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Hunter
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Good bye, Gary
and God damn them!
Al Giordano's farewell on behalf of
us all | Gary
Webb in his own words (video)
The Dark Alliance
Dark
Alliance reeports
Evidence Begins To Indicate
Gary Webb Was Murdered
Webb Spoke Of Death Threats, 'Government People' Around His Home
Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson,
December 15 2004
UPDATE: Only In Arkansas:
Webb 'Double Gunshot Wounds' Explanation Defies Belief
We will simply not let the
issue drop. How on earth can somebody have two different gunshot
wounds and their cause of death still be passed off as suicide?
UPDATE: Coroner: Gary Webb's
Death Confirmed as Suicide
First it was multiple gunshot
wounds, then it was just one and now it's multiple again. Would
somebody stealing your motorcycle really drive you over the edge?
Credible sources who were close
to Gary Webb have stated that he was receiving death threats,
being regularly followed, and that he was concerned about strange
individuals who were seen on multiple occasions breaking into
and leaving his house before his apparent 'suicide' on Friday
morning.
Webb, a Pullitzer prize winning
journalist, exposed CIA drug trafficking operations in a series
of books and reports for the San Jose Mercury News. He was found
dead on Friday morning in what the police said was an apparent
suicide.
Webb's 1996 series in the Mercury
News alleged that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold tons of
crack cocaine in Los Angeles and funneled millions of dollars
in profits to the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras during the
1980s.
Today's Alex Jones Show, aired
on the GCN radio network featured interviews with Chico Brown
and Cele Castillo. Castillo is author of "Powder Burns",
Cocaine, Contras & The Drug Connection. A retired DEA agent,
Castillo personally witnessed CIA drug smuggling operations.
Chico Brown, was former business parter and co-defendent with
'Freeway' Ricky Ross, the biggest drug dealer on the west coast
supplied by the CIA.
Ricky Ross, one of Gary Webb's
primary sources had spoken to Gary in the days before his death.
Gary told Ricky that he had seen men scaling down the pipes outside
his home and that they were obviously not burglars but 'government
people'. Gary also told Ricky that he had been receiving death
threats and was being regularly followed. It was also mentioned
that Gary was working on a new story concerning the CIA and drug
trafficking.
Gary described the men around
his home as 'professionals' who jumped from his balcony and ran
away when Gary confronted them
Tape of phone conversation when Freeway Ricky
is informed of Gary's death (Rick
Ross was an important source for the Dark Alliance story)
-----------------------------------
Interview of Kevin Booth
and Cele Castillo
Alex Jones Radio Show
Dec. 14, 2004
AJ: Kevin Booth is a documentary filmmaker.
He has been working for the last year on a film entitled, "The
American Drug War." And the website is theamericandrugwar.com.
The film will be coming out in about a year. He's interviewed
basically everybody under the sun concerning the history of the
drug war, who really controls the drug trade, and I am the narrator
of the film and the host of it. And I have been involved in some
interviews with Ricky Ross, known as "Freeway" Ricky
Ross," the biggest public drug dealer that is, the
biggest known drug dealer in West Coast history, on some
days, $25 million worth of dealing going on that linked
directly back to the CIA. He was one of the main sources for
Gary Webb, Pulitzer prize winning author of the book, "Dark
Alliance" CIA Drug Series, in the San Jose Mercury
News. And then, of course, he wrote the best selling book, "Dark
Alliance."
He was shot-gunned in the face
something that the major newspapers aren't reporting. But I have
this from direct sources in Sacramento and some of Gary's best
friends and associates. It's just unbelievable. He was shot-gunned
in the face. And then movers who were coming to the house found
a note on the door saying "Don't Come in, Call 911, Call
an Ambulance."
Yesterday, Kevin called me and we've
interviewed Ricky in the past. He said Ricky is scheduled to
call me tonight at 10:30 because you can't call him at
the Federal Prison he's in. They've moved him there from Victorville
in Southern California, to the Panhandle of Texas, North Texas,
where they do not let the media in to interview Mr. Ross. So
we've been doing it over the telephone. Kevin Booth was able
to get the call last night and had the unfortunate job of breaking
the news to "Freeway" Ricky Ross that Gary Webb had
died from gunshot wounds to the head, to the face in very questionable
circumstances. And now Kevin can reveal to us what Gary Webb,
via telephone, had recently told "Freeway" Ricky Ross.
Kevin Booth?
KB: Hey Alex.
AJ: We've got about 3 minutes before
we hit the break. Just tell folks basically who "Freeway"
Ricky is and what happened in the conversation last night.
KB: Like you said, Ricky Ross was known
as the biggest crack dealer in West Coast history. The name "Freeway"
came from the fact that he was buying up so much real estate
along the harbor freeway in Los Angeles. And when he finally
got put away the second time, he didn't know that the CIA was
behind allowing him to become so big. It's not like CIA agents
were supplying him with cocaine. It's more like he just couldn't
believe he never got caught and he couldn't believe how low the
prices were. He couldn't believe how easy it all was to .
AJ: In the Dark Alliance series, in talking
to Ricky, they had a go-between but it was Contras directly selling
him and then the Contras flying back. It was all part of the
CIA operation.
KB: Right, it was all these cartels.
So, like you said, he was in the Victorville prison, right above
Los Angeles there and the last time he spoke to Gary, which wasn't
that long ago, he told me that Gary was still working on the
story. This was the kind of thing that Gary was never going to
give up on because Gary felt like he could just keep going with
this forever and uncover more and more people and exposing more
names. But he did tell me that Gary knew he was being followed.
Every time he drove some where, there were always cars following
him around. He said he knew it was government people. Several
times he came home to his apartment, his two-story apartment,
late at night, and a guy would come shimmying down a drainage
pipe off of his balcony. You could tell he wasn't a burglar.
It was obviously somebody probably in his apartment rummaging
around looking at documents or looking at his computer.
AJ: And we talked off air and he was
described as kind of a Special Forces type, you know really fast
going down the pipe.
KB: Yeah, definitely, the whole suicide
angle of the story, it's kind of like they did stuff to kind
of freak him out, to intimidate him, to push him to actually
being depressed. But everybody I've spoken to, Ricky included,
said there's no way that this guy would have taken his life
that he enjoyed life, he loved his kids. He was excited about
the future. And people of South Central LA thought of Gary Webb
as a God-send. He was..
AJ: We'll be right back, Kevin, we've
got to break. Stay with us.
BREAK
AJ: Coming up in a few minutes, we'll
be talking to Cele Castillo, the top DEA agent in Central and
South America, who was an eye witness to massive drug deals by
the CIA, by the Contras, and another one of Gary Webb's sources.
The Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Dark Alliance series
in the San Jose Mercury News and then wrote the best selling
book, "Dark Alliance CIA Drug Trafficking." And
the new developments, Kevin Booth, who again has been interviewing
and talked to him last night I've interviewed him for the
film as well talking to "Freeway" Ricky Ross,
who was the person who was supplied with CIA cocaine and the
biggest known drug dealer in West Coast history. Tens of millions
of dollars a day going on for years and was absolutely untouchable
- one of the major sources for the Dark Alliance piece. Kevin
broke the news to "Freeway Ricky", Ricky Ross, last
night. And describe for us Kevin before we get back into the
people who were rummaging through and up on his balcony and following
Gary Webb around, according to Ricky Ross. How did Ricky take
it when you described it to him? I know we are going to be able
to play that on the air. But you weren't at your office when
I called you for this broadcast this morning. So, we are not
going to be able to have that until tomorrow. But Kevin describe
that discussion for us.
KB: He took it really bad. He thought
of Gary as a God-send. And that this guy Gary put his life on
the line to expose this story and that, you know, he just thought
it was really depressing. It just really made him sad. He's said
a lot of the guys there in jail who are familiar with the story
and a lot of people are going to be sad. You know, when he came
out with that story, a lot of people in South Central had a wake-up
call and it just rang so true to them. And the crazy parts of
the story is that, like I said, Ricky wasn't aware of all this
until he got put in prison and Gary Webb came out to try to help
him with his case. And that's when all this evidence started
becoming uncovered. It was just like with me working on the film
of the drug wars it's like one thing leads to another.
It just never ends. You talk to one person and they lead you
to another. And he just kept following this chain. And the chain,
just because he finished that one book, it just never stops.
My question to Ricky was you know the
book is already out, everybody knows all this stuff, so why kill
him now? Was this just a revenge thing? He said, "Absolutely
not because Gary was still hot on the trail and he was never
going to give up on this thing."
AJ: He had just recently been vindicated.
The establishment media had been trying to attack him with ham-fisted
attacks but it wasn't working. And he had just, as of late, had
a lot of new evidence. He had been vindicated. That was starting
to come out in the news. He was still on the trail. That had
been reported on.
Now Cele Castillo is joining us right
now and he may not be aware of this development. When you talked
to Ricky Ross last night, for Cele, please repeat what Ricky
told you Gary told him about people at his apartment and about
being followed.
KB: He knew he was being following all
the time and there were several instances where he would come
home after working all day, late at night, and he would see a
guy shimmy down he had a drain pipe that went up to the
balcony on the second floor apartment. And these guys, who were
definitely not burglars, would come shimmying down the pole really
fast and just disappear. And he was pretty confident that they
were up there rummaging through documents looking at his computer.
AJ: What was the term he used to describe,
I mean why did he think they weren't just regular burglars? I
believe he described it as if they were just so professional
how they did it.
KB: Their professionalism. Well Ricky
said that Gary said they were definitely government. That's all
he told me. So I'm not going to put words in his mouth. But he
said that Gary had said that these were government people.
AJ: That was the term he used was definitely
government people.
KB: Yes.
AJ: Unbelievable. Anything else he told
you during this interview? I've been doing interviews before
with you and Ricky, he only gets about fifteen minutes and then
the prison cuts him off. It's the only way we are allowed to
interview him. They don't really let the media in to interview
him and you actually had to contact lawyers and started proceedings
concerning that because they aren't supposed to be able to do
that.
KB: Another part of the story that I
didn't know about after Chico and Ricky had gotten arrested that
time, there was some production company in New York that wanted
to, that was trying to buy the rights to do a film about this.
And the DEA raided their office and confiscated everything -
some big film company in New York. That would definitely put
an end to any thoughts that these guys were going to make a movie
about this.
AJ: Yeah, this would blow Scar Face,
which was based on some real characters, out of the water. This
is a film that needs to be made. And so that's another big piece
of this anything they can to try to stop it. And Kevin
I know that you are out taking care of errands right now. I hope
that you can try let's be honest. I called Kevin this morning.
He's out on the Green Belt beautiful weather here, down
by the river, walking his two dogs. But Kevin, do you think you
can get back to your office and get that qued up by the end of
the show?
KB: I'll try to.
AJ: If you can't it's okay, we can..
KB: I don't know how to play it over
the phone though.
AJ: Well you can figure it out. I think
you can plug it into just try to figure it out. If you
can't we can get it over here and get it uploaded to the computer
tonight or put it on the web in high bandwidth and we can download
it and stream it that way. This needs to get out immediately
for Gary.
Kevin I want to bring up Cele Castillo.
Now Cele was the top DEA agent. He's been all over the big national
TV shows, foreign television. We've interviewed him many times.
He's come to Austin and showed the pictures of the CIA drug dealers.
He shows us the connection to Latin America how that coupled
through to people like "Freeway" Ricky Ross and the
direct connection of the CIA and these conduits to people like
"Freeway" Ricky Ross and the LAPD protecting Ricky
Ross and other top drug dealers.
Cele, was this a new development for
you to learn that Kevin talked to "Freeway" Ricky and
found out that he had told "Freeway" Ricky that he
had men at his house?
CC: I've heard something to that effect
but I wasn't really sure what actually did happen. But my whole
point in this issue is the fact that, you've got to remember
one thing, nobody's ever done a movie or a documentary on the
Iran-Contra investigation, which involved the CIA involved in
drug trafficking. Now, Gary Webb, at one point, pointed to the
assets that were heavily involved and I myself pointed to actually
the CIA officials who were actually participating in loading
and unloading and refueling the planes.
AJ: You came to Austin and did a two-hour
presentation and showed photos of them, documents, everything.
CC: Yeah, I've got another 100-set of
slides I'm going to bring over to Kevin Booth so he can put them
on. And those slides do have the good, the bad and the ugly.
AJ: For people who don't know who you
are, in a nutshell, tell us what you did and why you went public.
Describe what you saw in Latin America.
CC: You've got to remember one thing,
I'm not an individual who comes from the left or from the right
but I was reared as a very patriotic family, came from a very
patriotic family and we all served our country. And when I joined
the DEA I thought that by putting my life on the line that I
would make a difference. But it was there in Central America,
in my six years that I realized that we were the enemy. We were
sleeping with the enemy, we were involved in drug trafficking
and when I tried to expose the whole issue, I remember Randy
Kapster (?), a CIA official saying to me "Nobody is
going to listen to you. We've been doing this for years and nobody
is going to ever, ever stop us."
And he was absolutely right. Nobody has
stopped them from doing their black ops worldwide. [crosstalk]
and I saw DEA's participation in refueling some planes of cocaine
into the US and never been arrested, never been seized or anything.
[ ..] They were heavily, definitely involved in drug ops.
AJ: And you had individuals tell you,
"Hey buddy, you are never going to stop us."
CC: That's right. I had a CIA official
by the name of Randy Kapster(?) who was down there for close
to 7-8 years involved in covert operations. He was involved in
training death squads and basically about anything you can do
covertly in Central America, he was involved in it.
AJ: I have about an hour long video that's
full of clips of you on national television going over much of
this in years past and they are unable to even challenge you.
You got to be a little bit worried about your safety, sir.
CC: Recently, to be honest with you,
I've had some [ ] follow me around. I could tell they're government
because of my experiences with how when you approach them, they
turn their face and they are on their cellphone. I've been under
surveillance for quite a while now..
AJ: But you're not afraid. You were a
highly decorated sniper in Vietnam.
CC: Exactly, my point is this, since
Vietnam, I've been on borrowed time. So, I've made my peace with
God, I will fight to the end and I will never, ever commit suicide.
AJ: I want to say that, too. I will never
commit suicide. Kevin, you want to ?
KB: It's a triple non-suicide pact. I
will never commit suicide.
CC: We are in this for the long haul.
We need to fight these people to the very end. And whatever we
have available, with what little we have, we need to continue
fighting or it will just get worse. And it's going to get worse
before it gets better if it gets better.
AJ: Talking about Gary Webb, Cele, he's
dead, shotgun to the face. And they described his face, from
the sources, and you got a call just two hours after they found
him, you were notified. And that his face was basically unrecognizable.
A shotgun doesn't do that if it's point-blank. A shotgun only
does that from a few feet away for the pattern to expand.
People don't normally commit suicide with a shotgun to the face.
Can you comment on what you learned about this?
CC: I got a call from Michael Ruppert
who got his information right away after this incident and he
knew that a note had been left and so forth. And that he was
planning to move that morning and had the movers coming in. And
they found that note on the door. Allegedly, that saying to not
come in, to call 911 and call an ambulance. Why on earth if you
are going to commit suicide would you bring an ambulance? If
you shoot yourself with a 12-guage shotgun .
AJ: Well that sounds like a classic mafia
activity blowing somebody's face off.
CC: To be honest with you, I really think
when I think about government people, I think about Felix Rodriguez
and his goon squads, that's been involved in all kinds of assassinations
- be they foreign or domestic. You know, Felix and his group
are very well documented as assassins.
AJ: Well it's like Barry Seal. They just
marched up and machine-gunned him
CC: Exactly, and they blamed a couple
of Columbians for that but there are always people who are willing
to take the fall for the Agency.
AJ: Unbelievable. Again Cele, just for
the record, tell us about your position in the DEA.
CC: I was a senior agent in El Salvador.
We had two agents covering the four countries in Central America.
I was assigned to cover El Salvador.
AJ: Well to be clear, I had read in mainstream
media reports that you were described as the senior DEA officer
in Latin America, are those incorrect?
CC: No, those are correct. You know I
spent my time in New York City and domestically but I was the
senior agent and I was in charge of El Salvador. And, you know,
we went out there and conducted investigations and...
AJ: And so you signed on, you signed
on to fight drugs. When did you find out that it was the government
controlling it?
CC: From the very git-go. When I got
into Guatemala City and J Robert Stea(?) said to me, "You
know, there are some funny things going on in El Salvador and
just don't step on anybody's toes. Don't report anything and
everything comes to me" and so forth. And sure enough, my
source of information was the guy who did all the flight plans
for the Contra pilots that were heavily involved in drug trafficking.
And it was very well documented money being seized in the
U.S. and drugs being seized in the U.S. that came out of Alipondo{?}.
There is no doubt about that. And we ourselves, we re-fueled
some of those planes with the anticipation that they would be
seized in the U.S. but
Cocaine pipeline financed
rebels
Evidence points to
CIA knowing of high-volume drug network
by Gary Webb, San Jose Mercury
News, Aug 22, 1996
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
an arm of the contra guerrillas of Nicaragua run by the Central
Intelligence Agency, the San Jose Mercury News has found.
This drug network opened the
first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black
neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack"
capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark
a crack explosion in urban America - and provided the cash and
connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy weapons.
It is one of the most bizarre
alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S.-backed army
attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government
and the "gangstas" of Compton and South-Central Los
Angeles.
The army's financiers - who
met with CIA agents before and during the time they were selling
the drugs in L.A. - delivered cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through
a young South-Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.
Unaware of his suppliers' military
and political connections, "Freeway Rick" turned the
cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the
country.
Drug cash for
the contras
Court records show the cash
was then used to buy equipment for a guerrilla army named the
Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force)
or FDN, the largest of several anti-communist groups commonly
called the contras.
While the FDN's war is barely
a memory today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous
side effects. Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions
of homeless crack addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving
long prison sentences for selling cocaine - a drug that was virtually
unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA's
army brought it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement
prices.
And the L.A. gangs, which used
their enormous cocaine profits to arm themselves and spread crack
across the country, are still thriving.
"There is a saying that
the ends justify the means," former FDN leader and drug
dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes testified during a recent cocaine-trafficking
trial in San Diego. "And that's what Mr. Bermudez (the CIA
agent who commanded the FDN) told us in Honduras, OK? So we started
raising money for the contra revolution."
Recently declassified reports,
federal court testimony, undercover tapes, court records here
and abroad and hundreds of hours of interviews over the past
12 months leave no doubt that Blandon was no ordinary drug dealer.
Shortly before Blandon - who
had been the drug ring's Southern California distributor - took
the stand in San Diego as a witness for the U.S. Department of
Justice, federal prosecutors obtained a court order preventing
defense lawyers from delving into his ties to the CIA.
Blandon, one of the FDN's founders
in California, "will admit that he was a large-scale dealer
in cocaine, and there is no additional benefit to any defendant
to inquire as to the Central Intelligence Agency," Assistant
U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale argued in his motion shortly before
Ross' trial on cocaine-trafficking charges in March.
The 5,000-man FDN, records
show, was created in mid-1981 when the CIA combined several existing
groups of anti-communist exiles into a unified force it hoped
would topple the new socialist government of Nicaragua.
Waged a losing
war
From 1982 to 1988, the FDN
- run by both American and Nicaraguan CIA agents - waged a losing
war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government, the Cuban-supported
socialists who'd overthrown U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza
in 1979.
Blandon, who began working
for the FDN's drug operation in late 1981, testified that the
drug ring sold almost a ton of cocaine in the United States that
year - $54 million worth at prevailing wholesale prices. It was
not clear how much of the money found its way back to the CIA's
army, but Blandon testified that "whatever we were running
in L.A., the profit was going for the contra revolution."
At the time of that testimony,
Blandon was a full-time informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration,
a job the U.S. Department of Justice got him after releasing
him from prison in 1994.
Though Blandon admitted to
crimes that have sent others away for life, the Justice Department
turned him loose on unsupervised probation after only 28 months
behind bars and has paid him more than $166,000 since, court
records show.
"He has been extraordinarily
helpful," federal prosecutor O'Neale told Blandon's judge
in a plea for the trafficker's release in 1994. Though O'Neale
once described Blandon to a grand jury as "the biggest Nicaraguan
cocaine dealer in the United States," the prosecutor would
not discuss him with the Mercury News.
Blandon's boss in the FDN's
cocaine operation, Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero, has never spent
a day in a U.S. prison, even though the federal government has
been aware of his cocaine dealings since at least 1974, records
show.
Meneses - who ran the drug
ring from his homes in the Bay Area - is listed in the DEA's
computers as a major international drug smuggler and was implicated
in 45 separate federal investigations. Yet he and his cocaine-dealing
relatives lived quite openly in the Bay Area for years, buying
homes, bars, restaurants, car lots and factories.
"I even drove my own cars,
registered in my name," Meneses said during a recent interview
in Nicaragua.
Meneses' organization was "the
target of unsuccessful investigative attempts for many years,"
O'Neale acknowledged in a 1994 affidavit. But records and interviews
revealed that a number of those probes were stymied not by the
elusive Meneses but by agencies of the U.S. government.
CIA hampered
probes
Agents from four organizations
- the DEA, U.S. Customs, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement - have complained
that investigations were hampered by the CIA or unnamed "national-security"
interests.
One 1988 investigation by a
U.S. Senate subcommittee ran into a wall of official secrecy
at the Justice Department.
In that case, congressional
records show, Senate investigators were trying to determine why
the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, Joseph Russoniello, had given
$36,000 back to a Nicaraguan cocaine dealer arrested by the FBI.
The money was returned, court
records show, after two contra leaders sent letters to the court
swearing that the drug dealer had been given the cash to buy
weapons for guerrillas.
After Nicaraguan police arrested
Meneses on cocaine charges in Managua in 1991, his judge expressed
astonishment that the infamous smuggler went unmolested by American
drug agents during his years in the United States.
His seeming invulnerability
amazed American authorities as well.
A Customs agent who investigated
Meneses in 1980 before transferring elsewhere said he was reassigned
to San Francisco seven years later "and I was sitting in
some meetings and here's Meneses' name again. And I can remember
thinking, `Holy cow, is this guy still around?' "
Blandon led an equally charmed
life. For at least five years he brokered massive amounts of
cocaine to the black gangs of Los Angeles without being arrested.
But his luck changed overnight.
On Oct. 27, 1986, agents from
the FBI, the IRS, local police and the Los Angeles County sheriff
fanned out across Southern California and raided more than a
dozen locations connected to Blandon's cocaine operation. Blandon
and his wife, along with numerous Nicaraguan associates, were
arrested on drug and weapons charges.
The search-warrant affidavit
reveals that local drug agents knew plenty about Blandon's involvement
with cocaine and the CIA's army nearly 10 years ago.
"Danilo Blandon is in
charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution
organization operating in Southern California," L.A. County
sheriff's Sgt. Tom Gordon said in the 1986 affidavit. "The
monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida
and laundered through Orlando Murillo, who is a high-ranking
officer of a chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities
Corporation. From this bank the monies are filtered to the contra
rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua."
Raids a spectacular
failure
Despite their intimate knowledge
of Blandon's operations, the police raids were a spectacular
failure. Every location had been cleaned of anything remotely
incriminating. No one was ever prosecuted.
Ron Spear, a spokesman for
Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, said Blandon somehow
knew that he was under police surveillance.
FBI records show that soon
after the raids, Blandon's defense attorney, Bradley Brunon,
called the sheriff's department to suggest that his client's
troubles stemmed from a most unlikely source: a recent congressional
vote authorizing $100 million in military aid to the contras.
According to a December 1986
FBI teletype, Brunon told the officers that the "CIA winked
at this sort of thing. . . . (Brunon) indicated that now that
U.S. Congress had voted funds for the Nicaraguan contra movement,
U.S. government now appears to be turning against organizations
like this."
That FBI report, part of the
files of former Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh,
was made public only last year, when it was released by the National
Archives at the San Jose Mercury News' request.
Blandon has also implied that
his cocaine sales were, for a time, CIA-approved. He told a San
Francisco federal grand jury in 1994 that once the FDN began
receiving American taxpayer dollars, the CIA no longer needed
his kind of help.
None of the government agencies
known to have been involved with Meneses and Blandon would provide
the Mercury News with any information about them, despite Freedom
of Information Act requests.
Blandon's lawyer, Brunon, said
in an interview that his client never told him directly that
he was selling cocaine for the CIA, but the prominent Los Angeles
defense attorney drew his own conclusions from the "atmosphere
of CIA and clandestine activities" that surrounded Blandon
and his Nicaraguan friends.
"Was he involved with
the CIA? Probably. Was he involved with drugs? Most definitely,"
Brunon said. "Were those two things involved with each other?
They've never said that, obviously. They've never admitted that.
But I don't know where these guys get these big aircraft."
That very topic arose during
the sensational 1992 cocaine-trafficking trial of Meneses after
he was arrested in Nicaragua in connection with a staggering
750-kilo shipment of cocaine. His chief accuser was his friend
Enrique Miranda, a relative and former Nicaraguan military intelligence
officer who had been Meneses' emissary to the cocaine cartel
of Bogota, Colombia. Miranda pleaded guilty to drug charges and
agreed to cooperate in exchange for a seven-year sentence.
In a long, handwritten statement
he read to Meneses' jury, Miranda revealed the deepest secrets
of the Meneses drug ring, earning his old boss a 30-year prison
sentence in the process.
"He (Norwin) and his brother
Luis Enrique had financed the contra revolution with the benefits
of the cocaine they sold," Miranda wrote. "This operation,
as Norwin told me, was executed with the collaboration of high-ranking
Salvadoran military personnel. They met with officials of the
Salvadoran air force, who flew (planes) to Colombia and then
left for the U.S., bound for an Air Force base in Texas, as he
told me."
Meneses - who has close personal
and business ties to a Salvadoran air-force commander and former
CIA agent named Marcos Aguado - declined to discuss Miranda's
statements during an interview at a prison outside Managua in
January. He is scheduled to be paroled this summer, after nearly
five years in custody.
U.S. General Accounting Office
records confirm that El Salvador's air force was supplying the
CIA's Nicaraguan guerrillas with aircraft and flight support
services throughout the mid-1980s.
The same day the Mercury News
requested official permission to interview Miranda, he disappeared.
While out on a routine weekend
furlough, Miranda failed to return to the Nicaraguan jail where
he'd been living since 1992. Though his jailers, who described
him as a model prisoner, claimed Miranda had escaped, they didn't
call the police until a Mercury News correspondent showed up
and discovered he was gone.
He has not been seen in nearly
a year.
Salvador air force linked
to cocaine flights, Nicaraguan contras, drug dealer's supplier
by Gary Webb, San Jose Mercury
News, Aug 22, 1996
One thing is certain: There
is considerable evidence
that El Salvador's air force was deeply involved with cocaine
flights, the contras and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes'
cocaine supplier, Norwin Meneses.
Meneses said one of his oldest
friends is a former contra pilot named Marcos Aguado, a Nicaraguan
who works for the Salvadoran air-force high command.
Aguado was identified in 1987
congressional testimony as a CIA agent who helped the contras
get weapons, airplanes and money from a major Colombian drug
trafficker named George Morales. Aguado admitted his role in
that deal in a videotaped deposition taken by a U.S. Senate subcommittee
that year.
His name also turned up in
a deposition taken by the congressional Iran-contra committees
that same year. Robert Owen, a courier for Lt. Col. Oliver North,
testified he knew Aguado as a contra pilot and said there was
"concern" about his being involved with drug trafficking.
While flying for the contras,
Aguado was stationed at Ilopango Air Base near El Salvador's
capital.
In 1985, the DEA agent assigned
to El Salvador - Celerino Castillo III - began picking up reports
that cocaine was being flown to the United States out of hangars
4 and 5 at Ilopango as part of a contra-related covert operation.
Castillo said he soon confirmed what his informants were telling
him.
Starting in January 1986, Castillo
began documenting the cocaine flights - listing pilot names,
tail numbers, dates and flight plans - and sent them to DEA headquarters.
The only response he got, Castillo
wrote in his 1994 memoirs, was an internal DEA investigation
of him. He took a disability retirement from the agency in 1991.
"Basically, the bottom
line is it was a covert operation and they (DEA officials) were
covering it up," Castillo said in an interview. "You
can't get any simpler than that. It was a cover-up."
Trio created mass market
in U.S. for crack cocaine
by Gary Webb, San Jose Mercury
News, Aug 22, 1996
If they'd been in a more
respectable line of
work, Norwin Meneses, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes and "Freeway
Rick" Ross would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.
This odd trio - a smuggler,
a bureaucrat and a ghetto teenager - made fortunes creating the
first mass market in America for a product so hellishly desirable
that consumers will literally kill to get it: "crack"
cocaine.
Federal lawmen will tell you
plenty about Rick Ross, mostly about the evils he visited upon
black neighborhoods by spreading the crack plague in Los Angeles
and cities as far east as Cincinnati. Tomorrow, they hope, Freeway
Rick will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility
of parole.
But those same officials won't
say a word about the two men who turned Rick Ross into L.A.'s
first king of crack, the men who, for at least five years, supplied
him with enough Colombian cocaine to help spawn crack markets
in major cities nationwide. Their critical role in the country's
crack explosion has been a strictly guarded secret.
To understand how crack came
to curse black America, you have to go into the volcanic hills
overlooking Managua, the capital of the Republic of Nicaragua.
Biggest military
upset
During June 1979, those hills
teemed with triumphant guerrillas called Sandinistas - Cuban-assisted
revolutionaries who had just pulled off one of the biggest military
upsets in Central American history. In a bloody civil war, they'd
destroyed the U.S.-trained army of Nicaragua's dictator, Anastasio
Somoza.
In the dictator's doomed capital,
a minor member of Somoza's government decided to skip the war's
obvious ending. On June 19, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes gathered
his wife and young daughter and flew into exile in California.
Today, Blandon is a well-paid
and highly trusted operative for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Federal officials say he is one of the DEA's top informants in
Latin America, collecting intelligence on Colombian and Mexican
drug lords and setting up stings.
In March, he was the DEA's
star witness at a drug trial in San Diego, where, for the first
time, he testified publicly about his strange interlude between
government jobs: the years he sold cocaine to the street gangs
of black Los Angeles.
Blandon swore that he didn't
plan on becoming a dope dealer when he landed in the United States
with $100 in his pocket, seeking political asylum. He did it,
he insisted, out of patriotism.
When duty called in late 1981,
he was working as a car salesman in East Los Angeles. In his
spare time, he said, he and a few fellow exiles were working
to rebuild Somoza's defeated army, the Nicaraguan national guard,
in hopes of one day returning to Managua in triumph.
But the rallies and cocktail
parties the exiles hosted raised little money. "At this
point, he became committed to raising money for humanitarian
and political reasons via illegal activity (cocaine trafficking
for profit)," said a heavily censored parole report, which
surfaced during the March trial.
That venture began, Blandon
testified, with a phone call from a wealthy college friend in
Miami.
Blandon said his college chum,
who also was working in the resistance movement, dispatched him
to Los Angeles International Airport to pick up another exile,
Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero. Though their families were related,
Blandon said, he'd never met Meneses until that day.
"I picked him up, and
he started telling me that we had to (raise) some money and to
send to Honduras," Blandon testified. He said he flew with
Meneses to a camp there and met one of his new companion's old
friends, Col. Enrique Bermudez.
Bermudez - who'd been Somoza's
Washington liaison to the American military - was hired by the
Central Intelligence Agency in mid-1980 to pull together the
remnants of Somoza's vanquished national guard, records show.
In August 1981, Bermudez's efforts were unveiled at a news conference
as the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN) - in English, the
Nicaraguan Democratic Force. It was the largest and best-organized
of the handful of guerrilla groups known as the contras.
Bermudez was the FDN's military
chief and, according to congressional records and newspaper reports,
received regular CIA paychecks for a decade, payments that stopped
shortly before his still-unsolved slaying in Managua in 1991.
Reagan OKs
covert operations
White House records show that
shortly before Blandon's meeting with Bermudez, President Reagan
had given the CIA the green light to begin covert paramilitary
operations against the Sandinista government. But Reagan's secret
Dec. 1, 1981, order permitted the spy agency to spend only $19.9
million on the project, an amount CIA officials acknowledged
was not nearly enough to field a credible fighting force.
After meeting with Bermudez,
Blandon testified, he and Meneses "started raising money
for the contra revolution."
While Blandon says Bermudez
didn't know cocaine would be the fund-raising device they used,
the presence of the mysterious Mr. Meneses strongly suggests
otherwise.
Norwin Meneses, known in Nicaraguan
newspapers as "Rey de la Droga" (King of Drugs), was
then under active investigation by the DEA and the FBI for smuggling
cocaine into the United States, records show.
And Bermudez was very familiar
with the influential Meneses family. He had served under two
Meneses brothers, Fermin and Edmundo, who were generals in Somoza's
army.
Despite a stack of law-enforcement
reports describing him as a major drug trafficker, Norwin Meneses
was welcomed into the United States in July 1979 as a political
refugee and given a visa and a work permit. He settled in the
San Francisco Bay Area, and for the next six years supervised
the importation of thousands of kilos of cocaine into California.
At the meeting with Bermudez,
Meneses said in a recent interview, the contra commander put
him in charge of "intelligence and security" for the
FDN in California.
Blandon, he said, was assigned
to raise money in Los Angeles.
Blandon said Meneses gave him
two kilograms of cocaine (roughly 4 1/2 pounds) and sent him
to Los Angeles.
"Meneses was pushing me
every week," he testified. "It took me about three
months, four months to sell those two keys because I didn't know
what to do. . . ."
To find customers, Blandon
and several other Nicaraguan exiles working with him headed for
the vast, untapped markets of L.A.'s black ghettos.
Blandon's marketing strategy,
selling the world's most expensive street drug in some of California's
poorest neighborhoods, might seem baffling, but in retrospect,
his timing was uncanny. He and his compatriots arrived in South-Central
L.A. right when street-level drug users were figuring out how
to make cocaine affordable: by changing the pricey white powder
into powerful little nuggets that could be smoked - crack.
Emergence of
crack
Crack turned the cocaine world
on its head. Cocaine smokers got an explosive high unmatched
by 10 times as much snorted powder. And since only a tiny amount
was needed for that rush, cocaine no longer had to be sold in
large, expensive quantities. Anyone with $20 could get wasted.
It was a "substance that
is tailor-made to addict people," Dr. Robert Byck, a Yale
University cocaine expert, said during congressional testimony
in 1986. "It is as though (McDonald's founder) Ray Kroc
had invented the opium den."
Crack's Kroc was a disillusioned
19-year-old named Ricky Donnell Ross, who, at the dawn of the
1980s, found himself adrift on the streets of South-Central Los
Angeles.
A talented tennis player for
Dorsey High School, Ross had recently seen his dream of a college
scholarship evaporate when his coach discovered he could neither
read nor write.
A friend of Ross' - a college
football player home at Christmas from San Jose State University
- told him "cocaine was going to be the new thing, that
everybody was doing it." Intrigued, Ross set off to find
out more.
Through a cocaine-using auto-upholstery
teacher Ross knew, he met a Nicaraguan named Henry Corrales,
who began selling Ross and a friend , Ollie "Big Loc"
Newell, small amounts of remarkably inexpensive cocaine.
Thanks to a network of friends
in South-Central L.A. and Compton, including many members of
various Crips gangs, the pair steadily built up clientele. With
each sale, Ross reinvested his hefty profits in more cocaine.
Eventually, Corrales introduced
Ross and Newell to his supplier, Blandon. And then business really
picked up.
"At first, we was just
going to do it until we made $5,000," Ross said. "We
made that so fast we said, no, we'll quit when we make $20,000.
Then we was going to quit when we saved enough to buy a house
. . ."
Ross would eventually own millions
of dollars' worth of real estate across Southern California,
including houses, motels, a theater and several other businesses.
(His nickname, "Freeway Rick," came from the fact that
he owned properties near the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles.)
Within a year, Ross' drug operation
grew to dominate inner-city Los Angeles, and many of the biggest
dealers in town were his customers. When crack hit L.A.'s streets
hard in late 1983, Ross already had the infrastructure in place
to corner a huge chunk of the burgeoning market.
It was not uncommon, he said,
to move $2 million or $3 million worth of crack in one day.
"Our biggest problem had
got to be counting the money," Ross said. "We got to
the point where it was like, man, we don't want to count no more
money."
Nicaraguan cocaine dealer Jacinto
Torres, another former supplier of Ross and a sometime-partner
of Blandon, told drug agents in a 1992 interview that after a
slow start, "Blandon's cocaine business dramatically increased.
. . . Norwin Meneses, Blandon's supplier as of 1983 and 1984,
routinely flew quantities of 200 to 400 kilograms from Miami
to the West Coast."
Blandon told the DEA last year
that he was selling Ross up to 100 kilos of cocaine a week, which
was then "rocked up" and distributed "to the major
gangs in the area, specifically the Crips and the Bloods,"
the DEA report said.
At wholesale prices, that's
roughly $65 million to $130 million worth of cocaine every year,
depending on the going price of a kilo.
"He was one of the main
distributors down here," said former Los Angeles Police
Department narcotics detective Steve Polak, who was part of the
Freeway Rick Task Force, which was set up in 1987 to put Ross
out of business. "And his poison, there's no telling how
many tens of thousands of people he touched. He's responsible
for a major cancer that still hasn't stopped spreading."
But Ross is the first to admit
that being in the right place at the right time had almost nothing
to do with his amazing success. Other L.A. dealers, he noted,
were selling crack long before he started.
What he had, and they didn't,
was Blandon, a friend with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of
high-grade cocaine and an expert's knowledge of how to market
it.
"I'm not saying I wouldn't
have been a dope dealer without Danilo," Ross stressed.
"But I wouldn't have been Freeway Rick."
The secret to his success,
Ross said, was Blandon's cocaine prices. "It was unreal.
We were just wiping out everybody."
"It didn't make no difference
to Rick what anyone else was selling it for. Rick would just
go in and undercut him $10,000 a key," Chico Brown said.
"Say some dude was selling for 30. Boom - Rick would go
in and sell it for 20. If he was selling for 20, Rick would sell
for 10. Sometimes, he be giving (it) away."
Ross said he never discovered
how Blandon was able to get cocaine so cheaply. "I just
figured he knew the people, you know what I'm saying? He was
plugged."
But Freeway Rick had no idea
just how "plugged" his erudite cocaine broker was.
He didn't know about Meneses, or the CIA, or the Salvadoran air-force
planes that allegedly were flying the cocaine into an air base
in Texas.
And he wouldn't find out about
it for another 10 years.
Crack was born during
1974 in S.F. Bay Area
by Gary Webb, San Jose Mercury
News, Aug 22, 1996
Though Miami and Los Angeles
are commonly regarded
as the twin cradles of crack, the first government-financed study
of cocaine smoking concluded that it was actually born in the
Bay Area in January 1974.
After comedian Richard Pryor
nearly immolated himself during a cocaine-smoking binge in 1980,
the National Institute on Drug Abuse hired UCLA drug expert Ronald
Siegel to look into the then-unfamiliar practice.
Siegel, the first scientist
to document crack's use in the United States, traced the smoking
habit back to 1930, when Colombians first started it.
But what was being smoked south
of the border - a paste-like substance called BASE (bah-SAY)
- was very different from what Californians were putting in their
pipes, Siegel found, even though they called it the same thing:
free base.
BASE was a crude, toxics-laden
precursor to cocaine powder. On the other hand, free base (which
later became known as crack or rock) was cocaine powder that
had been reverse-engineered to make it smokable.
When San Francisco Bay Area
dealers tried recreating the drug they'd seen in South America,
Siegel learned, they'd screwed up.
"When they looked it up
in the Merck Manual, they saw cocaine base and thought, well,
yeah, this is it," Siegel, a nationally known drug researcher,
said. "They mispronounced it, misunderstood the Spanish,
and thought (BASE) was cocaine base."
The base described in the organic-chemistry
handbook was cocaine powder separated from its salts, a process
easily done with boiling water and baking soda.
It was an immediate, if unintentional,
hit.
"They were wowed by it,"
Siegel said. "They thought they were smoking BASE. They
were not. They were smoking something nobody on the planet had
ever smoked before."
Using the sales records of
several major drug-paraphernalia companies, Siegel correlated
crack's public appearance with the appearance of base-making
kits and glass pipes for smoking it. The sales records zeroed
in on the Bay Area.
"We were able to show
to our satisfaction that they were directly responsible for distributing
the habit throughout the United States," Siegel said.
"Wherever they were selling
their kits, that's where we started getting the clinical reports.
It all started in Northern California."
His groundbreaking study was
never published by the government, purportedly for budgetary
reasons.
Siegel, who said he grew concerned
that the information would not be made available to other researchers,
published it himself in an obscure medical journal in late 1982.
- Drug king free, but
black aide sits in jail
How cheap cocaine became the scourge of the inner city
by Gary Webb, San Jose Mercury
News, Aug 23, 1996
For the past 1 1/2 years,
the U.S. Department
of Justice has been trying to explain why nearly everyone convicted
in California's federal courts of "crack" cocaine trafficking
is black.
Critics, including some federal-court
judges, say it looks like the Justice Department is targeting
crack dealers by race, which would be a violation of the Constitution.
Federal prosecutors, however,
say there's a simple, if unpleasant, reason for the lopsided
statistics: Most crack dealers are black.
But why - of all the ethnic
and racial groups in California to pick from - crack planted
its deadly roots in L.A.'s black neighborhoods is something Oscar
Danilo Blandon Reyes may be able to answer.
Blandon is the Johnny Appleseed
of crack in California - the Crips' and Bloods' first direct
connect to the cocaine cartels of Colombia. The tons of cut-rate
cocaine he brought into black L.A. during the 1980s and early
1990s became millions of rocks of crack, which spawned new markets
wherever they landed.
On a tape made by the Drug
Enforcement Administration in July 1990, Blandon casually explained
the flood of cocaine that coursed through the streets of South-Central
Los Angeles during the previous decade.
"These people have been
working with me 10 years," Blandon said. "I've sold
them about 2,000 or 4,000 (kilos). I don't know. I don't remember
how many."
"It ain't that Japanese
guy you were talking about, is it?" asked DEA informant
John Arman, who was wearing a hidden transmitter.
"No, it's not him,"
Blandon insisted. "These . . . these are the black people."
Arman gasped. "Black?!"
"Yeah," Blandon said.
"They control L.A. The people (black cocaine dealers) that
control L.A."
But unlike the thousands of
young blacks now serving long federal prison sentences for selling
mere handfuls of the drug, Blandon is a free man today. He has
a spacious new home in Nicaragua and a business exporting precious
woods, courtesy of the U.S. government, which has paid him more
than $166,000 over the past 18 months, records show - for his
help in the war on drugs.
That turn of events both amuses
and angers "Freeway Rick" Ross, L.A.'s premier crack
wholesaler during much of the 1980s and Blandon's biggest customer.
"They say I sold dope
everywhere, but, man, I know he done sold 10 times more dope
than me," Ross said during a recent interview.
Nothing epitomizes the drug
war's uneven impact on black Americans more clearly than the
intertwined lives of Ricky Donnell Ross, a high-school dropout,
and his suave cocaine supplier, Blandon, who has a master's degree
in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California
of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency. Called the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense
(FDN), it became known to most Americans as the contras.
In recent court testimony,
Blandon, who began dealing cocaine in South-Central L.A. in 1982,
swore that the first kilo of cocaine he sold in California was
to raise money for the CIA's army, which was trying on a shoestring
to unseat Nicaragua's new socialist Sandinista government.
After Blandon crossed paths
with Ross, a South-Central teenager with gang connections and
street smarts necessary to move the army's cocaine, a blizzard
engulfed the ghettos.
Former Los Angeles police narcotics
detective Stephen Polak said he was working the streets of South-Central
in the mid-1980s when he and his partners began seeing more cocaine
than ever before.
"A lot of detectives,
a lot of cops, were saying, `hey, these blacks, no longer are
we just seeing gram dealers. These guys are doing ounces; they
were doing keys,' " Polak recalled. But he said the reports
were disregarded by higher-ups who couldn't believe black neighborhoods
could afford the amount of cocaine the street cops claimed to
be seeing.
"Major Violators (the
LAPD's elite anti-drug unit) was saying, basically, `ahh, South-Central,
how much could they be dealing?' " said Polak. "Well,
they (black dealers) went virtually untouched for a long time."
It wasn't until January 1987
- when crack markets were popping up in major cities all over
the nation - that law-enforcement brass decided to confront L.A.'s
crack problem head-on. They formed the Freeway Rick Task Force,
a cadre of veteran drug agents whose sole mission was to put
Rick Ross out of business. Polak was a charter member.
"We just dedicated seven
days a week to him. We were just on him at every move,"
Polak said.
Ross, as usual, was quick to
spot a trend. He moved to Cincinnati and quietly settled into
a woodsy, suburban home.
"I called it cooling out,
trying to back away from the game," Ross said. "I had
enough money."
His longtime supplier, Blandon,
reached the same conclusion about the same time. He moved to
Miami with $1.6 million in cash and invested in several businesses.
But neither Ross nor Blandon
stayed "retired" for long.
A manic deal-maker, Ross found
Cincinnati's virgin crack market too seductive to ignore.
Plunging back in, the crack
tycoon cornered the Cincinnati market using the same low-price,
high-volume strategy - and the same Nicaraguan drug connections
- he'd used in L.A. Soon, he also was selling crack in Cleveland,
Indianapolis, Dayton and St. Louis.
"There's no doubt in my
mind crack in Cincinnati can be traced to Ross," police
officer Robert Enoch told a Cincinnati newspaper three years
ago.
But Ross' reign in the Midwest
was short-lived. In 1988, one of his loads ran into a drug-sniffing
dog at a New Mexico bus station, and drug agents eventually connected
it to Ross. He pleaded guilty to crack trafficking charges and
received a mandatory 10-year prison sentence, which he began
serving in 1990.
In Miami, Blandon's retirement
plans also had gone awry as his business ventures collapsed.
He returned to the San Francisco
Bay Area and began brokering cocaine again, buying and selling
from the Nicaraguan dealers he'd known in his days with the FDN.
In 1990 and 1991, he testified, he sold about 425 kilos of cocaine
in Northern California - $10.5 million worth at wholesale prices.
But unlike before, when he
was selling cocaine for the contras, Blandon was constantly dogged
by the police.
Twice in six months he was
detained, first by Customs agents while taking $117,000 in money
orders to Tijuana to pay a supplier, and then by the LAPD when
he was in the act of paying one of his Colombian suppliers more
than $350,000.
The second time, after police
found $14,000 in cash and a small quantity of cocaine in his
pocket, he was arrested. But the U.S. Justice Department - saying
a prosecution would disrupt an active investigation - persuaded
the police to drop their money-laundering case.
Soon after that, Blandon and
his wife, Chepita, were arrested by DEA agents on charges of
conspiracy to distribute cocaine. They were jailed without bond
as dangers to the community, and several other Nicaraguans also
were arrested.
The prosecutor, L.J. O'Neale,
told a federal judge that Blandon had sold so much cocaine in
the United States his mandatory prison sentence was "off
the scale."
Then Blandon "just vanished,"
said Juanita Brooks, a San Diego attorney who represented one
of Blandon's co-defendants. "All of a sudden his wife was
out of jail and he was out of the case."
The reasons were contained
in a secret Justice Department memorandum filed in San Diego
federal court in late 1993.
Blandon, prosecutor O'Neale
wrote, had become "valuable in major DEA investigations
of Class I drug traffickers." And even though probation
officers were recommending a life sentence and a $4 million fine,
O'Neale said the government would be satisfied if Blandon got
48 months and no fine. Motion granted.
Less than a year later, records
show, O'Neale was back with another idea: Why not just let Blandon
go? After all, he wrote the judge, Blandon had a federal job
waiting.
O'Neale, saying that Blandon
"has almost unlimited potential to assist the United States,"
said the government wanted "to enlist Mr. Blandon as a full-time,
paid informant after his release from prison."
After only 28 months in custody,
most of it spent with federal agents who debriefed him for "hundreds
of hours," he said, Blandon walked out of the Metropolitan
Correctional Center in San Diego, was given a green card and
began working on his first assignment: setting up his old friend,
"Freeway Rick," for a sting.
Records show Ross was still
behind bars, awaiting parole, when San Diego DEA agents targeted
him.
Soon after Ross went to prison
for the Cincinnati bust, federal prosecutors offered him a deal.
His term would be shortened by five years in return for testimony
in a federal case against Los Angeles County Sheriff's detectives
that included members of the old Freeway Rick Task Force.
Within days of Ross' parole
in October 1994, he and Blandon were back in touch, and their
conversation quickly turned to cocaine.
According to tapes Blandon
made of some of their discussions, Ross repeatedly told Blandon
that he was broke and couldn't afford to finance a drug deal.
But Ross did agree to help his old mentor, who was also pleading
poverty, find someone else to buy the 100 kilos of cocaine Blandon
claimed he had.
On March 2, 1995, in a shopping-center
parking lot in National City, near San Diego, Ross poked his
head inside a cocaine-laden Chevy Blazer, and the place exploded
with police.
Ross jumped into a friend's
pickup and zoomed off "looking for a wall that I could crash
myself into," he said. "I just wanted to die."
He was captured after the truck careened into a hedgerow. He
has been held in jail without bond since then.
Ross' arrest netted Blandon
$45,500 in government rewards and expenses, records show. On
the strength of Blandon's testimony, Ross and two other men were
convicted of cocaine-conspiracy charges in San Diego last March
- conspiring to sell the DEA's cocaine. Sentencing was set for
today. Ross is facing a life sentence without the possibility
of parole. The other men are looking at 10- to 20-year sentences.
Acquaintances say Blandon,
who refused repeated interview requests, is a common sight these
days in Managua's better restaurants, drinking with friends and
telling of his "escape" from U.S. authorities.
According to his Miami lawyer,
Blandon spends most of his time shuttling between San Diego and
Managua, trying to recover Nicaraguan properties seized in 1979,
when the Sandinistas took power.
Cocaine sentences weighted
against blacks
by Gary Webb, San Jose Mercury
News, Aug 23, 1996
When it comes to cocaine,
it isn't just a suspicion
that the war on drugs is hammering blacks harder than whites.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, it's a fact.
The "main reason"
cocaine sentences for blacks are longer than for whites, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 1993, is that 83 percent
of the people being sent to prison for "crack" trafficking
are black "and the average sentence imposed for crack trafficking
was twice as long as for trafficking in powdered cocaine."
Even though crack and powder
cocaine are the same drug, you have to sell more than six pounds
of powder before you face the same jail time as someone who sells
one ounce of crack - a 100-to-1 ratio.
That logic has eluded Dr. Robert
Byck, a Yale University drug expert, from the moment he discovered
the 100-to-1 ratio may have been his inadvertent doing.
In 1986, at the height of an
election-year hysteria over crack, Byck was summoned before a
U.S. Senate committee to tell what he knew about cocaine smoking.
Byck, a renowned scientist
who edited and published Sigmund Freud's cocaine papers, had
been studying crack smoking in South America for nearly 10 years,
with growing alarm.
Sen. Lawton Chiles, a Florida
Democrat (and now that state's governor), was pushing for tougher
crack laws, and he asked Byck about testimony he had given previously
that "some experts" believed crack was 50 times more
addictive than powder cocaine. Byck acknowledged some people
believed that.
Despite the speculative nature
of the figure, Byck said, the addictive factor of 50 was "doubled
by people who wanted to get tough on cocaine" and then,
for reasons he still finds incomprehensible, turned into a measurement
of weight.
The resultant 100-to-1 (powder-vs.-crack)
weight ratio, Byck said, was "a fabrication by whoever wrote
the law, but not reality. . . . You can't make a number."
Recently, the U.S. Sentencing
Commission - a panel of experts created by Congress to be its
unbiased adviser in these matters - tried and failed to find
a better reason to explain why powder dealers must sell 100 times
more cocaine before they get the same mandatory sentence as crack
dealers.
The "absence of comprehensive
data substantiating this legislative policy is troublesome,"
it reported last year.
In 1993, cocaine smokers got
an average sentence of nearly three years. People who snorted
cocaine powder received a little over three months. Nearly all
of the long sentences went to blacks, the commission found.
Justice Department researchers
estimated that if crack and powder sentences were made equal,
"the black-white difference . . . would not only evaporate
but would slightly reverse."
Based on such findings, the
commission recommended in May 1995 that the cocaine-sentencing
laws be equalized, calling the 100-to-1 ratio "a primary
cause of the growing disparity between sentences for black and
white federal defendants."
Apparently fearful of being
seen as soft on drugs, Congress voted overwhelmingly last year
to keep the crack laws the same. On Oct. 30, President Clinton
signed the bill rejecting the commission's recommendations.
Affidafit shows CIA knew
of contra drug ring
by Gary Webb and Pamela
Kramer, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, Oct. 3, 1996
LOS ANGELES - During the
early 1980s, federal
and local narcotics agents knew that a massive drug ring operated
by Nicaraguan contra rebels was selling large amounts of cocaine
"mainly to blacks living in the South Central Los Angeles
area," according to a search-warrant affidavit obtained
by the San Jose Mercury News.
The Oct. 23, 1986, affidavit
identifies former Nicaraguan government official Danilo Blandon
as "the highest-ranking member of this organization"
and describes a sprawling drug operation involving more than
100 Nicaraguan contra sympathizers.
The affidavit of Thomas Gordon,
a former Los Angeles County sheriff's narcotics detective, is
the first independent corroboration that the contra army - the
Nicaraguan Democratic Force - was dealing "crack" cocaine
to gangs in Los Angeles' black neighborhoods. Known by its Spanish
initials, the FDN was an anti-communist commando group formed
and run by the CIA during the 1980s.
Gordon's sworn statement says
that both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI had
informants inside the Blandon drug ring for several years before
sheriff's deputies raided it Oct. 27, 1986. Gordon's affidavit
is based on police interviews with those informants and one of
the DEA agents who was investigating Blandon.
Twice during the past year,
Ron Spear, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department spokesman,
told the Mercury News that his department had no records of the
1986 raids and denied having a copy of Gordon's search-warrant
affidavit.
The Mercury News obtained the
entire search-warrant affidavit this week. Sheriff Sherman Block's
office did not respond yesterday to written questions about the
affidavit.
A recent Mercury News series
revealed how Blandon's operation, which sold thousands of kilos
of cocaine to black Los Angeles drug dealers, created the first
mass market for crack in America during the early 1980s and helped
fuel a crack explosion that is still reverberating through black
communities. Both the CIA and the Justice Department have denied
government involvement.
But according to a legal motion
filed in a 1990 case involving a deputy who helped execute the
search warrants, one of the suspects involved in the raid identified
himself as a CIA agent and asked police to call CIA headquarters
in Virginia to confirm his identity. The motion, filed by Los
Angeles defense attorney Harlan Braun on behalf of Deputy Daniel
Garner, said the narcotics detectives allowed the man to make
the call but then carted away numerous documents purportedly
linking the U.S. government to cocaine trafficking and money-laundering
efforts on behalf of the contras.
The motion said CIA agents
appeared at the sheriff's department within 48 hours of the raid
and removed the seized files from the evidence room. But Braun
said detectives secretly copied 10 pages before the documents
were spirited away. Braun attempted to introduce them in the
1990 criminal trial to force the federal government to back off
the case. Braun was hit with a gag order, the documents were
put under seal and Garner was convicted of corruption charges.
Internal sheriff's department
records of the raid "mysteriously disappeared" around
the same time the seized files were taken, Braun's motion said.
That claim was buttressed in an interview this week by an officer
involved in the raid.
The officer, who requested
anonymity, said the alleged CIA agent was Ronald Lister, a former
Laguna Beach police detective who worked with Blandon in the
drug ring. The 1986 search-warrant affidavit identifies Lister's
home in Laguna Beach as one of the places searched. It says Lister
was involved in transporting drug money to Miami and was Blandon's
partner in a security company. The company, according to a former
employee, was doing work at a Salvadoran military air base in
the early 1980s. Lister pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking
in 1991.
How Web fueled story
of CIA, crack:
Difference in format a problem, says editor
by Eleanor Randolph and
John M. Broder, Los Angeles Times, Oct. 23, 1996
WASHINGTON - The controversy
that began with the
San Jose Mercury News' publication of a series on cocaine and
the Nicaraguan contras has become a case study in how information
caroms around the country in the digital age.
In its printed version, as
the paper's editor has pointed out, the stories were careful
never to claim that the Central Intelligence Agency condoned
or abetted drug dealing to support the contras.
Reporter Gary Webb has said
that his research into the CIA-crack connection "ended at
the CIA's door," but did not firmly establish a link between
the agency and the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
But that unproven link has
become established as fact in the minds of many Americans, and
the Mercury News' editor, Jerry Ceppos, says the way the paper
used the World Wide Web to disseminate its material may have
contributed to that misinterpretation.
Even before the stories were
published in mid-August, managers of the paper's Web site, Mercury
Center, were alerting Internet users to a coming bombshell.
The electronic version of the
series appeared with a logo - a figure smoking crack superimposed
on the CIA seal - that was more prominent than in the newspaper
series. Underneath were the words, "the story behind the
crack explosion."
Many Americans believed that
the Mercury News had finally proved what had been a long-running
rumor of government complicity in the scourge of drugs in U.S.
cities.
Ceppos said earlier this week
that editing standards at the paper's Web site are not always
consistent with those for the print version of the paper. He
said the paper deleted the CIA logo from the Web site after it
became controversial.
"We changed the logo,
because for a day or two it seemed to be the focus of attention,"
Ceppos said. "You have to make sure you're keeping your
standards high, and we're going to have some more conversations
about that."
The series has provoked startlingly
different reactions in different media.
It ignited a storm of controversy
on black-oriented radio programs and in such newspapers as Louis
Farrakhan's "The Final Call," which headlined its account
of the Mercury News story, "How the U.S. government spread
crack cocaine in the black ghetto."
Washington talk-radio host
Joe Madison, who is also black, is starting a hunger strike to
protest the CIA's alleged role in cocaine trafficking. The newspaper
series was seen by many as confirmation of what had long been
suspected in black neighborhoods. "We've always speculated
about this, but now we've got proof," Madison said.
On the other hand, several
prominent newspapers have published stories that have been skeptical
about the allegations. The Los Angeles Times, The Washington
Post and The New York Times ran articles this month casting doubt
on a direct link between the cocaine trade and the CIA's support
of the contras.
The reaction on the "new
media" of the Internet has opened an additional dimension.
The Mercury News' Web site received 100,000 additional "hits"
a day after the series was posted, the paper reported.
The paper invited Internet
readers to comment, and hundreds replied. Many indicated that
they believed the paper had finally proved that the CIA was trafficking
in cocaine in black neighborhoods.
The Mercury News broke new
ground by making available not only the articles, but much of
the supporting documentation - legal affidavits, court filings,
charts, diagrams and interview transcripts.
But a key document that appears
to undercut one of the series' central contentions is made available
on the Internet site in heavily edited form with contradictory
material left out.
That document is the court
testimony of convicted drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon. The
paper's stories lean heavily on Blandon's testimony in the recent
cocaine trafficking trial of Los Angeles drug dealer "Freeway"
Ricky Ross in San Diego.
The stories cite the testimony
as establishing that for a period of several years in the early-
and mid-1980s, Blandon's drug profits were going to the contras.
The Internet site includes portions of the trial transcript that
support the story's contentions.
But the complete transcript,
which is not included on the Web site, includes statements by
Blandon that point in a different direction. According to his
testimony, he diverted drug profits to the contras not for years,
but only during a period of months early in his career - at a
time when he was making virtually no money dealing cocaine.
During the trial, Webb says,
he gave questions to Ross' attorney that the attorney, in turn,
asked Blandon under oath. Webb then used the statements elicited
from Blandon as information for his series.
Webb dismisses criticism of
the appearance of taking sides in a criminal case he was covering
by saying that the Blandon testimony provided "the best
interview I've ever had - while the man was under oath in a federal
court and being vouched for by two federal agencies."
Ceppos defended his reporter's
relationship with Blandon's attorney. "I may be missing
something here," he said, "but I think that everything
he did with the lawyer was journalistically ethical and aboveboard."
CIA series fell short,
says paper
by Associated Press, May
12, 1997
SAN JOSE, Calif. - The executive
editor of the San Jose Mercury News has admitted to shortcomings
in the newspaper's controversial series on the crack-cocaine
explosion in Los Angeles in the 1980s.
In an open letter to readers
in the newspaper's editorial section yesterday, Jerry Ceppos
said the newspaper solidly documented that a drug ring associated
with the contra rebels in Nicaragua sold large quantities of
cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles, and that some of the profits
from those sales went to the contras.
However, he said, the three-part
"Dark Alliance" series, published last summer, occasionally
omitted important information and created impressions open to
misinterpretation.
"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,"
he wrote.
"We have learned from
the experience and even are changing the way we handle major
investigations."
The series, written by reporter
Gary Webb, reported that a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold
cocaine in South Central Los Angeles, 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 in Nicaragua.
The Seattle Times ran the series
on Aug. 22-23, 1996.
The reports sparked widespread
anger in the black community toward the CIA, as well as numerous
federal investigations into whether the CIA took part in or countenanced
the selling of crack cocaine to raise money for contras.
The investigations never found
that the CIA had any link to drug dealing. Several newspapers
also disputed the Mercury News report.
Ceppos wrote that while the
newspaper did not report the CIA knew about the drug operations,
it implied CIA knowledge.
"Although members of the
drug ring met with contra leaders paid by the CIA and Webb believes
the relationship with the CIA was a tight one, I feel that we
did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship,"
he wrote. "I believe that part of our contract with readers
is to be as clear about what we don't know as what we do know.
"We also did not include
CIA comment about our findings, and I think we should have."
Ceppos also said the series
omitted conflicting information that Blandon testified he stopped
sending cocaine profits to the contras at the end of 1982, after
being in operation for a year. That information, Ceppos said,
"contradicted a central assertion of the series" and
should have been included.
The editor also said the series
reported the profit figures from the drug sales as fact when
they were estimates, and unfairly suggested the drugs funneled
to Los Angeles played a critical role in the crack problem in
urban America.
"Because the national
crack epidemic was a complex phenomenon that had more than one
origin, our discussion of this issue needed to be clearer,"
Ceppos said.
Mercury News retraction
won't stop drug probe
by Thomas Farragher, Knight-Ridder
Newspapers, May 14, 1997
WASHINGTON - A federal investigator
said he will continue to examine whether a California drug ring
sold cocaine to aid a CIA-run guerrilla army, even though the
San Jose Mercury News has backed away from some aspects of the
stories that sparked the inquiry.
"We have our own investigative
agenda . . ." said Justice Department Inspector General
Michael Bromwich.
The Mercury News series spawned
twin investigations by the inspectors general of the CIA and
the Justice Department.
Bromwich's comment came after
the Mercury News on Sunday acknowledged that its series about
shadowy drug dealers didn't meet the paper's standards.
The inspector general drew
a distinction between journalistic concerns of Mercury News editors
and what interests government investigators. "We're not
examining per se the practices in the newspaper that led to the
publication of the article," Bromwich said.
In its "Dark Alliance"
series published last August, the Mercury News traced urban America's
crack-cocaine explosion to a Northern California drug ring involving
two Nicaraguan cocaine dealers who also were civilian leaders
of the contras, an anti-communist commando group formed and run
by the CIA during the 1980s. The series said millions of dollars
in profits from the drug sales were funneled to the contras.
It never reported direct CIA involvement, though many readers
drew that conclusion.
But on Sunday, Mercury News
Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos told readers that "we didn't
know for certain what the profits were" and that the crack-cocaine
scourge "was a complex phenomenon that had more than one
origin."
Ceppos also said the newspaper
"did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship"
of the drug ring and contra leaders.
Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.,
the chief congressional champion of a thorough investigation
into the newspaper's findings, insisted yesterday that the Mercury
News, while acknowledging problems with its series, has not retreated
from findings that some drug money went to the contras.
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
