Jeremy Renner Ready To ‘Kill The Messenger’ In Film About CIA-Smeared Journo Gary Webb

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141. 10.4.14 Cleaveland Plain Dealer-Gary Webb and 'Kill the Messenger':Reporter played by Jeremy Renner

Gary Webb and 'Kill the Messenger': Reporter played by Jeremy Renner honed journalism skills in Cleveland and Columbus
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Jeremy Renner plays investigative reporter Gary Webb in "Kill the Messenger." The thriller opens nationwide Friday, Oct. 10. (Focus Features)
Clint O'Connor, The Plain Dealer By Clint O'Connor, The Plain Dealer
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on October 03, 2014 at 8:00 AM, updated October 03, 2014 at 8:07 AM

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When Gary Webb wrote a major expose about the CIA and cocaine trafficking in 1996, he might have expected the toppling of government officials and massive follow-up investigations, not to mention a possible Pulitzer, book offers and movie deals.

Instead, the reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, who had honed his investigative skills at The Plain Dealer in the 1980s, ran into a firestorm. Not from the drug dealers, money launderers and gunrunners he had written about, but from America's major newspapers, which went into attack mode regarding his findings.

"He was never really the same after that," said Sue Stokes, Webb's former wife. "He lost his spark."

Within a year of the series, Webb had quit the Mercury News and never again worked for a daily newspaper. After divorcing, he fell into money troubles and depression. In December 2004, he killed himself. He was 49.

Jeremy Renner plays Webb in the new thriller "Kill the Messenger," which hits Cleveland theaters on Friday, Oct. 10. Directed by Michael Cuesta and written by Peter Landesman, the film also stars Rosemarie DeWitt, Ray Liotta, Michael Sheen and Andy Garcia.


It charts Webb's 12 months of digging to uncover ties between the CIA and the arming of the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s thanks to money from tons of cocaine flooding the U.S. The three-part series, published in August of 1996, connected the dots of the powder trail and suggested that it helped spur the crack-cocaine explosion in poor black urban areas, especially South Central Los Angeles.

"The tragic irony in all of this is that Webb was brought down by his bliss," said Cuesta, an Emmy-award winning director of such shows as "Homeland" and "Six Feet Under." "To believe in something so deeply, to be so passionate, and then to have that same thing turn on you is devastating."

The series was one of the first major newspaper projects to be posted online simultaneously, and it included links to Webb's documentation and taped interviews, then a rarity. Thanks to the Internet, the story spread across the country and fueled public outrage, particularly in the black community. Newsweek called the series "powerful," saying "this is the first time the Internet has electrified African Americans."

Webb became omnipresent on talk radio and network and cable news shows. The national press had largely abandoned the story of drug-smuggling related to the Contras in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal and the 1987 congressional hearings that made Lt. Col. Oliver North a household name. NBC and a few other news organizations advanced certain aspects of the series, but beginning in early October of 1996, Webb became the focus of a 1-2-3 punch.

First the Washington Post, then the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, published lengthy page-one stories deriding Webb's reporting and conclusions. It was the beginning of his professional undoing.

"Each one of the papers did it for a different reason," said Landesman, a former investigative reporter who wrote for the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker before turning to screenwriting.

"The L.A. Times had an envious, jealous reaction of being scooped in their own territory. They created a team of 15 journalists to specifically go after Gary and the story," he said.

Some called it the "Get Gary Webb Team."

"The Washington Post had a very strong quid pro quo relationship with the CIA, and the Post was not going to be outdone by an out of town reporter who didn't have any Washington relationships," he said. "The New York Times' approach was more professional arrogance."

Landesman's script is based on two books: Nick Schou's "Kill the Messenger," published in 2006, and Webb's own "Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion," from 1998.

The film does not focus on Webb's suicide, instead streamlining events from 1995-1997. Under the weight of the mounting national criticism, the Mercury News ran an unprecedented apology in May of 1997 backing away from parts of Webb's series. The stories had overreached in some areas and had not nailed down a direct connection between the CIA and crack cocaine dealings. Critics on both sides of the Webb ordeal agree that the stories would have benefited from sharper editing.

One aspect that hounded Webb for years was not of his making. The large, featured graphic illustrating the series was a shadowy figure lighting a crack pipe over the official seal of the CIA.

Marine Brat with Swagger

Gary Stephen Webb was born in Corona, California, on Aug 31, 1955. His dad was a Marine Corps sergeant and the family bounced from California to Hawaii, Florida and North Carolina, eventually landing in suburban Indianapolis.

"Gary was 18 and I was 16 when we first met and started dating in Indianapolis," said Sue Stokes. She and Gary were married from 1979 to 2000 and had three children. Sue remarried two years ago and now lives in El Dorado Hills, California, outside of Sacramento. After they met, Gary's family moved again, to Cincinnati, and he attended Northern Kentucky University before dropping out to take a reporting job at the Kentucky Post.
Gary WebbView full sizeGary Webb's staff photo when he worked at The Plain Dealer in the 1980s.Plain Dealer File Photo

"We wrote a lot of letters," said Sue of their long-distance romance. "And we sent cassette tapes back and forth because phone calls were too expensive and our parents would yell at us."

Gary was smart, very detailed in his work and loved to debate, said Sue. He also looked cool driving around in an MG sports car (later shifting to Triumph TR6s). Webb rose quickly at the Post, winning acclaim for co-writing a series about mobbed up coal operations. In 1983, he was hired at the Plain Dealer and he and Sue, who was pregnant with their first child, bought a house on West 138th Street.

Webb was hired at the urging of another star Plain Dealer reporter, Walt Bogdanich, who had met Webb in Kentucky when he was doing legwork for a story.

"We immediately hit it off. He was full of life and had a great sense of humor," said Bogdanich, now an acclaimed New York Times investigative reporter and editor who has won three Pulitzer Prizes.

"Gary was a great researcher. In the pre-Internet era, he was able to find records and materials hidden away in very unusual places. He was big on documents," said Bogdanich. "He had a low threshold of indignation, which is a critically important element of any investigative reporter."

Webb joined the Plain Dealer as part of a hiring wave that included Christopher Evans and Steve Luttner.

"Gary had zero tolerance for sycophants and fools," said Evans, now an editorial writer and columnist for the Northeast Ohio Media Group. "The hardcore investigative reporters, the Gary Webbs, the Walt Bogdaniches, once they got your scent, God help you."

Luttner sat in front of Webb amid the Plain Dealer's rows and rows of industrial desks in the cramped, smoke-filled newsroom. "If he got hold of a story he was consumed by it. And I mean that in a positive way," said Luttner, now with Lesic & Camper Communications in Cleveland.

In 1985, Mary Anne Sharkey, The Plain Dealer's bureau chief in Columbus, enticed Webb to move to the capital where he could keep closer tabs on state officials. "He told me working in Columbus was like being a kid in a candy shop," said Sharkey.

Webb exposed corruption in Ohio's Supreme Court, the state medical board and state mental health system, among other institutions. He and Sharkey also published a high-impact series on bizarre serial killer Dr. Michael Swango.

"I would come to work sometimes and Gary had been there all night," said Sharkey, who now runs a public affairs consulting firm. "And he would be reading documents. His office would be stacked and stacked with files."

When Landesman started writing the script about eight years ago, he contacted Sharkey several times to fill in the shadings of Webb's life.

"Gary had a feisty personality," said Sharkey. "People might think because he was a newspaperman he leaned liberal, but he didn't really. He had a weapon. He once shot a guy in the ass who was trying to steal his car. He kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer."

Sounds like a movie-ready character.

"He was a good looking guy," said Sharkey. "He had a swagger. He really attracted women. They called him the Marlboro Man."

Love of the Chase

Renner definitely has the requisite swagger, but he plays Webb as more of an astonished researcher than stud reporter. He can barely believe the levels of deceit he keeps uncovering.

"Kill the Messenger" rattled around in various stages of development for years and finally came together when Renner signed on to star, and co-produce, in February of 2013. The actor, who plays Hawkeye in the Marvel movies and has two Oscar nominations for "The Hurt Locker" and "The Town," delivers another terrific performance. He conveys Webb's doubts and struggles, his affection for his family, and his truth-seeking devotion.

He loved the chase and the writing. During one hellacious typing session, Renner captures Webb's fury, pounding away at his keyboard to the fight-the-power sounds of The Clash's "Know Your Rights."

After Webb left the Plain Dealer in 1988, he was part of a Mercury News reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake that devastated Northern California in 1989. Webb was again based at a state capital bureau, this time in Sacramento.

He didn't even answer the phone call that changed his life. It appeared in the form of a pink While You Were Out message slip left on his desk in July of 1995. When he returned the call, he discovered the tipster was Coral Baca, girlfriend of a drug trafficker named Rafael Cornejo who was awaiting trial. One of the government's witnesses, she said, was a man "who used to work with the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it."

"In 17 years of investigative reporting," Webb later wrote, "I had ended up doubting the credibility of every person who ever called me with a tip about the CIA."

This was different. The next year was filled with traveling; interviews; shady sources; stacks of notebooks, tapes, court records, police reports; and the bizarre horizontal haziness of Freedom of Information Act requests, which yielded reams of papers often dominated by neat rows of blacked-out sentences.

When the Mercury News brass backed away from the story, Webb said, "It's nauseating. I had never been more disgusted with my profession in my life."

His editors doubled the blow by demoting Webb to a suburban bureau. "This is just harassment," he said. "This isn't the first time that a reporter went after the CIA and lost his job over it."


He quit the paper in 1997, worked for a time as an investigator for the California Legislature, did some freelance writing and was briefly on staff at an alternative weekly in Sacramento. A report released in 1998 by the CIA Inspector General revealed that the CIA did have ties to drug smugglers supporting the Contras, and that between 1982 and 1995 the agency got a free pass from the Department of Justice because it had not been required "to report on allegations of drug trafficking with respect to non-employees of the agency."

It did not do much to vindicate Webb, as the more scathing aspects of the CIA's report were released at the height of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. Missing the hunt of investigative journalism, Webb sent out more than 50 resumes at one point but had no takers. Then his marriage unraveled.

"Gary had affairs. That's what ended our marriage," said Sue, who is portrayed in the film by Rosemarie DeWitt. "I didn't know about the affairs at the time. He was having an affair in 1999 and that's what started this whole downward spiral through the divorce. And it was during therapy when things came out about other affairs. That was one of the reasons he had wanted to move to California."

Conspiracy Theories

A detail-oriented man, Webb stage-managed a detail-oriented death.

He wrote and mailed letters to his ex-wife, his three children, his brother and his mother. He updated his will. He set out his Social Security card, cremation certificate and a suicide note. On the turntable was a favorite album, Ian Hunter's "Welcome to the Club: Live." Running out of money, he was preparing to live with his mother, and movers were arriving the next day with a truck. He stuck a note on the front door: "Please do not enter. Call 911."

Almost immediately, there were rumors that Webb had been murdered. The Sacramento County coroner's report revealed two gunshot wounds from a .38-caliber revolver. Conspiracy theorists said Webb had been killed by shady operatives, grim speculation that found currency in online headlines such as "The Murder of Gary Webb" and "Did the CIA Kill Gary Webb?"

There were two gunshot wounds because the first one was off target and went through his cheek. So he fired again.

"It's gruesome, but he never hit his brain," said Sue. "According to the coroner's office, the second bullet hit the carotid artery and he just bled out."

Sue, who consulted on the script and provided old home videos to the producers, has now seen the film three times at preview screenings set up for her and Webb's family and friends. "The first time, I was just too close to it. I could barely blink through the whole thing. But it's impressive."

Is it accurate?

"It is Hollywood and it's not a documentary. But I felt it was a really good portrayal of what happened to him."

She plans to attend the New York premiere on Thursday.

"It has given us some closure as a family," she said. "And hopefully, somehow, somewhere, Gary knows this is happening, and maybe it gives him some peace."