Ernesto Carrasco also testified that one of the co-pilots, which usually accompanied him, went by the alias, "Hippie". During the course of his drug/weapon moving activities, Fabio, along with George Morales, noted that they had met with leaders of the Contras (Octaviano Cesar, Fopo Chamorro, and two unnamed others) several times in Miami, Florida, During their meetings in Florida, they would utilize places such as hotels, restaurants and even George Morale's own house. One restaurant that was mentioned in Fabio's testimony was called, "The Rusty Pelican". Fabio stated that during 1984–1985 he had made between 30 and 40 money/weapon drops to Costa Rica, which contained "war-grade" weapons (K-19, M-16, AR-15, grenade launchers, etc.) and several million dollars. He stated that the return was in the form of cocaine (an estimated total of 3-4 hundred kilos) shipped in fruit/vegetable crates belonging to the company, Frigorificos de Punta Arenas. Though he could not identify who owned the company, Fabio acknowledged that the company was primarily a front for moving cocaine through Costa Rica. 1992 Alan Fiers, a then member of the CIA, reported that North had a substantial hand in the Noriega sabotage proposal. He recalled, at a meeting with Reagan's Restricted Interagency Group, North had "strongly suggested" that the western part of Nicaragua needed a resistance group. He offered to have Noriega cause an issue there so that there would be a resistance group created. It would have cost $1 million. Everyone at the table denied this idea. 1996 to 1997 In August 1996, a series of articles titled "Dark Alliance", brought to the fore by journalist Gary Webb at the San Jose Mercury News, linked the origins of crack cocaine and its subsequent epidemic in California to the Contras. Historian Alfred W. McCoy, writing in his 2017 book titled In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, cited the assertions made by the "Dark Alliance" reporting series that "the Contra-run drug network opened the first conduit between Columbia's ... cartels and L.A.'s black neighborhoods", with the additional belief in an accompanying editorial that "It's impossible to believe that the Central Intelligence Agency didn't know." Once the chorus of indignation over the San Jose Mercury News claims had risen to an undeniable shrill in the African American community, "the national press entered the debate on the side of the CIA ... publishing front-page investigations,