"Authentic journalism is telling people something that the government doesn't want them to know."--Gary Webb
Gary Webb exposed, in his Dark Alliance series, how CIA-led Nicaraguan rebels brought cocaine to poor L.A. neighborhoods in the early '80s--and started the crack epidemic. Profits earned from this crack market allowed the Los Angeles-based Crips and bloods to expand into other cities and spread crack use to other black urban areas, turning a bad local problem into a bad national problem. The San Francisco Bay Area drug ring then funneled profits to the Contras for the better part of a decade. The series traced the drugs to dealers Danilo Blandon and Ricky Ross, leaders of a CIA-run guerrilla army that terrorized Nicaragua for 10 years. The milestone in exposing government drug dealing which ended his career as a mainstream media journalist, and his life... by "suicide" with two bullets to the head. The man is a great hero in my book.
Gary Webb 1999
2014 Movie about Gary Webb now on Netfilx
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