Am J Mens Health, 2018 Mar 1:1557988318758788. doi: 10.1177/1557988318758788. He is from United States. Even 10 years after his tragic death, the media refuse to let him rest. 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. Gary Webb was a journalist of outsized talent. Obituary | GARY HAYS WEBB of Neenah, Wisconsin | WESTGOR FUNERAL HOMES "I think Kerry learnt a lesson from all this," reporter Robert Parry says. He received his medical degree from American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine and has been in practice for more than. When Ross discovered the market for crack in Los Angeles, he began buying cocaine from Blandn. The CIA, the drug dealers, and the tragedy of Gary Webb - The Telegraph Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb How Kill the Messenger Will Vindicate Investigative Journalist Gary Webb Melinda Welsh September 29, 2014 This one has all the ingredients of a dreamed-up Hollywood. "[2], Ceppos noted that Webb did not agree with these conclusions. [67], Webb later moved to the State Assembly's Office of Majority Services. The CIA Inspector General's report, commissioned in response to the allegations in "Dark Alliance", was published in the autumn of 1998. His erstwhile editors on the Mercury News, meanwhile, saw their careers thrive. Gary Webb became, quite unfairly, the victim of one of the most extraordinary examples of piling on by the mainstream press, ever.". "[55] In June 1997, The Mercury News told Webb it was transferring him from the paper's Sacramento bureau and offered him a choice between working at the main offices in San Jose under closer editorial supervision, or spot reporting in Cupertino; both locations were long commutes from his home in Sacramento. "Gary was given the choice of relocating either to San Jose," says Bell, "or to Cupertino". "They tried to make us look like crazies," says Blum. At the end of March, Ceppos told Webb that he was going to present the internal review findings in a column. [59], The first volume of the report found no evidence that "any past or present employee of CIA, or anyone acting on behalf of CIA, had any direct or indirect dealing" with Ross, Blandn, or Meneses or that any of the other figures mentioned in "Dark Alliance" were ever employed by or associated with or contacted by the agency. By this stage, he was prepared to work as a jobbing reporter. According to the report's "Epilogue," the report was completed in December 1997 but was not released because the DEA was still attempting to use Danilo Blandn in an investigation of international drug dealers and was concerned that the report would affect the viability of the investigation. Shortly before I left for Sacramento, Moreira, who knew Webb, had shown me unbroadcast footage which shows the French reporter making a phone call to a media commentator in the US, asking him about Webb's death. He also defended the series in interviews with all three papers. "Exactly," replied Kornbluh, who - referring specifically to the LA Times, said he is "baffled as to how they could be so gullible. [73], On the other hand, many of the writers and editors who worked with him have had high praise for him. That wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been willing to stand up and risk it all.". Gary Webb Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth, Family n 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles under the title "Dark Alliance" for the suggesting a CIA connection between anti-government contras in Nicaragua and monies raised from. 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. She said the paper wanted to make up for what it had done in the past. "I think the behaviour of the media in all of this has been amazing," says Bell. [46] Overholser was harshly critical of the series, "reported by a seemingly hotheaded fellow willing to have people leap to conclusions his reporting couldn't back up." To pay off his mounting debts, Webb sold the Carmichael property, where he was living alone, and arranged to move in with his mother. George Webb and Paul Cottrell have begun a weekly series on CoronaVirus now, Mondays at 5PM, EST on paul Cottrell's Rumble Channel. [18], Webb began researching "Dark Alliance" in July 1995. And when he got something in his head, he was determined to do it. Then, on 10 December, he resigned. [37], In 2013, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, said of the newspaper's coverage "As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope, and we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and split his helmet open. [60], The House Intelligence Committee issued its report in February 2000. 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. "You do not understand the power of these people," he adds, referring to the US intelligence services. A Celebration of Life will be . It was also posted on The Mercury News website with additional information, including documents cited in the series and audio recordings of people quoted in the articles. Dr. Gary A. Webb is a geriatrician in Marco Island, Florida. Webb made his early reputation as a reporter with the Plain Dealer before going on to fame and turmoil at the San Jose Mercury News. My wife has kept me grounded for . But you say - dear God. Webb was an assertive figure who drove fast cars and powerful motorcycles, hung heavy metal posters in his office and, at certain times in his life, smoked a fair amount of cannabis. 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. Webb undeniably made mistakes of detail and emphasis in the newspaper version of "Dark Alliance". Gary Webb (Investigative Journalist) Wiki, Biography, Age, Wife, Family color:rgb(46,179,178); But while calling the flaws in the series "unforgivably careless journalism," Overholser also criticized the Post's refusal to print Ceppos' letter defending the series and sharply criticized the Post's coverage of the story. The Mercury News reporter came under sustained attack from the weightier US newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and, especially, the Los Angeles Times, infuriated at being scooped, on its own patch, by what it saw as a small-town paper. Two years later, he was promoted to Vice President of Knight Ridder, the Mercury News's parent company; he retired from this position last month. [31] In their front-page article, reporters Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus wrote that "available information" did not support the series's claims and that "the rise of crack" was "a broad-based phenomenon" driven in numerous places by diverse players. The article resulted in a lawsuit against Webb's paper which the plaintiffs won. When his medical insurance expired, he stopped taking his antidepressants. line-height:1.5; "I told Gary not to go near this story," his source replies, in an emotional voice. After Ceppos' column, The Mercury News spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story. During and immediately after the controversy over "Dark Alliance," Webb's earlier writing was examined closely. "Which was that, if he wanted a future within the political establishment of the United States, then he should concentrate on other aspects of life.". I first heard about Webb eight years ago, I tell Bell, from the Paris-based journalist Paul Moreira. Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . It was published in 1998 as Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. According to Bell, Webb had been unhappy for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper. He began his career working for newspapers in Kentucky and Ohio, winning numerous awards, and building a strong reputation for investigative writing. 4) The series "created impressions that were open to misinterpretation" through "imprecise language and graphics. "You sound very scared," Moreira remarks. Gary Numan's superfan wife had 'body lift' and exploding breasts Gary Webb Was Right | HuffPost Latest News 'It's just good vibes': Cooper Webb, Eli Tomac in tight Supercross The February 2000 report by the House Intelligence Committee in turn considered the book's claims as well as the series' claims. The claim that the drug ring of Meneses-Blandn-Ross sparked the "crack explosion" has been perhaps the most criticized part of the series. Gary Webb and 'Kill the Messenger': Reporter played by - cleveland Her husband began his career on The Kentucky Post, and rapidly proved himself to be the sort of character who can be a secretive agency's worst nightmare: a full-blooded provocateur who liked to put the hours in at the library. .article-native-ad { Gary Hays Webb, 78, passed away on Monday May 9, 2022, at ThedaCare Regional Medical Center, Neenah. I'm glad that I didn't dissuade him, because it was important to get the truth out but for Gary Webb, there was a very high price to pay." Emma Lee Webb of Crossett, Arkansas | 1947 - 2023 | Obituary Webb, unlike Blum or Kerry, had to face his difficulties alone. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Ross was a major drug dealer in Los Angeles. Gary Webb was born on August 31, 1955 in Corona, California, USA. Gary Webb's painstaking investigation and the incindiary conclusions he drew from it were based mostly on public records, as detailed in the "notes on sources" section in "Dark Alliance", including: undercover audio tapes, declassified government documents from the CIA, DEA, FBI, L.A. Sheriff's Department, files from the Iran-Contra . He was previously married to Sue Bell. ", She pauses: "That said, he did sleep with a gun under his bed.". After the series's publication, the Northern California branch of the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996. He was born June 18, 1943, in Appleton, son of the late Wilford and Helen (Hauskey) Webb. Baca claimed that a drug dealer with close links to the CIA had framed her boyfriend, who was also in the cocaine business. "But that," pointed out Blum, who is now a Washington attorney, "in no way - in no way - diminishes the wrongness of what these bastards did. Walter Bogdanich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who worked with Webb on The Plain Dealer, told American Journalism Review editor Susan Paterno "He was brilliant; he knew more about public records than anybody I've ever known. [42] The extent of the criticism, however, convinced Ceppos that The Mercury News had to acknowledge to its readers that the series had been subjected to strong criticism. ", The report called several of its findings "troubling." He was so depressed. ", "Reporter's suicide confirmed by coroner", "Repercussions From Flawed News Articles", "Herhold: Thinking back on journalist Gary Webb and the CIA", Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes for "Tawdry" Attacks, "Gary Webb was no journalism hero, despite what 'Kill the Messenger' says", "Jeremy Renner's 'Kill the Messenger' Gets Fall Release Date", The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department's Investigations and Prosecutions, United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, Report of Investigation Concerning Allegations of Connections Between CIA and The Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States, Central Intelligence Agency Office of the Inspector General, United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, "Secrecy, Conspiracy, and the Media During the CIA-Contra Affair", Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography, "Inside the Dark Alliance: Gary Webb on the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion", 'A NATURAL STORY': Tribute to 'Dark Alliance' and Journalist Gary Webb, San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, Archive of Gary Webb stories at Sacramento News and Review, "Frontline: Cocaine, Conspiracy Theories & the C.I.A. According to Walt Bogdanich, a former colleague on the Plain Dealer who has won two Pulitzers and now works for The New York Times, Webb was the best retriever of information from public records he has ever seen. "[72] California Representative Maxine Waters, who was Webb's strongest supporter in Congress after the "Dark Alliance" controversy broke, issued a statement after Webb's death calling him "one of the finest investigative journalists that our country has ever seen. Why bring up old white people atrocities against black people now? [11], In 1983, Webb moved to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he continued doing investigative work. He concluded, "How did these shortcomings occur? [16] As part of The Mercury News team that covered the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Webb and his colleague Pete Carey wrote a story examining the causes of the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct. If the antagonism of competing publications was predictable, what happened to Webb within his own newspaper was not. We were dismissed as a bunch of nuts." Gary's ex-wife Susan Bell states: "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide." An interesting OPINION, but she supplies no convincing evidence to illustrate what she means by this. [7] After transferring to Northern Kentucky, he entered its journalism program and wrote for the school paper, The Northerner. The Man Who Exposed The Crips, Bloods & CIA Connection to - YouTube When Webb's body was discovered last December, Bell says, this last item had been dumped in the trash. 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. Snowfall is an American crime drama television series set in Los Angeles in 1983. "I believe that Americans, as a nation, are mainly concerned with living their happy little lives. Parry, the first reporter to write about the US authorities' drug-running on behalf of the Contras, had survived a campaign by the White House to discredit first his story, then his reputation. Born in Corona, California, son of a conservatively minded Marine, he met Bell, whose father was a university lecturer, at high school in Indianapolis. And the importance of exposing them. Webb, one of the boldest and most outstanding reporters of his generation, was the journalist who, in 1996, established the connection between the CIA and major drug dealers in Los Angeles, some of whose profits had been channelled to fund the Contra guerrilla movement in Nicaragua. But Webb had one huge blind side: He was fundamentally a man of passion, not of fairness. While working at the legislature, Webb continued to do freelance investigative reporting, sometimes based on his investigative work. "[76] Scott Herhold, Webb's first editor at The Mercury-News, wrote in a 2013 column that "Gary Webb was a journalist of outsized talent. One article, dealing mostly with the response of the Los Angeles Black community to the stories, described the series's evidence as "thin". Family and friends will gather to celebrate his life of 59 years at 10 a.m. on Thursday, March 7, 2019, at Lamesa Continue Reading Leave a Message, Share a Memory After introducing the three, the first article discussed primarily Blandn and Meneses, and their relationship with the Contras and the CIA. Emma Lee Webb, age 75, of Crossett, AR passed away Monday February 27, 2023, in her home surrounded by her family. It was an amazing scoop - but one that would ruin his career and drive him to suicide. [81], Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at George Washington University's National Security Archives, also does not agree that the report vindicated the series. This is why Webb's "Dark Alliance" series is an essential source, a primary text that every journalism student should study. By the autumn of 1997, on medication for clinical depression, he was given leave of absence from the paper. The article discussed Webb's contacts with Ross's attorney and prosecution complaints of how Ross's defense had used Webb's series. . Instead, he found work in 1978 as a reporter at the Kentucky Post, a local paper affiliated with the larger Cincinnati Post. Gary Webb famously died of two gun shot wounds to the head and his death that was ruled a suicide, is the common sense notion that this was clearly assassination true? He was a writer, known for Kill the Messenger (2014), Filming in Georgia (2015) and Crack in America (2015). [71] When asked by local reporters about the possibility of two gunshots being a suicide, Lyons replied "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots, but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility." When Attorney General Janet Reno determined that a delay was no longer necessary, the report was released unaltered. He also had this inherent belief that the truth could not harm him. The series examined the origins of the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles and claimed that members of the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua had played a major role in creating the trade, using cocaine profits to finance their fight against the government in Nicaragua. When his body was found, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was on the DVD machine, and his favourite CD, Ian Hunter's live album Welcome to the Club, was in the CD player. The CIA admits used the media to ruin his career. [51], The editors met with Webb several times in February to discuss the results of the paper's internal review and eventually decided to print neither Carey's draft article nor the articles Webb had filed. "The second bullet," adds Bell, who has worked for more than 20 years in the area of respiratory therapy, "struck his carotid artery. When he told me, I said it sounded crazy. Ceppos failed to reply to one phone message and six emails. When facts didn't fit his theory, he tended to shove them to the sidelines.
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