DEATH BY PRESS
Ex-wife says investigative reporter and 'Dark Alliance' author Gary Webb had been planning his own d
By Kevin Uhrich
Gary Webb, the Northern California investigative reporter who in 1996 connected crack cocaine sales in South Los Angeles to CIA-backed Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries, or contras, is fueling even more controversy, this time with his own death.
Webb's apparent decision Friday to kill himself at his home near Carmichael with his father's .38-caliber handgun has sent waves of shock, despair, and disbelief through the nation's journalistic community. It has also sparked stunned reactions by Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters of Los Angeles and former Pasadena Mayor Bill Paparian, both of whom worked with Webb in trying to tie CIA operatives to drug dealing.
But according to his former wife, Susan Bell, the highly emotional Webb had been planning his own death at least since May, when he made her the beneficiary on an insurance policy. She learned he had made his own cremation arrangements in October, and he had even written letters to their three children explaining why he was going to kill himself.
The theft of his cherished 1986 Honda motorcycle the day before seemed to have been the last straw, Bell said. Sometime on Friday, while alone in the house, Webb shot himself in the head with his father's handgun and killed himself. The only baffling detail was that there were apparently two gunshots. His body was discovered Friday morning by hired movers, who found a note tacked to the front door that read: "Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance."
"There were plenty of signs before that he was very depressed, and we had some concern already that something like this would happen," Bell said this week.
Waters was among a handful of federal lawmakers who demanded answers from CIA officials on the central theme of Webb's original 20,000-word three-part series, "Dark Alliance," which appeared in the San Jose Mercury-News in August 1996: that CIA-backed contra operatives had fueled much of the crack cocaine trade in Southern California, and particularly in predominantly African American South-Central Los Angeles, in the 1980s and '90s.
"I am stunned and pained with the loss of Gary Webb," Waters wrote in a prepared statement. "The 'Dark Alliance' series was one of the most profound pieces of journalism I have ever witnessed ... . It single-handedly created discussion and debate about the proliferation of crack cocaine and the role of the CIA.
"Unfortunately," Waters continued, "the major newspapers attempted to silence him by undermining his personal character and professional integrity."
The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times each ran stories dismissing Webb's research, discrediting his reporting and essentially exonerating the CIA of any wrongdoing. Even the Mercury-News buckled under the pressure, with Managing Editor Jerry Ceppos distancing himself and the paper from Webb and his story. Webb quit soon after being transferred out of the Mercury-News newsroom and wrote a book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.
By 1998, however, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz had found that a large portion of Webb's findings were true. But the story was dead. Journalist Robert Parry wrote this week, in an homage to Webb, "Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases and executive summaries." Parry wrote his own book about the contra-cocaine connection, which tracked right into Reagan's National Security Council.
Webb was acutely conscious of being hung out to dry by mainstream journalism. Writing about his "Dark Alliance" story for CounterPunch.com in March 2001, Webb stated, "To this day, no one has ever been able to show me a single error of fact in anything I've written about this drug ring, which includes a 600-page book about the whole tragic mess. But, in the end, the facts didn't really matter. What mattered was making the damned thing go away, shutting people up, and making anyone who demanded the truth appear to be a wacky conspiracy theorist. And it worked."
"We are, in fact, satisfied it was a suicide," Sacramento County Deputy Coroner Dave Brown told CityBeat, adding that he had interviewed Webb's ex-wife and their 20-year-old son before making that determination. The couple has another younger son and a younger daughter.
"When the Merc turned on him and weenied out on the story, he was forced out and at that point things went downhill," Bell said, adding that she was proud of Webb's talent, honesty, and integrity as a reporter. "Our marriage broke up and things never got better, at least that's how he looked at it, and he never thought it was going to get better."Published: 12/16/2004
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
