Dark Alliance: The Cia, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

Gary Webb

Seven Stories Press, 1999 - History - 574 pages

Dark Alliance is a book that should be fiction, whose characters seem to come straight out of central casting: the international drug lord, Norwin Meneses; the Contra cocaine broker with an MBA in marketing, Danilo Blandon; and the illiterate teenager from the inner city who rises to become the king of crack, "Freeway" Ricky Ross. But unfortunately, these characters are real and their stories are true.

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.

Now Gary Webb has pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from recently declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that have 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. Congressional inquiries into these allegations are ongoing; results of the internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department are pending.

What people are saying

Review: Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion

User Review  - Eddy Allen - Goodreads

Dark Alliance is a book that should be fiction, whose characters seem to come straight out of central casting: the international drug lord, Norwin Meneses; the Contra cocaine broker with an MBA in ...

Review: Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion

User Review  - Sean - Goodreads

Very interesting,shocking and horrifying really... But got a little tired of the detailed documentation of these drug rings... It's a shame that it was only Gary Webb that had the courage to bring ...

About the author

GARY WEBB was an investigative reporter who focused on government and private sector corruption and who won more than thirty journalism awards. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting for a series of stories on the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct during northern California's 1989 earthquake. In 1996, Webb wrote a shocking series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News exposing the CIA’s link to Nicaraguan cocaine smuggled into the US by the Contras, which had fueled the widespread crack epidemic that swept through urban areas. Webb’s bold, controversial reporting was the target of a famously vicious media backlash that ended his career as a mainstream journalist. When Webb persisted with his research and compiled his findings in the book Dark Alliance, some of the same publications that had vilified Webb for his series retracted their criticism and praised him for having the courage to tell 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 like an outlaw for the brilliant and courageous work he’d done. Webb received the 1997 Media Hero Award from the Institute for Alternative Journalism and in 1996 was named Journalist of the Year by the Bay Area Society of Professional Journalists. Webb’s death on December 10, 2004, at the age of 49, was determined to be a suicide.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Dark Alliance: The Cia, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
• Author: Gary Webb
• Edition: illustrated, revised
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 1999
• ISBN: 1888363932, 9781888363937
• Length: 574 pages
• Subjects: History / Latin America / Central America; History / United States / 20th Century; Language Arts & Disciplines / Journalism; Political Science / American Government / General; Political Science / General; Political Science / Intelligence & Espionage; Political Science / International Relations / General; Political Science / Law Enforcement; Psychology / Psychopathology / Addiction; Social Science / Criminology; Social Science / Sociology / General