Tran­scripts from Gary Webb’s orig­i­nal San Jose Mer­cury News series.

Octo­ber 3, 1996
Affi­davit shows CIA knew of con­tra drug ring<
by Gary Webb and Pamela Kramer
Knight-Ridder Newspapers

LOS ANGELES — Dur­ing the early 1980s, fed­eral and local nar­cotics agents knew that a mas­sive drug ring oper­ated by Nicaraguan con­tra rebels was sell­ing large amounts of cocaine “mainly to blacks liv­ing in the South Cen­tral Los Ange­les area,” accord­ing to a search-warrant affi­davit obtained by the San Jose Mer­cury News.

The Octo­ber 23, 1986, affi­davit iden­ti­fies for­mer Nicaraguan gov­ern­ment offi­cial Danilo Blandón as “the highest-ranking mem­ber of this orga­ni­za­tion” and describes a sprawl­ing drug oper­a­tion involv­ing more than 100 Nicaraguan con­tra sympathizers.

The affi­davit of Thomas Gor­don, a for­mer Los Ange­les County sheriff’s nar­cotics detec­tive, is the first inde­pen­dent cor­rob­o­ra­tion that the con­tra army — the Nicaraguan Demo­c­ra­tic Force — was deal­ing “crack” cocaine to gangs in Los Ange­les’ black neigh­bor­hoods. Known by its Span­ish ini­tials, the FDN was an anti-communist com­mando group formed and run by the CIA dur­ing the 1980s.

Gordon’s sworn state­ment says that both the Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion and the FBI had infor­mants inside the Blandón drug ring for sev­eral years before sheriff’s deputies raided it Octo­ber 27, 1986. Gordon’s affi­davit is based on police inter­views with those infor­mants and one of the DEA agents who was inves­ti­gat­ing Blandón.

Twice dur­ing the past year, Ron Spear, Los Ange­les County Sheriff’s Depart­ment spokesman, told the Mer­cury News that his depart­ment had no records of the 1986 raids and denied hav­ing a copy of Gordon’s search-warrant affidavit.

The Mer­cury News obtained the entire search-warrant affi­davit this week. Sher­iff Sher­man Block’s office did not respond yes­ter­day to writ­ten ques­tions about the affidavit.

A recent Mer­cury News series revealed how Blandón’s oper­a­tion, which sold thou­sands of kilos of cocaine to black Los Ange­les drug deal­ers, cre­ated the first mass mar­ket for crack in Amer­ica dur­ing the early 1980s and helped fuel a crack explo­sion that is still rever­ber­at­ing through black com­mu­ni­ties. Both the CIA and the Jus­tice Depart­ment have denied gov­ern­ment involvement.

But accord­ing to a legal motion filed in a 1990 case involv­ing a deputy who helped exe­cute the search war­rants, one of the sus­pects involved in the raid iden­ti­fied him­self as a CIA agent and asked police to call CIA head­quar­ters in Vir­ginia to con­firm his iden­tity. The motion, filed by Los Ange­les defense attor­ney Har­lan Braun on behalf of Deputy Daniel Gar­ner, said the nar­cotics detec­tives allowed the man to make the call but then carted away numer­ous doc­u­ments pur­port­edly link­ing the U.S. gov­ern­ment to cocaine traf­fick­ing and money-laundering efforts on behalf of the contras.

The motion said CIA agents appeared at the sheriff’s depart­ment within 48 hours of the raid and removed the seized files from the evi­dence room. But Braun said detec­tives secretly copied 10 pages before the doc­u­ments were spir­ited away. Braun attempted to intro­duce them in the 1990 crim­i­nal trial to force the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to back off the case. Braun was hit with a gag order, the doc­u­ments were put under seal and Gar­ner was con­victed of cor­rup­tion charges.

Inter­nal sheriff’s depart­ment records of the raid “mys­te­ri­ously dis­ap­peared” around the same time the seized files were taken, Braun’s motion said. That claim was but­tressed in an inter­view this week by an offi­cer involved in the raid.

The offi­cer, who requested anonymity, said the alleged CIA agent was Ronald Lis­ter, a for­mer Laguna Beach police detec­tive who worked with Blandón in the drug ring. The 1986 search-warrant affi­davit iden­ti­fies Lister’s home in Laguna Beach as one of the places searched. It says Lis­ter was involved in trans­port­ing drug money to Miami and was Blandón’s part­ner in a secu­rity com­pany. The com­pany, accord­ing to a for­mer employee, was doing work at a Sal­vado­ran mil­i­tary air base in the early 1980s. Lis­ter pleaded guilty to cocaine traf­fick­ing in 1991.