OBITUARY: GARY WEBB, PRIZE-WINNING INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER

Gary Webb, a prize-winning investigative journalist whose star-crossed
career was capped with a controversial newspaper series linking the
CIA to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, died Friday of
self-inflicted gunshot wounds, officials said.

Mr. Webb, 49, was found dead in his Carmichael home Friday morning of
gunshot wounds to the head, the Sacramento County Coroner's Office
said Saturday.

He left a note, but officials would not disclose its
contents.

"I'm still in a state of shock," said Tom Dresslar, who works as a
spokesman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and had known
Mr. Webb for 15 years.

"He was a hard-core, no-fear investigative reporter," Dresslar said.
"He wasn't afraid to stand up to whatever authority."

The two worked together when the Joint Legislative Audit Committee was
investigating the Davis administration over the failed Oracle Corp.
software contract.

Dresslar said Mr. Webb brought all the skills and tenacity that he had
honed as an investigative reporter to his job as an investigator for
the Assembly. "I was proud to work with him and call him a friend,"
Dresslar said.

Mr. Webb was divorced and had three children, according to
Dresslar.

Most recently, Mr. Webb had been reporting for the Sacramento News &
Review, covering politics and state government.

Mr. Webb had been working in the California Assembly speaker's Office
of Member Services until February, when he was ousted after the new
speaker, Fabian Nunez, took office.

Mr. Webb won more than 30 journalism awards in his career, which
included stints with the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the San Jose
Mercury News.

But it was Mr. Webb's tenure at the Mercury News from 1988 to 1997
that made his name in the business and eventually drove him from daily
newspapers.

Mr. Webb, who was based in the newspaper's Sacramento bureau, authored
a three-part investigative series in 1996 that linked the CIA to
Nicaraguan Contras seeking to overthrow the Sandin ista government and
to drug sales of crack cocaine flooding south-central Los Angeles in
the 1980s.

The series, "Dark Alliances: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," was
controversial almost from the start.

Even as newspapers nationwide carried versions of Mr. Webb's reporting
and congressional leaders called for investigations, the CIA director
at the time visited Los Angeles for an unprecedented town hall meeting
with area residents at which he denied the allegations and was met
with loud jeers.

Three of the nation's leading newspapers, the New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times and the Washington Post, followed up with reports
questioning Mr. Webb's conclusions, and eventually his own newspaper
turned on him.

In a letter to readers published in the Mercury News in May 1997,
then-Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos told readers there had been
problems with the series and that "we fell short at every step of our
process - in the writing, editing and production of our work."

Within a month of that note's publication, Mr. Webb told the
Washington Post that he had been pulled off the story, and his editors
had told him they would not publish his follow-ups.

He also said he was fighting a transfer from the Sacramento bureau to
a posting in Cupertino.

By then, however, his fate at the Mercury News was sealed, and he left
the paper that year, eventually taking a job with the Assembly.

Mr. Webb later published a 548-page book based on his series, and in a
1998 interview with The Bee he said he still was befuddled over how he
became notorious while the allegations in his stories were dismissed.

"That is an amazing phenomenon," he said. "I'm still not exactly sure
how that happened."