Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, Kill the Messenger, to be be released in Fall 2014Winner of the 1999 PEN/Oakland Censorship AwardWinner of the 1999 Firecracker Alternative Bookseller (FAB) Award, Politics categoryFinalist for the 1999 Bay Area Book Reviewers AwardsDark Alliance is a book that should be fiction, whose characters seem to come straight out of central casting: the international drug lord, Norwin Meneses; the Contra cocaine broker with an MBA in marketing, Danilo Blandon; and the illiterate teenager from the inner city who rises to become the king of crack, Freeway Ricky Ross. But unfortunately, these characters are real and their stories are true.In August 1996, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his yearlong investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled Dark Alliance, revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIAbacked Nicaraguan Contras.Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities.Webbs original article spurred an immediate outcry. Within days of publication, both of Californias senators made formal requests for investigations of the U.S. governments relationship with the cocaine ring. As a result, public demonstrations erupted in L.A., Washington D.C., and New York. Thenchief of the CIA, John Deutsch, made an unprecedented attempt at crisis control by going to South Central L.A. to hold a public forum. Representative Maxine Waters later said in George magazine, I was shocked by the level of corruption and deceit and the way the intelligence agencies have knowledge of bigtime drug dealing.The allegations in Webbs story blazed over the Internet and the Mercury News website on the series was deluged with hitsover a million in one day. A Columbia Journalism Review cover story called it the most talkedabout piece of journalism in 1996 and arguably the most famoussome would say infamousset of articles of the decade.Webbs own strangerthanfiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the medianot because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the storyhad been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the Dark Alliance story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.The updated paperback edition of Dark Alliance features revelations in justreleased reports from the Department of Justice, internal CIA investigations, and a new cache of recently declassified secret FBI, DEA, and INS filesmuch of which was not known to Webb when writing the first edition of this book. Webb further explains the close working relationship that major drug traffickers had with U.S. Government agenciesparticularly the DEAand recounts the news of the past year regarding this breaking story.After more than two years of careerdamning allegations leveled at Webb, joined in the past year by glowing reviews of the hardco