by Nick Schou
By the time Ross’ luck ran out in 1994, when he was arrested for distributing crack in Texas, Ross had become something of a local legend in Los Angeles. On December 20, the LA Times had published a 2,400-word profile of Ross that identified him the “king of crack” who was “key to the drug’s spread” in that city. The story, written by Times staff writer Jesse Katz, appeared just after Ross’ release from prison. Ross accompanied Katz to the tiny hamlet in rural Texas where he’d been born, shed a few tears, and told the reporter he planned to put his criminal past behind him and lend his entrepreneurial talents to legitimate business activity in Los Angeles.
According to Webb’s lawyer friend, Blandon had been Ross’ supplier during the 1980s. When Ross had been released from prison in March 1995, Blandon had pleaded for his help in unloading a major coke deal. Ross agreed to pick up $ 1 million worth of cocaine at a department store parking lot in San Diego. What Ross didn’t know was that Blandon was now a paid DEA informant, helping the government arrange a “reverse sting,” when a supplier sets up his underling.
Webb immediately called Alan Fenster, Ross’ Beverly Hills-based attorney, and asked him what he knew about Blandon. At first, Fenster had no idea who Webb was talking about, but when Webb said he had heard that “Danilo” Blandon had been Ross’ supplier, Fenster gasped with recognition. As is common in the paranoid culture of the illegal drug trade, Ross had only known Blandon by his first name.
A few hours later, Ross called Webb from inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in San Diego, where he was awaiting trial. In his book, Webb wrote that he pried Ross for information about his friend Danilo. “He was almost like a godfather to me,” Ross said. “He’s the one who got me going.” Webb asked if it was true that Blandon was Ross’main cocaine source. “He was,” Ross affirmed. “Everybody I knew, I knew through him. So really, he could be considered as my only source. In a sense, he was.”
Webb flew down to San Diego to meet with Fenster and Ross, neither of whom had any idea that Blandon had testified about his involvement in raising money for the contras. “What would you say if I were to tell you that he was working for the contras, selling cocaine to help them buy weapons and supplies?” Webb asked. Ross giggled nervously. “I would say that was some fucked up shit there,” he offered. “They say I sold dope all over, but man, I know he done sold ten times more than me.”
In December 1995, Webb gathered his notes and documents and wrote a four-page memo to his editors, outlining his discoveries, an event he described three years later in his book, Dark Alliance. “This series will show that the dumping of cocaine on L.A.’s street gangs was the back end of a covert effort to arm and equip the CIA’s raging army of anti-communist contra guerrillas,” Webb wrote. “While there has long been solid—if largely ignored—evidence of a CIA-contra-cocaine connection, no one has ever asked the question: ‘Where did all the cocaine go once it got here?’ Now we know the answer.”
Webb wanted the series to run in March 1996, when Ross was scheduled to face a federal jury on his latest charge of dealing crack—a so-called “third strike” offense that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. He asked for permission to fly down to Miami to interview some of Blandon’s associates, and to travel to Nicaragua to interview Norwin Meneses, who was locked up inside a Managua jail.
“I believe it was at the request of managing editor David Yarnold, who was my boss, that Gary came into the newsroom and met with the two of us,” says Dawn Garcia. “Yarnold read the memo, really liked the sound of the project, and said he wanted to be directly involved—that we should work through him. The project editor was not invited to the meeting.” The uninvited project editor was Jonathan Krim, assistant editor for investigative projects, whose job was specifically to edit complex investigative series. According to several sources at the Mercury News, Yarnold and Krim didn’t like each other—Krim felt Yarnold was unqualified, and Yarnold thought Krim was arrogant. Their mutual animosity would have disastrous consequences for “Dark Alliance.”
As Webb later wrote in his book, Garcia and Yarnold were amazed with his discoveries. “Yarnold read the project memo, shook his head and grinned,” Webb wrote. “This is one hell of a story,’ he said. “How soon do you think you can complete it?’ ” Webb asked for some time to travel to Central America to do further reporting, and said he would start writing as soon as he got back. Yarnold approved the trip.
Webb arranged to work in Nicaragua with Georg Hodel, a Swiss journalist and friend of Martha Honey who had more than a decade of reporting experience in Central America. Webb’s collaboration with Hodel, and the latter’s involvement with the Christic Institute lawsuit as an investigator hired by Honey and Avirgan, would later be cited by Webb’s critics as evidence that “Dark Alliance” was simply a recycling of a decade-old conspiracy theory. With Hodel’s help, Webb flew to Managua hoping to interview Meneses, who had been arrested there four years earlier for smuggling 750 kilos of cocaine into the country.
Unlike Blandon, Meneses was more than happy to talk. He proudly recalled his work on behalf of the contras. He said he agreed to help raise money for the rebels in 1982 or 1983, after meeting with Enrique Bermudez, Somoza’s former military attaché, at a contra encampment in the Honduran jungle. At the time, Bermudez was a CIA asset, the agency’s hand-picked leader of the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense, or FDN, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the largest and best-organized faction of the contras. His right hand man, Ricardo Lau, a former intelligence officer for Somoza’s national guard, had ties to Salvadoran death squad founder Roberto D’Aubuisson, a former army major suspected in the 1980 slaying of Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero.
Webb had obtained a photograph showing Meneses with CIA asset and contra leader Adolfo Calero at a contra fundraising event in San Francisco. In Honduras, Meneses claimed, Bermudez appointed him chief of “intelligence and security” for the FDN in California. “Nobody [from California] would join the Contra forces down there without my knowledge and approval,” he said. Meneses also reminisced about his homes in Northern California, and how he owned restaurants, bars, car lots, and factories throughout the Bay Area. “I even drove my own cars, registered in my name,” he said.
Webb was amazed. He had DEA records showing that the U.S. government had implicated Meneses in forty-five separate investigations since 1974, but Meneses had been doing business there and living the high life—without a hitch. He had never spent a day in a U.S. prison or even been arrested. Webb later wrote that a Customs agent who had investigated Meneses in 1980 before being transferred to another city discovered that Meneses was still in business when he was reassigned to San Francisco years later. “I was sitting in some meetings and here’s Meneses’ name again,” the agent told Webb. “And I can remember thinking, ‘Holy cow, is this guy still around?’ ”
It seemed clear to Webb that Meneses had been enjoying a charmed life inside the U.S.—or maybe the lack of success in prosecuting him had more to do with Meneses’ ties to the contras. During Meneses’ 1992 trial in Nicaragua, though, his involvement with the anti-Sandinista rebels had come back to haunt him. Enrique Miranda, a former Nicaraguan military intelligence officer who had been Meneses’ emissary to the cocaine cartel of Bogota, Colombia, had pleaded guilty to drug charges and agreed to cooperate against Meneses in exchange for a reduced sentence.
In a written statement to the jury, Miranda had accused Meneses of funding the contras with cocaine proceeds. “This operation, as Norwin told me, was executed with the collaboration of high-ranking Salvadoran military personnel,” Miranda claimed. “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 refused to answer Miranda’s allegations when Webb interviewed him. And when Webb and Hodel requested an interview with Miranda, they learned that Miranda had vanished while out on a weekend furlough. Stranger still, his jailers hadn’t bothered rep
orting his absence until Webb showed up at the jail asking to see him.
***
SUCH SETBACKS DIDN’T dampen Webb’s enthusiasm. Although he wanted his story to be published during Ross’ trial in Los Angeles, he quickly realized that having Blandon on the witness stand would provide him with a unique opportunity as an investigative journalist. Blandon would not only have to answer questions, he would be under oath. So Webb provided Ross’ defense attorney, Alan Fenster, a series of questions aimed at getting Blandon to reveal as much as possible about his ties to the CIA, his role in contra fundraising efforts, his relationship to Meneses, and the extent of his drug dealing during the 1980s. While unorthodox, Webb’s opportunistic strategy was heartily endorsed by his editors. They saw it as exactly the kind of moxie required to get to the truth—perhaps the only way to force a recalcitrant conspirator like Blandon to fess up to his important role in the story.
Blandon arrived in the courtroom wearing a dark suit and aviator sunglasses. L. J. O’Neil, the deputy U.S. attorney prosecuting Ross—and who had previously sent Blandon to prison—did everything he could to block Fenster from grilling Blandon about his relationship to the CIA or Meneses, but the judge allowed many of the questions to go forward. On the witness stand, Blandon said he met Meneses through another contra activist, an old college classmate, who told him to pick Meneses up at the airport in Los Angeles.
“I picked him up, and he started telling me that we had to [raise] some money and send [it] to Honduras,” Blandon testified. He acknowledged being at the meeting where Meneses and Enrique Bermudez discussed contra fundraising efforts. “There is a saying that the ends justify the means,” Blandon testified. “And that’s what Mr. Bermudez told us in Honduras, okay? So we started raising money for the contra revolution.”
Upon arriving back in San Francisco, Blandon said, Meneses taught him everything he knew about the cocaine business and gave him two kilos of cocaine, the names of a few customers in Los Angeles, and a one-way ticket south. “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. . . . In those days, two keys was too heavy.”
But Blandon was more of a skilled marketer than he might have preferred to admit under oath. He quickly realized the easiest way to sell large quantities of cocaine was to find someone else to sell it for him. In 1982 or 1983—Blandon wasn’t exactly sure—he found that person in “Freeway” Ricky Ross. Through middlemen, the two had already been doing business, and after Blandon realized Ross’ potential as a salesperson, they worked closely together for the next several years. Things ran smoothly until October 27, 1986, when agents from the FBI, the IRS, local police, and the Los Angeles County sheriff raided more than a dozen locations connected to Blandon’s drug operation. Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request Webb filed with the National Archives for records from Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s 1987 Iran contra report, he had obtained a 1986 FBI report about the raid.
A search warrant affidavit from the raid showed that L.A. County Sheriff’s Department knew Blandon’s activities were connected to the CIA-backed civil war in Nicaragua. “Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in Southern California,” it stated. “The monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through . . . a chain of banks in Florida . . . From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”
Blandon, his wife, and several of their Nicaraguan associates, were arrested on drug and weapons charges. Not arrested that day was Ronald Lister, a retired Laguna Beach police detective who ran a security company in Newport Beach and who had met Blandon through right-wing contra support circles in Los Angeles. As Blandon would testify in Ross’ trial, Lister had supplied him with weapons and advanced security equipment such as police scanners, which Blandon then sold to Ross and other drug dealers.
But when deputies searched Lister’s home, they didn’t find any drugs. According to a police report from the raid, Lister claimed he knew his house was being watched and told deputies he worked for the CIA. Declaring that the agency wouldn’t be happy about the cops harassing him, Lister even picked up the telephone and threatened to call his contact at the agency, a man named Scott Weekly. An FBI report Webb had obtained showed that Blandon’s attorney, Bradley Brunon, had called the Sheriff’s Department and claimed that the CIA had “winked” at Blandon’s activities.
In a 1996 interview, Brunon told Webb that he met Lister shortly after Blandon was arrested in the 1986 raid. Lister, Brunon said, “scared him,” and he wasn’t sure whether Lister was investigating Blandon or working with him. “It was just like the hair on the back of your neck goes up,” Brunon said. “I never knew what his true role was. I mean he covertly insinuated that he was CIA. At least, if not a sworn agent, whatever the hell they do to get to become employees—some sort of operative.”
Webb tracked down Lister’s former boss, Neil Purcell, the former chief of the Laguna Beach police department, a cop who had achieved fame decades earlier for arresting Timothy Leary for pot possession. “The man in my opinion, is a lying, conniving, manipulative person who likes to play with people’s minds,” Purcell said of Lister. “He’s very evasive and loves living on the edge. He’s the biggest bullshitter that has ever been placed on this earth.”
Purcell told Webb that Lister had left police work to provide security services to rich Iranians. Another former Laguna Beach police officer, Christopher Moore, claimed that Lister had hired him in 1982 and that he had traveled to El Salvador with Lister to meet with a potential client: Roberto D’Aubuisson, then the leader of the country’s right-wing death squads. “That was probably the highlight of my life at that point,” Moore told Webb. “There I was, a reserve officer who’d only been in the country for a couple of days, and I was sitting in this office in downtown San Salvador across the desk from the man who ran the death squads. He had a gun lying on the top of his desk and had these filing cabinets pushed up against the windows of the office so nobody could shoot through them.”
To Webb, Lister’s connection to Blandon was like the proverbial “smoking gun,” suggesting CIA involvement in the drug ring. He already had Blandon testifying that shortly after meeting with CIA asset Enrique Bermudez in Honduras, he had been schooled in drug trafficking by Norwin Meneses, the “king of cocaine” in Nicaragua. Webb knew that Blandon had for years supplied coke to Ross, the largest crack dealer in L.A. history. Now, Webb had evidence that with the help of his partner Lister, Blandon had even been selling weapons and anti-surveillance gear to South Central drug dealers.
The National Archives also gave Webb a 1987 FBI report containing interviews with Douglas Ainsworth, a San Francisco contra supporter who told agents that Meneses and Bermudez were dealing weapons and drugs. Webb located Ainsworth, and tried to get him to talk. “You’re bringing up a very old nightmare here,” Ainsworth told Webb in an interview cited in his book. “You have no idea what you’re touching on here, Gary. No idea at all.”
Webb asked Ainsworth what he meant. “I almost got killed,” Ainsworth said. “I had friends in Central America who were killed. There was a Mexican reporter who was looking into one end of this, and he wound up dead.” Webb insisted that if Blandon and Meneses were selling drugs in L.A., it was his job to uncover it. As Webb tells it, Ainsworth laughed. “Meneses was selling it all over the country!” he exclaimed. “It wasn’t just L.A. It was national. And he was totally protected.”
It all seemed like the twisted plot of a Hollywood movie or a sensational episode of Miami Vice. But to Webb, it was simple: he had just uncovered the final link in the CIA-contra-cocaine connection—where the drugs ended up once they reached U.S. soil—a crucial piece of the puzzle that had eluded every journalist and government prosecutor before him. “It was all out in the open now,” Webb later wrote. “The [cont
ras] had sold drugs to American citizens—mainly black Americans—and the CIA was on the hook for it: a CIA agent had given the goddamned order.”
Webb thought back to all the “lies” that had been reported in the mainstream media suggesting that the CIA-drug connection was just a conspiracy theory. “All the bullshit that had been piled on the reporters, cops, and congressional investigators who’d tried to do an honest job and bring light into the dark swamp where covert operators and criminals colluded” had failed to stop him. “There was no denying it anymore,” Webb concluded. “Now I was ready to write.”
In a year of painstaking research, Webb had created history by uncovering the first direct evidence—documented by sworn testimony and law enforcement records—of Nicaraguan contra sympathizers selling cocaine on the streets of America to raise money for their CIA-backed cause. He had eyewitness testimony that Bermudez, a paid CIA asset, had advance knowledge of that activity, and he had uncovered compelling circumstantial evidence that the agency had not only failed to intervene, but had possibly even protected the drug ring’s operations.
But in chasing after the story, Webb had taken a perilous turn towards risking his reputation on a story that rested heavily on the allegations of a trio of convicted felons. Webb aimed to expose the elusive, long sought after connection between the CIA, the contras, and cocaine, a dangerous career move that had proven costly to every journalist who had gone before him. Reporters like Bob Parry and sources like contra supporter Ainsworth had tried to warn him about his story’s radioactive history. “But Gary would never listen to a warning in his life,” says Webb’s high school friend Greg Wolf. “He was the perfect guy to write this story.”
SIX
Trial and Error
THE POWERFUL AND perennially award-winning Los Angeles Times had always overshadowed The San Jose Mercury News, California’s second largest newspaper. Although it had several bureaus around the country and a reputation for solid investigative work, the paper had won only two Pulitzer prizes, one for Pete Carey’s coverage of the 1986 downfall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and one for the paper’s team reporting on the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
