Even with these documents the Los Angeles Times did not advance the Lister part of the story in the wake of the Mercury News series. The sole mission of the Times was to destroy Webb. However, reporter Nick Schou of the Orange County Weekly discovered that Lister’s company, Pyramid International Security Consultants, had been a contractor with the CIA, helping funnel weapons from El Salvador to Contra bases in Honduras.
One of Lister’s partners in this operation was Timothy LaFrance, a weapons manufacturer based in San Diego. Lister and LaFrance, the latter told Schou, built a munitions plant for the CIA in San Salvador. Schou also quoted from Lister’s notes describing his relationship to Scott Weekly, who was at various times a contractor with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, and with a man named Bill Nelson. Back in the 1980s, Nelson, now dead, was the executive vice president for security for the Fluor Corporation, which is based in Orange County. More intriguingly, Nelson had worked for the CIA from 1948 to 1976. He was chief of covert operations in the early 1970s, then resigned from the Agency after coming under congressional criticism for his role in CIA operations in Chile and Angola.
Also part of Lister’s arms supply network was a man called Richard Wilker, whom LaFrance described to Schou as another former CIA officer and later contractor for the Agency. “The whole idea was to set up an operation in El Salvador that would allow us to get around US laws and supply the contras with guns,” LaFrance said. “The smart way to do this was to find a military base. It’s much easier to just build the weapons down there.” LaFrance said he’d gone to El Salvador with “two giant boxes full of machine guns and ammunition.” Quartered with the Atlacatl Battalion, one of the US-trained Salvadoran units, they set up their operation at a military depot in downtown San Salvador. An October 1982 contract for this work was found in Lister’s files. It showed that Lister’s contact in El Salvador was Defense Minister General José Guillermo García. (Guillermo García has been linked to numerous atrocities, including the El Mozote massacre during which the Atlacatl Battalion killed over 1,000 Salvadoran peasants.)
By the end of 1986, there was no longer any need for the services of people like Lister, LaFrance and Blandón. This had certainly become apparent to Blandón. Webb was able to get a copy of an FBI teletype recording a conversation in which one party was Blandón’s lawyer, Brad Brunon. The teletype reads, “CIA winked at this sort of thing … Brunon indicated that now that US Congress had voted funds for Nicaraguan Contra movement US Government now appears to be turning against organizations like this.”
In 1986 Blandón left Los Angeles and with over a million dollars in cash moved to Miami, where he started a restaurant and a car dealership. Within two years Blandón’s business enterprises in Miami were failing, and he and his wife moved back to California and attempted to rebuild their cocaine empire. In 1990 an undercover DEA agent taped a conversation between Blandón and another drug dealer in which Blandón described his relationship with Rick Ross: “I’ve sold them about two thousand to four thousand kilos. These are black people, the people that control LA.” Over the next sixteen months Blandón sold 425 kilos of cocaine, worth about $10.5 million. By now Ross was sitting in an Ohio prison, serving a ten-year sentence for drug trafficking after he had relocated to Cincinnati. In 1991, the DEA arrested Blandón and his wife for cocaine trafficking. During the trial, Assistant US District Attorney L. J. O’Neale described Blandón as “the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer.” The US Probation Office recommended a sentence of life in prison and a $4 million fine. On May 2, 1992 Blandón was sentenced to only four years in prison. This indulgence was compounded in 1993, when O’Neale filed a motion with the court stating that Blandón had agreed to become an informant for the Department of Justice and the DEA. In exchange for his cooperation, O’Neale requested that Blandón’s sentence be reduced to time served and that he be released without parole or fine. The court approved the request and Blandón was freed from prison on September 19, 1994. He had served only twenty-eight months, and had spent almost that entire spell briefing the DEA and the Department of Justice and appearing as a government witness in trials such as that of Rafael Corñejo. The stage for the final denouncement of the LA ring was set.
In the spring of 1995, the DEA approached Blandón about setting up a sting operation that would snare his former client Rick Ross. The operation was planned while Ross was awaiting early release from his Ohio prison. He had won reduced time by testifying about corruption in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Ross returned to Los Angeles and was contacted by Blandón, who asked him if he wanted to start buying cocaine from him again. Ross said no; he wanted to stay clean. Blandón pressed Ross to give him names of other potential buyers, pleading he was desperate for cash. Ross agreed to see Blandón at a mall in San Diego on March 2. When Ross approached Blandón’s van, he found himself surrounded by law enforcement officers. He made a run for it, crashed his light truck into a hedge, and was arrested.
Ross was charged with conspiracy to purchase cocaine with the intent to distribute and convicted on the testimony of Blandón, and finally sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Blandón received at least $166,000 for his services as a DEA agent and returned to postrevolutionary Nicaragua, where he now commands a profitable timber export business.
The man who pieced this saga together, Gary Webb, looks a straight-arrow type, like many other reporters who cut their teeth in the Midwest. He grew up on the road, the son of a marine. “We were straight-up pro–Marine Corps,” Webb remembers. “My brother and I were brought up to despise hippies.”
In 1978 he got a job at the Kentucky Post. There Webb was broken in as a reporter by Gene Goltz, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter near the end of a long career. After five years at the Kentucky Post, Webb was hired as an investigative reporter by the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1983, writing stories on state politics and union corruption. Then in 1988 he went to work at the San Jose Mercury News. Again Webb was assigned to statewide investigations covering corruption in California state government.
In 1995 Webb wrote a series of articles on drug forfeiture laws. It was this story that led him to the whole CIA/crack/Contra nexus. “I’d written a story about a drug forfeiture case, a big important case that was going to throw out the Justice Department’s assets forfeiture program,” Webb remembers. The case had been filed by a jailhouse lawyer named Michael Montalbo who turned out to have found the Achilles heel in the law. The case had the potential to overturn all the forfeitures that had taken place since 1991. “I thought this was an amazing story,” Webb recalls, “that this guy was in jail serving life without parole for cocaine trafficking. I went to Lompoc Prison to interview him and wrote the story.”
After the story on Montalbo appeared in the Mercury News, Webb got a call from a woman in Oakland. She told the reporter that she had been intrigued by his story. She said she had called Montalbo to ask him about Webb, and the drug dealer had told her that Webb was trustworthy. The woman told Webb that he might be interested in the case of her boyfriend, Rafael Corñejo. Corñejo had been arrested for drug trafficking in 1992, and he had been sitting in jail for three years without a trial. The woman was convinced that Corñejo’s case would never come to trial because he worked for a man who was tied to the CIA and the Nicaraguan Contras. That man was named Norwin Meneses.
“This was the first time I heard the name Meneses,” Webb recalls. “She said the only person that had been let out of jail in this drug ring had been the percussion player for the rock group Santana, who was apparently another Nicaraguan.”
Corñejo’s girlfriend, Coral, told Webb that she had some damaging information against the chief witness against Corñejo, a Nicaraguan named Oscar Danilo Blandón. The information suggested that Blandón was associated with the CIA and that he had been smuggling cocaine for the Contras. Coral said the allegations about Blandón’s ties to the CIA were contained in federal grand jury transcripts.
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�I don’t know how she got these things,” Webb says. “I’ve been doing this type of work for nineteen years and I’ve only seen federal grand jury transcripts once in my life.” The government had accidentally turned over the transcripts, Drug Enforcement Agency reports, FBI documents and other information on Blandón’s CIA ties as part of the discovery process.
“Somebody fucked up somewhere,” Webb says. “But when I saw those documents, I thought, this is a different story. We’re not doing a story about some poor guy in jail with his property taken away. We’re doing a story about some CIA-connected drug dealer.” Webb took the story idea to his editor, Dawn Garcia, who ran the state desk at the Mercury News. She encouraged Webb to pursue the story.
Webb went back to the material unearthed about Blandón in the Corñejo case. In the documents, Blandón had testified that he had been running drugs for the Contras and that he was told by the CIA at one point they didn’t need any more drug money because Congress had just appropriated new funds for the Contras. It was then, Blandón said, that he went into the drug business for himself.
“The thing that struck me about Blandón was that he was appearing as a government witness,” Webb said. “He was not there to do anything but to give testimony as a DEA informant about the history of the Meneses family. What made it believable to me was that he wasn’t there trying to beat a rap. He was there as a cooperating witness for the government.”
Webb asked Coral what she knew about the Nicaraguan drug dealers and their backgrounds. Coral said she had grown up with and dated many of them. She told Webb that the man he really needed to be looking at was Norwin Meneses. Her boyfriend worked for Meneses. So did Danilo Blandón. “Meneses was the big man of the drug ring,” Coral told Webb. So Webb began looking into Meneses’s past. He found a story about Meneses’s arrest and trial on drug charges in Nicaragua in 1992. Then he came across a long story by Seth Rosenfeld that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1986. It described in detail Meneses’s connection to the Contra faction based in Honduras.
“I thought, somebody was on this story ten years ago,” Webb says. He continued researching the story until December 1995, describing it as a matter of gathering up the loose ends, getting lists of names and finding out all he could about those involved, scouring court records and interviewing police and prosecutors.
By the end of December he went back to Garcia and told her that the story was at the point where he needed to start traveling. He wanted to go to San Diego and to Nicaragua to locate Blandón and Meneses. Garcia and Webb then went to see the Mercury News’s managing editor, David Yarnold. They laid the entire story out for him, and Yarnold gave Webb the green light to go to Nicaragua.
Webb didn’t speak Spanish, so he called Martha Honey, an investigative journalist with many years of experience in Nicaragua. Honey suggested that Webb team up with Georg Hodel, with whom she had co-authored a book on Central America. Hodel is a Swiss reporter who had covered the Contra War for Der Spiegel; he had married a Nicaraguan woman and had stayed on in Nicaragua after the Sandinista defeat. Webb contacted Hodel and outlined the story for him. It turned out that Hodel already had a pretty good background on the situation and was familiar with many of the key players. “Georg knew everybody down in Nicaragua,” Webb recalls. “He was great.” So Webb went down to Managua and together with Hodel combed through court records and newspaper stories. They also interviewed Meneses. But they were unable to locate the man Webb had gone to Nicaragua to find – Danilo Blandón.
Webb returned to California. His next visit was to San Diego. And here, at last, the elusive Blandón’s name popped up in a 1992 court case. “I just started going down the list of attorneys who had represented Blandón and his codefendants,” Webb says. “I just started calling them up and asking, ‘Have you seen Blandón? Do you know where he is? Have you heard anything from him?’ ” Webb didn’t have much luck. It was as if Blandón had simply disappeared. Then he called a lawyer named Juanita Brooks who had represented Blandón’s wife in a drug case. She told Webb that Blandón was scheduled to be in San Diego in a couple of months to testify in a court case involving one of her clients. “Blandón’s testifying as a government witness,” Brooks told Webb. “He’s working for the DEA now.” Webb was incredulous. “Are you sure this is the same guy?” “Yeah,” Brooks said. “I represented his wife and then he disappeared out of the case and turned up working for the government. Now he’s set up one of his old customers in a sting operation.”
The man Blandón was taking down was Rick Ross, “Freeway” Rick, the same name Webb had come across during his investigations into the drug forfeiture story. Ross was known as one of California’s biggest drug kingpins, a crack lord. When Webb looked at Ross’s arrest record he found what seemed to be a typical pattern. Ross had been busted, but had never lost any property. It also appeared to Webb that the big players went free and that the street-corner peddlers and welfare mothers lost everything. At first Webb didn’t catch the significance of the connection between Blandón and Ross. Then Brooks filled in the blanks. “Danilo Blandón was one of Ross’s biggest suppliers,” Brooks said. “He’s been supplying Ross for a long time. My impression is that Blandón may have started Ross out in the business.”
Unlike Blandón, Ricky Ross was easy to find. He was locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego awaiting trial. Webb wrote Ross a letter asking the drug dealer for an interview. “Then the weirdest thing happened,” Webb says. “I got a call from Jesse Katz at the Los Angeles Times. Katz asked me what I wanted to talk to Ross about.” It turned out that Katz had written a profile of Ross for the Los Angeles Times. In his story Katz had described Ross as the “crack king” of Los Angeles. After the story ran, Ross and Katz kept up a correspondence. When Ross received Webb’s letter requesting an interview, he contacted Katz and asked him if Webb was a real reporter and whether he should talk to him.
A few days later Webb went down to San Diego for his first interview of Ross. Webb was surprised to discover that Ross and his lawyers were unaware that Blandón was going to appear as a witness against the crack dealer. The government hadn’t given Ross’s defense team a list of its witnesses. “When I mentioned it was Blandón,” Webb said. “Ross suddenly knew that he’d been set up.”
Ross told Webb that when his arrest went down, he was hustled off in one direction and Blandón in the other. As soon as Ross learned that Blandón had been working for the DEA, he opened up. He told Webb everything he knew about the Nicaraguan – how they met, their drug and money relationship, Blandón’s associates. “That’s when I put two and two together and figured out that this Contra drug ring was selling dope to the Crips and the Bloods,” Webb says. “Because Ricky Ross was the biggest gang wholesaler in South Central LA.”
Now Webb had a decision to make.
A few weeks later Webb flew to San Diego for a hearing in the Ross case. The hearing was to determine whether Ross’s lawyer, Alan Fenster, could question Danilo Blandón about his possible ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. The federal prosecutors had filed a motion with the court to keep the defense from exploring the CIA and Contra issues. Webb was one of the only people in the courtroom when the door opened and in walked Jesse Katz. Katz sat down next to Webb. “Hey, Gary, how you doing?”
“Fine.”
“They’re going to have a hearing today on that CIA stuff you’ve been sitting on, right?”
At that moment US Assistant District Attorney L. J. O’Neale got up and looked at Webb and Katz. He conferred with his colleagues and then approached the judge and whispered to her. The judge signaled to Ross’s lawyer. “Mr. Fenster, we’re going to have this hearing at side-bar,” the judge said. “Please approach the bench.” For about forty-five minutes the lawyers and the judge debated whether Blandón’s relationship with the CIA could be brought into the case. “All this time Katz was going crazy,” Webb remembers. “He was straining to hear what they were saying. But it was impossib
le. Finally he got pissed off and left. He never came back to cover the trial.”
Webb stayed in San Diego for the Ross trial and heard Danilo Blandón give his testimony against Freeway Rick. Afterward, Webb was approached by Ross’s lawyer, Alan Fenster, who invited him to lunch. The lawyer told Webb that he was at a loss as to how to conduct the cross-examination of Blandón. “The prosecution hasn’t told me anything about this Contra stuff,” Fenster said. “They haven’t said anything about the CIA. I don’t know enough to even raise any of this shit in court.”
Fenster asked Webb if he knew of any questions he could ask Blandón. Webb didn’t miss a beat. “Man, I’d ask him a lot of questions.” Webb told Fenster to look at the DEA records and the grand jury transcripts that had been turned over as part of the discovery process in the investigation into the Meneses drug ring in the Bay Area. Fenster immediately reviewed the documents and was able to lead Blandón through a series of questions about his ties to the Contras, his meetings with Col. Enrique Bermúdez and his relationship to Norwin Meneses. “O’Neale, the prosecutor, kept jumping up and objecting to every question,” Webb recalls. “But the judge was just sitting there doing her nails or something. She kept saying, ‘Overruled, overruled.’ Blandón testified how he became involved in the cocaine business. He recounted his meeting with Enrique Bermúdez and how the Contra leader had instructed him to return to the US, begin selling cheap cocaine and cycle the profits back to the Contra effort. Blandón described in some detail the inner workings of his drug ring, where he got the cocaine, how many kilos he sold and how much he sold it for.
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