Backers of CIA-led Nicaraguan rebels brought cocaine to poor L.A. neighborhoods in early '80s to help finance war -- and a plague was born.

In 1996, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist GARY WEBB (1955–2004) wrote a shocking series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News exposing the CIA’s link to Nicaraguan cocaine smuggled into the US by the Contras, which had fueled the widespread crack epidemic that swept through urban areas

reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua's Sandinista government during the 1980s.