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The hard-charging investigative reporter's career imploded in the wake of his much-criticized "Dark Alliance" series about the CIA and crack cocaine. But while Webb overreached, some key findings in "Dark Alliance" were on target-and important. Last December Webb committed suicide. SUSAN PATERNO profiles the controversial journalist and deconstructs the series.
Gary Webb never remembered the unruly Polish name of his hard-boiled colleague at Cleveland's Plain Dealer who called editors unprintable expletives and declared "It's The Big One!" every time he picked up the phone. But he never forgot what the guy taught him: "The Big One was the reporter's Holy Grail, the tip that led you from the daily morass of press conferences and of cop calls and on to the trail of The Biggest Story You'd Ever Write, the one that would turn the rest of your career into an anticlimax." The Big One, Webb remembered, "would be like a bullet with your name on it. You'd never hear it coming."
Webb's bullet came out of nowhere, a phone call from a seductive young Cuban woman in high heels, a short skirt and a daring décolletage, with a drug-dealer boyfriend. She left a number, no message. Webb could have ignored her call, but that would have been uncharacteristic. He phoned her back, and she introduced him to the unfamiliar world of espionage and drug dealing that he exposed in "Dark Alliance," a 1996 San Jose Mercury News series accusing the "CIA's army" of peddling crack in South Central Los Angeles to support the Reagan administration's efforts to overthrow a socialist government in Nicaragua.
Unfortunately for Webb, he made a few too many errors. The Mercury News posted the series on the paper's Web site, using the power of the nascent alternative media to fan the flames of indignation among African Americans. They, in turn, accused the nation's most powerful newspapers-the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times-of laziness at best, and of genocide at worst. The papers fought back, discrediting Webb and his reporting: The Los Angeles Times, for example, assigned two dozen reporters and published a page-one series of almost 20,000 words, painting the CIA "as law-abiding and conscientious," as one critic put it. But none of the...