By Gary Webb
(Excerpted from Dark Alliance)

THEY DIDN’T WANT TO KNOW

When I came to work in the sprawling newsroom of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the early 1980s, I was assigned to share a computer terminal with a tall middle aged reporter with a long, virtually unpronounceable Polish name. To save time, people called him Tom A.

To me, arriving from a small daily in Kentucky, Tom A. was the epitome of the hard-boiled big-city newspaperman. The city officials he wrote about and the editors who mangled his copy were "fuckin-jerks." And when his phone rang he would say, "It’s the Big One," before picking up the receiver.

The Big One was the reporter’s holy grail the tip that led you from the daily morass of press conferences and cop calls onto the trail of The Biggest Story You’d Ever Write, the one that would turn the rest of your career into an anticlimax. I never knew if it was cynicism or optimism that made him say it, but deep inside, I thought he was jinxing himself.

The Big One, I believed, would be like a bullet with your name on it. You’d never hear it coming. And almost a decade later, long after Tom A., the Plain Dealer and I had parted company, that’s precisely how it happened. I didn’t even take the call.

It manifested itself as a pink While You Were Out message slip left on my desk in July, 1995, bearing an unusual and unfamiliar name: Coral Marie Talavera Baca.

There was no message, just a number, somewhere in thc East Bay.

I called, but there was no answer, so I put the message aside. Several days later an identical message slip appeared. This time Coral Marie Talavera Baca was home.

"I saw the story you did a couple weeks ago," she began. "The one about the drug seizure laws. I thought you did a good job."

"Thanks a lot," I said, and I meant it. I asked what I could do for her.

"My boyfriend is in a situation like that," she said, "and I thought it might make a good follow-up story for you. What the government has done to him is unbelievable."

"Your boyfriend?"

"He’s in prison right now on cocaine trafficking charges. He’s been in jail for three years, and he’s never been convicted of anything."

"He must have waived his speedy trial rights," I said.

"No, none of them have," she said. "There are about five or six guys who were indicted with him, and most of them are still waiting to be tried, too. They want to go to trial because they think it’s a bullshit case. Rafael keeps writing letters to the judge and the prosecutor, saying, you know, try me or let me go."

"Rafael’s your boyfriend?"

"Yes. Rafael Cornejo."

"He’s Colombian?"

"No, Nicaraguan. But he’s lived in the Bay Area since he was like two or something."

It’s interesting, I thought, but not the kind of story likely to excite my editors. Some drug dealers don’t like being in jail? Oh.

She was not dissuaded.

"There’s something about Rafael’s case that I don’t think you would have ever done before," she persisted. "One of the government’s witnesses is a guy who used to work with the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it."

"What now?" I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.

"The CIA. He used to work for them or something. He’s a Nicaraguan too. Rafael knows him, he can tell you. He told me the guy had admitted bringing four tons of cocaine into the country. Four tons!

And if that’s what he’s admitted to, you can imagine how much it really was. And now he’s back working for the government again."

"You say you can document this?"

"Absolutely. I have all the files here at home. You’re welcome to look at all of it if you want."

I asked her where she lived.

"Oakland. But Rafael’s got a court date in San Francisco coming up in a couple weeks. Why don’t I meet you at the courthouse? That way you can sit in on the hearing, and if you’re interested we could get lunch or something and talk."

"OK, fine," I said. "But bring some of those records with you, OK? I can look through them while I’m sitting there in court."

She laughed. "You don’t trust me, do you? You probably get a lot of calls like this." "Not many like this," I said.

Flipping on my computer, l logged into the Dialog data-base, which contains full-text electronic versions of millions of newspaper and magazine stories, property records, legal filings, you name it.

I called a newspaper story that had appeared a year before in the San Francisco Chronicle.

My eyes widened.

"4 Indicted in Prison Breakout Plot-Pleasanton Inmates Planned to Leave in Copter, Prosecutors Say."

I quickly scanned the story. Son of a bitch.

Four inmates were indicted yesterday in connection with a bold plan to escape from the federal lock-up in Pleasanton using plastic explosives and a helicopter that would have taken them to a cargo ship at sea. The group also considered killing a guard if their keepers tried to thwart the escape, prosecutors contend.

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.

That’s some boyfriend she’s got there, I mused. The newspaper stories make him sound like Al Capone.

When I pushed open the doors to the vast courtroom in the San Francisco federal courthouse a few weeks later, I found a scene from Miami Vice.

To my left, a dark-suited army of federal agents and prosecutors - huddled around a long, polished wooden table, looking grim and talking in low voices. On the right, an array of long-haired, expensively attired defense attorneys were whispering to a group of long-haired, angry-looking Hispanics - their clients. The judge had not yet arrived.

I had no idea what Coral Baca looked like, so I scanned the faces in the courtroom, trying to pick out a woman who could be a drug king-pin’s girlfriend. She found me first.

"You must be Gary," said a voice behind me.

I turned, and for an instant all I saw was cleavage and jewelry. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. Dark hair. Bright red lipstick. Long legs. Short skirt. Dressed to accentuate her positive attributes. I could barely speak.

"You’re Coral?"

She tossed her hair and smiled. "Pleased to meet you.

She pointed out Rafael, a short, handsome Latino with a strong jaw and long wavy hair parted in the middle.

"Uh, why was he trying to break out of jail?" I asked.

The escape charges were in fact the product of an unsubstantiated accusation by a fellow inmate, a convicted swindler. They were later thrown out of court on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, and Cornejo’s prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall, was referred to the Justice Department for investigation by federal judge Saundra Brown Armstrong.

"Can we go out in the hall and talk for a minute?" I asked her.

We sat on a bench just outside the door. I told her I needed to get case numbers so I could ask for the court files. And, by the way, did she bring those documents she’d mentioned?

She reached into her briefcase and brought out a stack an inch thick. I flipped through the documents. Most of them were federal law enforcement reports. At the bottom of the stack was a transcript of some sort. I pulled it out.

"Grand Jury for the Northern District of California, Grand Jury Number 93-5 Grand Jury lnv. No. 9301035. Reporter’s Transcript of Proceedings. Testimony of Oscar Danilo Bland6n February 3,1994." whistled. ‘Federal grand jury transcripts? I’m impressed. Where’d you get these?"

"The government turned them over under discovery. Dave Hall did. I heard he really got reamed out by the DEA when they found out about all the stuff he gave us."

I skimmed the thirty-nine-page transcript. Whatever else this Blandon fellow may have been, he was pretty much the way Coral had described him. A big-time trafficker who’d dealt dope for many years; started out dealing for the Contras, a right-wing Nicaraguan guerrilla army, in Los Angeles. He’d used drug money to buy trucks and supplies. At some point after Ronald Reagan got into power, the CIA had decided his services as a fund-raiser were no longer required, and he stayed in the drug business for himself.

What made the story so compelling was that he was appearing before the grand jury as a U.S. government witness. He wasn’t under investigation. He wasn’t trying to heat a rap. He was there as a witness for the prosecution, which meant that the U.S. Justice Department was vouching for him.

But who was the grand jury investigating? Every time the testimony led in that direction, words-mostly names-were blacked out.

"Who is this family they keep asking him about?"

"Rafael says it’s Meneses. Norwin Meneses and his nephews. Have you heard of them?"

"Nope."

"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. Rafael has known [Norwin and his nephews] for years. Since the Seventies, I think. The government is apparently using Blandon to get to Meneses."

I kept trying to recall where I had heard about this Contra-cocaine business before. Had I read it in a book? Seen it on television’? It bothered me.

Like most Americans, I knew the Contras had been a creation of the CIA, the darlings of the Reagan Right, made up largely of the vanquished followers of deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and his brutal army, the National Guard. But drug trafficking? Surely, I thought, if there had been some concrete evidence, it would have stuck in my mind. Maybe I was confusing it with something else.

A few days later I was in balmy San Diego, squinting at microfiche in the clerk’s office of the U.S. District Court. I found Blandon’s case file within a few minutes.

He and six others, including his wife, had been secretly indicted May 5, 1992, for conspiring to distribute cocaine. According to the indictment, he’d been a trafficker for ten years, had clients nationwide, and had bragged on tape of selling other L.A. dealers between two and four tons of cocaine.

He was such a big-timer that the judge had ordered him and his wife held in jail without bail because they posed "a threat to the health and moral fiber of the community."

The file contained a transcript of a detention hearing, held to determine if the couple should be released on bail. Blandon’s prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O’Neale, brought out his best ammo to persuade the judge to keep the couple locked up until trial.

"Mr. Blandon’s family was closely associated with the Somoza government that was overthrown in 1979," O’Neale said. Blandon had been partners with a Jairo Meneses in 764 kilos of cocaine that had been seized in Nicaragua in 1991, O’Neale claimed, and he also owned hotels and casinos in Nicaragua with Meneses. He had a house in Costa Rica. He had a business in Mexico, relatives in Spain, phony addresses all over the -United States, and "unlimited access to money."

Blandon’s lawyer, Brad Brunon, confirmed the couple’s close ties to Somoza and produced a photo of them at a wedding reception with El Presidente and his spouse. That just showed what fine families they were from, he said. The accusations in Nicaragua against Blandon, Brunon argued, were "politically motivated because of Mr. Blandon’s activities with the Contras in the early 1980s."

Damn, here it is again. His own lawyer says he was working for the Contras.

From the docket sheet, I could see that the case had never gone to trial. Everyone had pleaded out, starting with Blandon. Five months after his arrest, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, and the charges against his wife were dropped. After that, his fugitive codefendants were quickly arrested and pleaded guilty. But they all received extremely short sentences. One was even put on unsupervised probation.

As I read on, I realized that Blandon was already back on the streets -totally unsupervised. No parole. Free as abird.

The last page of the file told me why. It was a motion filed by U.S. Attorney O’Neale, asking the court to unseal Blandon’s plea agreement and a couple of internal Justice Department memorandums. "During the course of this case, defendant Oscar Danilo Blandon cooperated with and rendered substantial assistance to the United States," O’Neale wrote. At the government’s request his jail sentence had been secretly cut twice. O’Neale then persuaded the judge to let Blandon out of jail completely, telling the court he was needed as a full-time paid informant for the U.S. Department of Justice. Since he’d been undercover, O’Neale wrote, he couldn’t very well have probation agents checking up on him. He was released on unsupervised probation.

Back in Sacramento, I did some checking on the targets of the 1994 grand jury investigation - the Meneses family - and again Coral’s description proved accurate, perhaps even understated. I found a 1991 story from the San Francisco Chronicle and a 1986 Suo Francisco Examiner piece that strongly suggested that Meneses, too, had been dealing cocaine for the Contras during the I 980s. One of the stories described him as the "king of cocaine in Nicaragua" and the Cali cartel’s representative there. The Chronicle story mentioned that a U.S. Senate investigation had run across him in connection with the Contras and allegations of cocaine smuggling.

That must have been where I heard about this Contra drug stuff before, I decided. A congressional hearing.

At the California State Library’s Government Publications Section, I scoured the CSI indices, which catalog congressional hearings by topic and witness name. Meneses wasn’t listed, but there had been a series of hearings back in 1987 and 1988, I saw, dealing with the issue of the Contras and cocaine: a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

For the next six days I sat with rolls of dimes at a microfiche printer in the quiet wood-paneled recesses of the Library, reading and copying many of the 1,100 pages of transcripts and exhibits of the Kerry Committee hearings, growing more astounded each day. The committee’s investigators had uncovered direct links between drug dealers and the Contras. Many of the Kerry Committee witnesses, I noted, later became U.S. Justice Department witnesses against Noriega.

Kerry and his staff had taken video-taped depositions from Contra leaders who acknowledged receiving drug profits, with the apparent knowledge of the CIA. The drug dealers had admitted under oath - giving money to the Contras, and had passed polygraph tests. The pilots had admitted flying weapons down and cocaine and marijuana back, landing in at least one in-stance at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. The exhibits included U.S. Customs reports, FBI reports, internal Justice Department memos. It almost knocked me off my chair.

I called Jack Blum, the Washington, D.C., attorney who’d headed the Kerry investigation, and he confirmed that Norwin Meneses had been an early target. But the Justice Department, he said, had stonewalled the committee’s requests for information and he had finally given up trying to obtain the records, moving on to other, more productive areas. "There was a lot of weird stuff going on out on the West Coast, but after our experiences with Justice... we mainly concentrated on the cocaine coming into the East."