I woke up this morning thinking of Gary Webb. I’m not sure why, but these things sometimes happen. I just want to share a small snippet from the Second Day of his Dark Alliance series of columns:

Norwin Meneses, known in Nicaraguan newspapers as ”Rey de la Droga” (King of Drugs), was then under active investigation by the DEA and the FBI for smuggling cocaine into the United States, records show.

And [CIA agent Col. Enrique] Bermudez was very familiar with the influential Meneses family. He had served under two Meneses brothers, Fermin and Edmundo, who were generals in Somoza’s army. Somoza himself spoke at the 1978 funeral of Edmundo Meneses, who was slain by leftists shortly after his appointment as Nicaragua’s ambassador to Guatemala, hailing him as an anti-communist martyr.

A violent death — someone else’s — had also made brother Norwin famous in his homeland. In 1977 he was accused of ordering the assassination of Nicaragua’s chief of Customs, who was gunned down in the midst of an investigation into an international stolen car ring allegedly run by Norwin Meneses.

Though the customs boss accused Meneses on his deathbed of hiring his killer, Nicaraguan newspapers reported that the Managua police, then commanded by Edmundo Meneses, cleared Norwin of any involvement.

Despite that incident and a stack of law enforcement reports describing him as a major drug trafficker, Norwin Meneses was welcomed into the United States in July 1979 as a political refugee and given a visa and a work permit. He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for the next six years supervised the importation of thousands of kilos of cocaine into California.

It arrived in all kinds of containers: false-bottomed shoes, Colombian freighters, cars with hidden compartments, luggage from Miami. Once here, it disappeared into a series of houses and nondescript storefront businesses scattered from Hayward to San Jose, Pacifica to Burlingame, Daly City to Oakland.

And, like Blandon, Meneses went to work for the CIA’s army.

What Gary Webb actually reported was distorted. He never actually said that the CIA intentionally infected our ghettoes with crack cocaine or that this was part of some nefarious plot they had to destroy the people in our inner cities.

What he reported was basically what I’ve reproduced above. Our government welcomed people like Norman Meneses into our country despite being well aware that he was capable of murder and was assuredly a violent criminal involved in stolen car rings and major cocaine trafficking. That’s beyond dispute.

And they allowed these people to operate criminal enterprises in this country and then divert their dirty profits to support the Contras even after Congress expressly forbid the Reagan administration from supporting them in any direct way. This is also beyond dispute.

In the case of Mr. Meneses, he appears to have had some assistance in getting the cocaine he provided into the country, mainly through CIA-connected assets in the El Salvadoran air force, but what’s absolutely not contentious is that he sold the product to black dealers like Freeway Ricky Ross who turned it into crack and created a health and legal epidemic in cities from Los Angeles to Cincinnati.

Gary Webb understood the significance of this, which is why the opening paragraph of the Dark Alliance series opened this way:

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.

The army’s financiers — who met with CIA agents both before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. — delivered cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.
Unaware of his suppliers’ military and political connections, “Freeway Rick” — a dope dealer of mythic proportions in the L.A. drug world — turned the cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the country.

The cash Ross paid for the cocaine, court records show, was then used to buy weapons and equipment for a guerrilla army named the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force) or FDN, the largest of several anti-communist commonly called the Contras.

While the FDN’s war is barely a memory today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects. Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine — a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army started bringing it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices.
And the L.A. gangs, which used their enormous cocaine profits to arm themselves and spread crack across the country, are still thriving, turning entire blocks of major cities into occasional war zones.

“There is a saying that the ends justify the means,” former FDN leader and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes testified during a recent cocaine trafficking trial in San Diego. “And that’s what Mr. Bermudez (the CIA agent who commanded the FDN) told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for the Contra revolution.”

I actually have a personal connection to this story because from 1989-1992, I frequently played pick-up basketball with members of the Venice Crips who were, indeed, involved in the trafficking of weapons, including Uzis. As far as I know, those particular chaps did not sell crack or other drugs. They sold semi-automatic guns and rifles. Their Compton brethren probably handled the crack, although they did not discuss these details with your author who they referred to in reverent tones as “that Danny Ainge motherfucker.” Let’s just say that I didn’t call a lot of fouls.

I saw what the cocaine epidemic did to Los Angeles and how it fueled other criminal activity and how it landed a whole generation of kids in either a cycle of prison and recidivism or a cold slab in the morgue. None of this is really is dispute, either.

It was at best criminal indifference on the part of our government which put anti-communist fanaticism above the health of our most vulnerable communities.

I think about this stuff when I see the Republicans complain about Latino immigrants being involved in drugs and other criminal activity. I think about how their hero, Ronald Reagan, utilized Latino car thiefs and drug dealers to finance his covert and illegal war on the Sandinistas. I think about the costs of those decisions.

And it pisses me off.