nicaraguan, regardless of their ties to organized crime or human rights violations. While well known to reporters who covered the civil war in the field, the CIA's collusion with torturers and drug dealers among the
contras had been hidden from the American public. Just about all the average American citizen knew about the contras was what President Ronald Reagan said about them in televised press conferences at the time: they were “freedom fighters” in the spirit of America's founding fathers.

In his testimony against Rafael Cornjeo, Blandon had stated under oath that he became a drug dealer shortly after arriving in the U.S. With the cash he raised, he purchased vehicles and other supplies for the contras. After it became clear that his support was no longer needed, he had continued dealing drugs, but kept the profits for himself. As Webb read through the thirty-nine-page grand jury transcript, it became clear that Cornejo wasn't actually the head of the drug trafficking ring the grand jury was probing. He noted repeated references to a certain Nicaraguan “family,” but every time the prosecutor led Blandon in that direction, his responses were blacked out, deleted by government censors.

Webb later wrote that he asked Baca what family Blandon was talking about. “Rafael says it's Meneses—Norwin Meneses and his nephews,” Baca said. “Norwin is one of the biggest traffickers on the West Coast. When Rafael got arrested, that's who the FBI and the IRS wanted to talk to him about.” Intrigued, Webb showed up at the federal courthouse in San Francisco for one of Cornejo's hearings. But Blandon—the prosecution's main witness—was a no-show. During a break from the proceedings, Webb approached the prosecutor, U.S. attorney David Hall, and asked him about Blandon's whereabouts. According to Webb, Hall responded that he had no idea.

Not knowing what to think, Webb went back to his office
in Sacramento and called his boss,
Mercury News
state editor Dawn Garcia, and told him about Cornejo's case. Garcia, who had worked as an investigative reporter, recalled hearing about the CIA and the contras during the 1980s. She was interested. Webb told her that Blandon had been arrested in San Diego a few years ago, and asked for permission to go there and look for court records that might reveal more about him. Garcia approved the trip. “When Gary brought me his first tip about what was later to become ‘Dark Alliance,' it sounded very intriguing,” Garcia says. “I agreed he should go check it out.”

Besides Garcia, the only person who knew the details of his project was Webb's wife. A licensed respiratory therapist, Sue never failed to be intrigued by his sordid accounts of official corruption. Throughout his career, every evening over dinner, she would ask her husband about his latest discoveries. But nothing could prepare her for what Webb told her about his story involving the CIA and drugs. “I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard in my life,” Sue recalls. “But after he got all these documents and started connecting the dots, I thought it was amazing.”

A few days later, Webb flew to San Diego. At the federal courthouse there, he found records from Blandon's trial. Along with his wife, Blandon had been arrested with five other suspects for conspiring to distribute cocaine. Blandon looked like a big fish; according to the indictment, he was buying coke in wholesale quantities and selling it to other major traffickers. One of the records Webb found was a motion filed by Blandon's prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney L. J. O'Neil, in opposition to Blandon's request to be released from prison on bail.

“Mr. Blandon's family was closely associated with the Somoza government that was overthrown in 1979,” O'Neil claimed. “He is a large-scale cocaine trafficker and has been for some time.” O'Neil's motion also stated that Blandon and another Nicaraguan, Jairo Meneses, a former commander in Somoza's National Guard, had been responsible for 764 kilos of cocaine seized in Nicaragua in 1991. The pair also owned hotels and casinos in Nicaragua that they had purchased after the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990. Meneses: Webb immediately recognized the name from his conversation with Baca about who really pulled the strings of her boyfriend Rafael Cornejo's cartel.

Blandon's lawyer, Bradley Brunon, didn't deny his client's ties to the Somoza regime. In his effort to win Blandon's release on bail, he introduced to the court record a photograph of Blandon at a wedding reception with Somoza and his wife. Brunon argued that Blandon's ties to Somoza proved that the allegations against him were “politically motivated because of Mr. Blandon's activities with the contras in the early 1980s.”

The court file revealed that Blandon and his co-conspirators had never gone to trial. Instead, the suspects took plea deals that gave them relatively light sentences; Blandon had been ordered to serve 48 months behind bars, but the file showed that sentence was later cut in half—presumably because Blandon had become an informant. As Webb kept reading, he discovered that Blandon was already out of prison. By the government's own admission, he had been a major cocaine trafficker for roughly a decade, and had spent exactly twenty-eight months behind bars.

B
ACK IN
S
ACRAMENTO
, Webb began to investigate Norwin Meneses, whom Baca's boyfriend Cornejo had identified as the ringleader of his drug network. He quickly found newspaper articles from the
Chronicle
and
San Francisco Examiner
reporting that Meneses had been dealing cocaine for the contras throughout the 1980s. One story referred to Meneses as the “king of cocaine in Nicaragua” where he acted as the Cali cartel's Central American liaison for smuggling to the U.S. Another article mentioned that his name had come up in connection with a U.S. Senate investigation of contras and drug dealing in the late 1980s.

Webb hit the library and spent the next several days reading through roughly 1,100 pages of transcripts and exhibits from the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics & Terrorism, better known as the Kerry Committee investigation. Led by Massachusetts Senator and future Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry, the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee had spent the better part of 1987 and 1988 digging into widespread allegations that the CIA-backed contras had engaged in drug trafficking on U.S. soil to support their cause.

Among other things, Kerry had uncovered evidence of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega's covert support for the contras and his ties to Colombian cocaine traffickers, much of which was used two years later to justify the U.S. invasion of Panama. The records were replete with testimony from contra leaders, drug traffickers and pilots, all of it under oath, regarding the covert smuggling of weapons on CIA cargo planes from the U.S. to Central America, with cocaine often coming back to military bases and remote airfields on the return flights.

Because of its sensitive nature, the committee, however, sealed most of the testimony and Kerry's investigation got scant play in the national news media. The Iran contra scandal had uncovered so much official wrongdoing already that Kerry found little political support even among Democrats for his efforts to force further disclosures about collusion with drug traffickers from the CIA or the Reagan White House.

Webb called Kerry's chief prosecutor, Jack Blum, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and asked him if he had ever run across Norwin Meneses in his investigation. Blum remembered the name. In his 1998 book,
Dark Alliance
, Webb wrote that Blum told him that Ronald Reagan's Justice Department had stonewalled the Kerry investigation into Meneses, and he had eventually moved on to other targets. “There was a lot of weird stuff going on out on the West Coast,” Blum said. “But after our experiences with Justice . . . we mainly concentrated on the cocaine coming into the East.”

Webb remembered being glued to the television during the Iran contra hearings in 1987. According to Sue, he had taped them while at work and had watched them every night until the early hours of the morning. During a family vacation to North Carolina's Outer Banks with Tom Loftus, his friend and former colleague from the
Kentucky Post
, Webb had skipped the beach entirely, sitting inside a rented cottage, relishing the sight of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North being grilled by lawmakers on national television. But Webb didn't remember seeing anything on television or reading anything in the newspapers about weapons and drugs being smuggled back and forth between the U.S. and Central America.

In a recent interview, Blum says Webb probably didn't see
much about the contra drug issue in the news, because nobody was really covering it. “We would have a day of hearings and the White House would call reporters and say ‘This is insane stuff—don't listen to them,' and by and large the press bought it,” he says. “The coverage stunk. It focused on how the witnesses weren't credible because they were drug dealers. I used to say to people who asked me why we had these ‘flakes' as witnesses, ‘Bring me a Lutheran pastor who was there when the drugs were unloaded in Miami and I'll call him as a witness.' These were the only witnesses we had.”

One of the few reporters who had done their homework on the story was Robert Parry, an Associated Press reporter who had eventually quit his job when his own credibility was attacked by Reagan administration officials and their allies in the news media, particularly the right-wing
Washington Times
. Martha Honey, a
New York Times
stringer who lived in Costa Rica during the 1980s, had also done some reporting on the issue. She and her husband, Tony Avirgan, had been set up on phony drug charges after trying to prove the CIA was involved in drug trafficking.

Webb later wrote that he called Parry at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, and told him what he'd unearthed about Blandon and Meneses. “Why in the world would you want to go back into this?” Parry asked. Webb wanted to know if Parry had ever heard anything about the contras dealing drugs in the West Coast. “Not that I'm aware of,” Parry said. “This is definitely a new angle. You think you can show it was being sold in L.A.?”

Now a freelance investigative reporter who runs his own
online magazine,
The Consortium
, Parry remembers getting a telephone call from Webb, and being impressed with his discoveries. “Brian Barger and I covered the external drug dealing activities of the contras,” he says. “But we never knew what had happened internally, where the drugs ended up once they reached the United States.”

Parry and Barger had done more than perhaps any other reporters to uncover drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan contras. In 1985, they wrote the first stories exposing the fact that a then-unknown Lieutenant in the Marine Corps named Oliver North was working for the Reagan Administration, covertly funneling weapons to the contras. That year, they also exposed a CIA memo, or “national intelligence estimate,” showing the agency knew the contras were involved in drug dealing, but had done nothing to stop it.

The story almost didn't run. Parry's editor called him and said the article would have to be held unless he could find someone in the CIA to confirm the memo's accuracy. But meanwhile, the piece had been sent to the wire service's Latin American desk to be translated into Spanish. From there it was sent to newspapers throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Once his editors realized what had happened, they reluctantly allowed an English-language version to run.

For their efforts, Parry and Barger were subjected to personal attacks by the Reagan administration. Both reporters left AP; Parry ended up at
Newsweek
, where his editors weren't happy about his perceived obsession with the story. At one point, the magazine's top editor told Parry's boss that he had been at a dinner party with senior White House
officials and had a “very unpleasant experience” because of Parry's work. While much of the pressure came from politicians, Parry says his fellow journalists did the dirty work. Both the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
essentially ignored his reporting, while the right-wing
Washington Times
openly ridiculed it.