RIP Charles Bowden (August 30, 2014)

I can’t even imagine the courage it takes to try to report on the drug world, especially knowing that the CIA is heavily entangled in it.  I think you have to know that your life is likely to be forfeit when you begin.  (I always think of Veronica Guerin in Ireland.)  If the drug lords or the CIA don't take you out, mainstream media might ruin you.

Charles Bowden got to die in his sleep.  At least that's the official report.

"Look, you have a gift, life is precious, and eventually you die.  All you are going to have to show for it is your work, and whether you did a good job or not."  -- Charles Bowden (1945-2014)

The world Charles Bowden leads us into in his story, "The Pariah," is [...] a place few would willingly visit. Reporter Gary Webb chose to enter the alternate universe where the CIA sponsors armies and sometimes finds itself allied with drug dealers who sell their wares in the United States. Webb wrote a newspaper series that documented how the Nicaraguan contras of the 1980s were in part financed by just such an arrangement — and he was then professionally destroyed for it. Bowden, in the course of reporting this story over the last six months, found considerable evidence that parallels and supports Webb's articles — including revelations from one of the DEA's most decorated agents, who speaks for the first time about the CIA's complicity in the drug trade. It was not, however, the agency's ties to drug traffickers that Bowden found most disturbing. It was that a man can lose his livelihood, his calling, his reputation, for telling the truth.

  Esquire

Indeed, the truth is a dangerous thing to reveal.

Excerpt from "The Pariah" by Charles Bowden on September 12, 2013:

"When the Big Dog gets off the porch, watch out." And by the Big Dog, he means the full might of the United States government.

[...]

I had been thinking about looking into the claim that during the civil war in Nicaragua in the eighties, the CIA helped move dope to the United States to buy guns for the contras, who were mounting an insurrection against the leftist Sandinistas. So I called up Hector Berrellez, a guy who worked under Mike Holm in Los Angeles, a guy known within the DEA as its Eliot Ness, and he said, "Look, the CIA is the best in the world. You're not going to beat them; you're never going to get a smoking gun. The best you're going to get is a little story from me."

What Berrellez meant by a smoking gun is this: proof that the United States government has, through the Central Intelligence Agency and its ties to criminals, facilitated the international traffic in narcotics.

That's the trail the reporter was on when his career in newspapers went to rack and ruin. So I decided to look him up.

His name is Gary Webb.

Nine years after investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who played a leading role in ruining the controversial journalist's career, has publicly apologized — just weeks before shooting begins in Atlanta on Kill the Messenger, a film expected to reinstate Webb's reputation as an award-winning journalist dragged through the mud by disdainful, competing media outlets.

  LA Weekly

An apology is nice.  A bit late, though, don't you think?

His “suicide”.

In 2004 he was found dead from two gunshot wounds to the back of the head, which the coroner's office judged a suicide.

  Wikipedia

Bill Conroy is another drug war corruption reporter who is still alive.  Stay well, Bill.  Be careful.