Government Distribute Crack
Aug 22, 2019 Defendant Sentenced to 18 Months’ Imprisonment for Participating in Conspiracy to Distribute Powder Cocaine and Crack. PITTSBURGH - A resident of Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, was sentenced in federal court yesterday for violating federal narcotics laws, United States Attorney Scott W. Brady announced today. He conspired with others to. According to the stories, the CIA and its operatives used crack cocaine-sold via the Los Angeles African-American community-to raise millions to support the agency's clandestine operations in. To distribute 280 grams or more of crack in the Blumberg Complex and committed related offenses. (Information, Doc. 69.) On April 25, 2018, Chandler pled guilty to the 17.
Though Evidence Is Thin, Tale of C.I.A. And Drugs Has a Life of Its Own October 21, 1996 Though Evidence Is Thin, Tale of C.I.A.
And Drugs Has a Life of Its Own By TIM GOLDEN OMPTON, Calif., Oct. 16 - Over the years that Beverly Carr has lived in South-Central Los Angeles, she has seen crack cocaine rage through her neighborhood like a violent storm, littering the streets with young bodies, battering schools and homes, tearing families from their hinges. But it was only after a series of articles in The San Jose Mercury News that Mrs.
Carr found what she took to be proof of an unseen force behind the devastation. That the force was said to be the United States Government surprised her not at all. That the plot supposedly involved associates of the Central Intelligence Agency selling drugs in black neighborhoods to finance an anti-Communist crusade in Central America made perfect sense. 'Everybody my age or older has always known that something like this was going on,' the 48-year-old caterer said. 'Who down here in Watts or Compton has planes or boats to get these drugs up here? They're targeting the young black men.
It's just ruining a whole generation.' Carr came upon the story in a conventional way: a local newspaper reprinted the series that The Mercury News published two months ago. But, propelled by newer technology, the San Jose paper's tantalizing assertion of a possible C.I.A. Role in the spread of crack through America's inner cities has now traveled much farther, reaching millions of people over the Internet, talk radio and cable television, setting off a flurry of Federal investigation and confirming the suspicions of many, African-Americans in particular, about a Government role in the drug trade. The story's trajectory through the body politic is itself a remarkable tale. While the paper's assertions might owe their widest dissemination to the World Wide Web, they owe much of their power to the longstanding network of newspapers, radio stations and word of mouth that informs and connects blacks in the United States.
By its disparate impact, the story has also underscored both the profound mistrust of government that history has engendered among many blacks and the difficulty that many whites have in understanding their views. 'What makes it so believable to me is that there is just abounding circumstantial evidence,' said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of many black political leaders who have publicly lent credence to the account in The Mercury News. 'There is the weight of a lot of experiences with our Government operating in adverse or conspiratorial ways against black people. The context is what's driving the story.'
' The force of the Mercury News account appears to have relatively little to do with the quality of the evidence that it marshals to its case. The series did raise some new questions about the Government's treatment of a pair of mid-level Nicaraguan drug traffickers in California who supported the contra rebels in their fight against the Sandinista Government that ruled their country from 1979 to 1990. But court documents, past investigations and interviews with more than two dozen current and former rebels, C.I.A. Officials and narcotics agents, as well as other law-enforcement officials and experts on the drug trade, all indicate that there is scant proof to support the paper's contention that Nicaraguan rebel officials linked to the C.I.A. Played a central role in spreading crack through Los Angeles and other cities. One of the traffickers, Oscar Danilo Blandon, has said he sent the rebels a pickup truck and some supplies.
The other, Juan Norwin Meneses Canterero, appears to have given them some money and may have been involved in shipping them weapons on at least one occasion, Government officials with access to intelligence reports on his activities said. But neither of the two ever held an official position in any of the Nicaraguan groups, many former contra and United States Government officials insist. Neither of them, Government officials say, worked for or had any discernable, direct contact with agents of the C.I.A. Nor is there any proof of a connection between the two Nicaraguans' support for the rebels fighting in Central America and the money that was generated during the long trafficking relationship that Mr. Blandon maintained with perhaps the most infamous crack merchant in Los Angeles, Ricky Donnell Ross, a 36-year-old Texas native convicted in San Diego on Federal narcotics charges.
The Reporter And the Lawyer In a sentencing memorandum filed last month, the Assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted Mr. O'Neale, suggested that if there was a conspiracy afoot to do something other than sell drugs, it involved the cooperative relationship between the Mercury News reporter who wrote the series, Gary Webb, and Mr. Ross's lawyer, Alan Fenster. Webb has acknowledged that he suggested questions to the defense for Mr.
Blandon, a paid informer for the Drug Enforcement Administration who was the star witness against Mr. Ross, so that his articles might draw on the Nicaraguan's testimony about his ties to the contras. Blandon's statements, Mr.
Fenster then centered his defense in part on the notion that his client was the victim of a C.I.A. Plot to flood the black community with cocaine. 'These articles uncritically swallow the Ross version of events hook, line and sinker, often ignoring or wrenching out of context the evidence that proves Ross wrong,' Mr.
O'Neale argued. 'Ross then waves the articles aloft as 'proof' that he was right.' Webb defended his contacts with Mr. Fenster in an unusual dissection of his reporting that was printed by his own newspaper last Sunday, and the paper's executive editor, Jerry Ceppos, echoed the defense.
'I may be blind, but I believe it was legitimate and fair and absolutely ethical,' Mr. Ceppos said in a telephone interview. The reporter's cooperation with the defense lawyer is only one of many aspects of the Mercury News series that has come under attack by media analysts and journalists. For the most part, the critics have accused the paper of taking a good, newsworthy story about the relationship between a right-wing Nicaraguan cocaine broker and a legendary Los Angeles drug dealer and inflating it, without much substantiation, into an account that strongly suggests that the C.I.A. Had a significant, if indirect, role in creating the crack epidemic. But the series owes its impact to more than the shocking 'alliance' it describes between Nicaraguan rebel officials and gang members from South-Central. The newspaper, which closely covers the information-technology industry that is centered in the area and prides itself on maintaining one of the newspaper world's most sophisticated Web sites, went to unprecedented lengths to repackage the series for the Internet.
By the time the first installment of the series was hitting doorsteps in San Jose, 44 miles southeast of San Francisco, on Aug. 18, the paper's Internet site, the Mercury Center, was offering ancillary material that included transcripts of relevant court records, photographs of the protagonists, diagrams, biographies and even audio recordings of trial testimony - all a mouse click away from the main text. Even earlier, the on-line service had begun announcing the series in messages to popular Internet news groups focused on subjects like drugs, the C.I.A. And conspiracy theories. For The Mercury News, a regional newspaper with an audited daily circulation last year of less than 300,000, the Net offered a readership it could only have imagined a few years ago.
Almost immediately, the newspaper's electronic site began receiving as many as 860,000 'hits' a day, well above the roughly 600,000 to 700,000 it had been getting before, said Bob Ryan, the director of the paper's on-line service. Elected Officials Show Quick Concern As public awareness of the series grew, the paper began promoting it more aggressively. For readers wanting more, the Mercury Center carried a separate Gary Webb page, with a daily update of the reporter's appearances on a slew of radio and television programs.
Interest in the series was also fueled by more traditional means. Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from the San Francisco Bay area who assailed the Reagan Administration 10 years ago over another California newspaper's reports on the contra connections of Mr. Meneses, wrote the Director of Central Intelligence, John M. Deutch, on Aug.
29 to demand an explanation of the C.I.A.' S possible involvement in the matter.
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No sooner had Senator Boxer's letter made headlines than the state's other Senator, Dianne Feinstein, also a Democrat, followed with a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno. Maxine Waters, a Democratic Congresswoman who represents part of South-Central Los Angeles, fired off her own letters to Mr. Reno and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois. Investigations were begun by the C.I.A., the Justice Department and the House Intelligence Committee. Of the many politicians who have voiced outrage over the C.I.A.' S purported role in the drug trade, none have been more vigorous than Representative Waters, who has held news conferences, given speeches, churned out handbills and led a demonstration over the reports.
'The impact and the implications of the Meneses/Blandon/Ross/contra/C.I.A. Crack cocaine connection cannot be understated,' the Congresswoman wrote to Mr. A Jolt Enhanced By the Internet The Mercury News series resounded just as powerfully among other members of the Congressional Black Caucus and among many African-Americans throughout the country. Curtis Harris, a young investment banker on Wall Street and a graduate of West Point, learned of the reports from BOBC, or Black-on-Black Communications, an on-line newsletter that describes itself as a source of 'useful information by blacks for blacks.' ' 'I immediately wanted to know more,' recalled Mr. Harris, who took off on the Net and kept going until he landed at the Mercury Center. Jon Katz, the media critic for Hot Wired, the electronic sister of Wired magazine, said the Mercury News series had ricocheted around the hundreds of mostly small, black-oriented news groups on the Web, not only reaching students, professionals and others with access to the Internet, but also facilitating quick delivery of the series to black newspapers, radio stations and community groups.
'Just as the gulf war established cable news as a medium, I think this story will dramatically raise African-American consciousness of the digital culture, which is now an overwhelmingly white medium,' Mr. On WBAI radio in New York, announcers read excerpts from the stories on the air each night for weeks after they were printed. At Styles, a New York City hair salon catering to an African-American and Hispanic clientele, a printout of the series sits in the magazine rack, alongside copies of Ebony and Essence magazines. 'The established press ignored the story until they found out that black folks weren't going to just let this one be swept under the rug,' said Don Middleton, 33, a jazz musician in Washington who read the series on the Internet.
Government Distribute Crack 2017
'The white press is pointing fingers at the black community, saying we're paranoid and quick to see conspiracy at every turn of the corner. Where have they been for the last 30 years?
Can I just mention the Tuskegee syphilis study, Cointelpro, Watergate, Iran-contra. Hello, America?' ' An Endless Supply Of Suspicion Black intellectuals said that if African-Americans were quicker than whites to believe in the possibility of C.I.A. Involvement in the spread of crack, it was largely a product of bitter history, like the episodes touched on by Mr. Middleton: a scientific study in which 652 black men suffering from syphilis went untreated; secret campaigns of the 1960's and early 70's by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that sought to spy on and discredit the Black Panther movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And other black leaders; the F.B.I.
Sting operation that captured Mayor Marion S. Of Washington smoking crack in a hotel room.
The country's biggest newspapers, to the extent that they have covered the story, have for the most part done so skeptically. Earlier this month, The Washington Post devoted most of two pages to a repudiation of the claims by The Mercury News. On Sunday, The Los Angeles Times ran the first of three articles on the subject, saying that the Nicaraguan traffickers were not instrumental in starting the crack epidemic. But the San Jose stories nonetheless found fertile ground. In 1990, long before any major news organizations had connected crack and the C.I.A., a telephone poll conducted for The New York Times and WCBS-TV found that a quarter of the 1,047 black New Yorkers surveyed believed that the Government 'deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people.' ' Another third of those polled said that might possibly be true.
Similarly, the poll showed that blacks were more likely than whites to believe that the AIDS virus was created to infect black people, and that the Government persecutes black elected officials. 'This plays into a longstanding feeling that blacks have that the Government is up to no good with regard to them,' Alvin F. Poussaint, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, said of the Mercury News reports. 'I think this would have caught on even if you didn't have an Internet.' Poussaint said the suspicions were also fed by contemporary evidence. Among other recent events, he cited the C.I.A.'
S involvement with Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the former Panamanian dictator; the revelations of the Iran-contra scandal, and the frequent disparities in sentencing between whites who deal in powdered cocaine and blacks who sell crack. Yet as the uproar over the Mercury News series has continued, even the newspaper has seemed to have second thoughts. 'Were there things I would have done differently in retrospect?' Ceppos, the paper's chief editor, asked. The principal thing I would have is one paragraph very high saying what we didn't find.
We got to the door of the C.I.A. We did not get inside the C.I.A.'
New Jersey man pleads guilty to intending to distribute crack and heroin (PLATTSBURGH, N.Y.) - Markell Reyes, age 20, of Jersey City, New Jersey, pled guilty today to possessing and intending to distribute crack cocaine and heroin. The announcement was made by Acting United States Attorney Grant C. Jaquith; James J. Hunt, Special Agent-in-Charge of the New York Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration; and Chief Patrol Agent John C. Pfeifer, United States Border Patrol, Swanton Sector. As part of his guilty plea, Reyes admitted that while in Ogdensburg, New York, he possessed a bag that contained approximately 58 grams of crack, 5 grams of heroin, and 135 grams of N-ethyl pentylone, often marketed as “Molly,” all of which Reyes intended to distribute.
The bag also contained a handgun. United States District Judge David N. Hurd will sentence Reyes on February 22, 2017. Reyes faces at least five years and up to 40 years in prison, a term of post-imprisonment supervised release of at least four years and up to life, and a maximum $5 million fine. This case was investigated by the United States Border Patrol and DEA, and is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Cyrus P.W.