Letters to the Editor
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Howard Kurtz and Gary Webb
Along with Walter Pincus, Howard Kurtz also took the lead in the pre-emptive "debunking" of the late Gary Webb's San Jose Mercury-News series documenting the Casey-North Enterprise protection of the trafficking of mass quantities of cocaine by Central American supporters of the clandestine Contra effort, in the 1980s. It was a series that the Washington Post never even ran in the first place.
The series was overwhelmingly accurate, but the facts got lost in the media mischaracterizations of the thematic content of the stories, misdirections that led to the topic being seen as a concern only relevant to the "black ghetto", and the character assassination of Gary Webb.
San Jose Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos folded- without providing any detailed referencing of why he was backing down on a series that he had previously approved- and Webb was subsequently made to feel unwelcome enough at the Mercury-News that he filed a suit against them for wrongful employment action, which was settled out of court in Webb's favor, for an undisclosed amount of compensation.
But Webb was effectively blacklisted as a reporter by every major daily in the USA. He eventually committed suicide.
Those stories were accurate, and they remain relevant and important. Some of us were his friends, and we haven't forgotten.
A few of the lesser-known facts:
Danilo Blandon, a former vice-president of the Bank of America in Nicaragua, with an MBA from Harvard, became the main supplier to the Hoover Crips of South Central Los Angeles, because he was able to offer his buyer, Ricky Ross, cocaine at a price less than 1/2 what he was formerly paying. By the end, Ross was getting his cocaine in kilogram quantities for $12,000 a kilo, the equivalent of $12 a gram. Ross was moving 100 kilos every week, and had worked out a deal with Blandon enabling him to obtain up to 25 kilos in advance of mentary payment.
Danilo Blandon's supplier was Norwin Meneses, the "King of cocaine" in Nicaragua, a man who was brother of 2 of the generals in Somoza's Guardia Nacionale- the core of the Somocista Contra force who later became the FDN, initially with the aid of the right-wing Argentine junta.
This was no small operation- although the public Congressional hearings dwelt at length on paltry sums of money, almost completely avoiding any mention of the FDN Contra group in the process.
Danilo Blandon eventually earned over $100,000 and a get-out-of-jail card from the FBI as a paid informant, in return for becoming a prosecution witness against the cocaine trafficking gangs that he had originally empowered and supplied.
Read the book Dark Alliance. Don't listen to Howard Kurtz.