The tragedy of Gary Webb.

• Author: Simon, Dan

I began working as Gary Webb's editor on Dark Alliance, the book, in July 1997, almost a year after his newspaper series of the same name broke so controversially in the San Jose Mercury News. As recently as one year earlier Gary Webb had been one of the nation's top investigative reporters. His awards included a Pulitzer in 1990 as part of a team, and at least four other major prizes for his solo work. But by the time I met him, he'd already begun the spectacular fall that ended with his suicide several weeks ago, barely seven years later, at the age of forty-nine.

What would turn out to be the biggest story of his life ran as a three-day series beginning on August 18, 1996. Here's how it started: "For the better part of a decade, a 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 guerilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found."

The "Dark Alliance" story documented a network of collusion in the 1980s that ,joined together the crack cocaine explosion, the Contras, and the CIA. But it might have vanished without a trace had the paper not chosen this story to create a splash for its website, complete with graphics and links to original source documents. It became, arguably, the first big Internet news story, with as many as 1.3 million hits on a single day. Talk radio picked it up off the Internet, and citizens' groups and media watchdogs soon followed. The CIA launched its own internal investigation. Gary's star had never shone more brightly.

The mainstream print media was ominously silent until October and November 1996, when The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all finally picked up the story. But instead of launching their own investigations into whether the CIA had shielded drug traffickers, these papers went after Gary's reporting, although they "could not find a single significant factual error," as Gary's then-editor at The Mercury News, Jerry Ceppos, would write in an internal memo. But after that, the series was described frequently as "discredited." Soon the story and Gary himself were spoiled goods. Gary's editor switched sides and penned an apologia distancing the paper from the series. Gary was forced out of his job, even though the body of evidence supporting Gary's account...