The L.A. Weekly has a fascinating piece concerning the late Gary Webb, the brilliant investigative reporter whose life and career were ruined when the establishment media of the time joined with the government to discredit a series he'd written about the involvement of the CIA in drug-running operations in alliance with the guerrilla forces the United States was backing in Central America in the 1980s.

(Full disclosure: Prior to his suicide in 2004, Webb wrote for the print editionof Esquire.)

Most notable in the LAW piece is a mea culpa from Jesse Katz, a reporter whose work in the Los Angeles Times went a long way towards demolishing Webb's reputation. Katz had done extensive work detailing the rise of a drug dealer named "Freeway Ricky" Ross as the majordomo of the crack-cocaine explosion of the 1980s. Webb's series revealed that one of Ross's mentors was a Nicaraguan kingpin named Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes, who also happened to be one of the sugar daddies funding the Contra rebels.

While Blandón supplied Ricky Ross with coke, the Mercury News revealed, Blandón and others in his politically connected drug cartel, which supplied Ross, were using drug profits to arm the contras. "Dark Alliance" blew the lid off the CIA's ties to America's crack market by showing for the first time not just the agency's role in turning a blind eye to Nicaraguan contras smuggling cocaine to the United States but also vividly illustrating the role of that cocaine in the spread - via marketers like Ross - of crack in America's inner cities. Katz' rather embarrassed employer, the L.A. Times - caught off-guard by Webb's reporting in its own backyard - yanked Katz all the way from Texas to re-evaluate Ricky Ross' role in the crack epidemic. Katz recast Ross as a much less central player in the crack plague, thus helping dilute the effect of "Dark Alliance," which had caused a firestorm of outrage, particularly in black communities. "The story of crack's genesis and evolution," Katz newly wrote, "is filled with a cast of interchangeable characters, from ruthless billionaires to strung-out curb dealers, none of whom is central to the drama."

Now, it seems, Katz is having second thoughts about how his old employer went all DefCon1 on Webb's series.

"As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope," Katz explained. "And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California."

Well, yeah, I'd say.

Katz seems to be referring to the fact thatTimes editor Shelby Coffey assigned a staggering 17 reporters to exploit any error in Webb's reporting, including the most minute. The newspaper's response to "Dark Alliance" was longer than Webb's series. It was replete with quotes from anonymous CIA sources who denied the CIA was connected to contra-backing coke peddlers in the ghettos.

And let us not underestimate the contributions to the debacle made by the utterly chickenshit.

Eventually, Webb's unnerved editors in San Jose withdrew their support for his story.

And, not that it mattered much at the time, but Webb was pretty much right.

Webb was vindicated by a 1998 CIA Inspector General report, which revealed that for more than a decade the agency had covered up a business relationship it had with Nicaraguan drug dealers like Blandón. The L.A. Times, New York Times and Washington Post buried the IG's report; under L.A. Times editor Michael Parks, the paper didn't acknowledge its release for months. The L.A. Times' smears against Webb continued after his death. After Webb committed suicide in a suburb of Sacramento in December 2004 - the same day he was to vacate his just-sold home and move in with his mother - a damning L.A. Times obituary described the coverage by the three papers as "discrediting" Webb. As Katz admitted to Mantle, "We really didn't do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of tawdry exercise. ... And it ruined that reporter's career."

And a lot of the people who ran the Contra operations from Washington continued to have fine careers in and out of the private sector, despite their earlier careers as de facto drug kingpins and money launderers. Yes, friends, it surely was Morning In America.

This whole business stank from jump. For all the whining about the current adminstration's knuckling of the press, the Reagan people were the true masters at it. They were able to scare editors and publishers out of stories about what was really going on with the Moral Equivalents Of Our Founding Fathers down in Central America. They scared them into selling out their reporters; Ray Bonner and Alma Guillermoprietoover the El Mozote massacre, and Bob Parry over a lot of his Iran-Contra work, much of which itself had to do with Contra drug running. The Reagan people got the L.A. Times and a lot of the prestige press to do its dirty work on Gary Webb, who got destroyed in the process, but who now gets to be a hero in a movie, so there's that, I guess. And he gets an apology from one of the journalistic button men who did him in.

Also, and not for nothing, Mr. President? But this is the kind of stuff that happens when you start arming one side in a civil war that turns into a proxy war. This kind of stuff will happen. You cannot avoid it.

READ: Driving While Black by Gary Webb in Esquire

ALSO: Esquire's Mark Warren on Gary Webb's Glorious Comeback

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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