Gary Webb

Based on a series of explosive articles written for the "San Jose Mercury News", this book uncovers the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, revealing connections between a Bay Area drug ring, an L.A. street gang, and CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras. of photos. Charts.

The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

Dark Alliance

Donna Kerrigan

By the authors of the popular Class Act, From Thought to Finish expands on the active, audience approach defined by their previous title. With engaging new readings, stimulating pedagogy and balanced grammar review this text encourages students to think of writing not just as composition but as communication. The text also acknowledges that today's students have access to unprecedented amounts of information and that the key to knowledge and success depends on logical and critical thinking and the creative use and communication of information. To this end, the pedagogy surrounding the readings reinforces logical thinking and argumentation.

A Writer's Journey

From Thought to Finish

This title reveals the results of Gary Webb's journalistic investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic. It shows how the crack market spread from Central America to the western world, revealing how the CIA aided the Nicaraguan Contras introduction of the drug to the West.

The average US household credit card debt stands at $15,593, counting only those households carrying debt. Americans owe $11.62 trillion in personal debt of various kinds. They owe $8.05 trillion in mortgages and an additional $1,122.7 billion in student loans. The bad news is that some many are in debt, it has become accepted as normal. But debt isn't normal. It robs us of freedom to live a more flexible, fun, and fruitful life. This book seeks to become the first step in your journey toward financial freedom. The author himself has experienced the pain that has resulted from the last recession and has been able to help many to work through the process of removing the burden of their personal debt. In You Can Be Debt Free, you will learn: Why people make stupid decisions about money. Three approaches for paying off debt. Five steps to get out of debt fast. Seven indirect ways to get out of debt faster. Some practical insights on avoiding college debt (while still getting the degree) You didn't get into deep debt overnight. Well, maybe you did, but what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. You may have gotten into debt by just one stupid decision, but you are very unlikely to get out without making many small steps in the right direction. Getting out of debt is usually a slow process that requires a clear pathway to work your way out. This book teaches some ways that debt can retired more quickly without paying it down from your paycheck, so we will look at those too. But you are going to need to keep this little book close while you take the steps included. It's not magic, but it will work. You can become financially free and then stay that way. Let's work on this together.

How to Get Out of Debt and Stay There

You Can Be Debt Free

Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, "Kill the Messenger," to be be released in Fall 2014 In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled “Dark Alliance,” revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras. Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities. Webb’s own stranger-than-fiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the media—not because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the story—had been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the “Dark Alliance” story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.

The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion

Dark Alliance: Movie Tie-In Edition

Gary Webb had an inborn journalistic tendency to track down corruption and expose it. For over thirty-four years, he wrote stories about corruption from county, state, and federal levels. He had an almost magnetic effect to these kinds of stories, and it was almost as if the stories found him. It was his gift, and, ultimately, it was his downfall. He was best known for his story Dark Alliance, written for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. In it Webb linked the CIA to the crack-cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles during the Iran Contra scandal. His only published book, Dark Alliance is still a classic of contemporary journalism. But his life consisted of much more than this one story, and The Killing Game is a collection of his best investigative stories from his beginning at the Kentucky Post to his end at the Sacramento News & Review. It includes Webb's series at the Kentucky Post on organized crime in the coal industry, at the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Ohio State’s negligent medical board, and on the US military’s funding of first-person shooter video games. The Killing Game is a dedication to his life’s work outside of Dark Alliance, and it’s an exhibition of investigative journalism in its truest form.

Gary Webb

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