Posts Tagged ‘Gary Webb’

Original Source Interviews: George Jung, ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross, Gary Webb, Dr Milton Friedman
Monday, November 8th, 2010

Finally I’ve had time to start uploading interviews. The first four – George Jung, Ricky Ross, Gary Webb and Milton Friedman, are now available in their entirety under ’Source Material’.

I’ll be interested to see if anyone actually wants to read them (some interviews are 20 or more pages long). It seems a great shame to me that writers and journalists spend hours and hours interviewing people, then use a quote or two and throw away – or lose – the rest. I suspect that a lot of this stuff might be of interest to researchers somewhere down the line, as well as to ordinary readers who want to learn more about people they’ve heard about.  Quite apart from the fact that some of the interviewees have since passed away, it’s always more informative to read the sources talking in their own words: Ricky Ross on how he transformed the crack cocaine scene in South Central LA is gripping, I think. Gary Webb – who first aired allegations that the CIA had looked the other way while cocaine shipments were moved into the US – is almost entirely convincing. His story becomes all the more poignant when we learn what happened next: Webb committed suicide not long after I interviewed him.

More interviews are to come – possibly lots more, if anyone wants them. If there really is interest, I’ll think about posting the original recordings of the interviews so you can hear the questions and the answers. If you have any particular source interviews you would like to read, drop me a line and I’ll try and fast-track them.

Please note, however: it took me hundreds and hundreds of hours to arrange, conduct, and type up these interviews. Do feel free to read them and use them for research. But if you want to copy them or quote from them, I’d appreciate advance warning – and a citation in whatever you’re writing.

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Posted in Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography, News | No Comments »

Interview with Gary Webb
Friday, November 5th, 2010

Context: Research for Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography
Location: San Francisco, California
Date: Fri 30 June, 2000
Interviewee: Gary Webb

Gary Webb was the investigative reporter who first aired allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been complicit in the trafficking of cocaine into the United States as part of its clandestine effort to supply the Contra armies in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Webb’s reporting linked for the first time suspicions that the Agency had employed cocaine traffickers in its supply operations – with a concrete explanation of what all this meant on the ground in the US: the explosion of crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles.

For his efforts, Webb was publicly vilified and eventually lost his job. The story was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

Since then, a number of detractors have climbed down and admitted that the majority of what he wrote was actually correct. In some cases, the truth was worse than he reported.

Public vindication came too late. On December 10, 2004 – unable to find a worthwhile job as an investigative reporter after the wholesale discrediting of his work – Webb committed suicide. That he was found with two bullets in his head provided further fuel for conspiracy theorists, who appear to believe that he was assassinated.

This interview took place in a coffee shop in San Francisco.

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

I started working in 1978 as a reported for a daily newspaper in Kentucky. I’m originally from California but my father was in the Marine Corps so we moved around all over the place and he retired in Indiana. And I did college newspapers when I was in college and I was in College in Kentucky and I got a job at the local newspaper out of school in ’78. Worked there for five years, then I worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in Cleveland for 5 yrs. And I worked for the Mercury News for 9 years.

Mercury News is not a huge newspaper. It’s is what they call a 2nd Tier in terms of circulation – it’s got a circulation of about 300,000 and it’s fairly progressive: one of the Pulitzers they won for Ferdinand Marcos looting his country. They have bureaux in Mexico City, in Tokyo, Illinois – pretty much all over. It had a great reputation as a reporters’ paper. If you filed a story, no matter what it was, you could go off and do it and they’d give you the money and the time to do it – and that’s why I went to work there in the first place. The Paper in Ohio was twice the size but it wasn’t as good a paper. Mercury had a reputation for invest reporting

I did a 17 part series on organised crime in the coal industry. Investigative reporting of state government. In Cleveland I investigated…so basically I was either their lone investigative reporter or one of a team of investigative reporters. When the Mercury News came and asked me to come and work out here they warned someone to come out here and investigate state legislature and state politics and so on.

So you had a history of investigative digging?

Oh yeah – that’s all I’ve ever done since I started. The first editor I ever had when I started was an investigative reporter and once he’d showed me how to do that I never wanted to do anything else because it’s fascinating, it’s a lot of fun. So…that’s pretty much what I did exclusively. I was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize at the Mercury in 1981…

How did you get involved with all this CIA/cocaine stuff in the first place?

In 1993/94 I started writing about the War on Drugs. I got interested in it and especially interested in covering it as if it was a war rather than some social propaganda or some feel-good stuff. I looked at it as a war correspondent might, covering the effect it was having on the American public. I was writing stories about drug testing and the sort of losses of civil liberties that the drug war is causing. I wrote a series about asset forfeiture – the programme that, if they think you are a drug dealer they take you bank account and your house and you have to prove that you’re not, essentially. So I did a series on that and they changed the law as a result. Within two weeks. The programme was so bad that they were shamed into doing something about it. So after that I started working pretty much exclusively on drug stories and I had done a story about an inmate in ***** who had challenged the federal asset forfeiture programme and was very close to winning and getting himself and a bunch of other inmates out of jail or getting their property back, or both.

This woman in Oakland read it and called me and told me that her boyfriend was in that situation and he was a drug trafficker and he was in prison and he was awaiting trial for cocaine trafficking. And she wanted to talk to me about asset forfeiture stuff. I had done a number of stories on it and I wasn’t all that interested and she said that this witness against him in the case was a former CIA operative that used to sell cocaine for the Contras. And at that point I remembered something about that in the ’80s when the first stories came out about the Contras allegedly dealing cocaine but it was always sort of a myth to me. I didn’t think that anything had ever been proven.

I didn’t believe most of the CIA stories. People who had come to me over the years and tried to tell me about CIA stories always turned out to be nuts. Or paranoiacs or something. So I never did them. I had never done a single CIA story. And it was sort of out of my area. I did state issues.

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Posted in Cocaine - Source Material, Source Material | 1 Comment »

Interview with ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross
Thursday, November 4th, 2010

Context: Research for Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography
Location: Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, California
Date: Fri 30 June, 2000
Interviewee: ‘Freeway’ Rick Ross

‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross. Alleged by some to be the inventor of crack cocaine – and the man most blamed for the explosion of the drug in the 1980s in California.

Ross explains how he first came to be involved in the cocaine trade, and how he created a narcotics empire that ended up generating millions of dollars a week. He also discusses his role in the CIA/Contra cocaine trafficking allegations (his main cocaine supplier was Danilo Blandon – who lay at the root of journalist Gary Webb’s now-infamous allegations). He then talks – extremely coherently, I think – about drug legislation in the United States, and what might be done to solve the problem of illicit drug use. One of the smartest people I have ever met in my life. Policymakers who want to understand why the ‘War on Drugs’ is not being won would do well to ask Ross.

The interview took place in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, California.

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

Your background?

I was as born in East Texas. Small town, in the country. Lot of trees. My mom used to pick cotton. My dad, too. They both were athletes, I found out later. My mom a basketball player, my dad a football player. Church-going people, always tried to do the right thing. My father says ‘yes sir’ to white people. In Texas that’s like a tradition they have down there… ‘Yes sir, yes ma’am’, like that type of respect. That’s my early roots. We moved to LA when I was three, maybe four years old. I can barely remember. I can remember the bus trip from Texas with my mom.

Big family?

No, we have one brother, one sister. I have three adopted brothers and sisters but they were my cousins. Their mother had passed, so they moved in with us when I was about 7 or 8 years old. So they are just like my brothers. Matter of fact, they would be even closer to me than my brothers because they were younger than me so I was kind of like the boss. You know, they followed me around. You could say I have six – but biological bros and sisters, I only have two.

School?

School wasn’t for me. It wasn’t something that I saw I could use. I’m looking for stuff I can use. And if I can’t use it, I don’t want it. So school – now that I look back on it, nobody ever explained school to me. They never showed me why I should learn how to read, why I should learn how to write. Why I should learn mathematics. I got lucky that when I was young somebody taught me mathematics well, a friend of the family. She used to sit down with me, just go over my times tables and addition – I was doing that at 5 or 6 years old. And I was lucky because I remembered it all. But when it came to reading and writing, I didn’t never catch on. None of the teachers ever sat me down and put me through what needed to be done to get it right. So school was just – something that I had to do because my mother made me. But I really didn’t want to go to school.

What did you hope to be when you were young?

Around ten I thought about maybe being a fireman or a pilot. I had those types of – policeman – I had those types of wants at that time. But as I started to grow up, gangs started coming up, Crips started coming up in our neighbourhood and I started wanting to be a Crip at around 12 years old. I didn’t want to be a fireman no more. I wanted to be like the older boys. Wanted to play football and basketball.

Crips?

It’s a gang. A group of guys and they hang out. Back then they used to play football, basketball against other neighbourhoods. It just so happened that my neighbourhood was Crip but there was other neighbourhoods that was Bloods and they would come to the park and – the park was right by my house – and they would play. I thought that was exciting because they was tough, tough guys, you know?

Illegality?

At this time it wasn’t – it started taking on like different type of things like they started fighting each other and shooting at each other later. But it originally started off like different streets playing football against each other – kind of like a little rivalry. I remember the first time they had a fight, in the park, the Crips and the Bloods and somebody got killed. And the rivalry just kept escalating and boom, it was all over. But it wasn’t like that when it started out. That was never meant to be.

You got into tennis quite young?

That happened around 13, 14. We was up at the park and these guys had these baskets of balls out. So we was on roller skates, 15 or 20 of us and we was skating around the nets, we was playing tag. So the guy calls us over and he says ‘I bet you can’t hit this ball over the net. I bet you 50 cents’ – a quarter, something like that. So when he said that everybody kicked their skates off. So we started hitting the balls and …finally somebody won the prize, and after that we were just hitting balls over the fence, hitting balls at each other, and a couple of guys stuck with it. They started going every day. I didn’t go every day, not at that time. I was still playing football and basketball. And they started doing really well. And I was like ‘I can outrun him, I can out-jump him’ but he started going to tournaments, winning prizes and coming back with Adidas sweatshirts and tennis shoes. And I was like ‘Man, they given you all that?’ and he was like ‘Yeah, we be getting all of this and we get to eat and everything.’ And I was like ‘I’m gonna start playing tennis, too.’ So then I started. I got pretty good at it. In high school in my last year I was number one or two in the team. I had a couple of good wins. I could have been not bad if I’d have knew what I know now, how to really work at it. A lot of the black pros, you know, when they went on the circuit they would come back and they liked to work out with me.

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Posted in Cocaine - Source Material, Source Material | 1 Comment »