Free Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou Page B

overwhelmed.”
    To escape his depression, Webb buried himself in his work with renewed vigor, and under Garcia’s tutelage, broke some impressive stories, including “The Forfeiture Racket,” a 1994 expose of California’s drug asset forfeiture laws, which allowed police to seize houses and other property belonging to suspected drug dealers. After the series ran, state lawmakers rescinded the forfeiture program, and Webb won the H.L. Mencken Award for reporting from the Free Press Association.
    â€œGary wasn’t well known in the newsroom because he had never worked there,” Garcia says. “As a bit of a loner, he did not have a big support network there.” But after Gary won awards for his reporting on the state’s drug forfeiture program, Garcia says, “his image was somewhat resurrected at the paper.”
    â€œThe Forfeiture Racket” also bore a much more unexpected piece of fruit. One afternoon in July 1995, Webb arrived at his desk to find a pink slip bearing a telephone number from a woman named Coral Baca, whose boyfriend, a Nicaraguan drug dealer named Rafael Cornejo, had been one of the criminals targeted by the forfeiture program Webb had exposed. Baca wanted Webb to write about how the government had set up her boyfriend on bogus charges and then seized and sold his house.
    Webb told Baca he didn’t think his editors would be too interested in her story. He had already written as much about California’s drug seizure laws as he was going to write. And an imprisoned drug dealer who says he’s innocent? That didn’t seem like news. But as Webb would later write in his 1998 book Dark Alliance , Baca quickly changed his mind. Webb was about to discover that this was the telephone call he had been waiting for his whole life, the one that his old friend at the Plain Dealer , Tom Andrzejewski, had jokingly anticipated every time he picked up the receiver.
    â€œThere’s something about Rafael’s case that I don’t think you would have done before,” Baca told Webb. “One of the government’s witnesses is a guy who used to work with the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it . . . And now he’s working for the government again.”
    Without realizing it, Webb had just stumbled onto “The Big One.”

FIVE
    Drug Stories
    AT FIRST, CORAL Baca’s tale of CIA-tied drug traffickers flooding the streets of San Francisco with cocaine seemed too strange to be true. She reminded Webb of a local conspiracy theorist who would bombard the Mercury News with wild allegations of secret government plots. Whenever the man demanded to speak with a reporter, he’d be unleashed on the newest hire—while everyone else in the office took bets on how long it would take for the unwitting subject of the bullshit detection test to realize the would-be source was nuts.
    But Baca didn’t seem crazy. She wasn’t talking about theories, she was talking about a specific case—her boyfriend’s—and claimed she had stacks of legal documents and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)records that would confirm that the chief witness against Rafael Cornejo sold drugs for the CIA.
    After hanging up the phone, Webb did the first thing he always did when checking out a lead—he examined the public record for any information that would shed light on Baca’s story. The first document he found was a recent San Francisco Chronicle article about a group of prisoners who tried to escape from a Bay Area federal prison. “Four inmates were indicted yesterday in connection with a bold plan to escape from the federal lockup in Pleasanton using plastic explosives and a helicopter that would have taken them to a cargo ship at sea,” the Chronicle had reported. “Rafael Cornejo, 39, of Lafayette, an alleged cocaine kingpin with reputed ties to Nicaraguan drug traffickers and Panamanian money launderers, was among those indicted