by Nick Schou
Besides Garcia, the only person who knew the details of his project was Webb’s wife. A licensed respiratory therapist, Sue never failed to be intrigued by his sordid accounts of official corruption. Throughout his career, every evening over dinner, she would ask her husband about his latest discoveries. But nothing could prepare her for what Webb told her about his story involving the CIA and drugs. “I thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever heard in my life,” Sue recalls. “But after he got all these documents and started connecting the dots, I thought it was amazing.”
A few days later, Webb flew to San Diego. At the federal courthouse there, he found records from Blandon’s trial. Along with his wife, Blandon had been arrested with five other suspects for conspiring to distribute cocaine. Blandon looked like a big fish; according to the indictment, he was buying coke in wholesale quantities and selling it to other major traffickers. One of the records Webb found was a motion filed by Blandon’s prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney L. J. O’Neil, in opposition to Blandon’s request to be released from prison on bail.
“Mr. Blandon’s family was closely associated with the Somoza government that was overthrown in 1979,” O’Neil claimed. “He is a large-scale cocaine trafficker and has been for some time.” O’Neil’s motion also stated that Blandon and another Nicaraguan, Jairo Meneses, a former commander in Somoza’s National Guard, had been responsible for 764 kilos of cocaine seized in Nicaragua in 1991. The pair also owned hotels and casinos in Nicaragua that they had purchased after the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990. Meneses: Webb immediately recognized the name from his conversation with Baca about who really pulled the strings of her boyfriend Rafael Cornejo’s cartel.
Blandon’s lawyer, Bradley Brunon, didn’t deny his client’s ties to the Somoza regime. In his effort to win Blandon’s release on bail, he introduced to the court record a photograph of Blandon at a wedding reception with Somoza and his wife. Brunon argued that Blandon’s ties to Somoza proved that the allegations against him were “politically motivated because of Mr. Blandon’s activities with the contras in the early 1980s.”
The court file revealed that Blandon and his co-conspirators had never gone to trial. Instead, the suspects took plea deals that gave them relatively light sentences; Blandon had been ordered to serve 48 months behind bars, but the file showed that sentence was later cut in half—presumably because Blandon had become an informant. As Webb kept reading, he discovered that Blandon was already out of prison. By the government’s own admission, he had been a major cocaine trafficker for roughly a decade, and had spent exactly twenty-eight months behind bars.
BACK IN SACRAMENTO, Webb began to investigate Norwin Meneses, whom Baca’s boyfriend Cornejo had identified as the ringleader of his drug network. He quickly found newspaper articles from the Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner reporting that Meneses had been dealing cocaine for the contras throughout the 1980s. One story referred to Meneses as the “king of cocaine in Nicaragua” where he acted as the Cali cartel’s Central American liaison for smuggling to the U.S. Another article mentioned that his name had come up in connection with a U.S. Senate investigation of contras and drug dealing in the late 1980s.
Webb hit the library and spent the next several days reading through roughly 1,100 pages of transcripts and exhibits from the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics & Terrorism, better known as the Kerry Committee investigation. Led by Massachusetts Senator and future Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry, the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee had spent the better part of 1987 and 1988 digging into widespread allegations that the CIA-backed contras had engaged in drug trafficking on U.S. soil to support their cause.
Among other things, Kerry had uncovered evidence of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s covert support for the contras and his ties to Colombian cocaine traffickers, much of which was used two years later to justify the U.S. invasion of Panama. The records were replete with testimony from contra leaders, drug traffickers and pilots, all of it under oath, regarding the covert smuggling of weapons on CIA cargo planes from the U.S. to Central America, with cocaine often coming back to military bases and remote airfields on the return flights.
Because of its sensitive nature, the committee, however, sealed most of the testimony and Kerry’s investigation got scant play in the national news media. The Iran contra scandal had uncovered so much official wrongdoing already that Kerry found little political support even among Democrats for his efforts to force further disclosures about collusion with drug traffickers from the CIA or the Reagan White House.
Webb called Kerry’s chief prosecutor, Jack Blum, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and asked him if he had ever run across Norwin Meneses in his investigation. Blum remembered the name. In his 1998 book, Dark Alliance, Webb wrote that Blum told him that Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department had stonewalled the Kerry investigation into Meneses, and he had eventually moved on to other targets. “There was a lot of weird stuff going on out on the West Coast,” Blum said. “But after our experiences with Justice . . . we mainly concentrated on the cocaine coming into the East.”
Webb remembered being glued to the television during the Iran contra hearings in 1987. According to Sue, he had taped them while at work and had watched them every night until the early hours of the morning. During a family vacation to North Carolina’s Outer Banks with Tom Loftus, his friend and former colleague from the Kentucky Post, Webb had skipped the beach entirely, sitting inside a rented cottage, relishing the sight of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North being grilled by lawmakers on national television. But Webb didn’t remember seeing anything on television or reading anything in the newspapers about weapons and drugs being smuggled back and forth between the U.S. and Central America.
In a recent interview, Blum says Webb probably didn’t see much about the contra drug issue in the news, because nobody was really covering it. “We would have a day of hearings and the White House would call reporters and say ‘This is insane stuff—don’t listen to them,’ and by and large the press bought it,” he says. “The coverage stunk. It focused on how the witnesses weren’t credible because they were drug dealers. I used to say to people who asked me why we had these ‘flakes’ as witnesses, ‘Bring me a Lutheran pastor who was there when the drugs were unloaded in Miami and I’ll call him as a witness.’ These were the only witnesses we had.”
One of the few reporters who had done their homework on the story was Robert Parry, an Associated Press reporter who had eventually quit his job when his own credibility was attacked by Reagan administration officials and their allies in the news media, particularly the right-wing Washington Times. Martha Honey, a New York Times stringer who lived in Costa Rica during the 1980s, had also done some reporting on the issue. She and her husband, Tony Avirgan, had been set up on phony drug charges after trying to prove the CIA was involved in drug trafficking.
Webb later wrote that he called Parry at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, and told him what he’d unearthed about Blandon and Meneses. “Why in the world would you want to go back into this?” Parry asked. Webb wanted to know if Parry had ever heard anything about the contras dealing drugs in the West Coast. “Not that I’m aware of,” Parry said. “This is definitely a new angle. You think you can show it was being sold in L.A.?”
Now a freelance investigative reporter who runs his own online magazine, The Consortium, Parry remembers getting a telephone call from Webb, and being impressed with his discoveries. “Brian Barger and I covered the external drug dealing activities of the contras,” he says. “But we never knew what had happened internally, where the drugs ended up once they reached the United States.”
Parry and Barger had done more than perhaps any other reporters to uncover drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan contras. In 1985, they wrote the first stories exposing the fact that a then-unknown Lieutenant in the Marine Corps named Oliver North was working for the Reagan Administration, covertly funneling weapons to the contras. That year, they also exp
osed a CIA memo, or “national intelligence estimate,” showing the agency knew the contras were involved in drug dealing, but had done nothing to stop it.
The story almost didn’t run. Parry’s editor called him and said the article would have to be held unless he could find someone in the CIA to confirm the memo’s accuracy. But meanwhile, the piece had been sent to the wire service’s Latin American desk to be translated into Spanish. From there it was sent to newspapers throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Once his editors realized what had happened, they reluctantly allowed an English-language version to run.
For their efforts, Parry and Barger were subjected to personal attacks by the Reagan administration. Both reporters left AP; Parry ended up at Newsweek, where his editors weren’t happy about his perceived obsession with the story. At one point, the magazine’s top editor told Parry’s boss that he had been at a dinner party with senior White House officials and had a “very unpleasant experience” because of Parry’s work. While much of the pressure came from politicians, Parry says his fellow journalists did the dirty work. Both the New York Times and Washington Post essentially ignored his reporting, while the right-wing Washington Times openly ridiculed it.
“The most aggressive attacks came from the news media,” Parry says. “It all started with the Washington Times claiming it had been disproved, but then the major news organizations piled on and acted like it was their job to put the story down.” The strange thing, Parry says, was that after Webb’s story appeared, the major newspapers pretended that they had already covered the story, and that the CIA had already admitted the contras were involved in drug trafficking. “But that’s not how they reported the story at the time, when they were busy mocking Senator Kerry as a ‘randy conspiracy buff,’ ” Parry says.
So when Webb called Parry nearly a decade later with an interest in advancing the CIA-contra story, Parry tried to warn him. “I asked him how his relationship was with his editors,” Parry says. “He asked me what I meant. He seemed genuinely curious. I told him, ‘You will be facing a serious counter-attack, because this has happened to everyone who had written about it.’ And Gary said he had a good relationship with his editors. He was naïve. He had no idea what he was about to set off on, how his colleagues would go after him.”
Martha Honey, now a research fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington, D.C., think tank, was also no stranger to the contra cocaine story. In May 1984, her husband, Tony Avirgan, a freelance cameraman, had been wounded at a press conference held in La Penca, Costa Rica by Eden Pastora, a former Sandinista guerrilla known as “Comandante Zero.” Pastora had defected from the rebels after the Nicaraguan revolution and formed his own contra army. At the conference, he announced he would no longer accept aid from the CIA. Halfway through Pastora’s speech, an explosion ripped through the crowd.
Pastora survived, but Honey began to investigate the attack for the New York Times, convinced it was the work of Comandante Zero’s rivals in a separate CIA-backed contra faction. In the course of her investigation, Honey stumbled into a covert contra support operation at the sprawling ranch of John Hull, an American expatriate who lived on the Costa Rican border with Nicaragua. Honey’s sources told her that Hull and a group of Cuban-Americans were using his ranch as a transshipment base to help the CIA supply the contras with weapons.
“We knew about the arms shipments, but started hearing about drug shipments too,” Honey says. “It became clear that there was this whole network in Costa Rica on John Hull’s farm. There were covert landing strips where this clandestine network was moving arms and men, but also drugs. Planes brought in supplies and left with drugs. It became clear that drugs were a central part of contra operations.”
In 1985, Honey hired Daniel Sheehan, a crusading attorney with the Christic Institute, a public interest law firm founded five years earlier by Sheehan, his wife Sara Nelson, and William J. Davis, a Jesuit priest. The firm had already won public acclaim—and even inspired a Hollywood film—for successfully suing the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Power Company on behalf of whistleblower Karen Silkwood. In the La Penca case, Sheehan began compiling the information Honey and Avirgan had unearthed about Hull and his cohorts, whom the couple was certain had been behind the bombing. The most intriguing evidence came from Jack Terrell, an employee of Rob Owen, who reported directly to Oliver North at the White House’s National Security Council. Terrell, who later testified in congressional hearings, told Sheehan he witnessed Hull admitting responsibility for the bombing during a meeting in Costa Rica with a rival of Pastora, a contra leader and CIA asset named Adolfo Calero.
In Sheehan’s mind, however, that testimony was just one small part of a much larger puzzle. Sheehan saw the La Penca incident as a perfect vehicle to expose a covert team he believed was operating on the fringes of the CIA and the White House, a crew that went all the way back to the Bay of Pigs, the agency’s failed 1961 invasion of Cuba, and the covert war in Laos. In May 1986, Sheehan filed suit against Hull, Oliver North, and several Reagan administration officials later named as Iran contra conspirators, charging them with negligence in the bombing injuries suffered by Avirgan.
Shortly after Sheehan filed the lawsuit, Honey and Avirgan received a notice from the Costa Rican postal service that they had a package awaiting them at the custom’s office. The couple sent their housekeeper to pick it up. Later that night, several customs police barged into their house and arrested them for drug possession. The package had contained a hollowed-out book full of cocaine and a purported note from a Sandinista leader. “Dear Tony and Martha,” it began. “Here is the latest sample of the shipment from Colombia we want you to test. If the quality is good enough, we will ship a ton to Miami, where it will be received by Senator Kerry.”
The charges were later dropped when the Costa Rican authorities investigated the drug shipment and determined it was a set up aimed at discrediting a pair of law-abiding journalists. But meanwhile, one of the witnesses in Honey’s lawsuit was killed, and several others received death threats and had to flee the country. Things didn’t go much better in the courtroom. Judge James L. King granted Sheehan discovery power allowing him to examine government records about the bombing and, more importantly, to force high-ranking Reagan officials to submit to depositions.
Sheehan furiously began collecting additional affidavits, but somewhere in all the excitement, it became unclear what the lawsuit had to do with the La Penca bombing. After two years of increasingly wild-sounding allegations, King threw the case out of court. Sheehan appealed King’s ruling, lost, and was ordered to pay the legal fees for the defendants: $1,034,381.35. Avirgan, Honey, and several other journalists later reinvestigated the La Penca bombing and came to the conclusion that the CIA most likely had nothing to do with it. Instead, they blamed the bombing on a newly discovered Argentinean who appeared to have ties to the Sandinistas.
Despite the fact that Honey now admits she was wrong in her belief that Hull or his friends in the Reagan administration had been behind the bombing—a fact that would tend to invalidate the entire lawsuit—she insists that the real reason Sheehan lost the case was because he had become obsessed with uncovering a widespread government conspiracy going back twenty years or more: A shadow government run by CIA officials and their private-sector allies that secretly pulled the strings of U.S. foreign policy. Critics of the lawsuit—and Sheehan—contend that Honey was naïve about her lawyer, or worse, complicit in his courtroom antics. But it’s hard to find a fiercer critic of Sheehan than Honey herself. “Sheehan’s a lousy, lousy lawyer,” she says. “After we found out about the Sandinista connection, we realized we had wasted millions of dollars and a decade with Sheehan,” she says.
In a 2000 interview, Sheehan defended the La Penca lawsuit. He told me that Honey and Avirgan were the ones who claimed that the CIA was responsible for the bombing, not him. “[Honey’s] theory has never been proved one way or the other,” he said. “The attorney general of Nicaragua said
that he investigated the entire case and was completely convinced that the bomber was the same guy we had identified as being in the meeting with John Hull. Martha changed her mind about the bombing more than a year after the case lost in court. So how does this come out to my doing anything wrong?”
WITHIN DAYS OF Webb’s conversation with Honey, Coral Baca called Webb. She said that Cornejo’s lawyers had succeeded in their effort to obtain uncensored files about Blandon from his grand jury testimony. But rather than cooperate, the government had dropped Blandon from its list of witnesses. Just as Webb thought he’d never find Blandon, he received a call from an attorney he knew in San Diego. The woman said Blandon was about to appear as a witness against her client, one of the Nicaraguans who had been busted with Blandon in San Diego a few years earlier.
The attorney added that Blandon was also being called to testify in the upcoming trial of one of the biggest crack dealers in the history of South Central Los Angeles, “Freeway” Ricky Ross. Webb knew the name from his investigation into California’s drug forfeiture laws. Ross was an illiterate, but highly intelligent child of Texas sharecroppers, God-fearing farmers who lived in a boarded-up shack and raised Ross with the notion that the same fate awaited him.
Ross felt otherwise. After moving to Los Angeles, he became a tennis prodigy in high school but lost a college scholarship when his coach discovered he couldn’t read. Faced with no lucrative employment prospects, Ross capitalized on his relationship with friends in the Crips street gang, the largest and most violent criminal organization in South Central Los Angeles, to establish himself as the area’s most successful crack dealer. Ross was soft-spoken, but sophisticated and ruthless in his determination to rise above his sharecropper roots. As soon as he started dealing drugs, he began investing his profits in property along L.A.’s Harbor “Freeway,” hence the nickname, “Freeway Rick.”
