by Nick Schou
At the bureau, Robinson covered the state budget, the governor’s office, and the legislature, a heavy load for one reporter. Gary didn’t seem to work nearly as hard. “Anyone who worked around him remarked on it,” Robinson says. When Webb was chasing after a story, he gave it his full attention. But in between projects, he tended to show up late and leave early. He wanted to spend time with his two kids and never seemed to stop fixing up his house. “Gary loved to work on his house,” Robinson adds. “When he came in each morning, he had been up all night working on the tile floor or redoing the wood trim in his bedroom.”
“At the time, I really looked up to Gary as a hard-hitting investigative reporter,” says Chris Knap, an Orange County Register reporter who then worked down the hall from Webb at the Register’s statehouse bureau. “I remember seeing him in his office. He never answered his phone: he just checked messages. He just worked on his own stories and ignored what the pack was doing. You’d never see him at a press conference. I think that caused some friction with other reporters. Occasionally I’d see him at one and I got the sense he had been ordered to get his ass out there.”
A Midwesterner like Webb, Knap hails from West Virginia. Both men sported anachronistic moustaches and shared an enthusiasm for fast motorcycles and cars. “Gary was always a renegade,” Knap says. “He always drove this Toyota Supra or some other pseudo sports car that still had his Ohio plates. He kept them on for years, which is a violation of the California vehicle code. A cop finally pulled him over for speeding and cited him for not having valid plates. Gary took the case to court and got the charge for the invalid plates dismissed because the cop couldn’t prove how long he had been living here.”
In the wake of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Webb teamed up with Pete Carey, a veteran correspondent for the Mercury News who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his joint coverage of the 1985 downfall of Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Together, Carey and Webb exposed how bureaucratic delays in retrofitting local “highways” had contributed to the earthquake disaster. Their work helped result in the paper’s Pulitzer prize for team reporting that year.
Together with Robinson, Webb reported that California Governor Pete Wilson had vetoed legislation that would have harmed companies who had contributed to his campaign. They also teamed up on a story about Dom Cortese, a Democratic Assemblyman from San Jose. An anonymous tipster claimed that Cortese had carried a bill on behalf of the Painting & Decorating Contractors of California. In return, the source said, the group had given Cortese a free paint job for his house. But the group forgot to tell the contractor who did the work that it was a freebie. Ultimately, Cortese paid the contractor, but got his money back when he received an honorary fee from the group for a speech on painter’s retirement funds.
Robinson and Webb figured if they called the contractor who had painted Cortese’s house, word would reach the politician in time for him to come up with an explanation. So Robinson interviewed the contractor while Webb interviewed Cortese. “The contractor spilled, Gary got his interview, and we wrote the story,” Robinson says. That was the highlight of their collaboration. Webb regaled his former colleagues at the Plain Dealer with the story, concluding that California politicians were guppies compared to their Midwestern counterparts when it came to graft. “It was the most fun we had,” Robinson says. “The only thing I like better than corruption is completely inept corruption.”
During their time together, adds Robinson, Webb displayed an amazing talent for working with documents. “It just seemed like a gift,” he says. “He could pick up a 200-page report and skim through it and focus on one sentence on page 63 that suggested some huge outrage. If there was something buried in a document, I would miss it and Gary would always find it. It was amazing to watch. He was a hell of a reporter.”
Another quality Webb had that distinguished him from other reporters was his crusading tendency to see the world in Manichean moral terms. “He quickly focused on who the good guys and bad guys were in a story,” Robinson says. “He did not spend a lot of time doubting his conclusions. I think that it can be argued, in retrospect, that he took that to an extreme.” Webb also professed more cynicism about editors than most reporters. He told Robinson that at the Plain Dealer, he had to take his files into his editor’s office and defend every sentence.
To Webb, Mercury News editors appeared far less demanding; they seemed to do little more than check his story structure and spelling. “Webb was probably exaggerating,” Robinson says. “But what strikes me in retrospect, is that if you are forged as a reporter in an adversarial editing setting, if you are used to your editors reining you in and ratcheting you back, you probably push things as far as you can.”
One of the Mercury News editors who hired Webb, Scott Herhold, also supervised his work at the Sacramento bureau. He grew to regret it, saying that if he knew Webb had been sued at the Plain Dealer, he wouldn’t have hired him. “I didn’t know about the lawsuits,” he says. “We didn’t ask and he didn’t tell us. We probably didn’t do our due diligence on the problems he had there.”
“I actually didn’t like Gary that much,” Herhold adds. “He was a very nasty guy.” Herhold recalls that when the paper’s management asked him to bring down the length of news stories, he wrote a memo to his writers asking them to cooperate, and Webb wrote a “long, nasty letter” to his boss that ridiculed his letter. “He didn’t tell me about it first,” Herhold says. “He was a nasty guy who played around your back.”
Herhold edited Webb’s stories for a year. The experience was “very painful,” he says. “Gary needed a very strong editor, and I tried, but I don’t think I was his match. I was still new as an editor. I don’t think I knew enough to ask Gary to make the requisite phone calls to make his stories more fair.”
A typical example, Herhold says, was Webb’s story about then-Attorney General John VanDeKamp, who was engaged in a bitter race for governor. Through a public records act request, Webb obtained a list of cases VanDeKamp had declined to prosecute. “Gary did a big, long piece about all these cases and the nut of the piece was that VanDeKamp was a wimp,” he says.
The story’s timing helped Dianne Feinstein beat VanDeKamp in the 1990 Democratic primary. “If I were a stronger editor, I would have told Gary to talk to some other prosecutors,” Herhold says. “That kind of innate sense of fairness didn’t come naturally to Gary. He was a crusader.”
In 1994, Webb wrote a series of articles about a failed effort by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to revamp its aging network of mainframe computers. In the wake of “Dark Alliance,” the New York Times would raise the series as yet another example of Webb’s one-sidedness. The stories involved the fact that the DMV had spent millions of dollars on software that was supposed to solve the agency’s legendarily inept record keeping. But the software had failed to noticeably improve the DMV’s database. Webb had blamed the DMV fiasco on a corporation named Tandem Computers, Inc., which had written the software program; his reporting implied that Tandem had intentionally sold the DMV faulty software. After his stories were published, James Treybig, the company’s founder, complained to Webb’s editors about the story, and took out a two-page advertisement in the Mercury News refuting his coverage point by point.
A second reporter, Lee Gomes, investigated Treybig’s complaint. Gomes came to the conclusion that Webb had gone into the story seeking to prove that Tandem was responsible, and had left out any information that showed otherwise. In fact, Gomes says, Tandem had done the best it could and the software had failed thanks to a complex array of unforeseen technical challenges. Gomes ultimately wrote a memo to his editors saying that one of Webb’s stories was “in all its major elements, incorrect.” A state audit later cleared the company of wrongdoing.
Now a San Francisco-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Gomes says that he wrote a lengthy story providing a full account of the DMV fiasco, but the Mercury News refused to publish it. Part of the reason
for that, he says, is that his story was long and complicated. “But institutionally, the Mercury News wanted to circle the wagons,” Gomes adds. “There wasn’t an institutional interest in getting the opposing story.”
Years later, when the New York Times interviewed Webb about Gomes and the Tandem controversy, Webb argued that Gomes was simply jealous because he had missed the story himself. “Whenever his reporting was challenged he always launched ad hominem attacks on people who challenged him, and he did that to me,” Gomes says. “I thought he was a completely dishonest reporter. I didn’t have a lot of respect for the guy and I think he’s an example of everything a reporter shouldn’t be.”
“Gary was smart: he knew how to dig and how to use public records to get great stories,” says Dawn Garcia, a former investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Garcia became the Mercury News’ state editor shortly after Herhold transferred out of the job in 1990. Now deputy director for Stanford University’s John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, Garcia says Webb, like a lot of investigative reporters, was passionate about his stories. “But he sometimes didn’t see other points of view,” she says. “I worked to help guard him against those instincts. That was one of my roles as his editor. I also learned pretty quickly that he had a temper and some editors did not like working with him.”
At the time, Webb appeared to be languishing at the Sacramento bureau. Between the birth of his daughter, Christine, that year, and his difficult relationship with Herhold and other editors, Webb experienced his first bout of clinical depression. “It wasn’t huge early on,” Sue says. “He was just kind of moody, but after Christine was born, he started getting really depressed. It was a lot of pressure to have a baby, a two-and-a-half year old kid, and a six-year-old. We were both pretty overwhelmed.”
To escape his depression, Webb buried himself in his work with renewed vigor, and under Garcia’s tutelage, broke some impressive stories, including “The Forfeiture Racket,” a 1994 expose of California’s drug asset forfeiture laws, which allowed police to seize houses and other property belonging to suspected drug dealers. After the series ran, state lawmakers rescinded the forfeiture program, and Webb won the H.L. Mencken Award for reporting from the Free Press Association.
“Gary wasn’t well known in the newsroom because he had never worked there,” Garcia says. “As a bit of a loner, he did not have a big support network there.” But after Gary won awards for his reporting on the state’s drug forfeiture program, Garcia says, “his image was somewhat resurrected at the paper.”
“The Forfeiture Racket” also bore a much more unexpected piece of fruit. One afternoon in July 1995, Webb arrived at his desk to find a pink slip bearing a telephone number from a woman named Coral Baca, whose boyfriend, a Nicaraguan drug dealer named Rafael Cornejo, had been one of the criminals targeted by the forfeiture program Webb had exposed. Baca wanted Webb to write about how the government had set up her boyfriend on bogus charges and then seized and sold his house.
Webb told Baca he didn’t think his editors would be too interested in her story. He had already written as much about California’s drug seizure laws as he was going to write. And an imprisoned drug dealer who says he’s innocent? That didn’t seem like news. But as Webb would later write in his 1998 book Dark Alliance, Baca quickly changed his mind. Webb was about to discover that this was the telephone call he had been waiting for his whole life, the one that his old friend at the Plain Dealer, Tom Andrzejewski, had jokingly anticipated every time he picked up the receiver.
“There’s something about Rafael’s case that I don’t think you would have done before,” Baca told Webb. “One of the government’s witnesses is a guy who used to work with the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it . . . And now he’s working for the government again.”
Without realizing it, Webb had just stumbled onto “The Big One.”
FIVE
Drug Stories
AT FIRST, CORAL Baca’s tale of CIA-tied drug traffickers flooding the streets of San Francisco with cocaine seemed too strange to be true. She reminded Webb of a local conspiracy theorist who would bombard the Mercury News with wild allegations of secret government plots. Whenever the man demanded to speak with a reporter, he’d be unleashed on the newest hire—while everyone else in the office took bets on how long it would take for the unwitting subject of the bullshit detection test to realize the would-be source was nuts.
But Baca didn’t seem crazy. She wasn’t talking about theories, she was talking about a specific case—her boyfriend’s—and claimed she had stacks of legal documents and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) records that would confirm that the chief witness against Rafael Cornejo sold drugs for the CIA.
After hanging up the phone, Webb did the first thing he always did when checking out a lead—he examined the public record for any information that would shed light on Baca’s story. The first document he found was a recent San Francisco Chronicle article about a group of prisoners who tried to escape from a Bay Area federal prison. “Four inmates were indicted yesterday in connection with a bold plan to escape from the federal lockup in Pleasanton using plastic explosives and a helicopter that would have taken them to a cargo ship at sea,” the Chronicle had reported. “Rafael Cornejo, 39, of Lafayette, an alleged cocaine kingpin with reputed ties to Nicaraguan drug traffickers and Panamanian money launderers, was among those indicted for conspiracy to escape.”
Other stories described Cornejo as a member of a major West Coast drug ring that imported millions of dollars worth of cocaine from Cali, Colombia to California. Webb agreed to meet Baca and check out her documents. She gave him a stack of DEA and FBI reports that Cornejo’s lawyers had obtained through discovery. One of them was a February 3, 1994 transcript from the federal grand jury probe of Cornejo’s drug ring. It contained testimony from the government’s chief witness against him, a Nicaraguan exile and drug trafficker named Oscar Danilo Blandon.
Then a twenty-seven-year-old son of a family of property owners, Blandon had fled Nicaragua just weeks after the 1979 Sandinista Revolution. His family was part of the land-owning aristocracy that had prospered under the dictatorship of the Somoza family. He had obtained a master’s degree in marketing from a Colombian university in Bogota. Through his family’s connections, he’d worked for the Somoza regime, providing U.S-supported food aid to the dictator’s National Guard and administering a free-market rural development program aimed at increasing production among the commercial planters who had ruled the country with an iron grip for decades.
From the moment the Sandinistas seized power, civil war was inevitable in the tiny Central American country. The Sandinistas formed in the early 1960s as a tiny group of guerrillas inspired by the Cuban revolution, but their tenacious efforts to win power from a widely despised dictator gradually attracted broad-based support among Nicaraguans from all economic classes. After seizing power, however, many of the rebels’ wealthy and middle-class supporters became disenchanted with the Sandinistas, their socially redistributive economic goals, and their professed admiration for Fidel Castro.
Blandon was just one of thousands of well-off Nicaraguans who fled the country for the United States, hoping to return someday to a “free” country, devoid of communist subversion. Like many exiles, Blandon also became active in supporting the Nicaraguan contras, a right-wing guerrilla army that aimed to restore “democracy” to Nicaragua. The contras had a powerful ally in the CIA, which was willing to work with just about any Nicaraguan, regardless of their ties to organized crime or human rights violations. While well known to reporters who covered the civil war in the field, the CIA’s collusion with torturers and drug dealers among the contras had been hidden from the American public. Just about all the average American citizen knew about the contras was what President Ronald Reagan said about them in televised press conferences at the time: they were “freedom fighters” in the spirit of America’s founding fathers.
In his testimony agai
nst Rafael Cornjeo, Blandon had stated under oath that he became a drug dealer shortly after arriving in the U.S. With the cash he raised, he purchased vehicles and other supplies for the contras. After it became clear that his support was no longer needed, he had continued dealing drugs, but kept the profits for himself. As Webb read through the thirty-nine-page grand jury transcript, it became clear that Cornejo wasn’t actually the head of the drug trafficking ring the grand jury was probing. He noted repeated references to a certain Nicaraguan “family,” but every time the prosecutor led Blandon in that direction, his responses were blacked out, deleted by government censors.
Webb later wrote that he asked Baca what family Blandon was talking about. “Rafael says it’s Meneses—Norwin Meneses and his nephews,” Baca said. “Norwin is one of the biggest traffickers on the West Coast. When Rafael got arrested, that’s who the FBI and the IRS wanted to talk to him about.” Intrigued, Webb showed up at the federal courthouse in San Francisco for one of Cornejo’s hearings. But Blandon—the prosecution’s main witness—was a no-show. During a break from the proceedings, Webb approached the prosecutor, U.S. attorney David Hall, and asked him about Blandon’s whereabouts. According to Webb, Hall responded that he had no idea.
Not knowing what to think, Webb went back to his office in Sacramento and called his boss, Mercury News state editor Dawn Garcia, and told him about Cornejo’s case. Garcia, who had worked as an investigative reporter, recalled hearing about the CIA and the contras during the 1980s. She was interested. Webb told her that Blandon had been arrested in San Diego a few years ago, and asked for permission to go there and look for court records that might reveal more about him. Garcia approved the trip. “When Gary brought me his first tip about what was later to become ‘Dark Alliance,’ it sounded very intriguing,” Garcia says. “I agreed he should go check it out.”