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LA Police Officer Mike Ruppert Confronts CIA Director John Deutch on Drug Trafficking
THE CIA-CONTRA-CRACK COCAINE CONTROVERSY:A REVIEW OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT'S INVESTIGATIONS AND PROSECUTIONS
For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.
This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the
black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of
the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . .
. and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.
The three-day series of articles, entitled "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the
Crack Explosion," told the story of a Los Angeles drug operation run by Ricky Donnell
Ross, described sympathetically as "a disillusioned 19-year-old . . . who, at the
dawn of the 1980s, found himself adrift on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles."
The Dark Alliance series recounted how Ross began peddling small quantities of cocaine in
the early 1980s and rapidly grew into one of the largest cocaine dealers in southern
California until he was convicted of federal drug trafficking charges in March 1996. The
series claimed that Ross' rise in the drug world was made possible by Oscar Danilo Blandon
and Norwin Meneses, two individuals with ties to the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense
(FDN), one group comprising the Nicaraguan Contras. Blandon and Meneses reportedly sold
tons of cocaine to Ross, who in turn converted it to crack and sold it in the black
communities of South Central Los Angeles. Blandon and Meneses were said to have used their
drug trafficking profits to help fund the Contra army's war effort.
It confirms the suspicion that government agents were involved. Clearly, when you're
talking about drug dealers meeting with CIA agents it does go a long way toward validating
this suspicion. There's a grain of truth to any conspiracy theory and it turns out there
are a lot of grains of truth to this one.
It's impossible to believe that the Central Intelligence Agency didn't know about the
Contras' fund-raising activities in Los Angeles, considering that the agency was
bankrolling, recruiting and essentially running the Contra operation. The CIA has a long
history of embarrassing the country it is supposed to work for, from the Bay of Pigs in
Cuba to the jungles of Vietnam. But no action that we know of can compare to the agency's
complicity, however tacit, in the drug trade that devastated whole communities in our own
country.
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