PPVC7OU/hqdefault.jpg' alt='Cocaine Cowboys Full Movie Online Free' title='Cocaine Cowboys Full Movie Online Free' />The CIA, the drug dealers, and the tragedy of Gary Webb Gary Webb knew his story would cause a stir. The newspaper report hed written suggested that a US backed rebel army in Latin America was supplying the drugs responsible for blighting some of Los Angeless poorest neighbourhoods and, crucially, that the CIA must have known about it. Dark Alliance was a series written by California based reporter Webb and published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1. Watch Cleaver Family Reunion Full Movie. In it, he claimed the Contra rebels in Nicaragua were shipping cocaine into the US. Compton and South Central Los Angeles in the mid Eighties after being turned into crack a relatively new and highly addictive substance sold in rocks that could be smoked. Webb also said the CIA was aware that proceeds from the sales of those drugs were being funnelled back to help fund the Contras. Dark Alliance has been called one of the most explosive and controversial exposs in American journalism, and was the first investigative story to go viral. Youtube Single Ladies Season 4 Episode 1 there. Webb didnt anticipate some of this, but he wasnt prepared for the level of uproar it would cause in LAs black communities, incredulous that their own government could in some way be responsible for the crack epidemic plaguing their homes that it would force the US government on the PR defensive that the mainstream press, scooped by a tiny upstart, would attack Webb rather than try to dig deeper into the scandal they uncovered or that the fallout would eventually lead to Webb taking his own life. Nineteen years on,the story of Webbs investigation and its aftermath has been given the full Hollywood treatment. Kill the Messenger, based on his account of what happened and a book of the same name about the saga by journalist Nick Schou was recently released in cinemas. And with it, some believe, came the full vindication that Webb deserves. Gary Webb caught the writing bug in his early teens and started to hone his craft on his high school newspaper in Indiana. Watch Pretty Cool Too Online (2017) on this page. Thats where he met his future wife, Sue, but work took Webbs father to Ohio and the rest of the family followed. Webb never finished his journalism degree instead landing a job with the Kentucky Post in 1. Sue a year later. Cocaine Cowboys Full Movie Online Free' title='Cocaine Cowboys Full Movie Online Free' />A decade on, after moving around a couple of different newspapers in Ohio, Webb and his family relocated to California where he was offered a job with the San Jose Mercury News. Just a year after he started working for the paper, an earthquake destroyed an area in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, killing 6. The Mercury Newss coverage of the Loma Prieta quake, to which Webb contributed, earned the paper a Pulitzer prize, the highest honour in American journalism. Smear campaign Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb, in Kill The Messenger But the story that would make Webbs name and then contribute to his many would say unwarranted downfall, and then untimely death began more than a decade earlier. In 1. 97. 9 the Sandinista National Liberation Frontknown colloquially as the Sandinistas overthrew Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Debayle. Fearing the creation of a Communist state allied with Cuba and the Soviet Union, the US government under President Ronald Reagan, began funding and arming groups of rebels opposed to the Sandinistas known as the Counterrevolutionaries, or Contras. In his book A Twilight Struggle, Robert Kagan, one of the architects of Latin American foreign policy in the Reagan administration, wrote that when the Americans began their covert support of the contras, these armed militants numbered less than 2,0. By the end of 1. 98. Opponents of Americas support for the contras pointed to the groups numerous human rights abuses and that was essentially the gist of Webbs story. Read Tim Robeys review of Kill The Messenger Webb arrived to the Contra story fairly late. Cocaine Cowboys Full Movie Online Free' title='Cocaine Cowboys Full Movie Online Free' />There had even been mention in the press of the Contras link with the drug trade in the U. S. and by default, CIA involvement. But what Webb did that nobody else had was to follow the supply chain right to the poverty stricken streets of Los Angeles. Slant Magazines film section is your gateway to some of the webs most incisive and biting film criticism and features. Watch TV shows and movies online. Stream TV episodes of South Park, Empire, SNL, Modern Family and popular movies on your favorite devices. Start your free trial now. He showed what happened to the cocaine after it had been smuggled in by the Contras, focusing in on the human impact, and then revealing what became of the money made from its sales. Webb summed up the heart of his Dark Alliance series thus 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. Perhaps most damningly, Webb wrote that crack was virtually unobtainable in the citys black neighbourhoods before members of the CIAs army began supplying it at rock bottom prices in the Eighties. For the better part of a decade, he wrote in the intro to the first piece in the trilogy, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tonnes of cocaine to the. Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles, and funnelled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency. He wrote about the cocaine trafficking trial of a former Contra leader named Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes who he said testified that the CIA agent who commanded the guerrilla army told them that the ends justify the means, and that they sold almost a tonne of cocaine in 1. Contra revolution. Webbs series was published on the Mercury Newss fledgling website, but it wasnt exactly an instant sensation. Webbs then wife Sue remembers coming home from the shops and finding her husband extremely excited as he was nearing the end of writing the Dark Alliance. He worked from home a lot, Sue tells me over the phone from her home in California one morning in late February. He said youre not going to believe what I figured out. He was maybe a little nervous but he was very excited. No one had ever got this far with the story. Nobody had traced it to where drugs were actually going and that was the first inkling we probably both had that this was a really big story. It made me a little nervous too. When Webb filed his story, the family were about to leave for a holiday in North Carolina and Indiana. It was published shortly after their return, and Sue says they were all a little surprised that at first there was hardly any reaction. It was really quiet, she says. Then the phone started ringing. Nick Schou heard Gary Webb interviewed on the radio before he read the Dark Alliance series. He was a cub reporter in Southern California and in awe of this fellow hack who had managed to expand a story that a lot of journalists on the big national papers had tried and failed to do. Schou read the story online and was struck by the effort the Mercury News team had put in to making it a big splash on the internet. It certainly was one of most ostentatious early journalism exposes that was published online, Schou says now. Because the Mercury News was in Silicon Valley the paper boasted a talented web and graphics team, and so Schou says when you clicked on the site all you saw was the seal of the CIA with a crack smoker superimposed on top of it and this very ominous lettering that read Dark Alliance. Read Did a woman die trying to find Fargos buried treasure Webb, he says, became something of a celebrity. A publicist, working full time at the Mercury News, fielded media inquiries. When Shou first contacted Webb he was in Washington, D. C. for a talk show appearance to promote the story. Unfortunately, Schou says, that was also its undoing Gary Webb had become the story. Once series was attacked, Webb obviously had his entire career and credibility invested in this thing. And everyone else involved at the Mercury News found it easy to back away out of spotlight and let him take the brunt of the criticism. They didnt really support the story once the papers of record began to tear it apart. Talk radio specifically African American talk radio helped spread word of Webbs story.