Dark Alliance: CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion - Hardcover

Webb, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1888363681 ISBN 13: 9781888363685

Publisher: Seven Stories Press,U.S., 1998

Synopsis

The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter expands upon, and offers new evidence to support, his claim--which touched off a firestorm of controversy--that the CIA and the Contra guerrillas fueled the crack trade in America's ghettos. 50,000 first printing. Tour. IP.

About this title

About the Authors

An award-winning investigative reporter, GARY WEBB (1955–2004) is best known for his “Dark Alliance” series that linked a Northern California drug ring with the CIA and the United States’ burgeoning crack epidemic. When the story first appeared in 1996 on the website of the San Jose Mercury News, it became an unprecedented internet sensation, receiving up to 1.3 million hits daily. The report was the target of a famously vicious media backlash that ended his career as a mainstream journalist. When Webb told the whole story in the book Dark Alliance, some of the same publications that had vilified him retracted their criticism and praised his courage in telling the truth about one of the worst official abuses in our nation’s history. Others, including his own former newspaper and the New York Times, continued to treat him as an outlaw. Before joining theMercury News, Webb cut his journalism teeth at the Kentucky Post andCleveland Plain Dealer. He is the co-recipient of an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award (for a story at the Post about links between the Kentucky coal mining industry and organized crime) and a Pulitzer Prize (as part of a team at theMercury News covering the 1988 San Francisco Earthquake). Dark Alliance won the 1998 Firecracker Alternative Book Award in the Politics category, and was a finalist for the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. In 2014 Webb’s story was adapted into the major motion picture Kill the Messenger. His death in 2004 was ruled a suicide.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Gary Webb (1955 -2004) was a Pulitizer Prize-winning investigative journalist best known for his 1996 "Dark Alliance" series of articles written for the San Jose Mercury News and later published as a book. Webb investigated Nicaraguans linked to the CIA-backed Contras who smuggled cocaine into the U.S. that was distributed as crack in LA and funneled profits to the Contras.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1888363681
• ISBN 13: 9781888363685
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 550