Crack cia los angeles

Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope. And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill.

We had this huge team of people at the L. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California. The report stated :.

In each case, one or another agency of the U. Curiously, this remained largely unnoticed by the media until Gary Webb picked up the story years later in , and linked it to the CIA. These included CIA assets, pilots who ferried supplies to the Contras, as well as Contra officials and others.

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. Some interpreted the connection as part of a CIA conspiracy to purposefully target the black community, an allegation Webb denies he ever made. Absolutely true! Why bring up old white people atrocities against black people now?

Because the gentile european caucasian, lepers, fake jews or white folks agenda has always been to destroy the black man, ever since pharaoh tried to murder Christ by murdering Hebrew babies, until now. I saw Ollie north cover-up for Marine drug runners in Michael pacut USMC Republish This Story.

All Citizen Truth original articles are licensed under a Creative Commons license provided you credit Citizen Truth and provide an active backlink. Jack Xiong October 14, An explosive report from a relatively unknown journalist, Gary Webb, claimed the CIA helped foster the crack epidemic that ravaged Los Angeles in the s.

Previous Article. Guest Post September 1, Barbara Dean October 14, Pedro Juan Lopez October 14, Arnold Negus October 14, Ken Emsweller October 14, Eve McQueen-Allinger October 14, Guillermo Rocha October 14, John Grier October 14, Louise Dodson October 14, Lola Johnson October 14, Daniel Sparks October 14, For the better part of a decade, a 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 guerilla army run by the U.

Central Intelligence Agency. The Mercury News published a three-part series in late August that detailed how a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the street gangs of South-Central Los Angeles in the s, sending some of the millions in profits to the Contras.

The series never reported direct CIA involvement, although many readers drew that conclusion. Regardless of the intent of the Mercury News , the accusation of government involvement in the crack epidemic had taken root. This dramatic interpretation of the series continued to build with ferocious velocity, especially in black communities, as the Mercury News story attracted the attention of newspapers across the country.

Throughout September , the Dark Alliance series was published in one newspaper after another: the Raleigh News and Observer ran the articles on September 1, ; the Denver Post published them on September 13, ; the Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran them on September 15, ; and so on. While many other newspapers did not publish the Dark Alliance series, they carried stories about the sensation created by the series' claims.

The story garnered further exposure from television and radio talk show appearances by Gary Webb. Ricky Ross' attorney, Alan Fenster, also made several appearances on television shows to assert that the government, not his client, was responsible for cocaine dealing in South Central Los Angeles.

Many African-American leaders were particularly troubled by the articles, mindful of the frequency with which young black men were being incarcerated for drug offenses. If the Mercury News was right, it appeared that the same government that was arresting so many black men had played a role in creating the drug crisis that precipitated their arrest.

This point was emphasized by the Mercury News ' Dark Alliance series, which included articles entitled, "War on drugs has unequal impact on black Americans; Contras case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L. The Congressional Black Caucus and many leaders in the black community also insisted upon an investigation into the charges raised by the Mercury News.

As noted above, the Mercury News series was not only a story about the United States government and crack cocaine. It also revisited allegations concerning the Contras and drug trafficking that has been reported upon and investigated for many years.

In , the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations began an investigation focusing on allegations received by the subcommittee chairman, Senator John Kerry, concerning illegal gun-running and narcotics trafficking associated with the Contras.

A two-year investigation produced a 1,page report in analyzing the involvement of Contra groups and supporters in drug trafficking, and the role of United States government officials in these activities. Allegations of cocaine trafficking by Contras also arose during the investigation conducted by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh into the Iran-Contra affair.

Drug trafficking allegations, however, were not the focus of that inquiry and the Walsh report included no findings on these allegations. The issue of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan Contras has also been the subject of books: e. It was also reported upon in the news media.

Following the December piece mentioned above from the Associated Press , the San Francisco Examiner ran stories in about Norwin Meneses, Carlos Cabezas an individual with links to Contra organizations who was convicted in the mids of drug charges , and drug trafficking by the Contras. It is undisputed that individuals like Meneses and Blandon, who had ties to the Contras or were Contra sympathizers, were convicted of drug trafficking, either in the United States or Central America.

There is also undeniable evidence that certain groups associated with the Contras engaged in drug trafficking. The pervasiveness of such activities within the Contra movement and the United States government's knowledge of those activities, however, are still the subject of debate, and it is beyond the scope of the OIG's investigation, which we describe below.

Yet it is noteworthy that, as interesting as the story of Contras and illicit drug deals may be, it was not the catalyst for the public's or the media's interest in the Dark Alliance series. Investigations into the alleged connection between Contras and cocaine dealing were conducted and articles were printed in the late s, at a time when interest in the Iran-Contra story was cresting.

Neither those investigations nor the published articles tracking the allegations sparked a firestorm of outrage comparable to that created by the Dark Alliance series. The furor over the Mercury News series was driven by the allegations of the government's complicity in cocaine deals within black communities. If the Dark Alliance series had been limited to reporting on Contras, it seems unlikely that the groundswell of press and public attention would have occurred.

Notwithstanding the Mercury News ' explosive allegations, the series did not receive extensive coverage from major newspapers in either August or September The Los Angeles Times briefly discussed the Mercury News series in several articles in August and September that covered Ross' postponed sentencing and other events in the Ross trial.

Similarly, the Dark Alliance series did not initially receive much television coverage. With the exception of CNN, which ran several pieces on the story in September, and the NBC Nightly News, which ran a piece about the allegations on September 27, , the story received little national television news coverage. By early October , however, that changed. It did not, for the most part, wrestle with the series' claims about drug dealing by the Contras. The Washington Post noted that the series had been selective in its use of Blandon's testimony to support its claims:.

The Mercury News uses testimony from Blandon in establishing that Nicaraguans selling drugs in California sent profits to the Contras. But if the whole of Blandon's testimony is to be believed, then the connection is not made between Contras and African American drug dealers because Blandon said he had stopped sending money to the contras by [the time he began selling to Ross]. And if Blandon is to be believed, there is no connection between Contras and the cause of the crack epidemic because Blandon said Ross was already a well-established dealer with several ready sources of supply by the time he started buying cocaine from Blandon.

The Washington Post piece also emphasized apparent contradictions between Ross' and Blandon's accounts. For example, while Blandon claimed to have been a used car salesman in who on the side sold two kilograms of cocaine for Meneses, Ross said Blandon was instead handling bulk sales of kilograms of cocaine for Meneses at the time.

The article did not seek to resolve these issues and merely noted the conflicts. It concluded, after conducting interviews of various unnamed sources:. Meneses and Mr. Blandon may indeed have provided modest support for the rebels, including perhaps some weapons, there is no evidence that either man was a rebel official or had anything to do with the C.

Nor is there proof that the relatively small amounts of cocaine they sometimes claimed to have brokered on behalf of the insurgents had a remotely significant role in the explosion of crack that began around the same time.

After reportedly assigning three editors and fourteen reporters to the story, the Los Angeles Times published its own three-part analysis of the Mercury News piece, which ran from October 20 to October 22, He didn't care.

He was there to fund the Contras, period. 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. After The Associated Press reported on these connections in , for example, more than a decade before Webb , then-Sen.

John Kerry D-Mass. According to the report, many of the pilots ferrying weapons and supplies south for the CIA were known to have backgrounds in drug trafficking. Gary Hart D-Colo. Plumlee has since spoken in detail about the flights in media interviews. Hart told HuffPost he recalls receiving Plumlee's letter and finding his allegations worthy of follow-up.

When the Contra revolution took off in the s, Plumlee says he continued to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with him, with the blessing of the U.

The Calero transactions Baca says she witnessed would have been no surprise to the Reagan White House. Celerino Castillo, a top DEA agent in El Salvador, investigated the Contras' drug-running in the s and repeatedly warned superiors, according to a Justice Department investigation into the matter.

Webb's investigation sent the CIA into a panic. 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 s -- abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved. In December , 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.

These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua. 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 s.

In the interview notes with filmmaker Levin, Blandon confirms his support of the Contras and his role in drug trafficking, but downplays his significance. There were the Torres [brothers], the Colombians, and others," he says.