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Senate investigators and agents from four organizations all complained that their contra-drug investigations “were hampered,” Webb wrote, “by the CIA or unnamed ‘national security’ interests.” In the 1984 “Frogman Case,” for instance, the U.S.Although Norwin Meneses is listed in DEA computers as a major international drug smuggler implicated in 45 separate federal investigations since 1974, he lived conspicuously in California until 1989 and was never arrested in the U.S.

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When Blandón testified in a 1996 trial against Ricky Ross, the Justice Department blocked any inquiry about Blandón’s connection to the CIA. The Justice Department, however, freed Blandón after only 28 months behind bars and then hired him as a full-time DEA informant, paying him more than $166,000.
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He wrote that the huge influx of cocaine happened to come at just the time that street-level drug dealers were figuring out how to make cocaine affordable by changing it into crack.
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They also note that neither Ross nor the gangs were the first or sole distributors of crack in L.A.

They deny that Bay Area-based Nicaraguan drug dealers, Juan Norwin Meneses and Oscar Danilo Blandon, worked for the CIA or contributed “millions in drug profits” to the contras, as Webb contended. And major media–the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post–have run long pieces refuting the Mercury News series. The CIA’s drug network, wrote Webb, “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.” Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.ĬIA Director John Deutch declared that he found “no connection whatsoever” between the CIA and cocaine traffickers. gangs who became street-level distributors of crack, a cheap and powerful form of cocaine.
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While much of the CIA-contra-drug story had been revealed years ago in the press and in congressional hearings, the Mercury News series added a crucial missing link: It followed the cocaine trail to Ross and black L.A. The Mercury News‘ Web page, with supporting documents and updates, received hundreds of thousands of “hits” a day. The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A.

In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles linking the CIA’s “contra” army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles.
