From August 18–20, 1996, the
San Jose Mercury News published the
Dark Alliance series by Gary Webb, 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. To support these claims, the series focused on 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. Ross was described as "a disillusioned 19-year-old ... who, at the dawn of the 1980s, found himself adrift on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles." The series alleged that Ross's suppliers 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. Webb claimed that the connection between the groups was to fund the Contras' revolt against Nicaragua's leftist government. He concluded that Blandon worked with Ricky Ross to supply cocaine and low-cost crack to an untapped market of poor black citizens of Los Angeles. The
Mercury News claimed that drug dealers connected to the Contras were immune to investigation, with the implication that they were being protected by the CIA. The paper also contended that the DEA, Customs Bureau, the Los Angeles County Sheriff, or the U.S. Congress were all denied information from the CIA during an inquiry into the dealer-connected parties. According to Webb, when the drug dealers lost their connection in the late 1980s, they were quickly arrested on drug charges.
Response African Americans,
especially in
South Central Los Angeles where the dealers discussed in the series had been active, responded with outrage to the series' charges. California senators
Barbara Boxer and
Dianne Feinstein also took note and wrote to CIA director
John Deutch and Attorney General
Janet Reno, asking for investigations into the articles.
Maxine Waters, the Representative for California's 35th district, which includes South-Central Los Angeles, was also outraged by the articles and became one of Webb's strongest supporters. Waters urged the CIA, the Department of Justice, and the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate. By the end of September, three federal investigations had been announced: an investigation into the CIA allegations conducted by CIA Inspector-General
Frederick Hitz, an investigation into the law enforcement allegations by Justice Department Inspector-General
Michael Bromwich, and a second investigation into the CIA by the House Intelligence Committee. 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.
Coverage in other papers In early October, 1996, a front-page article in
The Washington Post by reporters Roberto Suro and
Walter Pincus, argued that "available information" did not support the series's claims, and that "the rise of crack" was "a broad-based phenomenon" driven in numerous places by diverse players. The article also discussed Webb's contacts with Ross's attorney and prosecution complaints of how Ross's defense had used Webb's series.
The New York Times published two articles on the series in mid-October, both written by reporter
Tim Golden. One described the series' evidence as "thin"; The
Los Angeles Times devoted the most space to the story, developing its own three-part series called
The Cocaine Trail. The series ran from October 20–22, 1996, and was researched by a team of 17 reporters. The three articles in the series were written by four reporters: Jesse Katz, Doyle McManus, John Mitchell, and Sam Fulwood. The first article, by Katz, developed a different picture of the origins of the crack trade than
Dark Alliance had described, with more gangs and smugglers participating. The second article, by McManus, was the longest of the series, and dealt with the role of the
Contras in the drug trade and CIA knowledge of drug activities by the Contras. McManus found Blandón and Meneses's financial contributions to Contra organizations to be significantly less than the "millions" claimed in Webb's series, and no evidence that the CIA had tried to protect them. The third article, by Mitchell and Fulwood, covered the effects of crack on African Americans and how it affected their reaction to some of the rumors that arose after the
Dark Alliance series.
Mercury News response Surprised by
The Washington Post article,
Mercury News executive editor
Jerome Ceppos wrote to the
Post defending the series. The
Post ultimately refused to print his letter. Ceppos also asked reporter
Pete Carey to write a critique of the series for publication in
The Mercury News, and had the controversial website artwork changed. When the
Los Angeles Times series appeared, Ceppos again wrote to defend the original series. He also defended the series in interviews with all three papers. The extent of the criticism, however, convinced Ceppos that
The Mercury News had to acknowledge to its readers that the series had not been subjected to strong criticism. He did this in a column that appeared on November 3, defending the series, but also committing the paper to a review of major criticisms. Ceppos' column drew editorial responses from both
The New York Times and
The Washington Post. An editorial in the
Times, while criticizing the series for making "unsubstantiated charges", conceded that it did find "drug-smuggling and dealing by Nicaraguans with at least tentative connections to the Contras" and called for further investigation. The
Post response came from the paper's ombudsman, Geneva Overholser. Overholser was harshly critical of the series, "reported by a seemingly hotheaded fellow willing to have people leap to conclusions his reporting couldn't back up." But while calling the flaws in the series "unforgivably careless journalism", Overholser also criticized the ''Post's'' refusal to print Ceppos' letter defending the series and sharply criticized the ''Post's
coverage of the story. Calling the Post's'' overall focus "misplaced", Overholser expressed regret that the paper had not taken the opportunity to re-examine whether the CIA had overlooked Contra involvement in drug smuggling, "a subject The Post and the public had given short shrift." In contrast, the series received support from Steve Weinberg, a former executive director of
Investigative Reporters and Editors. In a long review of the series' claims in
The Baltimore Sun, Weinberg said: "I think the critics have been far too harsh. Despite some hyped phrasing, 'Dark Alliance' appears to be praiseworthy investigative reporting." After the series' publication, the Northern California branch of the national
Society of Professional Journalists had voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996. Despite the controversy that soon overtook the series, and the request of one board member to reconsider, the branch's board went ahead with the award in November.
End of the series After Ceppos' column,
The Mercury News spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story. The review was conducted primarily by editor Jonathan Krim and reporter
Pete Carey, who had written the paper's first published analysis of the series. Carey ultimately decided that there were problems with several parts of the story and wrote a draft article incorporating his findings. The paper also gave Webb permission to visit
Central America again to get more evidence supporting the story. By January, Webb filed drafts of four more articles based on his trip, but his editors concluded that the new articles would not help shore up the original series' claims. The editors met with Webb several times in February to discuss the results of the paper's internal review and eventually decided to print neither Carey's draft article nor the articles Webb had filed. Webb was allowed to keep working on the story and made one more trip to Nicaragua in March. At the end of March, however, Ceppos told Webb that he was going to present the internal review findings in a column. After discussions with Webb, the column was published on May 11, 1997. In the column Ceppos continued to defend parts of the article, writing that the series had "solidly documented" that the drug ring described in the series did have connections with the Contras and did sell large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles. But, Ceppos wrote, the series "did not meet our standards" in four areas. 1) It presented only one interpretation of conflicting evidence and in one case "did not include information that contradicted a central assertion of the series." 2) The series' estimates of the money involved was presented as fact instead of an estimate. 3) The series oversimplified how the
crack epidemic grew. 4) The series "created impressions that were open to misinterpretation" through "imprecise language and graphics." Ceppos noted that Webb did not agree with these conclusions. He concluded: "How did these shortcomings occur? ... I believe that we fell short at every step of our process: in the writing, editing and production of our work. Several people here share that burden ... But ultimately, the responsibility was, and is, mine." ==Investigation after Dark Alliance==