Dead Celebrity Alert

Side note: Anyone out there running a “Suspicious Circumstances” Dead Pool? If you know anything about Gary Webb and his work, this is not a guy you’d expect to off himself. And while it could be a typo, note the mention of “gunshot wounds” (plural). Very strange indeed…

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]t was Mr. Webb’s tenure at the Mercury News from 1988 to 1997 that made his name in the business… 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 Sandinista government and to drug sales of crack cocaine flooding south-central Los Angeles in the 1980s.

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. … Read full story

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