Kill the Messenger (12 page)

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.

Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s was at the forefront of the digital revolution. Thanks to its proximity to the software headquarters of the world, the paper boasted unparalleled coverage of the computer industry and the most advanced Web site of any American newspaper. There was a feeling
among reporters working there that the
Mercury News
was perfectly positioned to start competing directly with much larger newspapers. All it needed was one more Pulitzer to seal the deal.

“There was no question that the paper was very anxious to make a mark,” says Bert Robinson, Webb's former colleague and now an assistant managing editor at the
Mercury News
. “People sort of felt that like the paper was really verging on moving into the upper tier.” Webb, he adds, was specifically hired to make that happen. “Gary was supposed to find big stories,” he says. “The paper was striving very hard to get better and attract more attention.”

“It was an exciting time,” says a former reporter who asked to remain anonymous. “This was definitely a newspaper on the make.” Nobody defined the sense of journalistic ambition and craving for collegial respectability at the
Mercury News
than Jerry Ceppos, the paper's bespectacled executive editor, who would become a central player in the controversy over “Dark Alliance.” A 1969 graduate of the University of Maryland, where he edited the college paper, Ceppos had risen quickly in journalism—perhaps too quickly. He held a series of editing jobs at the
Miami Herald
before joining the
Mercury News
in 1981 as an associate editor.

“Ceppos was a nice guy, but the joke was he just added commas to your stories,” the former staffer says. “And he was a big wine guy. If you had a story about wine, he would make sure it ran on the front page.” Ceppos has never spoken publicly about “Dark Alliance” since the scandal subsided and did not respond to interview requests.

Unlike Ceppos, Webb's boss,
Mercury News
state editor
Dawn Garcia, had extensive experience as an investigative reporter. She was also the paper's only female Latina editor, the former staffer says, which caused some resentment among the
Mercury News
' old guard of white male editors, who felt she was an “affirmative action hire.” Among reporters, though Garcia was well liked, especially for her skills in marketing hard news stories to other editors and guaranteeing them front-page treatment.

Besides Garcia, the only other editor at the paper directly involved in editing “Dark Alliance” was managing editor David Yarnold, who had almost no reporting experience and only the thinnest of resumes as an editor. A staff photographer, Yarnold had been identified early in his career at the
Mercury News
as having potential as a manager. He had been promoted to head of the paper's graphics department before rotating through several editing positions in preparation for his rise to the top tiers of decision-making. Yarnold, who failed to respond to several interview requests, was widely considered to be a ruthless competitor obsessed with attaching his name to whatever project would win the paper its next Pulitzer Prize.

The timing of Webb's discovery about the CIA, the contras, and the crack-cocaine explosion, his instinctive passion for the story, the relative lack of reporting experience among top editors like Yarnold, and the competitive, secrecy-oriented atmosphere in the newsroom, would have fateful consequences for “Dark Alliance.” Webb's editors had generously given him a year to report the story, and could now barely contain their excitement about publishing it. But the project remained under tight wraps.

“I was at an editors meeting where we were talking about projects,” the former staffer who requested anonymity recalls. “I'll never forget that meeting.” As editors outlined upcoming projects, Garcia hinted that Webb was working on a major exposé involving the CIA and drug trafficking in California. “I asked if this was going to win a Pulitzer,” he says. “Dawn just smiled.”

By then, Webb's former colleague at the Sacramento bureau, Bert Robinson, had become the
Mercury News
' government and politics editor after three years at the paper's Washington, D.C., bureau. “I remember knowing that he was working on the story, but I didn't know much about it,” he says. “It was kind of a secretive process internally, which is very typical of investigations. Reporters are just as suspicious of their colleagues as the people they're writing about.”

Jonathan Krim, the paper's assistant managing editor for projects, was supposed to be responsible for shepherding investigative stories. But because Yarnold wanted to handle the project himself and he didn't get along well with Krim, the latter editor played no role in editing Webb's story. Krim was regarded by writers as a tough and brilliant editor. But he lacked Yarnold's political skills and wasn't well liked by many reporters or fellow editors. “He and Yarnold were always at odds,” the former staffer says. “Jonathan is a smart guy. If he was involved in ‘Dark Alliance,' a lot of people thought all the problems that happened could have been avoided.”

“The idea that Yarnold was in charge of this story—that's a scary thought,” said another former reporter who asked not to be identified. The reporter recalled how Yarnold sparked a mini-revolt among reporters when he insisted that the
paper run a light feature about a children's cartoon show in place of a more serious story. “I don't recall what news story it was that was bumped down below the fold,” the reporter says. “But it got bumped in order to put a story on the front page about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When that happened, a bunch of reporters at one of the news meetings started chanting, ‘No More Turtles!' ”

Krim, now head of the
Washington Post
's online department, refused to discuss other editors including Yarnold, but confirmed he had no involvement in editing “Dark Alliance.” “At that time, my brief was to run the investigative team and to consult with other desks on their investigative work if they desired,” he says. “This project was held tightly under wraps. I knew of its existence, and knew vaguely the subject matter, but never saw any copy until it was published.”

As Gary Webb sat down to write “Dark Alliance,” he learned that “Freeway” Ricky Ross had been convicted of conspiring to sell cocaine—a third-strike offense that automatically carried a sentence of twenty-five years to life in prison. Alan Fenster's line of defense—that Danilo Blandon, the chief prosecution witness and his client's former supplier, had set up Ross—didn't sway the jury. Neither did Blandon's testimony about his ties to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras. The verdict didn't surprise Webb, but stirred him to write an exposé on Blandon that would reveal not only that Ross had been supplied by a Nicaraguan cocaine ring with ties to the CIA and the contras, but also say something damning about the U.S. war on drugs.

“I became convinced that the whole war on drugs, fifty years from now, we're going to look back on it like we look
back on the McCarthy era, and say, ‘How the fuck did we ever let this stuff get so out of hand?' ” Webb told author Charles Bowden in 1998. “How come nobody stood up and said this is bullshit? I thought I had an obligation because I had the power at that point to tell people this is fucked up, to tell them ‘Don't believe what you are being told about this war on drugs because it's a lie.' I didn't want to be one of those guys fifty years from now and people said, ‘Why didn't you ever write anything?' ”

In his first draft of “Dark Alliance,” Webb laid out his story as a case study of the hypocrisy of the drug war, beginning it in the early 1980s with Blandon's involvement in the emergence of L.A.'s crack market and concluding it a decade later with Blandon's transformation from drug merchant to government informer and the passage of the anti-crack laws that were then packing the prisons with thousands of young black dealers. In April, Webb finished the drafts—roughly 12,000 words long—and sent them up to his editor, Dawn Garcia. “They were like nothing I had ever written before, and probably unlike anything my editors had ever grappled with either: a tale spanning more than a decade—the contra war and the crack explosion,” he wrote. Those events, Webb acknowledged, were “seemingly unconnected social phenomena,” but his story would prove they “were actually intertwined, thanks largely to government meddling.”

Webb's original draft highlighted the CIA's involvement in the drug ring, but didn't assert that the agency had conspired with Blandon or Meneses, but rather that it knew about their activities. In his 1998 book, Webb wrote that he “never believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA
conspiracy behind the crack plague. Indeed the more I learned about the agency, the more certain of that I became. The CIA couldn't even mine a harbor without getting its trench coat stuck in its fly.”

Rather than a CIA conspiracy to flood the streets of South Central Los Angeles with crack, Webb stated in his book
Dark Alliance
that what transpired was “a horrible accident of history” abetted by bad timing. “The contras just happened to pick the worst possible time ever to begin peddling cheap cocaine in black neighborhoods—unbridled criminal stupidity, cloaked in a blanket of national security,” he wrote.

But it was clear from the beginning that Webb's editors were understandably more interested in the CIA's role in the story than the human interest angle focusing on Blandon's conversion from cocaine wholesaler to paid DEA informant, and his ultimate betrayal of Ross. When Garcia read the series, Webb recalled, she told him the story was too long. Webb had written the series in four parts, each installment running from between 2,400 to 3,200 words. “For a major metropolitan daily, that's not a lot of space,” Webb wrote. “For the
Mercury
, though, it was as if I'd asked for the moon, a raise, a shower in my office, and an executive parking place all at the same time.”

Garcia says her first reaction to Webb's draft was that it contained some amazing reporting. “Like most projects of its size, it needed a lot of editing,” she says. “Plus, this series got complicated fast: it had dozens of players, referred to multiple documents and court cases and described events spanning decades and countries. It was the beginning of
months of editing . . . I was trying hard to make the series not only bulletproof but understandable.”

Besides editing “Dark Alliance,” Garcia had other office pressures to contend with. She had been recently promoted from state editor to city editor, a much more demanding job that put her in charge of about forty reporters and editors and required her to handle several long-term story projects at once. Because the
Mercury News
hadn't filled her old position, Garcia had to juggle both jobs while also doing her best to edit “Dark Alliance.” “To find time to edit drafts of Gary's project and do my new city editor job, I squeezed in time on either ends of my work day,” Garcia says. “I came into work some days at 6 A.M. and stayed long after everyone had left. I thought if I just worked hard enough, everything was going to be fine.”

When Garcia told Webb the story had to be cut substantially and run in three parts, Webb characteristically bristled at the notion. “I can't do it in less than four parts,” he protested. Webb argued that cutting it would be a journalistic disaster. “The problem was that the believability of the story hinged on the weight of the evidence,” he wrote. “Every fact that was cut would make the story appear more speculative than it really was.”

With Garcia running interference for him with Yarnold, Webb haggled over the story's length for the next several weeks. Yarnold stuck to his guns: the story would have to run in three parts. So Webb combined the second and third parts into one long section and sent it back to Garcia—with predictable results. “This second part is kind of long,” Webb claimed Garcia told him. “We need to cut it.”

After more weeks of editorial jiu-jitsu, Webb announced that he could find nothing else to cut from the story without destroying it. Garcia finally relented, telling Webb he could repackage the story in four parts. But when he turned in a new draft, Garcia told him that Yarnold believed the story read too much like a feature—he wanted the first section to focus on the CIA and the contras and their ties to Blandon's drug ring. “The reason it's got a feature lead is because the series is a feature,” Webb argued. “It's about the three men who started the L.A. crack market. That's the story I want to tell. If we turn this thing into a contra cocaine story, everyone is going to say, ‘Oh that's old news.' ”

But there was no dissuading Yarnold or Garcia. “Yarnold and I both agreed it should contain the strongest news that Gary's reporting would support,” Garcia says. “Gary had written a narrative feature lead. When I told him it needed to be a harder-news lead, he flipped out. After some coaxing and cajoling, he finally agreed to write a hard-news lead. We would regret a couple of words in that lead for the rest of our lives.”