gary webb wife

She was a homemaker and a member of Hunters Chapel Baptist Church. His career ended, his livelihood was destroyed and certain games were started to be . 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. Webb's research took a year, in the course of which he received death threats. Gary was preceded in death by his mother and father, Donna and James Webb of Carpentersville. By 1997, Bell tells me, Webb - whose 30-year career had earned him more awards than there is room for in her study - had been reassigned to the Mercury News's office in Cupertino. "You sound very scared," Moreira remarks. And it was ignored by the US media, for all of those reasons. There has been speculation that he may have met with foul play because he had received two gunshot wounds to the head, The Sacramento Bee reported Wednesday. '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. reports. [26] Other papers were slow to pick up the story, but African Americans quickly took note, especially in South Central Los Angeles where the dealers discussed in the series had been active. Gary Webb was a journalist of outsized talent. We are in the living room of Bell's house just outside Sacramento, California. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? And it ruined that reporter's career. 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. But as Krim told Webb's biographer Nick Schou, "The zeal that helped make Gary a relentless reporter was coupled with an inability to question himself, to entertain the notion that he might have erred. And this is not a happy story - or," she adds, "a little one.". Some editors regarded him as stubborn to the point of insolence. "[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. "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". Watkins and Debbie (John) Foutch; grandchildren, Makenzie and Ashlynn Fogg. [63]Dark Alliance was a 1998 Pen/Newman's Own First Amendment Award Finalist, 1998 San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, 1999 Bay Area Book Reviewers Award Finalist, and 1999 Firecracker Alternative Booksellers Award Winner in the Politics category. Pictured as a teenage fan: Gary Numan with Gemma, his now wife, getting his autograph in 1985 years before they got together Gary was 600,000 in debt, and on the verge of going under in. When Gary originally broke this mind blowing story, the arrogant authority's assumed they could simply ignore him and hope he'd go away. "[58], It also concluded that "the claims that Blandn and Meneses were responsible for introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and spreading the crack epidemic throughout the country were unsupported." To pay off his mounting debts, Webb sold the Carmichael property, where he was living alone, and arranged to move in with his mother. "Look at what happened to Gary Webb. [7] After transferring to Northern Kentucky, he entered its journalism program and wrote for the school paper, The Northerner. He was previously married to Sue Bell. So, how much is Gary Webb worth at the age of 49 years old? This drug ring "opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles" and, as a result, "The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America."[23]. GARY WEBB: His wife's office was burglarized. 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. "[25] It also found disparities in the treatment of Black and White traffickers in the justice system, contrasting the treatment of Blandn and Ross after their arrests for drug trafficking. He recently told the American Journalism Review (whose scrupulously researched piece, by Susan Paterno, is the only serious documentation of the Webb case I could find anywhere in the orthodox American media) that Webb's critics in rival newspapers, "quoted these CIA guys - who had a tremendous amount to hide - as though they were telling the truth. Although he attended Northern Kentucky for four years, he did not finish his degree. "They tried to make us look like crazies," says Blum. Investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of stories in 1996 for the San Jose Mercury News that documented the US-government-backed Contra insurgents' drug pipeline into Los Angeles. 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. .article-native-ad svg { But as his ex-wife told the . Work with a bunch of drug dealers to run guns? } margin: 0 45px; Meneses, an established smuggler and a Contra supporter as well, taught Blandn how to smuggle and provided him with cocaine. The review was conducted primarily by editor Jonathan Krim and reporter Pete Carey, who had written the paper's first published analysis of the series. [34], The Los Angeles Times devoted the most space to the story, publishing a three-part series called "The Cocaine Trail." While working at the legislature, Webb continued to do freelance investigative reporting, sometimes based on his investigative work. ", Many of these are in the series archive at. Ceppos initially defended Webb, and reportedly showed up at an in-house party wearing a military helmet. Webb, whose plans to become a journalist had begun when he was 13, but never included equine death notices, resigned from the Mercury News a few months later. } The article discussed Webb's contacts with Ross's attorney and prosecution complaints of how Ross's defense had used Webb's series. [22], The lede of the first article set out the series' basic claims: "For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency." [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. The February 2000 report by the House Intelligence Committee in turn considered the book's claims as well as the series' claims. "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.". Nobody who heads a government agency can let such an allegation stand.". In 1997 Ceppos was awarded the US Society of Professional Journalists' National Ethics Award. The film broadened the debate which led to the decriminalisation of . Within weeks, the site was attracting up to 1.3m hits per day. That was just the way he was.". 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. Ricky Donnell "Freeway Rick" Ross (born January 26, 1960) is an American author and convicted drug trafficker best known for the drug empire he established in Los Angeles, California, in the early to mid 1980s. "I think the behaviour of the media in all of this has been amazing," says Bell. LOS ANGELES, Dec. 12 - Gary Webb, a reporter who won national attention with a series of articles, later discredited, linking the Central Intelligence Agency to the spread of crack . [55] Webb eventually chose Cupertino, but was unhappy with the routine stories he was reporting there and the long commute. [49], The paper also gave Webb permission to visit Central America again to get more evidence supporting the story. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. Webb disagreed with this conclusion.[1][2]. Webb's pieces were not dealing with nameless peasants slaughtered in some distant republic, but demonstrated a clear link between the CIA and the suppliers of the gangs delivering crack to the ghetto of Watts, in South Central Los Angeles. "[75], Jonathan Krim, The Mercury News editor who recruited Webb from The Plain Dealer and who supervised The Mercury News internal review of "Dark Alliance," told AJR editor Paterno that Webb "had all the qualities you'd want in a reporter: curious, dogged, a very high sense of wanting to expose wrongdoing and to hold private and public officials accountable." Eli Tomac on track during Media Day at Daytona International Speedway, Friday, March 3, 2023. E&P Staff. The story they printed was just awful. In city after city, local dealers either bought from Ross or got left behind."[24]. "But Gary thought that if something was true, it should be told. He was preceded in death by his wife, Melody Webb; parents and three brothers, Albert, Duane and Ronald. "[82], Kill the Messenger (2014) is based on Webb's book Dark Alliance and Nick Schou's biography of Webb. ", The report called several of its findings "troubling." Family (1) Gary's family found that old, storied, ("priceless to us," as his ex-wife, Susan Bell, described it to me) CDROM among his possessions. 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. An investigative journalist, Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. "He walked in one day," Bell recalls, "and said, 'You are not going to believe what I just found out.' The follow-up reporting in the Los Angeles Times and other papers has been criticised for focusing on problems in the series rather than re-examining the earlier CIA-Contra claims. What he found, he wrote later, "nearly knocked me off my chair". .article-native-ad p { She kept crying about how terrible it all was - by which I mean that she was, physically, crying. Views on Webb's journalism have been polarized. It concluded, however, that these problems were "a far cry from the type of broad manipulation and corruption of the federal criminal justice system suggested by the original allegations.". For two years, Blum and Kerry supervised the interrogation of dozens of witnesses who described CIA-related drug deals in central America. Webb took a modestly paid, low-profile job as an investigator with the California State Legislature. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. [45], The Post's response came from the paper's ombudsman, Geneva Overholser. [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. Webb worked for several newspapers including The Kentucky Post and Cleveland Plain Dealer. Gary Webb's "Approach Split" in the atrium of 20 Triton Street London. Gary Webb, (born August 31, 1955, Corona, California, U.S.died December 10, 2004, Carmichael, California), American investigative journalist who wrote a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 on connections between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S.-backed Contra army seeking to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist "Do not quote me. 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.' Webb, Bell explains, had written four letters explaining what he was about to do - one to her, one to each of their three children - and mailed them immediately before he killed himself. [17] The Mercury News's coverage of the earthquake won its staff the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting in 1990. Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. Webb was born in Corona, California. Film of this encounter survives. Their explosive report, which appeared in 1989, was either ignored, or marginalised, by the American press. The first one, "The California Story," was issued in a classified version on December 17, 1997, and in an unclassified version on January 29, 1998. ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. They were outraged by the series's charges.[27]. Gary Webb was born on August 31, 1955 in Corona, California, USA. Look at the way the US press reports on Iraq. Webb undeniably made mistakes of detail and emphasis in the newspaper version of "Dark Alliance". GARY WEBB OBITUARY Gary Frank Webb Sept. 27, 1944 - Oct. 23, 2022 Gary passed away peacefully of complications following cardiovascular surgery. Webb's reports prompted three official investigations, including one by the CIA itself which - astonishingly for an organisation rarely praised for its transparency - confirmed the substance of his findings (published at length in Webb's 1998 book, also entitled Dark Alliance). By William Kennedy / Jan. 22, 2023 12:00 pm EST. Carey ultimately decided that there were problems with several parts of the story and wrote a draft article incorporating his findings. margin-top: 10px; Am J Mens Health, 2018 Mar 1:1557988318758788. doi: 10.1177/1557988318758788. A secret deal allowed drugs to go unreported by the DCI. And yet, for all his Easy Rider tendencies, he was also a dedicated family man with an extraordinary appetite for researching minutiae. Poor Gary Webb. A Celebration of Life will be . 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. Thank you." The drugs went to South Central LA. He also defended the series in interviews with all three papers. Webb's ex wife, Susan Bell told reporters that she believed Webb had died by suicide. He was assigned to its Sacramento bureau, where he was allowed to choose most of his own stories. Both sides were left angry and disappointed. His was the story of a man who gains information of wrongdoing, then, attempting to act in the public interest, seeks protection from his superiors, and the forces of law, and does not receive it. Cuts and amendments were made at the request of Ceppos, executive editor of the Mercury News, and Webb's immediate editor Dawn Garcia, among others. Attend in Miami or virtually, Sept. 1114. The CIA admits used the media to ruin his career. [73], On the other hand, many of the writers and editors who worked with him have had high praise for him. 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. Critics view the series' claims as inaccurate or overstated, while supporters point to the results of a later CIA investigation as vindicating the series. Webb's experience came as no surprise to Jack Blum, senior prosecutor for the Kerry Committee. 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. Actor Jeremy Renner portrays Webb.[83]. . [39] The Post refused to print his letter. Many writers discussing the series point to errors in it. "Like enjoy it.". The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors. Gary Webb's wife, Sue Webb (now Sue Stokes), said that he had been depressed for years due to his inability to get hired at a daily newspaper. Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff". 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.

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