Government Drug Dealing: from “Kill the Messenger” to “Pinocchio”

‘For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.
This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America and provided the cash and connections needed for L. A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.
It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U. S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting ‘gangstas’ of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles.’
These are the opening sentences of Gary Webb’s three-part series ‘Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion’. Published for the San Jose Mercury News, Gary Webb’s year long investigation culminated in the ‘most talked about piece of journalism in 1996′. It was released on the internet at the same time of its print publication, making it one of the first national security stories to ‘go viral’ by bringing the Mercury’s website over 1 million hits a day. ‘Dark Alliance’ prompted congressional hearings by Rep. Maxine Waters, an internalCIA investigation in 1998, and now, 18 years later, a major motion picture starring and produced by Jeremy Renner.
The movie Kill the Messenger is based on the book of the same title by Nick Schou, subtitledHow the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb. In the film, Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner) is cryptically warned by a Washington insider, ‘They’ll make you the story’, and that, more than the CIA-Contra-Cocaine controversy itself, is what the book and movie are about.
In today’s era of Snowden’s NSA revelations and government distrust at an all-time high, the allegations made in the Mercury series and Gary Webb’s follow-up book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion seem almost quaint in comparison. While it was as early as 1986 that the government publicly acknowledged that cocaine smuggling was funding the CIA-backed Contras, Gary Webb was the first one to answer the question of where that cocaine went and where the money came from. The answer was found in’Freeway’ Rick Ross, the ‘king of crack’ who sold $3 million worth of coke a day, bought 455 kilos a week, and in today’s dollar had earnings over 2.5 billion between 1982 and 1989. Rick Ross was a true entrepreneur in his field. Unlike typical drug dealers, he didn’t get bogged down in petty street rivalry because the whole nation would be his market. He would introduce himself to other dealers by giving them a kilo for free and then offering them his price that was $10,000 per kilo lower than anyone else, thereby turning all of his would-be competitors into customers.

This post was published at Lew Rockwell on November 1, 2014.