The CIA-Crack-Disney Connection

A series of controversial articles will get the big-screen treatment

By Jeff B. Copeland Oct 22, 1996 12:45 AMTags
"Torn from the headlines," as the old movie trailers used to say:

Daily Variety reports that Disney's Touchstone division will make a film out of a series of stories in the San Jose Mercury News claiming that during the Reagan Administration, drug smugglers, with the CIA's tacit approval, raised millions of dollars for the Contras--the right-wing revolutionaries who tried to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government--by smuggling cocaine into the U.S.

The articles by Gary Webb strongly implied that the CIA, which sponsored the Contras, bear some of the responsiblity for bringing crack into the inner cities--and for the devastating effect it had on America's youth.

Webb's articles have caused an outcry--particularly in the black communities of Los Angeles, where the crack trade started. Last month, about 2,000 persons rallied in L.A. to demand that the U.S. government take responsibility for inflicting crack on their neighborhoods. "People in high places were winking and blinking, and our children were dying," Maxine Waters, a black Congresswoman from Los Angeles told the crowd.

At the center of the Mercury News stories are Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes, a Nicaraguan exile and Contra supporter in Los Angeles, and "Freeway" Ricky Ross, a young black dope dealer in L.A. who became a major crack wholesaler.

The newspaper said that Blandon sent "millions" in cash collected from Ross to the Contras to buy arms--a story Blandon seemed to confirm in testimony at his recent trial in San Diego and which Ross has publicly admitted.

The CIA will conduct an internal investigation of the Contra-crack connection. Meantime, Webb's work has plenty of detractors. Former U.S. government officials have denied that the CIA knew about or condoned drug trafficking on behalf of the Contras. And the Los Angeles Times published a lengthy article this morning in which a former associate said that he doubted that Blandon had ever sent more than $50,000 to the Nicaraguan rebels.