Dark Alliance

A three-part investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s CIA-backed Contra rebels, and California’s crack epidemic in the 1980s.

  1. Part One

    Backers of CIA-led Nicaraguan rebels brought cocaine to poor L.A. neighborhoods in the early 1980s to help finance war – and a plague was born.

  2. Part Two

    How a smuggler, a bureaucrat and an ambitious teenager created the cocaine pipeline.

  3. Part Three

    The impact of the crack epidemic.