![]() They also note that neither Ross nor the gangs were the first or sole distributors of crack in L.A. They deny that Bay Area-based Nicaraguan drug dealers, Juan Norwin Meneses and Oscar Danilo Blandon, worked for the CIA or contributed “millions in drug profits” to the contras, as Webb contended. And major media–the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post–have run long pieces refuting the Mercury News series. The CIA’s drug network, wrote Webb, “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.” Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.ĬIA Director John Deutch declared that he found “no connection whatsoever” between the CIA and cocaine traffickers. gangs who became street-level distributors of crack, a cheap and powerful form of cocaine. While much of the CIA-contra-drug story had been revealed years ago in the press and in congressional hearings, the Mercury News series added a crucial missing link: It followed the cocaine trail to Ross and black L.A. The Mercury News‘ Web page, with supporting documents and updates, received hundreds of thousands of “hits” a day. ![]() The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles linking the CIA’s “contra” army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles. This article was published in 1996 and has not been updated since. ![]()
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