Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion: Webb, Gary, Waters, Maxine

Dark Alliance is a book that should be fiction, whose characters seem to come straight out of central casting: the international drug lord, Norwin Meneses; the Contra cocaine broker with an MBA in marketing, Danilo Blandon; and the illiterate teenager from the inner city who rises to become the king of crack, "Freeway" Ricky Ross.

But unfortunately, these characters are real and their stories are true.In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles.