by Nick Schou
The book received no television coverage, with the exception of C-SPAN, which invited Webb to answer phone calls from viewers, most of whom had little to say about Dark Alliance, and a lot to say about whatever they had read in the newspaper that morning. When one caller asked Webb what he thought of a story talking about a then-unknown Saudi dissident named Osama bin Laden, who had just declared war on the United States, Webb said it appeared bin Laden was angry because the U.S. had put troops on Saudi soil during the Persian Gulf war. “It sounds like just another example of our policies coming back to haunt us,” he said.
The Mercury News didn’t bother to review the book, the New York Times concluded that Webb still hadn’t done enough to verify his allegations with CIA insiders, while the LA Times dismissed it as “densely researched, passionately argued, [and] acronym-laden.” The Baltimore Sun gave a much more favorable review, and even the Washington Post grudgingly congratulated Webb for forcing the CIA to shed light on its “sleazy past.”
“That’s as close to an apology as Webb ever received” from the papers that had helped end his career, says publisher Dan Simon. But the accolades Webb received for his book from liberal fans didn’t provide him with much solace. “Gary went from being a hero of the establishment to being vilified by that club to being a hero of the American left,” he says. “Getting awards didn’t matter to Gary. He appreciated it but it didn’t comfort him at all, because they weren’t his people.”
Mixed reviews didn’t keep people from buying the book. According to publisher Dan Simon, Dark Alliance wasn’t a best seller, but enjoyed strong sales—which continue today, eight years later—thanks to Webb’s notoriety. On his book tour, crowds filled bookstores from San Francisco and Los Angeles to New York and Washington, D.C., as Webb traveled around the country giving speeches and signing autographs. With his newfound status as an exiled reporter, progressive audiences hailed Webb as a hero. Not all audiences were pleased with what he had to say, however. At the Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica, some members in the audience were shocked when Webb began his speech by explaining that he never believed the CIA had conspired to flood America’s inner cities with crack cocaine.
One serious-looking African-American woman interrupted his speech to announce that Webb had his facts wrong. “The police invented crack,” she said, her arms folded defiantly. “No, they didn’t,” Webb responded, looking down at his notes, struggling to regain his stream of thought. “What happened was this drug ring, which the CIA has now admitted it protected, arrived in South-Central at a particularly bad time, in 1982,” he said. “It hooked up with the gangs right when people in South-Central were learning how to turn powder cocaine into crack.”
“Don’t try to tell us that!” the woman responded, her voice rising in frustration. “The police invented that drug.” She then claimed that undercover police informants had broken into her house and fed her intravenous drugs “so they can turn me into another statistic.”
Like former CIA Director John Deutch, who defended his agency to a similarly irate crowd in South Central shortly after Webb’s story appeared, Webb did his best to push through with his speech. But the more he talked, the angrier people got. It wasn’t necessarily that anyone disagreed with what Webb was saying. It was more the fact that many in the audience hadn’t arrived to hear Webb talk about the CIA, but to bury the spy agency with their own words.
“I think we all appreciate what you’ve done, but we just want you to tell the whole truth about the CIA,” one of the audience’s white members helpfully explained, stopping Webb’s speech to launch into a diatribe about the agency’s genocidal plot to wipe out black America. The audience began screaming and cheering in unison—not at the man’s remark, but because U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters had arrived just in time for the end of Webb’s speech. Waters strode straight up to the podium and embraced Webb. In a single hug, the rage of decades of distrust between African Americans and the CIA, which seemed ready to devour even Webb just moments earlier, mercifully subsided.
BACK IN CALIFORNIA, Sue was paying the telephone bill one afternoon when she noticed an expensive long-distance call that Webb had made late one night from his hotel room on the East Coast to someone in the Bay Area. The call had lasted for more than an hour. When Webb returned, Sue confronted him about the mysterious phone call, and he admitted he was having an affair with a woman—a former source he had met while researching “Dark Alliance.” “I wasn’t sure what to do,” Sue says. “We had three kids and I didn’t ever want to get a divorce.”
Sue didn’t kick her husband out of the house. When Webb offered to break off the relationship, she suggested they try couple’s counseling. Sitting in a therapist’s office, Webb decided to come clean. He told Sue that the affair wasn’t his first. His first fling had been while he still worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It had happened just as Webb received an offer to move to California and work at the Mercury News; the woman had called him at home. It terrified him so much he decided to move to California.
In therapy, Webb confessed that the phone call played a critical role in his decision to leave the Plain Dealer. “That’s why we moved here,” Sue says. “He didn’t want to have another affair. But when we moved to California, he made a vow that he would change. And he did change. I know he was faithful after we moved. It was only after he wrote his book when everything fell apart.”
According to Sue, it wasn’t the first time her husband had raised the subject of infidelity. Two decades earlier, when Webb was still at the Kentucky Post, he had told Sue that he was disturbed by a friendship he was having with another woman. He thought it might go somewhere, he said. He was meeting her for lunch regularly, talking to her on the phone almost every day. Webb’s parents had recently divorced because of his father’s infidelity, and Webb had promised himself he’d never cheat on his wife. “Gary said, ‘I am telling you this because it’s scaring me,’ Sue recalls. “That devastated me. And in therapy, Gary said that was why he never told me about the other affairs, because he saw the effect it had on me.”
Therapy failed to hold the marriage together. One weekday morning in the spring of 1999, after a half year of therapy sessions, just after the kids had left for school, Sue became suspicious that her husband was having another affair. It happened halfway through a casual conversation, when Webb mentioned the name of a woman he knew at work. Sue grabbed the opportunity and demanded to know if he was sleeping with the woman. Webb knew he’d been caught and didn’t deny it.
Sue was speechless. She had remained by her husband’s side during the toughest years of his career, taking care of the children while he was away from home chasing after his big story, and again after his own newspaper had exiled him to Cupertino. The months he spent writing his book hadn’t been easy, either. “He was working all the time, but telling me that pretty soon, it was all going to be over, and everything was going to be fine again. I was looking forward to that, and then I find out he was having an affair, and I was furious.”
The couple sat on the couch in their living room waiting for their kids to get back from school so they could tell them their father was leaving that night. Webb didn’t look back. He moved into an apartment, and according to his high school friend Greg Wolf, quickly began dating a series of women. None of the relationships lasted very long. Webb had also begun taking anti-depressant medication and was smoking pot on a daily basis.
By then, Webb had lost interest in his job at the California State Legislature. It had started off well enough. His first assignment, for the legislature’s joint audit committee, was to investigate racial profiling by the California Highway Patrol (CHP). Working from reports on traffic stops and interviews with dozens of officers, he turned in a report showing that minority drivers were far more likely than whites to be pulled over, while the overwhelming majority of searches for drugs and weapons turned up nothing.
Webb’s findings raced serious questions about the justificati
on used to make such stops. CHP records showed that once they stopped vehicles on the freeway, officers could demand to search vehicles for drugs based on the presence of anything from fast food wrappers to out-of-state license plates. Webb also uncovered evidence that certain CHP officers were providing seminars on racial profiling to patrolmen throughout the state.
But according to Webb’s colleague, Tom Dresslar, now a spokesman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, Antonio Villaraigosa, then speaker of the California Assembly and later mayor of Los Angeles, prevented the report from being released. “The whole thing was true,” Dresslar says. “But this report was embarrassing to the CHP, so Villaraigosa made up some excuse about it not being ready for publication and killed it.”
Mike Madigan, a private investigator in Orange County who also runs an online journal about police corruption, www.twistedbadge.com, met Webb at a 1998 journalism conference and kept in touch with him over the years, trying to convince him to become a private investigator. While Webb was working on CHP report, Madigan had been hired by a lawyer to conduct surveillance on CHP officers in Needles, California, a desert town on Interstate 40 halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Madigan and his partner witnessed highway patrolmen armed with binoculars as they routinely pulled over minorities suspected of transporting drugs.
“We used to watch these officers looking for cars that had deodorizers, or that looked like they were carrying a heavy load, or that had a female with a male of a different ethnic background,” Madigan says. “They would pull them over for any reason and search the cars.” Madigan couldn’t wait for Webb to release his report. “It was going to tell the truth about what was going on,” he says. “The CHP was sanctioning a program that was educating its officers on how to violate the rights of minorities without getting caught. The CHP expected Gary to write the report they way they saw things, but he didn’t. As soon as he filed that report, they took his name off his door.”
On April 1, 1999, Webb published the results of his findings in a lengthy article for Esquire magazine entitled “DWB,” a slang term among minority motorists that stands for “Driving While Black.” A year earlier, Esquire had published “The Pariah,” a haunting feature story about the “Dark Alliance” controversy by author Charles Bowden. After the CHP fiasco, Webb was transferred to the Office of Majority Services, where his talents were wasted. “That’s where they put the hacks who really have nothing to contribute except working on political campaigns,” Dresslar says. “They gave him all these bullshit political hack jobs, and he didn’t want to do them. I guess his attendance record wasn’t good.”
Anita Webb, who then lived in Los Alamitos, recalled her son calling her from Long Beach, where he had been sent to canvas on behalf of a local Democratic candidate. “He was furious about that,” she says. “He called me up and says, ‘I’m staying her at this hotel with this other guy and I have to share a room.” Anita invited her son to stay at her condominium until he returned to Sacramento. “He was very morose at the time,” she says. “He was upset because he had to do this legwork for the Democratic Party. And you couldn’t talk to him about it. He didn’t want to elaborate. Gary was just closing himself off.”
Ian Webb says his father’s occasional bouts of depression never seemed chronic until he worked at the legislature. “It wasn’t anything he really wanted to do,” he says. “Sometimes I’d be talking to him on the phone and he sounded just melancholy. He’d talk in this monotone voice. And he’d never really go into work because they didn’t give him anything to do. That’s when he really got into motorcycles, because he would always have a lot of free time.”
Ian and his father often rode together. He says the times he spent riding with his dad were the happiest experiences they had shared since he was in junior high school, when Webb coached Ian’s hockey team. “We’d ride into the mountains and make a day trip out of it,” he says. “We’d find a place to eat. It was a great way to relieve stress.” Ian noticed that, over time, his father’s reflexes weren’t quite as good, a possible effect of taking anti-depressants. In the winter, when the weather got too cold to ride, Webb would typically be in a sour mood. “I remember talking to him on the phone when there had been a long period of overcast days,” Ian says. “I said, ‘This really sucks.’ And he said, ‘Depressing is what it is.’ ”
When Greg Wolf’s mother died in 2000, Webb flew back to Indianapolis to attend the funeral. In the four years that had passed since Wolf last saw him on the eve of “Dark Alliance,” his friend had changed. Webb no longer seemed to have a sense of humor. “I don’t know if the fame got to him or what the hell happened,” Wolf says. “He just didn’t seem very empathetic. He just seemed lost.”
Webb’s divorce didn’t become final until September 2000. The day the paperwork cleared, Webb crashed his motorcycle when a young woman turned in front of him. Webb went flying into the street, but escaped with only minor injuries. He continued to date various women, but after a series of breakups, managed to reconcile with his ex-wife. The two began dating again. They got together on weekends to have dinner or see a movie, but kept the relationship secret from the kids to keep them from getting confused. Then Webb surprised Sue with two roundtrip tickets to Mexico. A photograph taken on their vacation reveals a smiling, suntanned couple apparently very much in love.
“It was beautiful,” Sue says. “That was one of the best vacations we ever had.” But the moment they arrived back in Sacramento, they were transported back to the reality of their divorce. Sue was still hurt by her husband’s infidelity. Although he professed his love for her, he expected her unconditional trust, and she wasn’t ready to give it. Sue suggested they take a break from each other and see what happened. “He said, ‘Okay, if that’s what you want to do,’ ” Sue says.
When Sue told her husband she wanted a break, that’s exactly what she meant—not that they’d never get back together, but that they take some time to figure out if they were truly ready to revive their marriage. Her answer came a few months later, when she learned that Webb had been involved in another motorcycle accident. While riding in the mountains with some friends near Reno, Nevada, he had skidded on loose gravel and lost control.
It was a hard fall that cracked Webb’s helmet. But he brushed himself off, got back on his bike, and rode on. On the ride back to California, however he passed out and went off the road into a meadow. As his bike sputtered nearby, Webb dangled from a barbed wire fence, unconscious and bleeding from a ruptured spleen from his earlier accident. He had had to be airlifted to a hospital. When Sue offered to go visit him, he acted nervous, telling her not to bother; it was too long a drive. She found out a few weeks later that he had already started dating a reporter he’d gotten to know at work.
According to Sue and her son Ian, Webb’s new girlfriend was a positive influence on his life. He seemed dedicated to her, and despite years of growing depression, appeared happy again. They moved in together, and Webb began showing more interest in his job. By now, Webb had been transferred back to the joint legislative audit committee to work with Dresslar, probing the state’s energy crisis. The two also investigated charges that the Oracle Corporation had received a no-bid contract award worth $95 million from former California Governor Gray Davis.
“He worked his ass off,” Dresslar says. The day he and Webb got the assignment, they stayed in the office until 4 AM doing research. Later, they interviewed all the witnesses to the awarding of the contract, wrote up a timeline, and provided the committee with a report that led to several Davis administration officials losing their jobs. “He was happy,” Dresslar says. “The job utilized the talents he had. You could tell he loved the work. It was like being a reporter, but you didn’t have to hand your stuff off to an editor. We had a blast.”
In late 2002 however, Dresslar accepted a job with California Attorney General Lockyer’s office when he came to the conclusion that the committee’s new leadership wasn’t serious about investigating
corruption. Webb kept his job, but went back to doing pointless grunt work for Democratic candidates at the Office of Majority Services. Occasionally, Dresslar would invite Webb out to grab a beer, but Webb always had an excuse not to go. Although Webb was still living under the same roof with his girlfriend, they were no longer dating, and Webb’s depression deepened to despair. She told Sue that simply being in the same room with him was too much for her to bear.
TWELVE
Withdrawal
DESPITE HIS SEEMING downward spiral, Webb enjoyed happier moments. In January 2003, he attended a journalism conference on the Isla de Mujeres, an island resort off the coast of Cancun, Mexico, which had been organized by Al Giordano, an expatriate American reporter. Giordano’s conference brought together young journalists from around Latin America interested in covering the war on drugs. (Giordano initially agreed to an interview, but only in writing; he failed to respond to subsequent emails.) Webb, who gave speeches about investigative reporting at the conference, was given a hero’s welcome, says Jeremy Bigwood, a freelance photographer who attended the conference and helped Webb coach the younger journalists on accessing government records.
“He was known as the ‘Marlboro Man’ because he smoked Marlboro Reds and looked like the Marlboro man in the poster,” Bigwood recalls. “Al was the first to call him that and it really took off.” Despite the presence of a large contingent of beautiful young South American female reporters who fawned over him, Webb behaved himself well, Bigwood says. “Al had gotten a lot more women than men at this conference, but I think Gary saw that people were looking up to him and he gave a really good impression. Everyone really liked him.”
Also at the conference was Adam Saytanides, a producer with National Public Radio’s Latino USA. Saytanides met Webb at the airport and rode to the conference with him, and quickly realized that Webb was going to be the highlight of the conference. “Gary was a fucking Pulitzer-prize winner and he couldn’t get a job in journalism.” he says. “Gary was kind of a stud, because he was an example of that crash and burn mentality: publishing these stories and going out in a blaze of glory.”
