LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A journalist who won national attention with a series of later-discredited articles linking the CIA with the spread of crack cocaine in Los Angeles has died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday.
The paper said Gary Webb, a former journalist with the San Jose Mercury News, was found dead on Friday at his home near the state capital of Sacramento. He was 49.
Webb wrote in 1996 that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods and used the profits to fund operations of the CIA-backed Contras, who were fighting the leftist government in Nicaragua.
The articles led to calls in Congress for a government probe. However, major newspapers discredited parts of Webb's work. The Mercury News reassigned Webb to a suburban bureau and he quit the paper in 1997.
Webb -- who was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for coverage of the killer Bay Area earthquake the prior year -- stood by his story. In 1999, he published a book, "Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion." -- Eugene Vilensky evilensky at gmail.com