“El Rev de la Droga” (The King of Drugs), Norwin Meneses Cantarero, during an interview with the author and Georg Hodel at Tipitapa Prison outside Managua in 1996. PHOTO BY GARY WEBB

FDN supporter Don Sinicco snapped this picture in his kitchen in San Francisco during a cocktail party he was hosting for CIA agent Adolfo Calero, center. Drug lord Norwin Meneses is on the far right. The other men are local Contra supporters. At the time this photo was taken, June 1984, Meneses was engaged in a cocaine smuggling conspiracy, according to federal prosecutors. PHOTO COURTESY OF DON SINICCO

Danilo Blandόn, circa 1995.

ABC Park and Fly, near the Miami International Airport. Blandόn established his car rental company in this building during his brief “retirement” from the cocaine business in 1987. The day this picture was taken Anastasio Somoza’s former counterinsurgeney expert, Maj. Gen. Gustavo “El Tigre” Medina, was working behind the counter. PHOTO BY CARY WEBB

Enrique Miranda Jaime, shortly after the FBI kidnapped him in Miami and sent him back to Nicaragua to face escape charges in late 1996. Miranda, a former double agent for the CIA and the Sandinistas, was Meneses’s top aide after the war and would later help send his boss to prison. PHOTO BY GARY WEBB

Former Contra cocaine courier Carlos Cabezas, at his law office in Managua. PHOTO BY GARY WEBB

The Oval Office, August 5, 1987. A gathering of Nicaraguan resistance leaders to mark yet another CIA-inspired merger of the Contra armies from the FDN to the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO). Second from left is Aristides Sanchez. Adolfo Calero is on the far right. COURTESY OF THE RONALD REAGAN LIBRARY

The Oval Office, April 4, 1985. From left: CIA agent Adolfo Calero, political boss of the FDN; Lt. Col. Oliver North and President Ronald Reagan, after the CIA handed off the day-to-day management of the Contra project to North and the National Security Council. COURTESY OF THE RONALD REAGAN LIBRARY

L.A. crack kingpin “Freeway” Ricky Ross was all smiles as he was released from a Texas prison in 1994 after serving a short stint for cocaine trafficking. Though he had vowed to go straight, a few months later he would be lured back into the drug business by his old friend and cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandόn. ROBERT GAUTHIER/LOS ANGELES TIMES

Ricky Ross was captured March 2, 1995 in National City after his truck careened into a hedgerow. PHOTO BY GARY WEBB

Part of the $160,000 seized by the DEA from crack dealer Leroy “Chico” Brown during the 1995 sting that snared “Freeway” Ricky Ross. DEA PHOTO

Ricky Donnell Ross, shortly before he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in October 1996. ROBERT GAUTHIER/LOS ANGELES TIMES