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a five bedroom house and said hecould live with us,” Sue recalls. “So he moved in for about a year, long enough for my dad to be not too happy about it.”
    Sue says Webb told her his father had been unfaithful. “He confronted his dad about it when he was eighteen years old,” she says. “His father was a cheater and Gary was always pissed off about it. He asked him how he could do that. And his dad said, ‘Oh Gary, you wait ten or fifteen years. Just imagine if you marry Sue and you’re off in some other country and a beautiful woman approaches you in a bar. What are you going to do?’ That’s the answer he got from his father. Isn’t that nice?”
    Just shy of graduating from Northern Kentucky University, Webb quit school and started looking for a job. Across the river from Cincinnati was Covington, Kentucky, where Webb had heard from a friend that Vance Trimble, the eccentric, curmudgeonly editor of The Kentucky Post , had a reputation for hiring people off the street if they made a good first impression.

THREE
    Sin City
    TOM LOFTUS STILL remembers seeing a handsome young man with a thin packet of clippings walk through the doors of the Kentucky Post one morning in early 1978. Now the state capital bureau chief for the Louisville Courier-Journal , Loftus was a young reporter at the Covington, Kentucky-based Post when Gary Webb asked to see Vance Trimble, the paper’s editor.
    â€œSomeone had told him that the editor was always looking for people and if you went there early in the morning, you could get a job,” Loftus says. “Vance was eccentric and mean, but a hell of a smart guy. He would hire people on a one-day basis.”
    Getting the job meant more than impressing Trimble in an interview. Loftus doesn’t know for certain, but saysTrimble typically sent potential hires directly into the field to cover a breaking story. I’m pretty sure he told Gary, ‘You look young, but go see the city editor and we’ll put you to work,’” he says. “He probably went out on a trial basis to cover a traffic fatality on deadline.”
    In an April 1998 interview with author Charles Bowden, who profiled Webb that year for Esquire magazine in a feature story called “The Pariah,” Webb recalled that Trimble told him to find two stories and report back to him in a week. He went home, sat in his back yard and thought it over. “Fuck, I can do this,” he thought to himself. Webb went back to Trimble with a story about strippers in Newport, Kentucky, and a man who carved gravestones for a living. Trimble rejected the stripper story as a “twice-told tale,” but liked Webb’s writing enough to tell him to find two more stories. A week later, he gave Webb another week to find two more articles, and Webb realized that, despite feeling like he was on perpetual probation, he had started writing full-time.
    Now retired and living in Oklahoma City, Trimble doesn’t recall the details of how he came to hire Webb, but he still remembers him almost thirty years later. “He was green as grass but eager as hell,” Trimble says. “He was bright and good-looking and wanted to write.” Trimble says Webb called him years later, shortly after he published “Dark Alliance,” to thank him for giving him his first job. “He was very emotional,” Trimble says. “I don’t know if he was about to cry, but he thanked me for five or ten minutes.”
    The Kentucky Post was located on the second floor of an office building where fifteen reporters cramped together like mechanics in a boiler room scrambled to assemble thepaper every morning by 9:30 a.m. The paper consisted of sixteen pages wrapped around the Cincinnati Post and delivered every afternoon to 55,000 residents in suburban Cincinnati and a dozen rural counties in northern Kentucky. Covering the news often required driving more than 100 miles a