Kill the Messenger Read online

  According to Webb, he refused to apologize. “They said, ‘Look, why don’t you just come down and the cheerleaders are going to come in, and they want to talk to you and tell you what they think,’ and I said okay. So I went down to the newspaper office, and there were about fifteen of them sitting around this table, and they all went around one by one telling me what a scumbag I was, and what a terrible guy I was, and how I’d ruined their dates, ruined their complexions, and all sorts of things . . . and at that moment, I decided, ‘Man, this is what I want to do for a living.’”

  “I don’t think you can attach any political weight to it,” Wolf insists. On the one hand, Webb was serious about being a reporter. “He was delivering papers for the Lawrence Journal, and I guess he worked his way up there writing articles for them, too,” he says. But Wolf says Webb was just screwing around with the drill team satire. “He wasn’t a pacifist or anything like that,” he says. “His dad was a Marine. Gary and I would go shoot guns. It wasn’t a Birkenstock and Volvo kind of thing. I never thought it was a seminal event in Gary’s writing career, but it was sort of typical of him. Gary wasn’t afraid of anything. It was a sort of character flaw.”

  Kurt Webb says his brother found the whole experience hilarious. “I don’t think he really apologized,” he says. “He just said ‘I’m sorry you were offended.’ He had the attitude that it was their problem and if they didn’t like it they could write something about him. Gary always had a flippant attitude about stuff like that, how people could get so uptight about such a simple little thing.”

  “It was a good piece,” Anita Webb says. “I thought it was very funny.” But when parents of the cheerleaders demanded an apology from Webb, she confronted his teacher. “I told her that if anyone should apologize, she should, because she was the one who submitted the essay to the paper,” she says. “And Gary came home from school and said he got up in class and said he was sorry. Gary just felt it was the better thing to do. Everyone was just pouncing all over the poor kid.”

  WHEN WEBB GRADUATED from high school, he won a Hoosier scholarship and chose to attend IUPI, a community college whose initials stand for Indiana University/Purdue University in Indianapolis. “IUPI was where the poor kids went,” says Rex Davenport, one of Webb’s college friends who now edits a magazine for the Washington, D.C.-based American Society for Training and Development. At IUPI, Davenport edited the school newspaper, The Sagamore, where Webb wrote music reviews.

  “He showed up as a freshman and started working for me,” Davenport says. “We were an independent bunch and didn’t have a lot of supervision. We didn’t cover much hard news; it was all opinions and rants. I certainly didn’t teach him anything, but Gary was a good critic. We got a lot of free vinyl, and a lot people hung out at the newspaper for the free records.”

  Davenport recalls that Webb mostly wrote about his favorite bands, Mott the Hoople and Roxy Music, but just as in high school, he also wrote scathing satires about campus events. When a liberal history professor sponsored an antiwar film series at the school, Webb helped pen several reviews of the series, each freighted with self-parodying pacifist clichés.

  “We got irked because there was all this money being spent on a film series that was essentially just antiwar propaganda,” Davenport says. “Not that any of us were against that necessarily, but it was horribly one-sided. The professor called the series ‘Battle Cry of Peace,’ and we just mocked it horribly. We kept running headlines like ‘Battle Cry of Peace,’ ‘More Battle Cry of Peace,’ and ‘Still More Battle Cry.’ Gary was on board for that. It was pretty funny considering that Gary was a military brat.”

  The lack of editorial supervision at The Sagamore meant that campus reporters had to police each other. “Some kid had written a film review and convinced us to run it, and I got called on the carpet because the kid had stolen it from Playboy,” Davenport says. “Gary found him a day later and dragged him into a restaurant and threatened to beat him up, but didn’t. He explained that we didn’t want our reputation messed with that way. He had a sort of honest streak in him back then and always did. He just didn’t suffer fools at all. If you weren’t honest and straight-forward, he had no use for you at all.”

  In the summer of 1975, Webb got a job with City Lights of Indianapolis, a fledgling alternative weekly. His IUPI friend, Rex Davenport, was the paper’s managing editor. “We were mostly focused on arts and entertainment,” Davenport says. “Gary did some big interviews for us that summer: Billy Joel and maybe Paul McCartney.” David Letterman, then a local celebrity weatherman, wrote a piece for the paper as well. Davenport can’t recall what it was about, but wasn’t impressed. “It made no sense,” he says. “It was crap, actually.”

  Webb spent most of his free time hanging around with Greg Wolf, who often borrowed Gary’s rebuilt MG, a blue roadster that he and his dad had picked up at a local junkyard. With his father, Webb rebuilt the engine and repainted the car. His father fashioned a personalized brass plaque for the dashboard, which read, “This car built especially for Gary Webb.”

  Wolf was a year behind Webb in high school. Through a girlfriend, he met a beautiful brunette named Sue Bell. “I asked Sue out,” he recalls. “It wasn’t a big deal or anything. We were just friends, but Gary had the hots for her.” On that first date, Wolf borrowed Webb’s car.

  Sue laughs when she recalls what went through her mind when she noticed the plaque. “I was sixteen,” she says. “I thought ‘My, he must have a lot of money.’ Greg asked if I wanted to go back to his parent’s house. Gary was there watching TV. He used to hang out there and watch old Godzilla movies and stuff and make fun of them and laugh. He was just sitting there. He talked to me a little, but he was really shy. But two weeks after that, he asked me out and we started dating. And two weeks after that he told me he was moving to Kentucky.”

  Bill Webb had found a new job in Cincinnati. Gary and Kurt gave up their scholarships and transferred to Northern Kentucky University. Webb spent the next four years there studying journalism, working for the school paper, The Northerner, and traveling back to Indianapolis to see Sue. “I figured we’d never see each other again, but somehow we made it work,” she says.

  Anita Webb says she realized her son was going to marry Sue the first time she saw them together. “They were in the dining room sitting near this big window,” she says. “She was a sweet girl, very nice, and just sixteen at the time. He fell for her. They were always together. When we moved to Kentucky, I figured he’d get over it. But they kept communicating. The funny thing is, she would write him and he would take a red pen and correct her letters. I’d say ‘Gary, you can’t do that.’ But she put up with him. I couldn’t believe it. I would have ditched him right away. But he was funny that way. Very strange.”

  More than thirty years later, Sue still has those letters, including one from July 11,1974. “Your mistakes are getting fewer, thanks to my brilliant tutelage,” Webb wrote. “Here they are: ‘Sorry I haven’t written sooner’ should read ‘Sorry I didn’t write sooner.’ The tense in your sentence doesn’t agree.” After pointing out several other grammatical errors, Webb added, “‘Alex finally took Pam out from the bank’ doesn’t make any sense. (By the way, ‘sense’ is not spelled ‘since.’) Did he take her out from the bank or out for a date? (I knew what you meant but grammatically, it’s wrong.)”

  Webb then pointed out that “a lot” is not one word, “to often,” is spelled “too often,” and “No, you better not,” should read, “No, you’d better not.” “Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I’m glad to get your letters and I want one a day if you manage. Well, enough corrections; let’s get to the meat of your article.”

  According to Sue, those corrections, annoying as they were, also showed that her boyfriend couldn’t stop thinking about her. Halfway through one of his letters to Sue, in fact, he realized he was in love. “Oh, shit,” he wrote. “For once, I can’t even think of the words to tell you. This is the first time w
ords have ever failed me. Words were created by man to tell of happenings and not of inner feelings. They don’t describe the emotions of the . . . deepest emotions I feel. And they shouldn’t. What I feel for you is too delicate to be mauled by unwieldy words. A touch, a look, a sign between us is the proper medium.”

  When he was eighteen years old, Webb’s parents separated and two years later, divorced. The experience damaged him in a way that left him unable to talk about it to anyone. “Gary was very intense and he kept a lot of emotions very tight to himself,” Anita says. “A lot of the disappointments he had in life, he kept to himself.”

  Kurt Webb says his older brother never truly recovered from the divorce. “Gary was a strong sentimental family man,” he says. “He took umbrage to our parents getting divorced. Gary was an idealist. He wanted a perfect world where people weren’t corrupt and where family life really mattered.”

  Anita wouldn’t say what led to the separation. “It was a stressful time,” she says. “Things were up in the air. I don’t remember. We got in an argument, and he said he was leaving and I said that was fine with me.” But she added that her son never forgave his father for the divorce. “When his father broke away from the family, that bothered Gary a great deal,” she says. “I didn’t go into gross detail with the kids about why I didn’t want to live with their father, because he was a very devoted father. He might not have been the best husband, but there’s nobody who had a better father than those kids.”

  After his parent’s divorce, Webb moved in with Sue’s parents in Indianapolis. They were already talking about marriage. “My parents had a five bedroom house and said he could live with us,” Sue recalls. “So he moved in for about a year, long enough for my dad to be not too happy about it.”

  Sue says Webb told her his father had been unfaithful. “He confronted his dad about it when he was eighteen years old,” she says. “His father was a cheater and Gary was always pissed off about it. He asked him how he could do that. And his dad said, ‘Oh Gary, you wait ten or fifteen years. Just imagine if you marry Sue and you’re off in some other country and a beautiful woman approaches you in a bar. What are you going to do?’ That’s the answer he got from his father. Isn’t that nice?”

  Just shy of graduating from Northern Kentucky University, Webb quit school and started looking for a job. Across the river from Cincinnati was Covington, Kentucky, where Webb had heard from a friend that Vance Trimble, the eccentric, curmudgeonly editor of The Kentucky Post, had a reputation for hiring people off the street if they made a good first impression.

  THREE

  Sin City

  TOM LOFTUS STILL remembers seeing a handsome young man with a thin packet of clippings walk through the doors of the Kentucky Post one morning in early 1978. Now the state capital bureau chief for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Loftus was a young reporter at the Covington, Kentucky-based Post when Gary Webb asked to see Vance Trimble, the paper’s editor.

  “Someone had told him that the editor was always looking for people and if you went there early in the morning, you could get a job,” Loftus says. “Vance was eccentric and mean, but a hell of a smart guy. He would hire people on a one-day basis.”

  Getting the job meant more than impressing Trimble in an interview. Loftus doesn’t know for certain, but says Trimble typically sent potential hires directly into the field to cover a breaking story. I’m pretty sure he told Gary, ‘You look young, but go see the city editor and we’ll put you to work,’” he says. “He probably went out on a trial basis to cover a traffic fatality on deadline.”

  In an April 1998 interview with author Charles Bowden, who profiled Webb that year for Esquire magazine in a feature story called “The Pariah,” Webb recalled that Trimble told him to find two stories and report back to him in a week. He went home, sat in his back yard and thought it over. “Fuck, I can do this,” he thought to himself. Webb went back to Trimble with a story about strippers in Newport, Kentucky, and a man who carved gravestones for a living. Trimble rejected the stripper story as a “twice-told tale,” but liked Webb’s writing enough to tell him to find two more stories. A week later, he gave Webb another week to find two more articles, and Webb realized that, despite feeling like he was on perpetual probation, he had started writing full-time.

  Now retired and living in Oklahoma City, Trimble doesn’t recall the details of how he came to hire Webb, but he still remembers him almost thirty years later. “He was green as grass but eager as hell,” Trimble says. “He was bright and good-looking and wanted to write.” Trimble says Webb called him years later, shortly after he published “Dark Alliance,” to thank him for giving him his first job. “He was very emotional,” Trimble says. “I don’t know if he was about to cry, but he thanked me for five or ten minutes.”

  The Kentucky Post was located on the second floor of an office building where fifteen reporters cramped together like mechanics in a boiler room scrambled to assemble the paper every morning by 9:30 a.m. The paper consisted of sixteen pages wrapped around the Cincinnati Post and delivered every afternoon to 55,000 residents in suburban Cincinnati and a dozen rural counties in northern Kentucky. Covering the news often required driving more than 100 miles a day to compile arrest reports, hospital and jail admissions, lawsuit filings, and birth and death reports from small towns.

  Any information that didn’t pan out into a full story was dutifully transcribed into the paper’s celebrated “Town Crier” section. “It wasn’t a very glorious beginning for a reporter, going into a county clerk’s office, plopping down a typewriter and checking all the lawsuits,” Loftus says. “But you got a lot of stories that way. Good reporters are supposed to check that kind of thing.”

  Another obligation imposed by Trimble was covering high school football games. Every Friday night, six city desk reporters would receive marching orders to fan out to local games. A favorite pastime of reporters stuck with that assignment was to insert clichés into their work that Trimble would often overlook on deadline. For that reason, Webb grew to relish the assignment.

  “Every time Gary covered a football game he’d check who had carried the ball for the most yardage,” Loftus says. “And the third or fourth paragraph of every one of his stories would usually contain the phrase ‘Johnny so-and-so carried the ball however many times, grinding up the yardage like cheap hamburger.’ Gary would always howl when he got a good cliché in there, usually while he was smoking a cigarette behind his typewriter.”

  A former Washington, D.C.-based correspondent for the Scripps Howard news agency, Trimble had won numerous awards, including a 1961 Pulitzer Prize, for his reporting. He had forty years of experience in journalism, and liked to point that out whenever he called reporters into his office to berate their work. Trimble says he doesn’t remember yelling at Webb, but guesses he did. “I yelled at everybody,” he says.

  Trimble says his reporters were always after the big scoop, but were often “as green as they were eager.” One reporter called him at home late one evening, saying that he had been in a convenience store that appeared to be running a mob-tied bookie operation. “People were coming in and saying, ‘Give me five dollars on number four, or three dollars on number two,’ ” the reporter told Trimble. “He wanted to call the police right away and have them raid the place,” Trimble says. “I said, ‘You damn well better not do that; we’ll assess this in the morning.’ Sure enough, it turned out the people were coming in there to buy gasoline.”

  “You didn’t want to get called into his office,” Loftus says. “If he walked out into the newsroom and pointed to you and said ‘Get in here,’ it was going to be a bad day to say the least. You knew you were going to get the speech, and the speech always had the same line: ‘This is the worst piece of shit I have seen in forty years of journalism.’ The problem was he was usually right.”

  Trimble wasn’t especially fond of investigative reporting, but to him no story was too small for painstaking detail. He wanted every possible quest
ion in every story answered. After the paper had been sent to the printer each morning, reporters spread across northern Kentucky looking for news. They knew not to bother showing up the next morning without a well-developed and thoroughly researched story.

  Although most of his staff regarded him as somewhat of a tyrant, Loftus says, they also recognized his genius. “There’s no newspaper I can think of that was more cognizant of what was going on in its circulation area,” Loftus says. “It had a lot of the qualities of a really good tabloid. Trimble was a brilliant guy, but he had some unique ideas and it was a weird newspaper. He loved tearjerker stories about missing or sick children.”

  Such stories inevitably earned darkly humorous unofficial headlines among Post staffers. “One story was the ‘Little Blue Ricky’ story,” Loftus says. “Little Blue Ricky had some sort of heart condition which caused his complexion to fade and turn blue. Then there was ‘Tiny Mark Stone.’ Tiny Mark Stone was an infant who was lost by his mother and nobody could figure out where he was. Trimble couldn’t get enough of that story.”

  A month after Tiny Mark Stone vanished, police located a dead baby that was almost certainly the missing infant. “But for some reason, maybe the advice of their lawyers, the parents never claimed the body,” Loftus says. “And the police couldn’t positively identify the baby because the body had deteriorated. We ran this story called ‘Nobody Wants Dead Baby,’ which for some reason strikes me as a really interesting headline when you think about it. Trimble told me to get out there and find out where they were going to bury this kid. I drove out to the county potter’s field, this ugly patch of land out there somewhere and we ran this big picture and a caption, ‘Baby To Be Buried Here.’ ”