archive reading room: the game (follow the money) (wire)

[[ this section is to be saved; do not remove this section]]

First thing is we need the names of all front companies limited partnerships, LLCs, and all that mess.

- LLCs?

- Limited liability corporations.

Start with the night club which Barksdale owns.

Look up Orlando's, by address, you match it, and you see it's owned by who?

It's on Baltimore street, right?

Got it. D & B enterprises.

Hand it over to Prez, who's going to get off his ass and walk on over to the state office buildings on Preston street.

- Preston street?

- corporate charter office.

corporate who?

They have the paperwork on every corporation and LLC licensed to do business in the state.

You look up D & B enterprise on the computer.

You're going to get a little reel of microfilm.

Pull the corporate charter papers that way ...

write down every name you see:

corporate officers, shareholders, or more importantly

the resident agent on the filing who is usually a lawyer.

While they use front names, you know, as corporate officers, they'll usually use the same lawyer to do the charter filing.

Find that agent's name, run it through the computer ...

find out what other corporations he's done the filing for ...

and that way we find other front companies.

While he's doing that, what do I do?

You're going to keep your head in this assessment book.

Look up any properties that you can connect to Barksdale.

How do you know it connects to Barksdale, right?

You work off of what Prez gets you from the corporate charter documents.

Whatever companies he links to Barksdale or people connected to Barksdale, you look for those companies in the city land records.

For examples: McNulty said that he heard that Barksdale owned an apartment building up on Druid park lake.

You look up all the blocks on Reservior hill.

See if there's anything owned by D & B enterprises or any other company that Prez finds through corporate charter or anything similar.

If you find something that fits, you write down the folio number so that you can look it up later at the court house.

You don't find anything ...

just take the names of all the corporate listings for the multi-units near the lake.

You call that list over to Prez, who pulls the charter papers and he'll look for connections.

- It's like a scavenger hunt.

- But what if Barksdale is careful?

I mean, what if we can't find his name on anything?

In this country somebody's name has got to be on a piece of paper.

A cousins, a girlfriend, a grandmother, a lieutenant he can trust, somebody's name is on a piece of paper.

And here's the rub: You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers.

But you start to follow the money and you don't know where the fuck it's going to take you.

While we're running around on this, what are you going to do?

- You need something?

- Yeah.

Let me get the campaign financial reports for the western districts and actually, any city wide race.

You want quarterly reports or individual donor lists?

- Both, please.

- It'll be a couple hundred pages.

Really? I'll take all of it.

source:

The wire (2002-2004) (2006-2008)

HBO (home box office)

David Simon

episode 9, game day

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[[ blog accessible 7/28/2023 15:33 n. america pacific ]]

[[ internet up ]]

[[ this page has been marked for dramatic modification or deletion ]]

Sharon Weinberger, The imagineers of war : the untold history of DARPA, the pentagon agency that changed the world, 2017

pp.290-291

p.290

White House of National Drug Control Policy in the mid-1990s funded DARPA's simulation experts to create a model of drug tafficking to see if there might be ways of cutting off the drug cartels in South America.

p.291

“The big issue was and still is the movement of cocaine from Central and South America into the United States”, explained Dennis McBride, who was in charge of the effort. He named the project after Iolaus, who in Greek mythology had helped Heracles battle Hydra. The name ended up more appropriate than he had imagined.

p.291

“We built this incredible complex end-to-end model from seed planting down in South America through the changing to a product at a wholesale level, the transportation across myriad modes of transportation, ultimately into warehouses in the United States of America”, McBride said. Yet the more DARPA modeled the problem, the worse it looked. If one cartel was defeated, it ended up just strengthening another cartel. Like the Greek Hydra, if you cut off one head, two more rose in its place. DARPA came up with answers, but the answers did not fit what the White House wanted. If the Drug Enforcement Administration put more aircraft in the air, it did not help, because the cartels still had more planes. No matter which way DARPA modeled the drug war, it could not come up with a scenario that cut off the supply. “We built this very big model. We played with it every way we could. We said, ‘Let's do this’, and ‘Let's do that’. At the end, this huge model would say here's the result and it was not good news.”

p.291

The simulation showed the limits of technology to solve what was essentially a policy problem: simulation was not going to teach anyone how to win the drug war, it could only demonstrate that it was unwinnable, and that was not a message the government wanted to hear. The reaction was denial: law enforcement would just have to try harder. “I don't know if we're a hell of a lot better off that we now kind of understand the problem because we have the simulation”, McBride reflected. “It's like a massive wounds all over the body; blood is pouring out from everywhere. We can understand that, but there is nothing we can do about it.”

p.291

The counter-drug simulation failed because technology hit up against the limits of policy.

(The imagineers of war : the untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world / by Sharon Weinberger., New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, united states. defense advanced research projects agency──history. | military research──united states. | military art and science──technological innovations──united states. | science and state──united states. | national security──united states──history. | united states──defenses──history., U394.A75 W45 2016 (print) | U394.A75 (ebook) | 355/.040973, 2017, )

____________________________________

David Priess, The president's book of secrets, 2016 [ ]

p.163

Upper Hualaga Valley, Peru

cocaine fields [the leafs to the plants that cocaine come from]

[cocaine plant, picture, common name, ... ]

(Priess, David, author, The president's book of secrets : the untold story of intelligence briefings to America's presidents from Kennedy to Obama / David Priess ; forward by George H. W. Bush, subjects:

intelligence service--united states--history. |

presidents--united states--history. |

united states. central intelligence agency--history. |

national security--united states. |

united states--foreign relations. |

political science / government / executive branch. |

political science / political freedom & security / intelligence., 2016, )

────────────────────────────────────

Pentagon paper ( Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force )

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Panama paper

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers

Estate planning is another example of legal tax avoidance.

American film-maker Stanley Kubrick had an estimated personal worth of $20 million when he died in 1999, much of it invested in an 18th-century English manor he bought in 1978. He lived in that manor for the rest of his life, filming scenes from The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut there as well. Three holding companies set up by Mossack Fonseca now own the property, and are in turn held by trusts set up for his children and grandchildren.[35] Since Kubrick was an American living in Britain, without the trust his estate would have had to pay transfer taxes to both governments and possibly have been forced to sell the property to obtain the liquid assets to pay them.[36] Kubrick is buried on the grounds along with one of his daughters, and the rest of his family still lives there.[35][36]

Holly Watt; David Pegg; Juliette Garside; Helena Bengtsson (April 6, 2016). "From Kubrick to Cowell: Panama Papers expose offshore dealings of the stars". The Guardian. Archived from the original on April 23, 2016. Retrieved April 23, 2016.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/06/panama-papers-reveal-offshore-dealings-stars

Leah McGrath Goodman (April 15, 2016). "PANAMA PAPERS: WHAT STANLEY KUBRICK CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT TAX SHELTERS". Newsweek. Archived from the original on April 23, 2016. Retrieved April 23, 2016.

http://www.newsweek.com/panama-papers-stanley-kubrick-tax-shelters-448494

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David Cay Johnston

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cay_Johnston

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en.wikipedia.org

Mossack Fonseca

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossack_Fonseca

Mossack Fonseca & Co. (Spanish pronunciation: [moˈsak fonˈseka]) was a Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider.[2][4]

On 14 March 2018, the firm announced that it was closing due to the damage inflicted to its finances and reputation by the discovery of the multi-billion-dollar money laundering schemes.[8]

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en.wikipedia.org

United States as a tax haven

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_as_a_tax_haven

The Tax Justice Network ranks the US third in terms of the secrecy and scale of its offshore financial industry, behind Switzerland and Hong Kong but ahead of the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg.[2] The United States has been popular as a destination for offshore funds for Chinese investors, said Canadian financial crimes expert Bill Majcher, because investors think it will resist pressure from China.[3] Andrew Penney from Rothschild & Co described the US as "effectively the biggest tax haven in the world" and Trident Trust Co., one of the world's biggest providers of offshore trusts, moved dozens of accounts out of Switzerland and Grand Cayman, and into Sioux Falls, saying: "Cayman was slammed in December, closing things that people were withdrawing ... I was surprised at how many were coming across that were formerly Swiss bank accounts, but they want out of Switzerland."[1]

A 2012 study by various US universities showed that the US has the most lenient regulations for setting up a shell company anywhere in the world outside of Kenya.[4] Tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Jersey and the Bahamas were far less permissive, researchers found, than states such as Nevada, Delaware, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming and New York.[2][4] "[Americans] discovered that they really don't need to go to Panama", said James Henry of the Tax Justice Network.[2] For example, a single address in Wilmington (1209 North Orange Street) is listed as the headquarters for at least 285,000 separate businesses[5] due to Delaware's desirable corporate taxes and law. As of 2016, it was estimated that 9 billion dollars of potential taxes were lost over the past decade, due to the Delaware 'loophole'. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have firms registered in North Orange Street,[6] and lawyers, trust companies and financial firms including Rothschild & Co are moving offshore accounts from locations such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands into the US to take advantage of the country's loose regulations, calling it the "new Switzerland" (see Banking in Switzerland).[1]

Mark Hays of Global Witness said "the US is one of the easiest places to set up so-called anonymous shell companies",[2] and Stefanie Ostfeld from the same organization said that "the US is just as big a secrecy jurisdiction as so many of these Caribbean countries and Panama".[7] More than 1.1 million live legal entities were incorporated in Delaware at the end of 2014. An increasing number – more than 70% – of those were LLC.[8] The Delaware Division of Corporations said in August 2015 that "an LLC entices all types of people since it is easy to operate and oversee", and Delaware is currently one of the few states without sales tax.[9] Delaware does not tax companies which operate there, nor their royalty income. However, the LLC is more popular and often less expensive in states such as Wyoming, Nevada and Oregon. Approximately 668,000 anonymous LLCs are registered just in those three states.[8]

Parts of the country serve as havens for others, and for covert governmental actions.[10] In the 1980s the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used Guam as the location for a trust incorporation.[10] The CIA then used Guam as an offshore haven both from taxes and from scrutiny in the course of operating a Hawaiian front company.[10]: 334

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Tax haven

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven

In 1981, the US IRS published the Gordon Report on the use of tax havens by US taxpayers, which highlighted the use by tax havens by US corporations.[44]

A new class of corporate tax haven had emerged that was OECD-compliant, transparent, but offered complex base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools that could achieve net tax rates similar to traditional tax havens.[43][42]

complex base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools that could achieve net tax rates similar to traditional tax havens.[43][42]

British Empire-based tax havens and European-based tax havens, and included the Netherlands, Singapore, Ireland, and the U.K., and even reformed traditional tax havens such as Luxembourg, Hong Kong, the Caribbean (the Cayman, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands) and Switzerland.[42]

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The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is a 1972 non-fiction book on heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia and the CIA complicity and aid to the Southeast Asian opium/heroin trade. Written by Alfred W. McCoy, the book covers the period from World War II to the Vietnam War.

── "We have to continue to fight the evil of Communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium." General Tuan Shi-wen, commander of the Kuomintang Fifth Army (based in the Golden Triangle), as quoted by McCoy.

── en.wikipedia.org, The politics of heroin in southeast asia

── https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia

── The politics of heroin in southeast asia, 1972

── authors (Alfred W. McCoy, Cathleen B. Read, Leonard P. Adams II),

── subject: heroin trafficking, cover operations, central intelligence agency (CIA)

── To attain its operational goals, McCoy notes, the CIA tolerated and concealed the drug dealing by its local assets.

── "it is difficult to state unequivocally that the individual drug lords allied with the CIA did or did not shape the long-term trajectory of supply and demand within the vastness and complexity of the global drug traffic" (p. 529).

── Simply put, they [the CIA and the national security apparatus] prioritize their national security goals over the drug war and the profits from illegal drugs help our military allies wage war.

── the U.S. government is not the only country to be involved this type of illegal activity.

── Although charges that the agency engaged in the crack cocaine epidemic that devastated African American inner cities in the US during the 1980s and 1990s are not true(strictly speaking)- the worst that the CIA can be held responsible for is turning a blind eye to drug trafficking by their Contra allies,

source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia

____________________________________

CIA complicits in the African American families' crack epidemic, located in low-income inner city neighborhoods.

── “... If anyone was responsible for the drug problems in a specific area, I thought, it was the people who were bringing the drugs in.” (Gary Webb)

── “... drugs don’t just appear magically on street corners in black neighborhoods. Even the most rabid hustler in the ghetto can’t sell what he doesn’t have. If anyone was responsible for the drug problems in a specific area, I thought, it was the people who were bringing the drugs in.” (Gary Webb)

── chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation

── An entry from July 12, 1985 relates that “14 million to finance [an arms depot] came from drugs” (Oliver North, the White House National Security Counsel official in charge of the Contra operation, diary)

── “It’s not a situation where the government or the CIA sat down and said, 'Okay, let’s invent crack, let’s sell it in black neighborhoods, let’s decimate black America,’” Webb says. “It was a situation where, 'We need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know anything about it.'" (Gary Webb)

── declassified article titled “Managing A Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,”

── from the agency’s internal journal, “Studies In Intelligence,”

── “The charges could hardly be worse,” the article opens. “A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in America’s inner cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the Internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and to keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of CIA -- reminiscent of the 1970s -- abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.”

── “ ... I mean, part of the problem is that the media often times believes its own propaganda. And one of the biggest propaganda efforts that I came across in the story was the idea that crack happened overnight, that in 1986 suddenly we woke up one morning and we were engulfed by this tidal wave of crack. And that’s pretty much the prevailing media belief to this day, which, you know, it’s nonsense. I mean, it started very slowly and started in South Central, and it took years to spread to other cities. So, I mean, I think Ceppos and I just disagree on the whole epidemiology of crack. ...” (Gary Webb)

── https://www.democracynow.org/1997/5/14/san_jose_mercury_news_editor_claims

____________________________________

occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration.

Between 1981 and 1986, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, a right-wing rebel group, in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal.[13]

The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who had been Vice President at the time of the affair.[14]

Former Independent Counsel Walsh noted that in issuing the pardons, Bush appeared to have been preempting being implicated himself by evidence that came to light during the Weinberger trial, and noted that there was a pattern of "deception and obstruction" by Bush, Weinberger and other senior Reagan administration officials.[15]

Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up.

A group of senior Reagan administration officials in the Senior Interdepartmental Group conducted a secret study on 21 July 1981,

At the same time that the American government was considering its options on selling arms to Iran, Contra militants based in Honduras were waging a guerrilla war to topple the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) revolutionary government of Nicaragua. Almost from the time he took office in 1981, a major goal of the Reagan administration was the overthrow of the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua and to support the Contra rebels.[18]

The Reagan administration's policy towards Nicaragua produced a major clash between the executive and legislative branches as Congress sought to limit, if not curb altogether, the ability of the White House to support the Contras.[18]

Direct U.S. funding of the Contras insurgency was made illegal through the Boland Amendment, the name given to three U.S. legislative amendments between 1982 and 1984 aimed at limiting U.S. government assistance to Contra militants. By 1984, funding for the Contras had run out; and, in October of that year, a total ban came into effect. The second Boland Amendment, in effect from 3 October 1984 to 3 December 1985,

Between 1981 and 1986, secret arms sale to Iran

By 1984, funding for the Contras had run out;

in October of that year (1984), a total ban came into effect.

In violation of the Boland Amendment, senior officials of the Reagan administration continued to secretly arm and train the Contras and provide arms to Iran,

Given the Contras' heavy dependence on U.S. military and financial support, the second Boland Amendment threatened to break the Contra movement, and led to President Reagan ordering in 1984 that the National Security Council (NSC) "keep the Contras together 'body and soul'", no matter what Congress voted for.[18]

As part of the effort to circumvent the Boland Amendment, the NSC established "the Enterprise", an arms-smuggling network headed by a retired U.S. Air Force officer turned arms dealer Richard Secord that supplied arms to the Contras. It was ostensibly a private sector operation, but in fact was controlled by the NSC.[21] To fund "the Enterprise", the Reagan administration was constantly on the look-out for funds that came from outside the U.S. government in order not to explicitly violate the letter of the Boland Amendment, though the efforts to find alternative funding for the Contras violated the spirit of the Boland Amendment.[23] Ironically, military aid to the Contras was reinstated with Congressional consent in October 1986, a month before the scandal broke.[24][25]

"Soon after taking office in 1981, the Reagan Administration secretly and abruptly changed United States policy." Secret Israeli arms sales and shipments to Iran began in that year, even as, in public, "the Reagan Administration" presented a different face, and "aggressively promoted a public campaign... to stop worldwide transfers of military goods to Iran." The New York Times explains: "Iran at that time was in dire need of arms and spare parts for its American-made arsenal to defend itself against Iraq, which had attacked it in September 1980," while "Israel [a U.S. ally] was interested in keeping the war between Iran and Iraq going to ensure that these two potential enemies remained preoccupied with each other." Maj. Gen. Avraham Tamir, a high-ranking Israeli Defense Ministry official in 1981, said there was an "oral agreement" to allow the sale of "spare parts" to Iran. This was based on an "understanding" with Secretary Alexander Haig (which a Haig adviser denied). This account was confirmed by a former senior American diplomat with a few modifications. The diplomat claimed that "[Ariel] Sharon violated it, and Haig backed away...". A former "high-level" CIA official who saw reports of arms sales to Iran by Israel in the early 1980s estimated that the total was about

Reagan always publicly insisted after the scandal broke in late 1986 that the purpose behind the arms-for-hostages trade was to establish a working relationship with the "moderate" faction associated with Rafsanjani to facilitate the reestablishment of the American–Iranian alliance after the soon to be expected death of Khomeini, to end the Iran–Iraq War and end Iranian support for Islamic terrorism while downplaying the importance of freeing the hostages in Lebanon as a secondary issue.[46] By contrast, when testifying before the Tower Commission, Reagan declared that hostage issue was the main reason for selling arms to Iran.[47]

On the day of McFarlane's resignation, Oliver North, a military aide to the United States National Security Council (NSC), proposed a new plan for selling arms to Iran, which included two major adjustments: instead of selling arms through Israel, the sale was to be direct at a markup; and a portion of the proceeds would go to Contras, or Nicaraguan paramilitary fighters waging guerrilla warfare against the Sandinista government, claiming power after an election full of irregularities.[57][not specific enough to verify]

North proposed a $15 million markup, while contracted arms broker Ghorbanifar added a 41% markup of his own.[59] Other members of the NSC were in favor of North's plan; with large support, Poindexter authorized it without notifying President Reagan, and it went into effect.[60] At first, the Iranians refused to buy the arms at the inflated price because of the excessive markup imposed by North and Ghorbanifar. They eventually relented, and in February 1986, 1,000 TOW missiles were shipped to the country.[60] From May to November 1986, there were additional shipments of miscellaneous weapons and parts.[60]

Throughout February 1986, weapons were shipped directly to Iran by the United States (as part of Oliver North's plan), but none of the hostages were released.

The American delegation comprised McFarlane, North, Cave (a retired CIA officer who worked in Iran in the 1960s–70s), Teicher, Israeli diplomat Amiram Nir and a CIA translator. They arrived in Tehran in an Israeli plane carrying forged Irish passports on 25 May 1986.[68] This meeting also failed.

On 26 July 1986, Hezbollah freed the American hostage Father Lawrence Jenco, former head of Catholic Relief Services in Lebanon.[69]

By this point, the Americans had grown tired of Ghobanifar who had proven himself a dishonest intermediary who played off both sides to his own commercial advantage.[69] In August 1986, the Americans had established a new contact in the Iranian government, Ali Hashemi Bahramani, the nephew of Rafsanjani and an officer in the Revolutionary Guard.[69] The fact that the Revolutionary Guard was deeply involved in international terrorism seemed only to attract the Americans more to Bahramani, who was seen as someone with the influence to change Iran's policies.[69]

In September and October 1986 three more Americans – Frank Reed, Joseph Cicippio, and Edward Tracy – were abducted in Lebanon by a separate terrorist group, who referred to them simply as "G.I. Joe," after the popular American toy. The reasons for their abduction are unknown, although it is speculated that they were kidnapped to replace the freed Americans.[71] One more original hostage, David Jacobsen, was later released. The captors promised to release the remaining two, but the release never happened.[72]

North's explanation for destroying some documents was to protect the lives of individuals involved in Iran and Contra operations.[59] It was not until 1993, years after the trial, that North's notebooks were made public, and only after the National Security Archive and Public Citizen sued the Office of the Independent Counsel under the Freedom of Information Act.[59]

U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese admitted on 25 November that profits from weapons sales to Iran were made available to assist the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. On the same day, John Poindexter resigned, and President Reagan fired Oliver North.[79] Poindexter was replaced by Frank Carlucci on 2 December 1986.[80]

The American historian James Canham-Clyne asserted that Iran–Contra affair and the NSC "going operational" were not departures from the norm, but were the logical and natural consequence of existence of the "national security state", the plethora of shadowy government agencies with multi-million dollar budgets operating with little oversight from Congress, the courts or the media, and for whom upholding national security justified almost everything.[82] Canham-Clyne argued that for the "national security state", the law was an obstacle to be surmounted rather than something to uphold and that the Iran–Contra affair was just "business as usual", something he asserted that the media missed by focusing on the NSC having "gone operational."[82]

In Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987, journalist Bob Woodward chronicled the role of the CIA in facilitating the transfer of funds from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras spearheaded by Oliver North. According to Woodward, then-Director of the CIA William J. Casey admitted to him in February 1987 that he was aware of the diversion of funds to the Contras.[83]

On 6 May 1987, William Casey died the day after Congress began public hearings on Iran–Contra. Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh later wrote: "Independent Counsel obtained no documentary evidence showing Casey knew about or approved the diversion. The only direct testimony linking Casey to early knowledge of the diversion came from [Oliver] North."[84]

President Reagan appeared before the Tower Commission on 2 December 1986, to answer questions regarding his involvement in the affair. When asked about his role in authorizing the arms deals, he first stated that he had; later, he appeared to contradict himself by stating that he had no recollection of doing so.[87]

The report published by the Tower Commission was delivered to the president on 26 February 1987.

Oliver North wrote that "Ronald Reagan knew of and approved a great deal of what went on with both the Iranian initiative and private efforts on behalf of the contras and he received regular, detailed briefings on both...I have no doubt that he was told about the use of residuals for the Contras, and that he approved it. Enthusiastically."[93]

• Alan D. Fiers, Chief of the CIA's Central American Task Force, convicted of withholding evidence and sentenced to one year probation. Later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Fiers

• Clair George, Chief of Covert Ops-CIA, convicted on two charges of perjury, but pardoned by President George H. W. Bush before sentencing.[106]
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_George

• Oliver North, member of the National Security Council was indicted on 16 charges.[107] A jury convicted him of accepting an illegal gratuity, obstruction of a Congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents. The convictions were overturned on appeal because his Fifth Amendment rights may have been violated by use of his immunized public testimony[108] and because the judge had incorrectly explained the crime of destruction of documents to the jury.[109]

• Albert Hakim. A businessman, he pleaded guilty in November 1989 to supplementing the salary of North by buying a $13,800 fence for North with money from "the Enterprise," which was a set of foreign companies Hakim used in Iran–Contra. In addition, Swiss company Lake Resources Inc., used for storing money from arms sales to Iran to give to the Contras, plead guilty to stealing government property.[117] Hakim was given two years of probation and a $5,000 fine, while Lake Resources Inc. was ordered to dissolve.[116][118]
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hakim

• Thomas G. Clines. A former CIA clandestine service officer. According to Special Prosecutor Walsh, he earned nearly $883,000 helping retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim carry out the secret operations of "the Enterprise". He was indicted for concealing the full amount of his Enterprise profits for the 1985 and 1986 tax years, and for failing to declare his foreign financial accounts. He was convicted and served 16 months in prison, the only Iran-Contra defendant to have served a prison sentence.[119]
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_G._Clines

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Calero
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Berm%C3%BAdez

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Cruz
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_Robelo

Although Bush publicly insisted that he knew little about the operation, his statements were contradicted by excerpts of his diary released by the White House in January 1993.[125][127] An entry dated 5 November 1986 stated: "On the news at this time is the question of the hostages... I'm one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flak and misinformation out there. It is not a subject we can talk about..."[125][127]

The Iran–Contra affair and the ensuing deception to protect senior administration officials (including President Reagan) was cast as an example of post-truth politics by Malcolm Byrne of George Washington University.[131]

source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

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Ricky Ross

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross

Through his connection to Blandón, and Blandón's supplier Norwin Meneses Cantarero, Ross was able to purchase Nicaraguan cocaine at significantly reduced rates.[20] Ross began distributing cocaine at $10,000 per kilo less than the average street price, distributing it to the Bloods and Crips street gangs. By 1982, Ross had received his moniker of "Freeway Ricky" and claimed to have sold up to US$3 million worth of cocaine per day, purchasing 1,000 pounds of cocaine a week.[8]

Ross initially invested most of his profits in houses and businesses, because he feared his mother would catch on to what he was doing if he started spending lavishly on himself. In a jailhouse interview with reporter Gary Webb, Ross said, "We were hiding our money from our mothers."[21] He invested a portion of the proceeds from his drug dealing activities in Anita Baker's first album.

Drug empire

With thousands of employees, Ross has said he operated drug sales not only in Los Angeles but in places across the country including St. Louis, New Orleans, Texas, Kansas City, Oklahoma, Indiana, Cincinnati, North Carolina, South Carolina, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Seattle. He has said that his most lucrative sales came from the Ohio area. He made similar claims in a 1996 PBS interview.[22]

Federal prosecutors estimated that between 1982 and 1989 Ross bought and resold several metric tons of cocaine. In 1980 dollars, his gross earnings were said to be in excess of $900 million – with a profit of nearly $300 million. As his distribution empire grew to include forty-two cities, the price he paid per kilo of powder cocaine dropped from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000."[7]

Much of Ross's success at evading law enforcement was due to his ring's possession of police scanners and voice scramblers. Furthermore, journalist Gary Webb alleged that the CIA was sponsoring the operation as part of its effort to finance Contras, giving Ross another level of protection. Following one drug bust, a Los Angeles County sheriff remarked that Ross's men had "better equipment than we have."[23]

____________________________________

Gary Webb

── cia involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking

── claim that the cocaine trafficking had played an important role in the creation of the crack cocaine problem in central Los Angeles

── in the cia report, it was found that CIA assets had been trafficking narcotics to fund the Contra rebels.

── the cia (The Agency) was aware of this trafficking, and in some cases dissuaded the DEA and other government agencies from investigating the Contra drug supply networks involved.[6]

Former Panamanian deputy health minister Dr. Hugo Spadafora, who had fought with the Contra army, outlined charges of cocaine trafficking to a prominent Panamanian official. Spadafora was later found murdered.

drug enforcement administration (DEA),

customs service,

federal bureau of investigation (FBI),

costa rica public security ministry,

rebels,

Americans who work with [the rebel]

note: "two Cuban-Americans used armed rebel troops to guard cocaine at clandestine airfields in northern Costa Rica. They identified the Cuban-Americans as members of Brigade 2506, an anti-Castro group that participated in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Several also said they supplied information about the smuggling to U.S. investigators."

One of the Americans said "that in one ongoing operation, the cocaine is unloaded from planes at rebel airstrips and taken to an Atlantic coast port where it is concealed on shrimp boats that are later unloaded in the Miami area."[7]

Julio Zavala, also convicted on trafficking charges, said "that he supplied $500,000 to two Costa Rican-based Contra groups and that the majority of it came from cocaine trafficking in the San Francisco Bay area, Miami and New Orleans."[11]

April 1986

"Twelve American, Nicaraguan and Cuban-American rebel backers interviewed by The Associated Press said they had been questioned over the past several months [about contra cocaine trafficking] by the FBI. In the interviews, some covering several days and being conducted in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Colorado and California, several of the Contra backers told AP of firsthand knowledge of cocaine trafficking."[12]

“Once you set up a covert operation to supply arms and money, it's very difficult to separate it from the kind of people who are involved in other forms of trade, and especially drugs. There is a limited number of planes, pilots and landing strips. By developing a system for supply of the Contras, the US built a road for drug supply into the US.”

— Former contract analyst for the CIA David MacMichael[14]

U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations

According to the report, the U.S. State Department paid over $806,000 to "four companies owned and operated by narcotics traffickers" to carry humanitarian assistance to the Contras.[1]

From August 18–20, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the Dark Alliance series by Gary Webb,[15][16] which claimed:

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. [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.[17]

Ricky Ross

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross

https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch06p3.htm

Oscar Danilo Blandón

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Danilo_Bland%C3%B3n

https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p1.htm

Norwin Meneses

<< get en.wikipedia.org entry >>

<< no wikipedia page on Norwin Meneses >>

https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch03p1.htm

three men: Ricky Ross, Oscar Danilo Blandón, and Norwin Meneses.

According to the series, Ross was a major drug dealer in Los Angeles, and Blandón and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. The series alleged that the three had relationships with the Contras and the CIA, and that law enforcement agencies failed to successfully prosecute them largely due to their Contra and CIA connections.

On October 3, 1996, LA County Sheriff Sherman Block ordered a fourth investigation into Webb's claims that a 1986 raid on Blandón's drug organization by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department had produced evidence of CIA ties to drug smuggling and that this was later suppressed.[22]

Justice Department report: concluded that "the claims that Blandón and Meneses were responsible for introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and spreading the crack epidemic throughout the country were unsupported." Although [the justice department report] did find that both men [Blandón and Meneses] were major drug dealers, "guilty of enriching themselves at the expense of countless drug users", and that they had contributed money to the Contra cause, "we did not find that their activities were responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in South Central Los Angeles, much less the rise of crack throughout the nation, or that they were a significant source of support for the Contras."

[the justice department report] found that some [personnels] in the government were "not eager" to have DEA agent Celerino Castillo "openly probe" activities at Ilopango Airport in El Salvador, where covert operations in support of the Contras were undertaken, and that the CIA had indeed intervened in a case involving smuggler Julio Zavala.

In the 623rd paragraph, the report described a cable from the CIA's Directorate of Operations dated October 22, 1982, describing a prospective meeting between Contra leaders in Costa Rica for "an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua."[49][non-primary source needed] The two main Contra groups, US arms dealers, and a lieutenant of a drug ring which imported drugs from Latin America to the US west coast were set to attend the Costa Rica meeting. The lieutenant trafficker was also a Contra, and the CIA knew that there was an arms-for-drugs shuttle and did nothing to stop it.[52]

The report also stated that former DEA agent Celerino Castillo III alleged that during the 1980s, Ilopango Airport in El Salvador was used by Contras for drug smuggling flights, and "his attempts to investigate Contra drug smuggling were stymied by DEA management, the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador, and the CIA".[53]

During a PBS Frontline investigation, DEA field agent Hector Berrellez said, "I believe that elements working for the CIA were involved in bringing drugs into the country."

"I know specifically that some of the CIA contract workers, meaning some of the pilots, in fact were bringing drugs into the U.S. and landing some of these drugs in government air bases. And I know so because I was told by some of these pilots that in fact they had done that."[54]

source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking

____________________________________

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, one of the things that your editor said in his letter was that the series had oversimplified the spread of the crack epidemic and blaming it sort of on Ricky Ross and its explosion eastward from Los Angeles. Yet, and I seem to recall that the L.A. Times itself had pinned a lot of the blame for the expanding crack epidemic on Ricky Ross years before. What’s your sense—do you think that that charge that the oversimplifying of the spread of crack was accurate?

GARY WEBB: No, I don’t think so at all. And I think it’s very clear, when you look at the historical record, that it started in South Central Los Angeles. It spread primarily through the gangs. I mean, there are federal government reports that we have which said that, you know, they found evidence of Crip crack dealing and Blood crack dealing in 45 cities in 32 states. And this was a couple of years ago, and it’s still spreading. I mean, part of the problem is that the media often times believes its own propaganda. And one of the biggest propaganda efforts that I came across in the story was the idea that crack happened overnight, that in 1986 suddenly we woke up one morning and we were engulfed by this tidal wave of crack. And that’s pretty much the prevailing media belief to this day, which, you know, it’s nonsense. I mean, it started very slowly and started in South Central, and it took years to spread to other cities. So, I mean, I think Ceppos and I just disagree on the whole epidemiology of crack. And unfortunately, he’s the editor, and he gets to write a column, and I don’t. I mean, I stand by the story.

source:

https://www.democracynow.org/1997/5/14/san_jose_mercury_news_editor_claims

____________________________________

https://www.democracynow.org/1997/5/14/san_jose_mercury_news_editor_claims

Jerry Ceppos, editor of the San Jose Mercury News, has made statements that the integrity of his paper’s story connecting the CIA to crack cocaine distribution in South Central Los Angeles and the military contras in Nicaragua. Amy and Juan are joined by Gary Webb, the journalist that first broke the story. Webb defended his journalistic integrity as well as the information in his articles about the L.A. drug ring.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m joined now by my co-host, Juan González, a columnist with the New York Daily News. Nice to see you again, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Good day, Amy. And how are you?

AMY GOODMAN: Good. And we’re going to start off with a piece we’ve both been following since last summer, when the San Jose Mercury News series began, and we’re going to talk about the latest development. The executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News has acknowledged that its controversial series suggesting a link between the CIA and cocaine trafficking was, quote, “oversimplified,” omitted important conflicting evidence and, quote, “fell short of my standards,” he said. He is Jerry Ceppos. He wrote in a column on Sunday that the “Dark Alliance” series “strongly implied CIA knowledge” that a drug ring linked to the Nicaraguan contras was selling crack in Los Angeles in the 1980s. And he said, quote, “I feel that we did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship. … We also did not include CIA comment about our findings, and I think we should have.”

Well, when they were originally published last summer, the “Dark Alliance” series of articles by investigative reporter Gary Webb caused a sensation, prompting black congressional leaders, headed by Congressmember Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, to demand an independent investigation into the role of the CIA in illegal drug trafficking. Then, CIA Director John Deutch went so far as to hold a town meeting in Los Angeles, where he said a full investigation into the allegations would be held. For its part, the media establishment, led by The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, attacked the articles and claimed that radio shows and street corner gossip had distorted the facts of the CIA’s role in drug trafficking.

Joining us right now to talk about this extraordinary move of the editor of the—executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News is Gary Webb, the reporter at the San Jose Mercury News who broke the “Dark Alliance” series. I should say, by the way, that we did invite Mr. Ceppos to join us, but he didn’t and just said his words stand on their own.

So we welcome you, Gary Webb, to Democracy Now!

GARY WEBB: Hi. It’s good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, good to be with you. Why don’t you start out by telling us your reaction to Jerry Ceppos’s basically allegations against you, saying that you just engaged in shoddy journalism?

GARY WEBB: Well, I don’t think he said that. I mean, if you read the thing carefully—and believe me, you have to read it very carefully to get this out of it—he says that the story essentially is true, that, you know, the contras were selling cocaine in South Central Los Angeles, they were selling large quantities of it, and the money from the sales of the drugs were going to the war effort. And, you know, as he noted, we have solid documentation for that.

What he took issue with was a couple of things which I consider sort of trivial. And the other problem is that a lot of the criticisms he made in that column are moot, because we’ve been investigating this for eight months since, and we’ve come up with a lot of additional information that so far the Mercury has not printed. And it’s specifically on point with a couple of the issues he raises. Primarily, you know, one of the issues he says is that the figure that we used, which was sort of a broad figure of millions of dollars going to the contras, he said was an estimate. I think it’s obvious to a lot of people that when you don’t put a number on something, when you just use a phrase like “millions,” it is an estimate.

Subsequent to that, however, we’ve interviewed one of the couriers for this drug ring, who told us that he took $5 million to $6 million down in one year alone, in 1982. I tried to persuade Mr. Ceppos that this is information that we ought to share with the public, and so far we haven’t done that. The other problem is that we have evidence now of direct CIA involvement with this drug operation. We also have evidence of very high-level CIA knowledge of at least portions of it. Again, this is information that was turned in several months ago and has not appeared in the paper, and I can’t really get a straight answer as to why that information is just sitting there.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Gary, what kind of pressure came on the paper, as far as you can tell, in terms of the public outcry of this series from government institutions or the federal government itself?

GARY WEBB: I don’t know about any. I mean, there was pressure on us initially not to print this information about Danilo Blandón, who was one of the drug traffickers that we wrote about, from the DEA. I mean, they were insistent that we not do this, and tried to set up various enticements for us to leave that bit out. After the series appeared, I mean, there was a huge, huge controversy. And, you know, I think it was a situation where you had us against the world, essentially. You know, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times were all saying that, you know, this wasn’t any big deal, that there was only five tons of cocaine sold by these folks down in South Central. And I think, you know, journalists are like anybody: They succumb to peer pressure very easily—and which is I think why you don’t see more stories like this. If you go back to the '80s and look at what happened to Brian Barger and Bob Parry, when they did their contra cocaine stories back in the ’80s, the same thing. I mean, it was them against the entire rest of the press. And it's not a comfortable position to be in. I don’t mind it, because I know the story is true, but I think other people get a little knock-kneed when that happens.

GARY WEBB: No, I don’t think so at all. And I think it’s very clear, when you look at the historical record, that it started in South Central Los Angeles. It spread primarily through the gangs. I mean, there are federal government reports that we have which said that, you know, they found evidence of Crip crack dealing and Blood crack dealing in 45 cities in 32 states. And this was a couple of years ago, and it’s still spreading. I mean, part of the problem is that the media oftentimes believes its own propaganda. And one of the biggest propaganda efforts that I came across in the story was the idea that crack happened overnight, that in 1986 suddenly we woke up one morning and we were engulfed by this tidal wave of crack. And that’s pretty much the prevailing media belief to this day, which, you know, it’s nonsense. I mean, it started very slowly and started in South Central, and it took years to spread to other cities. So, I mean, I think Ceppos and I just disagree on the whole epidemiology of crack. And unfortunately, he’s the editor, and he gets to write a column, and I don’t. I mean, I stand by the story.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said a few times now in this brief conversation that you have more evidence and that you’ve attempted to write more articles.

GARY WEBB: I have written more articles. They just haven’t appeared in the paper.

AMY GOODMAN: So what’s happening?

GARY WEBB: Nothing. They’re just sitting there. I mean, Georg Hodel, who is my Nicaraguan colleague who’s been working on this with me, we turned in four more parts of the series in February, and nobody’s even lifted a finger to edit them. They’re just sort of sitting there.

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t Jerry Ceppos just call them notes?

GARY WEBB: He was quoted in the Times calling them notes. I was frankly astonished to see that. I mean, unless his definition of “notes” is different than 99 percent of the American public, that’s just not true. These were very long, very detailed stories.

AMY GOODMAN: Like the first series you did?

GARY WEBB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the second part of the series goes—I mean, it’s probably even more explosive than the first part. The second part deals with who in the government knew about this, which federal agents were either aware of this and did nothing or, in some cases, were working with the members of the drug ring. I mean, we’ve got a paper trail now that goes all the way into the National Security Council. And, you know, when we were sent out to do these additional stories back in October, the feeling at the newspaper was let’s go after, let’s get this stuff, let’s put this stuff in the paper, let’s shut everybody up. And I said, you know, “That’s a great idea.” We went down to Central America two more times, came back with what I thought was just dynamite stuff. And it has just sat there. And instead, we have this column that ignores a lot of the stuff that we found then and pretends it doesn’t exist and says, “Well, I guess—you know, I guess we weren’t as right as we thought we were.” The truth is we were more right than we knew.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Have you—I’m familiar with the whole process when you initially break a story, that you inevitably get all kinds of people coming forward with even more tips.

GARY WEBB: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m sure that must have happened. You must have been overwhelmed.

GARY WEBB: They were coming out of the woodwork, yeah. They were coming out of the woodwork. And people that I had been looking for for a year suddenly surfaced after the story came out. And we went down, and we interviewed them. We interviewed pilots that were flying this cocaine in and out of the country. We interviewed the man who was taking the money down there. It was really a mess. And, you know, we got—like I said, we were more right than we knew. I was astonished how deep this thing went.

AMY GOODMAN: Gary Webb, if you can’t publish this new series in the San Jose Mercury News, would you like to name the names here on Democracy Now!?

GARY WEBB: I’m going to give the Mercury the opportunity to print the stuff first. If I can’t reach some agreement with them, then I’ll have to see what else we can do. But, I mean, it’s a very—it’s a sort of a hard position to be in, to have your paper sort of take a dive on a story that you know is true, a story that they know is true, and pretend that we don’t have this other information.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you thinking about leaving?

GARY WEBB: No, I’m thinking about staying there and fighting to get these stories in the newspaper. I mean, whatever the situation is, I mean, I like the Mercury News. I’ve like working for it. I like the people there. I think it’s a good, honest newspaper. I find these latest moves to be very bizarre, however.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, let me ask you about that, because I’m personally familiar with one of the executives there, Jay Harris, the publisher, who I—

GARY WEBB: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I used to work with him at the Philadelphia Daily News. And I generally considered him a more courageous news executive than most others, and certainly he’s one of the few African-American publishers, if not the only, of a major daily newspaper in the country.

GARY WEBB: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What has been Harris’s role? Has he met with you? Or has all the word from management come down directly through the editor?

GARY WEBB: You know, you’re talking about a level now that is not visible to mere mortals like me. I’m sure Harris was involved in some of this. What the extent of his involvement was, I don’t know. I mean, I did not talk to him about this.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, the paper has let you continue the investigation, presumably. You’re there as a regular reporter, and you’ve done this four-part series.

GARY WEBB: And that—right, and that’s all I’ve been working on since the series started. So, I mean, it seems to me—and certainly my immediate editor is intent on getting these other stories published. But, you know, I’ve got to tell you, I don’t think the chances are all that great, given the fact that the paper’s come out with this strange column, which says that we don’t have information that we do have.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there any direct CIA intervention there—I mean, even in taking the CIA seal that you had originally on the “Dark Alliance” series with a person smoking crack in the middle of it, taking that off?

GARY WEBB: If there was, I don’t know about it. You know, I’ve heard rumors that CIA attorneys showed up at the paper. I never heard or saw anything to substantiate that. Again, I mean, they don’t contact me. If there’s contact going on, it’s above my level. They don’t seem to like talking to me very much for some reason.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Gary Webb, we thank you for talking to us. Gary Webb, a San Jose Mercury News reporter, who broke the series, the “Dark Alliance,” last year, the story behind the crack explosion. And we do look forward to seeing these next series of articles published, hopefully in the San Jose Mercury News.

GARY WEBB: I hope so, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you for being with us.

GARY WEBB: All right.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

____________________________________

In a three-part exposé, investigative journalist Gary Webb reported that a guerrilla army in Nicaragua had used crack cocaine sales in Los Angeles’ black neighborhoods to fund an attempted coup of Nicaragua’s socialist government in the 1980s — and that the CIA had purposefully funded it.

It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? Except it actually happened.

For Webb, his reporting “challenged the widely held belief that crack use began in African American neighborhoods not for any tangible reason but mainly because of the kind of people who lived in them.”

“Nobody was forcing them to smoke crack, the argument went, so they only have themselves to blame. They should just say no. That argument never seemed to make much sense to me because drugs don’t just appear magically on street corners in black neighborhoods. Even the most rabid hustler in the ghetto can’t sell what he doesn’t have. If anyone was responsible for the drug problems in a specific area, I thought, it was the people who were bringing the drugs in.”

── “... If anyone was responsible for the drug problems in a specific area, I thought, it was the people who were bringing the drugs in.” (Gary Webb)

Those people, he found, were backed by the CIA.

source:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb

https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb

____________________________________

source:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748

https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748#main

____________________________________

That big aircraft came largely from El Salvador, according to U.S. General Accounting Office records.

When DEA agent Celerino Castillo III, who was assigned to El Salvador, heard that the Contras were flying cocaine out of a Salvadoran airport and into the U.S., he began logging flights — including flight numbers and pilot names.

“Was he involved with the CIA? Probably. Was he involved in drugs? Most definitely… Were those two things involved with each other? They’ve never said that, obviously. They’ve never admitted that. But I don’t know where these guys get these big aircraft.”

Bradley Brunon, attorney for Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes

He sent his information to DEA headquarters in the 1980s, but the only response he got was an internal investigation — not of these flights, but of him. He retired in 1991.

“Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they [DEA officials] were covering it up,” he told Webb. “You can’t get any simpler than that. It was a cover-up.”

A cover-up with devastating consequences. L.A.’s drug lords had come up with a way to make cocaine cheaper and more potent: cooking it into “crack.” And nobody spread the plague of crack as far and wide as Ricky Donnell “Freeway Rick” Ross.

Freeway Rick And South-Central: Crack Capital Of The World

Gary Webb believed that if Blandón, Meneses, and Rick Ross had worked in any other legal line of business, they “would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.”

source:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb

https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb

____________________________________

Associate Press report from 1985 and a House Subcommittee from 1989 that found that “U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.”

source:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb

https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb

____________________________________

https://allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb

https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb

How Gary Webb Linked The CIA To The Crack Epidemic — And Paid The Ultimate Price

By Marco Margaritoff

Published December 5, 2019

Updated February 18, 2022

Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series boldly claimed the CIA knew about a U.S. drug trafficking scheme that ravaged the country's inner cities to fund Nicaragua's Contra rebels. Years later, he shot himself in the head.

It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? Except it actually happened.

The series of reports, published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, set off a firestorm of protests in L.A. and in black communities across the country, as African-Americans became outraged by the assertion that the U.S. government could have supported — or at least turned a blind eye to — a drug epidemic that had ravaged their population while at the same time incarcerating a generation with Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs.”

Those people, he found, were backed by the CIA.

[Image: Gary Webb Speaks At A Congressional Conference]

Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty ImagesGary Webb speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference. He participated in a panel discussion called, “Connections, Coverage, and Casualties: The Continuing Story of the CIA and Drugs.” Sept. 11, 1997.

On the other hand, more prominent newspapers couldn’t believe that a small-time newspaper had scooped them in such a groundbreaking story. Webb faced an onslaught of reports from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and especially the Los Angeles Times that sought to discredit him — and it worked.

The CIA, amid a public relations “nightmare,” broke its policy of not commenting on any individual’s agency affiliation and denied Webb’s story entirely.

Facing intense pressure from the biggest names in media, Webb’s own editor-in-chief rescinded support for his story.

Gary Webb’s career was ruined, and in 2004 he ended it all for good with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.

Here’s how Webb’s groundbreaking story propelled him to the national stage — and spelled his doom.

Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance”

Webb’s “dark alliance” consisted of a group of rebels trying to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua. These Contras were funded by a Southern California drug ring and backed by the CIA.

“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 an arm of the contra guerrillas of Nicaragua run by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Gary Webb, August 1996

Let’s go back to where it all began.

The U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua came to an end with the Sandinista Revolution of 1978 and 1979. With no legal recourse to topple the five-person junta that took Somoza’s place, CIA interests had to find alternative means to plant a figurehead of their choosing.

President Ronald Reagan allocated $19.9 million to set up a U.S.-trained paramilitary force of 500 Nicaraguans, what eventually became known as the FDN, or the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force).

But in order to topple the Sandanistas, the FDN, also known as the Contras, needed a lot more weapons — and a lot more money. And to get that money, it needed to look beyond foreign aid.

Soon enough, according to Webb, the FDN set its sights on the poor, black neighborhood of South-Central Los Angeles — and rendered it ground zero of the 1980s crack epidemic.

A C-SPAN segment in which Gary Webb elaborates on his investigative work on the dark alliance of CIA agents, Contra rebels, and California drug dealers.

Webb’s reporting, focused on a few central players of the L.A. coke scene and the Contra rebels, illustrated how a CIA-backed war in South America devastated black communities in southern California and across the country.

At worst, the CIA orchestrated the drug ring. At best, they knew about it for years and did absolutely nothing to stop it. All the better to serve the country’s economic and political interests abroad.

Shepherding Traffickers To Safety

One of the most notable street-level players was Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes, a former Nicaraguan bureaucrat-turned-prolific cocaine supplier in California.

From 1981 to 1986, Blandón seemed to be protected by invisible higher-ups that quietly held jurisdiction over local authorities.

After six years of shepherding thousands of kilos of cocaine worth millions of dollars to the black gangs of L.A. during the early 1980s without a single arrest, Blandón was busted on drugs and weapons charges on Oct. 27, 1986.

[Image: Teenage Contra Rebels]

Jason Bleibtreu/Sygma/Getty ImagesTeenage Contra rebels at a training camp in Nicaragua. The Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguauense (FDN) guerrilla group was created in 1981 to oust the country’s socialist government.

In a written statement to obtain a search warrant for Blandón’s sprawling cocaine operation, L.A. County sheriff’s Sergeant Tom Gordon confirmed that local drug agents knew about Blandón’s involvement with the CIA-backed Contras — all the way back in the mid-1980s:

“Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in Southern California… The monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo, who is a high-ranking officer of a chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation. From this bank the monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”

── chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation

All of this and more was later backed up by Blandón himself, after he became an informant for the DEA and took the stand as the Justice Department’s key witness in a 1996 drug trial.

“There is a saying that the ends justify the means,” said Blandón in his court testimony. “And that’s what Mr. Bermudez [the CIA agent who instructed the FDN] told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for the contra revolution.”

[Image: South Central Los Angeles Resident]

Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times/Getty ImagesDonald Shorts, a mechanic and resident of Watts, blamed the crack epidemic that washed over South-Central Los Angeles on the complicity of the CIA and the lack of employment opportunities for black youth.

Meanwhile, Blandón testified that his drug ring sold close to one ton of cocaine in the U.S. in 1981 alone. In the following years, as more and more Americans became hooked on crack, that figure skyrocketed.

While he wasn’t sure how much of that money went to the CIA, he said that “whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going for the contra revolution.”

Blandón confessed to crimes that would have meant life in prison for the average dealer, but instead he spent just 28 months in prison, followed by unsupervised probation. “He has been extraordinarily helpful,” said O’Neale to Blandón’s judge while arguing for his release.

The DOJ proceeded to pay him more than $166,000 in the two years after his 1994 release, for his services as an informant for the U.S. government.

Even Blandón’s lawyer, Bradley Brunon, was convinced of Blandón’s alliance with the world’s most powerful intelligence agency.

[Image: Boston Cia Protests]

Tom Landers/The Boston Globe/Getty ImagesProtestors march outside of the CIA’s Boston offices in the middle of winter to demonstrate against the war in Nicaragua. March 2, 1986.

Brunon said that his client never specifically claimed he was selling cocaine for the CIA, but figured as much from the “atmosphere of CIA and clandestine activities” that surfaced during that time.

That big aircraft came largely from El Salvador, according to U.S. General Accounting Office records.

Bradley Brunon, attorney for Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes

He sent his information to DEA headquarters in the 1980s, but the only response he got was an internal investigation — not of these flights, but of him. He retired in 1991.

“Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they [DEA officials] were covering it up,” he told Webb. “You can’t get any simpler than that. It was a cover-up.”

Freeway Rick And South-Central: Crack Capital Of The World

Gary Webb believed that if Blandón, Meneses, and Rick Ross had worked in any other legal line of business, they “would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.”

[Image: Freeway Rick Ross]

Ray Tamarra/GC Images“Freeway” Rick Ross didn’t know how to read until he taught himself at the age of 28 while imprisoned. It was as a direct result that he noticed a flaw in his conviction, which subsequently led to a successful appeal. June 24, 2015.New York City, New York.

According to Esquire, Ross raked in more than $900 million in the 1980s, with a profit encroaching on $300 million (nearly $1 billion in today’s dollars).

His empire ultimately grew to 42 U.S. cities, but it all came tumbling down after Blandón, his main supplier, turned into a confidential informant.

Webb first heard of Ross while researching asset forfeitures in 1993 and found he was “one of the biggest crack dealers in L.A.,” he recalled in his 1998 book. He then discovered that Blandón was the CI that got Ross imprisoned in 1996.

When Webb realized that Blandón — the fund-raiser for the Contras — sold cocaine to Ross, South-Central’s biggest crack dealer, he had to speak to him. He eventually got Ross on the phone, and asked him what he knew about Blandón. Ross had only known him as Danilo, and figured he was regular guy with an entrepreneurial streak.

Freeway Rick Ross, Gary Webb, and John Kerry tell their side of the story.

“He was almost like a godfather to me,” said Ross. “He’s the one who got me going. He was [my main source]. Everybody I knew, I knew through him. So really, he could be considered as my only source. In a sense, he was.”

Ross confirmed to Webb that he met Blandón in 1981 or 1982, right around the time when Blandón started dealing drugs. Webb spent hours talking with Ross at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, where he found that Ross knew nothing about Blandón’s past at all.

He didn’t even know who the Contras were, or who was financing their war. Blandón was just a smooth-talking guy with an unending stash of cheap cocaine.

When Webb told Ross that Blandón had worked for the Contras, selling drugs to finance their weapons supplies, Ross was flabbergasted.

“And they put me in jail? I’d say that was some fucked up shit there,” said Ross. “They say I sold dope all over, but man, I know he done sold ten times more dope than me… He’s been working for the government the whole damn time.”

[Image: Contra Forces Moving Down San Juan River]

Bill Gentile/Corbis/Getty ImagesContra forces move down San Juan River (which separates Costa Rica from Nicaragua). “Freeway” Rick Ross said he was entirely unaware his rampant drug dealing in L.A. was funding this group of anti-Sandinistas in Central America.

Ross learned how to read at the age of 28 while imprisoned and found a legal loophole that set him free. The three-strikes law had been falsely applied, which led to a sentence reduction of 20 years after he appealed. He was released in 2009, and has since spread his story far and wide.

Problems With Gary Webb’s Reporting

To be sure, there were serious problems with Webb’s writing and reporting. As Peter Kornbluh laid out in the Columbia Journalism Review in 1997, Webb presented some powerful evidence that two FDN-affiliated Nicaraguans became prolific drug smugglers in the 1980s U.S.

But when it came to the most enticing bit of the story and the part that most animated and enraged the American public — that these smugglers were linked to the CIA — there was, on a closer reading, very little direct evidence.

In all 20,000 words of “Dark Alliance,” Gary Webb never claimed outright that the CIA knew about the Contras’ drug scheme, but he certainly implied as much.

[Image: Gary Webb Portrait]

Bob Berg/Getty ImagesThe CIA denied Gary Webb’s reporting, while his fellow journalists nitpicked Webb’s faults while failing to follow up on his claims. Los Angeles. March 1999.

Kornbluh writes: “Speculative passages like ‘Freeway Rick had no idea just how “plugged” his erudite cocaine broker [Blandón] was. He didn’t know about Norwin Meneses or the CIA,’ were clearly intended to imply CIA involvement.”

It was clear that Blandón and Meneses had connections to the FDN, and it was a known fact that the FDN was backed by the CIA, but Webb failed to make a compelling case for Blandón’s and Meneses’ direct connection to the CIA.

“To some this may seem a trivial distinction,” Kornbluh writes. Rep. Maxine Waters said at the time that “it doesn’t make any difference whether [the CIA] delivered the kilo themselves, or they turned their heads while somebody else delivered it, they are just as guilty.”

But, in the words of Kornbluh, “the articles did not even address the likelihood that CIA officials in charge would have known about these drug operations.”

Failing to do so — and crafting the whole piece as a one-sided, damning report without presenting contradictory evidence — was a major oversight by Webb and his editors, and made his exposé wide open to criticism.

[Image: Maxine Waters Holding A Brick Of Cocaine]

Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty ImagesU.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, representing a majority-minority district in Los Angeles, holds up an apparent package of cocaine for the press. She pushed the government to investigate Webb’s findings. Oct. 7, 1996.

The Major Papers Poke Holes

And that criticism came like a tidal wave — after a brief blackout.

While some Bay Area papers and talk radio, particularly black talk radio, pounced on the story, the country’s major newspapers and TV news networks remained mostly silent.

“Dark Alliance” was breaking internet records, boasting 1.3 million site visits daily — a remarkable feat at a time when only about 20 million Americans had home internet access. And all the while, at least for the first month after the series’ release, America’s most popular news sources were mum.

Then, on October 4, the Washington Post published a scathing “investigation” declaring that “available information does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed contras — or Nicaraguans in general — played a major role in the emergence of crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States.” Even though Webb’s article focused on southern California, not the U.S. in general.

A C-SPAN segment in which Gary Webb fields a range of questions on investigative hurdles and the journalism world’s response.

A couple weeks later, the New York Times released it’s declaration: that there was “scant proof” for Webb’s main contentions.

But the greatest criticism came from the Los Angeles Times, which assembled a 17-person team; one member remembered it being called the “get Gary Webb team.” On October 20, the L.A. paper — incensed that it had been scooped in its own backyard — began publishing a three-part series of its own.

Like the other major papers, the Times relied on the very hyperbole and selective reporting in its own takedown series that it criticized Webb of committing.

Reporter Jesse Katz, who two years prior had written a profile of “Freeway Rick” Ross describing him as “a criminal mastermind…most responsible for flooding Los Angeles streets with mass-marketed cocaine” did a complete about face and characterized Ross as just one small player in a sprawling landscape of L.A. crack dealers. “How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ross,” he wrote.

All three papers ignored evidence already out there — including a mostly ignored Associate Press report from 1985 and a House Subcommittee from 1989 that found that “U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.”

According to a CIA article that was finally released in 2014 titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” the media’s penchant for jealousy and cannibalism worked in the agency’s favor. Rather than mount a stealth public relations campaign, all the agency had to do was provide reporters with comments of denial. The reporters didn’t need to be convinced to go after Webb, they did it gladly.

“Clearly, there was room to advance the contra/drug/CIA story rather than simply denounce it,” Kornbluh wrote. Instead of investigating the questions Gary Webb raised and provide crucial information to an enraged public that had been devastated by crack addiction and the War on Drugs, the “big three” papers made it their main goal to discredit Webb.

The “Dark Alliance” saga began as a matter of, “Look what horrible things the government may be implicated in.” But it turned into, “Look at what a sloppy journalist Gary Webb is.”

Steve Weinberg of The Baltimore Sun was one of the few who rationally defended Webb’s supposed guesswork.

“[Webb] took the story where it seemed to lead — to the door of U.S. national security and drug enforcement agencies. Even if Webb overreached in a few paragraphs — based on my careful reading, I would say his overreaching was limited, if it occurred at all — he still had a compelling, significant investigation to publish.”

Kill The Messenger: The Death Of Gary Webb

Whatever the desired effect was — To vindicate their own journalists for not covering the groundbreaking story first? To assure black Americans that all was fine and the CIA really did have their backs? — the biggest impact it had was on Gary Webb’s life.

Jerry Ceppos, then the executive editor of the Mercury News, wrote an open letter to readers in May 2017 rescinding support for Webb’s reporting and listing the editorial flaws in “Dark Alliance.”

The news media took his apology and put it on blast. Webb, who just a few years prior had won a Pulitzer Prize, was reassigned to the Cupertino desk, where his thirst for investigative reporting went depressingly unquenched. He resigned from the paper by the end of the year, and his reputation was so tarnished that he couldn’t get a good job anywhere else.

He was forced to sell his home in 2004, but on moving day he shot himself in the head with two .38-caliber bullets.

Webb’s rise and fall was most recently dramatized in the 2014 movie Kill the Messenger starring Jeremy Renner as Webb, based on journalist Nick Schou’s titular book.

The official trailer for Michael Cuesta’s 2014 film Kill the Messenger.

“Once you take away a journalist’s credibility, that’s all they have,” said Schou. “He was never able to recover from that.”

Webb’s reporting ultimately panned out: We now know that the U.S. government was complicit in drug smuggling in order to support its foreign policy interests. It was a phenomenon that, combined with the “War on Drugs,” devastated large and mostly black swaths of Americans for generations.

Still, the journalism world’s response to Webb’s “Dark Alliance” spelled his doom.

“It’s impossible to view what happened to him without understanding the death of his career as a result of this story,” said Schou. “It was really the central defining event of his career and of his life.”

After reading about Gary Webb exposing the CIA’s potential complicity in L.A.’s crack epidemic,

____________________________________

Oliver North, the White House National Security Counsel official in charge of the Contra operation, was notified in a memo that Calero’s deputies were involved in the drug business. Robert Owen, North’s top staffer in Central America, warned that Jose Robelo had “potential involvement with drug-running and the sale of goods provided by the [U.S. government]” and that Sebastian Gonzalez was “now involved in drug-running out of Panama.” North’s own diary, originally uncovered by the National Security Archive, is a rich source of evidence as well. “Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S.,” reads an entry for Aug. 9, 1985, reflecting a conversation North had with Owen about Mario Calero, Adolfo’s brother. An entry from July 12, 1985 relates that “14 million to finance [an arms depot] came from drugs” and another references a trip to Bolivia to pick up “paste.” (Paste is slang term for a crude cocaine derivative product comprised of coca leaves grown in the Andes as well as processing chemicals used during the cocaine manufacturing process.)

Celerino Castillo, a top DEA agent in El Salvador, investigated the Contras' drug-running in the 1980s and repeatedly warned superiors, according to a Justice Department investigation into the matter. Castillo “believes that North and the Contras’ resupply operation at Ilopango were running drugs for the Contras,” Mike Foster, an FBI agent who worked for the Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, reported in 1991 after meeting with Castillo, who later wrote the book Powderburns about his efforts to expose the drug-running.

book, Powderburns

source:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748

https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748#main

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A recently declassified article titled “Managing A Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” from the agency’s internal journal, “Studies In Intelligence,”

declassified article titled “Managing A Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,”

“The charges could hardly be worse,” the article opens. “A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in America’s inner cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the Internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and to keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of CIA -- reminiscent of the 1970s -- abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.”

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December 1997

an internal inspector general report

“In 1984, CIA received allegations that five individuals associated with the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE)/Sandino Revolutionary Front (FRS) were engaged in a drug trafficking conspiracy with a known narcotics trafficker, Jorge Morales,” the report found. “CIA broke off contact with ARDE in October 1984, but continued to have contact through 1986-87 with four of the individuals involved with Morales.” It also found that in October 1982, an immigration officer reported that, according to an informant in the Nicaraguan exile community in the Bay Area, “there are indications of links between [a specific U.S.-based religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua. A meeting on this matter is scheduled to be held in Costa Rica ‘within one month.’ Two names the informant has associated with this matter are Bergman Arguello, a UDN member and exile living in San Francisco, and Chicano Cardenal, resident of Nicaragua." The inspector general is clear that in some cases “CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA.” In other cases, “CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so.”

“Let me be frank about what we are finding,” the CIA’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, said in congressional testimony in March 1998. “There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.”

source:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748

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While Blandon may have been operating on behalf of the Contras early in his career, they charged, he later broke off on his own. But an October 1986 arrest warrant for Blandon indicates that the LA County Sheriff's Department at the time had other information.

“Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in southern California,” the warrant reads, according to Webb's orginal report. “The monies gained through the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo who is a high-ranking officer in a chain of banks in Florida. … From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”

Blandon's number-one client was “Freeway” Rick Ross, whose name has since been usurped by the rapper William Leonard Roberts, better known by his stage name “Rick Ross” (an indignity that plays a major role in the film). The original Ross, who was arrested in 1995 and freed from prison in 2009, told Webb in "Dark Alliance" that the prices and quantity Blandon was offering transformed him from a small-time dealer into what prosecutors would later describe as the most significant crack cocaine merchant in Los Angeles, if not the country.

His empire -- once dubbed the “Walmart” of crack cocaine -- expanded east from LA to major cities throughout the Midwest before he was eventually taken down during a DEA sting his old supplier and friend Blandon helped set up.

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LOS ANGELES -- With the public in the U.S. and Latin America becoming increasingly skeptical of the war on drugs, key figures in a scandal that once rocked the Central Intelligence Agency are coming forward to tell their stories in a new documentary and in a series of interviews with The Huffington Post.

More than 18 years have passed since Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with his “Dark Alliance” newspaper series investigating the connections between the CIA, a crack cocaine explosion in the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, and the Nicaraguan Contra fighters -- scandalous implications that outraged LA’s black community, severely damaged the intelligence agency's reputation and launched a number of federal investigations.

It did not end well for Webb, however. Major media, led by The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, worked to discredit his story. Under intense pressure, Webb's top editor abandoned him. Webb was drummed out of journalism. One LA Times reporter recently apologized for his leading role in the assault on Webb, but it came too late. Webb died in 2004 from an apparent suicide. Obituaries referred to his investigation as "discredited."

Now, Webb’s bombshell expose is being explored anew in a documentary, “Freeway: Crack in the System,” directed by Marc Levin, which tells the story of “Freeway” Rick Ross, who created a crack empire in LA during the 1980s and is a key figure in Webb’s “Dark Alliance” narrative. The documentary is being released after the major motion picture “Kill The Messenger,” which features Jeremy Renner in the role of Webb and hits theaters on Friday. Webb's investigation was published in the summer of 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News. In it, he reported that a drug ring that sold millions of dollars worth of cocaine in Los Angeles was funneling its profits to the CIA’s army in Nicaragua, known as the Contras.

Webb’s original anonymous source for his series was Coral Baca, a confidante of Nicaraguan dealer Rafael Cornejo. Baca, Ross and members of his “Freeway boys” crew; cocaine importer and distributor Danilo Blandon; and LA Sheriff's Deputy Robert Juarez all were interviewed for Levin's film.

The dual release of the feature film and the documentary, along with the willingness of long-hesitant sources to come forward, suggests that Webb may have the last word after all.

* * * * *

Webb’s entry point into the sordid tale of corruption was through Baca, a ghostlike figure in the Contra-cocaine narrative who has given precious few interviews over the decades. Her name was revealed in Webb's 1998 book on the scandal, but was removed at her request in the paperback edition. Levin connected HuffPost with Baca and she agreed to an interview at a cafe in San Francisco. She said that she and Webb didn’t speak for years after he revealed her name, in betrayal of the conditions under which they spoke. He eventually apologized, said Baca, who is played by Paz Vega in “Kill The Messenger."

The major media that worked to undermine Webb's investigation acknowledged that Blandon was a major drug-runner as well as a Contra supporter, and that Ross was a leading distributor. But those reports questioned how much drug money Blandon and his boss Norwin Meneses turned over to the Contras, and whether the Contras were aware of the source of the funds.

During her interview with HuffPost, Baca recounted meeting Contra leader Adolfo Calero multiple times in the 1980s at Contra fundraisers in the San Francisco Bay Area. He would personally pick up duffel bags full of drug money, she said, which it was her job to count for Cornejo. There was no question, she said, that Calero knew precisely how the money had been earned. Meneses' nickname, after all, was El Rey De Las Drogas -- The King of Drugs.

"If he was stupid and had a lobotomy," he might not have known it was drug money, Baca said. "He knew exactly what it was. He didn't care. He was there to fund the Contras, period." (Baca made a similar charge confidentially to the Department of Justice for its 1997 review of Webb's allegations, as well as further allegations the investigators rejected.)

Indeed, though the mainstream media at the time worked to poke holes in Webb's findings, believing that the Contra operation was not involved with drug-running takes an enormous suspension of disbelief. Even before Webb’s series was published, numerous government investigations and news reports had linked America's support for the Nicaraguan rebels with drug trafficking.

After The Associated Press reported on these connections in 1985, for example, more than a decade before Webb, then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) launched a congressional investigation. In 1989, Kerry released a detailed report claiming that not only was there “considerable evidence” linking the Contra effort to trafficking of drugs and weapons, but that the U.S. government knew about it.

According to the report, many of the pilots ferrying weapons and supplies south for the CIA were known to have backgrounds in drug trafficking. Kerry's investigation cited SETCO Aviation, the company the U.S. had contracted to handle many of the flights, as an example of CIA complicity in the drug trade. According to a 1983 Customs Service report, SETCO was “headed by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a class I DEA violator.”

Two years before the Iran-Contra scandal would begin to bubble up in the Reagan White House, pilot William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee revealed to then-Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) that planes would routinely transport cocaine back to the U.S. after dropping off arms for the Nicaraguan rebels. Plumlee has since spoken in detail about the flights in media interviews.

“In March, 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver Senate Office and … raised several issues including that covert U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved in the smuggling and distribution of drugs to raise funds for covert military operations against the government of Nicaragua,” a copy of a 1991 letter from Hart to Kerry reads. (Hart told HuffPost he recalls receiving Plumlee's letter and finding his allegations worthy of follow-up.)

Plumlee flew weapons into Latin America for decades for the CIA. When the Contra revolution took off in the 1980s, Plumlee says he continued to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with him, with the blessing of the U.S. government.

The Calero transactions Baca says she witnessed would have been no surprise to the Reagan White House. On April 15, 1985, around the time Baca says she saw Calero accepting bags of cash, Oliver North, the White House National Security Counsel official in charge of the Contra operation, was notified in a memo that Calero’s deputies were involved in the drug business. Robert Owen, North’s top staffer in Central America, warned that Jose Robelo had “potential involvement with drug-running and the sale of goods provided by the [U.S. government]” and that Sebastian Gonzalez was “now involved in drug-running out of Panama.” North’s own diary, originally uncovered by the National Security Archive, is a rich source of evidence as well. “Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S.,” reads an entry for Aug. 9, 1985, reflecting a conversation North had with Owen about Mario Calero, Adolfo’s brother. An entry from July 12, 1985 relates that “14 million to finance [an arms depot] came from drugs” and another references a trip to Bolivia to pick up “paste.” (Paste is slang term for a crude cocaine derivative product comprised of coca leaves grown in the Andes as well as processing chemicals used during the cocaine manufacturing process.)

* * * * *

Webb's investigation sent the CIA into a panic. A recently declassified article titled “Managing A Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” from the agency’s internal journal, “Studies In Intelligence,” shows that the spy agency was reeling in the weeks that followed.

The emergence of Webb’s story “posed a genuine public relations crisis for the Agency,” writes the CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer, whose name is redacted.

In December 1997, CIA sources helped advance that narrative, telling reporters that an internal inspector general report sparked by Webb's investigation had exonerated the agency.

Yet the report itself, quietly released several weeks later, was actually deeply damaging to the CIA.

* * * * *

One of the keys to Webb's story was testimony from Danilo Blandon, who the Department of Justice once described as one of the most significant Nicaraguan drug importers in the 1980s.

“You were running the LA operation, is that correct?” Blandon, who was serving as a government witness in the 1990s, was asked by Alan Fenster, attorney representing Rick Ross, in 1996. “Yes. But remember, we were running, just -- whatever we were running in LA, it goes, the profit, it was going to the Contra revolution,” Blandon said.

Levin, the documentary filmmaker, tracked down Blandon in Managua.

“Gary Webb tried to find me, Congresswoman Maxine Waters tried to find me, Oliver Stone tried to find me. You found me,” Blandon told Levin, according to notes from the interview the director provided to HuffPost. Waters, a congresswoman from Los Angeles, had followed Webb’s investigation with one of her own. In the interview notes with filmmaker Levin, Blandon confirms his support of the Contras and his role in drug trafficking, but downplays his significance. "The big lie is that we started it all -- the crack epidemic -- we were just a small part. There were the Torres [brothers], the Colombians, and others," he says. "We were a little marble, pebble, rock and [people are] acting like we're big boulder."

[Image: kill]

The Managua lumberyard where Levin tracked down Blandon. Webb’s series connected the Contras' drug-running directly to the growth of crack in the U.S., and it was this connection that faced the most pushback from critics. While Blandon may have been operating on behalf of the Contras early in his career, they charged, he later broke off on his own. But an October 1986 arrest warrant for Blandon indicates that the LA County Sheriff's Department at the time had other information.

Levin's film not only explores the corrupt foundations of the drug war itself, but also calls into question the draconian jail sentences the U.S. justice system meted out to a mostly minority population, while the country's own foreign policy abetted the drug trade.

“I knew that these laws were a mistake when we were writing them," says Eric Sterling, who was counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in the 1980s and a key contributor to the passage of mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, in the documentary.

In 1980, there were roughly 40,000 drug offenders in U.S. prisons, according to research from The Sentencing Project, a prison sentencing reform group. By 2011, the number of drug offenders serving prison sentences ballooned to more than 500,000 -- most of whom are not high-level operators and are without prior criminal records.

"There is no question that there are tens of thousands of black people in prison serving sentences that are decades excessive,” Sterling says. “Their families have been destroyed because of laws I played a central role in writing.”

The height of the drug war in the 1980s also saw the beginning of the militarization of local law enforcement, the tentacles of which are seen to this day, most recently in Ferguson, Missouri.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, former LA County Sheriff's Deputy Robert Juarez, who served with the department from 1976 to 1991 and was later convicted along with several other deputies in 1992 during a federal investigation of sheriff officers stealing seized drug money, described a drug war culture that frequently put law enforcement officers into morally questionable situations that were difficult to navigate.

[Image: kill]

The hunter and the hunted: A Los Angeles detective finally meets the kingpin he'd pursued.

“We all started getting weapons,” said Juarez, who served five years in prison for skimming drug-bust money. “We were hitting houses coming up with Uzis, AK-47s, and we’re walking in with a six-shooter and a shotgun. So guys started saying, 'I’m going to get me a semi-automatic and the crooks are paying for it.' So that’s how it started.”

But Juarez, who served in the LA County Sheriff’s narcotics division for nearly a decade, explained that what started as a way for some officers to pay for extra weapons and informants to aid in investigations quickly devolved into greed. Since asset forfeiture laws at the time allowed the county to keep all cash seized during a drug bust, Juarez says tactics changed.

“It got to where we were more tax collectors than we were dope cops,” Juarez recalled. “Everything seized was coming right back to the county. We turned into the same kind of crooks we’d been following around ... moving evidence around to make sure the asshole goes to jail; backing up other deputies regardless of what it was. Everyone, to use a drug dealer's term, everyone was taking a taste.”

* * * * *

Between 1982 and 1984, Congress restricted funding for the Contras, and by 1985 cut it off entirely. The Reagan administration, undeterred, conspired to sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages, using some of the proceeds to illegally fund the Contras. The scandal became known as Iran-Contra. Drug trafficking was a much less convoluted method of skirting the congressional ban on funding the Contras, and the CIA's inspector general found that in the early years after Congress cut off Contra funding, the CIA had alerted Congress about the allegations of drug trafficking. But while the ban was in effect, the CIA went largely silent on the issue. “CIA did not inform Congress of all allegations or information it received indicating that Contra-related organizations or individuals were involved in drug trafficking,” the inspector general's report found. “During the period in which the FY 1987 statutory prohibition was in effect, for example, no information has been found to indicate that CIA informed Congress of eight of the ten Contra-related individuals concerning whom CIA had received drug trafficking allegations or information.”

This complicity of the CIA in drug trafficking is at the heart of Webb’s explosive expose -- a point Webb makes himself in archival interview footage that appears in Levin’s documentary.

“It’s not a situation where the government or the CIA sat down and said, 'Okay, let’s invent crack, let’s sell it in black neighborhoods, let’s decimate black America,’” Webb says. “It was a situation where, 'We need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know anything about it.'"

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Effect on African American communities[edit]

Due to racial segregation and discriminatory practices by real estate agents, African American families were largely located in low-income inner city neighborhoods. This led to crack impacting African American communities far more than others.[8]

Between 1984 and 1989, the homicide rate for Black males aged 14 to 17 more than doubled, and the homicide rate for Black males aged 18 to 24 increased nearly as much. During this period, the Black community also experienced a 20–100% increase in fetal death rates, low birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.[9] The United States remains the largest overall consumer of narcotics in the world as of 2014.[10][11]

A 2018 study found that the crack epidemic had long-run consequences for crime, contributing to the doubling of the murder rate of young Black males soon after the start of the epidemic, and that the murder rate was still 70 percent higher 17 years after crack's arrival.[12] The paper estimated that eight percent of the murders in 2000 are due to the long-run effects of the emergence of crack markets, and that the elevated murder rates for young Black males can explain a significant part of the gap in life expectancy between black and white males.[12]

Crack cocaine use and distribution became popular in cities that were in a state of social and economic chaos such as New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta, and particularly in their low-income inner city neighborhoods with high African American concentrations.[8] "As a result of the low-skill levels and minimal initial resource outlay required to sell crack, systemic violence flourished as a growing army of young, enthusiastic inner-city crack sellers attempt to defend their economic investment."[13] Once the drug became embedded in the particular communities, the economic environment that was best suited for its survival caused further social disintegration within that city.

source:

Crack epidemic in the united states

www.wikipedia.org entry

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• CIA-supplied contra planes and pilots carried cocaine from Central America to U.S. airports and military bases. In 1985, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Celerino Castillo reported to his superiors that cocaine was being stored at the CIA’s contra-supply warehouse at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador for shipment to the U.S. The DEA did nothing, and Castillo was gradually forced out of the agency.

source:

The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack

Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua's leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross.

November 1, 1996

William Blum

http://fpif.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/

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Friday, May 12, 2023

the game (follow the money) (wire)

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