Gary Webb, who reported on the crime syndicate known as the CIA and their smuggling of cocaine into the US during the 1980s via Nicaragua, and who later "committed suicide" by shooting himself in the head multiple times, wrote a book titled The Politics of Heroin in South-East Asia. The book, still in print, details how the CIA used its private airline, known as Air America, to shuttle opium grown by hill tribes, to Laos where it was refined into Number 4 heroin. The heroin with its own brand was then flown into S. Vietnam where it was sold to GIs. Most of the heroin was smuggled into the US inside the body bags of dead US soldiers. The Vietnam War and the US crack epidemic of the 1980s was very profitable for the CIA.