Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism, revised and updated edition

Most of the best journalism is bottom-up, rather than top-down.

—GENE ROBERTS

It may now be a journalistic article of faith that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s work at the Washington Post pushed news organizations into making investigative reporting a priority and set American youth dreaming of journalism careers. In the five years leading up to Watergate, though, the number of undergraduate journalism degrees had doubled. And investigative reporting was already experiencing something of a boom, with all reporters having gotten a boost from the federal Freedom of Information Act passed in 1966.¹

Within a decade of winning the 1954 Pulitzer Gold Medal, Newsday was using team techniques that would eventually help it capture the 1970 Public Service Prize and yet another in 1974. Papers like the Boston Globe often cited Newsday as a model for starting their own teams. And when the national group Investigative Reporters and Editors started up in 1975, Newsday was at the center of IRE’s effort too.²

Truth be told, it was a seriously flawed Newsday that won that 1954 Pulitzer. The paper had been responsible for the significant public service of “dethroning DeKoning,” as its own corporate history described the exposé that led to William DeKoning’s imprisonment. But even that 1990 book by staffer Robert F. Keeler noted that personal conflicts of interest were a driving force as managing editor Alan Hathway launched investigations of the area’s labor czar.

In the early years after Alicia Patterson’s purchase of the paper in 1940, Newsday had treated DeKoning with kid gloves, often concentrating on what appeared to be his philanthropic side. But then Hathway became personally involved with a drive to build an arena for Long Island. It was a move that, “combined with his private ambition to make some money, overruled journalistic common sense,” Keeler wrote. Eventually, Hathway’s interests had come into conflict with those of DeKoning, who controlled the workforce that was to be involved in building the arena project. And later, when DeKoning also backed a Republican congressional candidate to oppose Newsday’s choice for office, that second conflict became a “triggering event that finally pushed Hathway over the edge, prompting him to convert his files on DeKoning into an aggressive series of stories.” So much for the “disinterested” nature of the journalism that the gold medal was supposed to recognize. The Pulitzer board probably had no idea.

The 1954 vintage Newsday was a weak journalistic model in other ways too. “Seizing her newspaper’s greatest moment of glory,” wrote Keeler, “Alicia Patterson decided to use the Pulitzer Prize not as a crown of laurel, but as a whip.” Sure, that was partly to discourage staffers at the young paper from becoming smug in their success. But more than that, she considered the paper still “minor league” in its editing and its appearance. The copy desk was almost nonexistent, for example, leading to amateurish-style snafus.³ After she invested heavily in its improvement, the paper was in much better shape by 1963—the year Patterson suddenly died of a stomach ulcer at fifty-six, leaving her wealthy husband to take over. He was Harry Guggenheim, a mining family heir whose relatives had founded New York’s Guggenheim Museum with some of the family riches.⁴

The Greene-ing of Newsday

Of all of Newsday’s investments after winning the 1954 prize, the best might have been the hiring of Robert W. Greene to run investigations for the paper. Bob Greene was a born snoop. He had been doing some kind of investigating since a high school job as a “sniffer” for a department store, checking out the underarms of fancy dresses that women bought and later returned. His olfactory test proved whether a woman had worn the garment to a party before bringing it back for a refund.

In his early newsroom years at another New Jersey paper, other sniffing around led him toward local corruption that warranted a closer study. But Greene left newspaper work for a succession of government crime-busting jobs, where he sharpened his organizational skills and elevated his promotional abilities. Groups like Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver’s subcommittee studying organized crime and the succession of regional crime commissions for which Greene worked were very publicity conscious. By parceling out information to reporters in the late 1950s, commissions taught the public about “a guy by the name of James Hoffa, who nobody really knew at the time,” said Greene. At the New York City Anti-Crime Commission, Greene had also been a major source of scoops for Newsday, helping reporters bring down DeKoning when it won its 1954 Public Service Prize. After a falling out with New York commissioners in a change of leadership, Greene jumped in 1955 to the paper that he had come to admire for its tenacity and for its shiny gold medal. He quickly built a reputation as a unique newsroom character.⁵

At Newsday, he was far from the only one. Greene started out answering to managing editor Hathway, a boisterous, profane Chicago-style chief. In later years Greene laughed when he recalled the strange chemistry in the office during the elegant Mrs. Patterson’s frequent visits to Hathway’s realm. “He was the barnyard dog. She was the genteel lady,” said Greene. “Whenever Hathway wanted something investigated, he’d come to me,” according to Greene. The reporter was the classic lone wolf at first, working on his own and keeping his sources to himself. Soon he began to spot ethical problems not only among the people he was investigating but also within Newsday itself. He talked about it with other reporters who had observed the same thing. The concerned staffers saw some conflicts of interest involving Hathway. But their greatest concern was with Kirk Price, whose job as the Suffolk editor put him in charge of coverage from that graft-ridden Long Island county.

If Greene began to write stories about abuses by officials in Suffolk County, “it was always a dead-end. You had a feeling you were being pulled off and steered in another direction.” He suspected that Price was personally invested in some of the deals that staffers sought to investigate. Later it became more than suspicion. Greene went to Hathway about the problem in the mid-1960s, suggesting that Price be removed from that key job. According to Greene, “Hathway says, ‘Absolutely not. Who is telling you this?’” For a time it created a personal crisis for Greene, who wasn’t sure whether to stay at the paper. “So now what do you do?” he asked himself. He felt that he couldn’t quit. He had two children and had just left the crime commission because of unhappiness with management. He decided to stay. Maybe he could be a force for change at Newsday.⁶

From Loner to Wolf Pack Leader

Greene traveled the South in 1964 exposing a yet-again resurgent Ku Klux Klan in a four-part series the tabloid headlined “The Klan Rides Again.” In 1967 he went to New Orleans to look into District Attorney Jim Garrison’s examination of President Kennedy’s assassination. A lover of good food who weighed in at more than three hundred pounds, Greene liked big expense accounts almost as much as he loved big stories. But because Greene turned up dirt in abundance wherever he went, managers tolerated the size of his invoices. He became like Eliot Ness: untouchable.

Then in 1967, Hathway retired, Kirk Price died, and the investigative environment at Newsday changed. Bill Moyers, who had served as press secretary during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, became the new publisher. Al Marlens, who like Moyers was known in the office for uncompromising ethics, took over as managing editor. The new Suffolk editor was Art Perfall, who had tried to work on corruption stories under Price and had complained that he “could never get any movement from Kirk.”

With Greene on the job, stories came furiously, many of them from the town of Islip. But the investigations quickly spread, exploring corruption as well in a succession of towns across Suffolk and Nassau counties. Greene’s own worries about the ethics of his editors were over. Instead he devoted time to selling them on story ideas. Given a few minutes of preparation before talking to an editor, Greene usually found a way. He employed what he called “the red-meat philosophy,” a sure-fire way to win over editors who needed persuading about a story. It worked like this: “You get something really good, and you say, Here’s what we have already. That’s the red meat. Then you say, If you give me time, I can get more. Editors get comfortable if you’ve got something in your pocket already.”

His Suffolk proposal started with the meat of what they knew already: a Newsday editor, now deceased, had been involved in suspect deals in the county. Greene promised that he could prove a bigger scandal. From that small start, the first “Greene Team” soon sprouted.⁷ Working through the Suffolk office of the Nassau County, New York-based paper, Greene combed through deeds and mortgages, creating paper trails that appeared to lead to various dirty officials. Greene also had a secret source with the federal Internal Revenue Service. The source, whom he nicknamed Zip, steered him toward more irregularities. “I’m saying, This is coming along pretty good, but I need more people to help me,” Greene recalled. “They gave me one, and then one more.” News clerk Geraldine Shanahan was assigned to the team and became a Greene favorite.

Greene found that he liked leading a team—his own wolf pack—and had a knack for teaching his investigation techniques and interviewing styles, unorthodox though they often were. His information-getting lessons started with a piece of advice: do enough research so it appears to the interviewee that you already know the whole story. “I like to think I know about 80 percent of the answers before I sit down,” he said. Then the subject on the hot seat would ask, “Who squealed?” Alternatively, according to Greene: “The minute you start asking questions like you don’t know the answer, they lie to you.”

Shanahan, who later became the assistant foreign editor at the New York Times, got her reporting education from the Greene Team. Reporter Kenneth Crowe showed her how to root through documents. “Sometimes you didn’t even know what you were looking for, but you’d know it when you found it,” she says. “These people had dummy corporations. There was so much land, and they were chipping in together and buying parcels, and then would rezone it so it would become much more valuable. Then they’d sell it.”⁸

The Greene Team’s first investigation turned up companies that were part of an Islip rezoning scam by officials. The team’s stories implicated the late Newsday editor Price. The work was entered for a Pulitzer Prize in 1968. It lost. Later, in October 1968, two of the officials netted in the Islip investigation were convicted, and similar disclosures by the team were made involving the town of Brookhaven. In 1969, Newsday entered again. Again it lost.

Sayonara, Indeed

But the team—which occasionally used the name Greene’s Berets, after the crack Army unit in Vietnam—was hardly finished. Greene and his crew found that the Islip and Brookhaven investigation formula could be applied in most other Long Island towns with the same result.

FIGURE 17.1 Newsday reporters behind investigative team leader Bob Greene in 1970 are (from left) Gerry Shanahan, Anthony Marro, Jim Klurfield, and Ken Crowe. Newsday won the 1970 gold medal for their work. Source: Newsday staff photo. Used by permission.

In 1969 they turned to reports of corruption involving three leading lights of Long Island: state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Cromarty, a major Republican Party leader; Nassau County state senator Edward Speno; and Babylon Republican leader Fred Fellman. Tony Marro, a Vermonter who had joined the paper in 1968, was added to the team.

“I knew very little about the team,” says Marro, who eventually became Newsday’s editor. “It was supposed to be an eight- or nine-week assignment. I was basically gone for three years.” He learned fast, a requirement in any Greene-run shop. “It was total immersion. You were locked up with a small group of people. You got assignments every day. You had to report what you did every day, and you had to read everybody else’s reports.” The intense process often produced stunning findings because few details of the entire three years of investigation ever got totally lost.

Food was often at the center of the job for Greene. As Marro puts it, “Ken Crowe taught me the difference between a mortgager and a mortgagee; Greene taught me the difference between chicken Kiev and chicken cordon bleu.” His reporters believed that Greene owed his considerable girth to his taste for eating only the best that restaurants had to offer. The story is told of the boss hosting one group lunch and interrupting a new reporter as he was ordering the Salisbury steak. “When you eat with the team,” Greene scolded, “you don’t eat chopped meat.”⁹

Greene sometimes used reporters as foils during interviews, and he often bluffed. Shanahan remembers a Greene interview with a county judge whom a Newsday source had accused of taking bribes to fix zoning decisions. “Greene wrote on a manila folder, ‘Tapes’—and had the subject’s name on them—to let that guy think we had something.” Greene remembered that he had actually made up a reconstruction of what the tape of a conversation about a bribe might have sounded like, complete with background sounds of babies crying and screen doors slamming. He then packaged those tapes up as if they were the real thing and laid the package on the interviewee’s desk. “His hands were shaking,” recalled Greene. “Then I said, ‘Did you know this guy was very much into electronics?’ Now he’s in shock; he’s reaching for his water glass.” Shanahan says, “He got the truth out of that guy.”

If he had 80 percent of what he needed before the interview, the remaining 20 percent was often crucial because that was the part that implicated others. Greene told the story of meeting Babylon Republican leader Fellman at a place named, appropriately enough, the Sayonara Motel. They caught Fellman off guard when Greene spread six folders out on the hotel room floor. Each contained incriminating documents. He then gave Fellman the choice of admitting his involvement in “three from Column A and three from Column B,” in a way that might save him from paying the heaviest amount of back tax. “Bob, can I have it all?” Fellman asked.¹⁰

“Off the Droshky!”

The Fellman case illustrated an interview technique that Greene’s Berets called “off the droshky.” The term came from a Russian fairy tale. As Tony Marro described it:

There are many different versions of this story, but they all have the same unhappy ending.

It starts with a family—father, mother and several children—traveling through the woods on a cold winter’s night. They’re riding in a Russian sleigh, which is called a droshky. Suddenly, a pack of starving wolves comes rushing out of the woods and begins to give chase. The horses try to race away, but the wolves keep getting closer and closer. The family becomes frightened, panicked, and desperate. Finally, to save the others, the father throws the youngest child off the droshky, into the jaws of the wolves.¹¹

When someone like Freddie Fellman admitted to fraud or implicated Judge Cromarty, the Greene Team saw it as a case of Fellman desperately feeding the pursuing journalistic wolves. “It was always a moment of celebration when a reporter would come back from an interview, give a thumbs up to the rest of the team, and announce: ‘Off the droshky!’” according to Marro.

While the information from Fellman tarred Cromarty, prosecutors ended up hitting the judge far more gently than they hit Fellman, who eventually went to prison. “We didn’t like it that way,” said Greene, because Fellman had cooperated with the team. “But there was huge juice protecting Cromarty.” The investigation had produced enough good graft stories and convictions, though, for another try at the Pulitzer.

The third time was a golden charm for Newsday. Bill Moyers, who had become handy at writing the publisher’s cover letter by that time, was able to note in 1970 that the investigations had led Governor Nelson Rockefeller to form a special commission on ethics. The Pulitzer jurors ranked Newsday first “for exposing secret land deals and zoning manipulations by public and political party office holders.”¹² The board agreed, adding to the citation the element that the paper’s work followed two earlier years of investigations. Newsday saw the 1970 prize as honoring all three years of investigations, as the Pulitzer citation had noted. It partied three times in celebration. Even one of the crooks it had exposed, Freddie Fellman, showed up.

Greene said that Fellman probably had no idea then that the Republicans had “made a decision to dump him”—a toss from its own droshky—and to protect Cromarty instead. At the party, Greene said, Fellman lived up to his reputation as a big talker, taking the floor at one point to make a short speech to the assembled journalists. “Wait a second,” he said to the surprised revelers. “You couldn’t have done this without me!” Long Island was just that kind of place. Greene, who died in 2008, said: “He was a crook, but I liked him.”¹³

1970—Newsday, Garden City, N.Y., for its three-year investigation and exposure of secret land deals in eastern Long Island, which led to a series of criminal convictions, discharges and resignations among public and political officeholders in the area.¹⁴

Greene Goes Global

Like many stories that involve Bob Greene, the tale of how he wound up in Turkey and France leading “The Heroin Trail” project for Newsday is rather convoluted. Greene himself saw the assignment as the simple product of an investigation that had been quashed by higher-ups at the paper. That had been a study of President Richard Nixon’s Florida ties to his friend Bebe Rebozo. The reporter blamed the executives of Times Mirror, whose flagship Los Angeles Times was a Republican stalwart, for stopping the project. With the Nixon-Rebozo probe entering the 1972 election year, the parent company was afraid the series would seem to be a political vendetta, Greene was told.

Greene was upset, of course. But when new Newsday publisher William Attwood suggested that the next team-based story would require Greene to go to Paris and scout the international drug trade’s French connection, the reporter decided it was worth a try. “I’d never been to Europe before,” Greene recalled. “And he says, ‘Fly first class.’” They were trying to placate him, Greene knew, but he willingly let them.¹⁵

Eventually the thirty-two-part series would run in February and March 1973, a year after the initial conversation with Attwood and after reporters Les Payne and Knut Royce served for more than six months overseas with Greene. The main idea was to test the Nixon administration’s claim that paying Turkey to stop growing opium poppies—the U.S. government policy—was drying up the heroin trade. (The team concluded that the payments were not working.) But from the start, the series had strong local and national angles. On the first day readers were introduced to the drug-shortened lives of three Long Island residents in their early twenties. Other installments, reported by a U.S.-based team headed by Tony Marro, concentrated on the New York and Long Island connections in organized crime. Other reporting originated in Washington, Miami, and Mexico. Marro, who had been in the Washington bureau when he was called for the project, was unhappy with the assignment. For one thing, in 1972 he had been in the middle of another little story—one growing out of a bungled burglary at the Watergate complex. “I can’t pretend I was breaking a lot of stories on Watergate—I wasn’t—but I knew it was a good story,” he says.¹⁶

As might be expected of an ambitious global project being run by an investigator who had never ventured east of Montauk Point, this one had its zany moments. Keeler noted that “the Newsday invasion of Europe began like the opening scenes of The Marx Brothers Stalk the Poppy.” Greene’s proposal for a Land Rover was turned down, but he was allowed a cache of weapons to accompany team members overseas and got Newsday to pay for a three-week Turkish-language course for team members.¹⁷ (Les Payne, a former Army officer who was among the first African Americans hired by Newsday, would later tell of Greene’s careful attention to the Turkish words for lamb, eggplant, sea bass, and other delicacies that would be on the menus in Ankara. Payne joked that for his own part, he wanted to learn the Turkish phrase for “Let’s get the black guy.”¹⁸)

One story from abroad tells of Greene, Payne, and Royce at a European gambling casino the night that the team leader hit it big time. “He was walking majestically towards the cashier’s cage with a large pile of chips in both hands when his pants fell down,” says Marro, who heard the tale later. “He couldn’t put down the chips without spilling them, so Payne and Royce had to pull his pants up from the rear.”

But thanks to the time spent on thorough organization of the international, U.S., and local Long Island elements, the Newsday report was clear and detailed. It contributed to an understanding of how the Turkey-to-France-to-America trail was operating while focusing on its local New York and Long Island outlets. Some at the paper felt that the headlong plunge into the Turkish-French connection was ill-timed, though, missing the bigger news: Southeast Asia had become a heroin hotbed in the Vietnam era, possibly with the encouragement of Central Intelligence Agency agents who were reported in other journals to have been taking political sides among nations in the region. Newsday had “a good story, but not a complete story,” says Marro.¹⁹

Still, it was the unanimous choice of the Pulitzer jurors, ahead of a New York Times report on art thefts and a St. Louis Post-Dispatch project that took an altogether different look at the drug trade: defending the constitutional rights of suspects against “high-handed government agents.”²⁰

Bob Greene, who died in 2008, also became known for leading the 1976 collaborative effort by the group Investigative Reporters and Editors to solve the murder of the Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. “The Arizona Project” of IRE brought together thirty-six journalists from twenty-three news organizations in a project that Greene considered his proudest moment professionally. While many stories were written, however, the case was never completely resolved.²¹

1974—Newsday, Garden City, N.Y., for its definitive report on the illicit narcotic traffic in the United States and abroad, entitled, “The Heroin Trail.”²²

Bringing Gold to Alaska

Howard Weaver was twenty-five when his editors at the Anchorage Daily News teamed him with relative veteran Bob Porterfield in pursuit of a story on the mightiest institution in Alaska: Teamsters Union Local 959. Unlike the kinds of team formation decisions being made at larger, investigation-minded papers, the choices were fairly simple for executive editor Stan Abbott and managing editor Tom Gibbony. There were only a dozen staffers. Compared to mainstream American newspapers there was also a sense of remoteness in the forty-ninth state, which was literally a place apart in 1975. “You could not watch Walter Cronkite live in Alaska,” says Weaver. “They videotaped it in Seattle, flew it up, and showed it at 11 at night.”

The Anchorage-born Weaver felt close to the latest trends in investigative journalism though. A year earlier he attended a ten-day American Press Institute reporting seminar at Columbia. Inspired, he did not see a story on the Teamsters as particularly daunting. After all, he had been exposed to the New York Times reporter David Burnham, whose stories had covered Frank Serpico, the cop who blew the whistle on widespread payoffs in the New York Police Department.²³ Weaver had read the Newsday stories of Bob Greene from just across Long Island Sound, rating the paper “a well-oiled machine that could get to the bottom of things.” And Watergate stories, reflecting the best of recent investigative journalism, were still in the news.²⁴

Looking back now, he sees that he probably should have been a bit daunted. The Daily News was the number-two paper in Anchorage. Its thirteen thousand subscribers gave it less than one-third of the circulation of the Anchorage Times, which owned the building and leased its smaller rival space under a joint operating agreement. As for Teamsters in Alaska, there were twenty-three thousand of them—more than the number of registered Republicans in the state. The Daily News had one special thing going for it: publisher Kay Fanning, whose idea it had been to throw the paper’s resources into finding out what made the Teamsters tick. She had also authorized Weaver to attend the Columbia investigative seminar. To her, Weaver was a logical choice for the Teamster assignment.

Fanning, in the mold of fellow publishers Katharine Graham and Alicia Patterson, had newspaper lineage, credentials, and instincts. After divorcing her first husband, Marshall Field IV, publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, she married newspaperman Larry Fanning and persuaded him to buy the Anchorage Daily News. She took over after he died. “Kay simply couldn’t see any reason why Anchorage ought to be backward,” according to Weaver. “The phrases ‘good enough for Anchorage’ or ‘just as nice as Seattle’ didn’t figure in her landscape.”

So when she targeted the Teamsters for coverage, it seemed natural enough. Now, Weaver reflects, “It was a very brave thing for her to do. Remember that the head of the union was also on the board of the largest bank in town. There was no real labor-management distinction; it was all about power. And the Teamsters had a lot of it, and Kay Fanning didn’t have much of it.” Of the project with so much potential to damage her little paper, he notes, “it would have been easy to duck.”

A Bubble of Dues Money

Fanning had not ordered up a Teamster story because of a tip about wrongdoing or fallout from some breaking news event. Instead she believed readers needed to know more about the state’s most powerful institution. Weaver, for one, had been on good terms with the union and had even been a dues-paying Teamster at one time. “I had no animosity,” says Weaver. “Au contraire, I saw unions as a social benefit.” In fact, Weaver used his union history as an icebreaker in interviews.

The reporters did not feel they needed to turn up a scandal in order to give readers a fascinating story. In a mere eighteen years, through Alaska’s meteoric oil boom, Jesse Carr’s Local 959 had swelled up like a balloon over the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—maybe menacing, maybe just big, but clearly hovering above everything else in the state. Teamsters in Alaska had the best health club in town, prepaid legal benefits, and other advantages. They had every benefit known to man. And it was all fueled by this enormous infusion of pipeline workers paying dues. The Teamsters Union was also big news nationally, and not only because of the specter of former convict/leader Jimmy Hoffa, who was to disappear in mid-1975. Labor reporters like the New York Times’s Wallace Turner had been following the Teamsters and their pension funds for years. Hoffa’s predecessor, Dave Beck, was also mentor to Jesse Carr.

Alaska’s Local 959 leadership knew that few of its strapping young members would ever retire as Teamsters—not in their state, anyway. They would move on, leaving behind much of the money they had pumped into the benefit pool. “It created this huge bubble,” says Weaver—a bubble of dues money. The Anchorage Times wrote of the union providing cradle-to-grave coverage. “We were a little racier, and referred to it as womb-to-tomb. But the Teamsters referred to it as erection to resurrection.”

As Weaver and Porterfield began their investigation, they found Local 959 entwined in the overheated Alaskan economy through a web of investments, often through complex trusts. It was easy to find individual Teamster investments, but it seemed impossible to grasp the whole picture of what they controlled.

The reporters immediately noticed the role of property. They discovered real estate investments in California especially. But they also found that few were willing to discuss the Teamsters’ investments or to be identified with any story that might be seen as negative to the powerful organization—especially if it was written by a news outlet that was roundly perceived as weak.

Even while the reporting was unfocused, the reporters adopted a system and applied it relentlessly. “I was single, and Bob was married but soon to be single. We worked constantly on this story,” says Weaver. “We developed these voluminous files, and had to make up filing systems to keep up with all this, because of course there were no computers. We’d make index cards, and we had big charts with four-colored pencils tying things together. This guy’s on this board, and that guy’s on another board.” Jim Babb was added to the team and was assigned to work on sidebars on the operation of the pension fund and the legal structure of the investments. Were the Teamsters breaking the law? Nowhere that they could see clearly. Yet their money and power were everywhere in the state. It was still a big story.

Another Goliath, Big and Gray

If the Teamsters Union was Goliath, the Daily News was about to face a second giant as well. The Los Angeles Times was coming to Alaska to write about the union. “That really panicked us. It was shadowy,” says Weaver, who learned that three or four reporters from Los Angeles had come to town and also interviewed people in Juneau about the union. The Daily News investigators, whose material was still unfocused, worried that they might have to rush something into print prematurely to beat or to match the Times. “In the end, we decided that we had to do our thing as best we could, and that we couldn’t do what the Times did,” Weaver says.

Then came the shock of seeing the Times’s story in November, a couple of weeks before the Daily News’s projected first installment. The headline read “Crime Wave Strangles Alaska.” The Times led with: “Widespread lawlessness, a helpless government and the stranglehold of a single Teamsters Union chief severely threaten a state crucial to the nation’s future energy independence.”

Weaver recalls, “We just about freaked out. We hadn’t found anything like that.” He and Porterfield read below the strong language of the opening paragraphs, though, and determined that the paper had fallen back on generalizations, failing to make the case. “I don’t want to ‘dis’ the L.A. Times, particularly because we won the prize and they didn’t,” says Weaver, “but we thought, ‘That’s the way you write it if you’re from out of town.’ We live here, and that’s not the story we’re going to write.” While other Alaskans conceded that the Times was correct in its conclusion that the oil pipeline boom had increased crime, there was a wide sense that the paper had overstated the case. (Governor Jay S. Hammond wrote that “most Alaskans [don’t] believe a midnight stroll down Cushman in Fairbanks [is] fraught with half the hazards faced on L.A.’s Sunset Strip at high noon.”) Weaver says, “I suppose it’s easier to be bold when your newsroom is 2,300 miles away.”

The Alaskan reporters found suspicious information about the North Star Terminals on the south edge of Fairbanks, an operation led by a man who had been sentenced to a year’s probation in California in the 1950s. On the one-hundred-person payroll under him were about forty individuals who had been convicted of murder, burglary, robbery, drug crimes, and other offenses. Three of the top six Teamster officials listed on the terminal roster had criminal records. The Daily News also concentrated on potential conflicts of interest involving union lobbyist Lewis M. Dischner. But the reporters found little direct lawbreaking. Instead their work concentrated on how the Teamsters were amassing enormous clout for a sparsely populated state, with a power structure that could exercise power far beyond the normal checks and balances of the union-versus-management environment.

The series moved toward a powerful conclusion too: that the inflated organization the Teamsters had set up in Alaska could not last. At his McClatchy office in Sacramento, Weaver years later kept a page of notes from the reporting tacked to his wall. “IMPLOSION” was written across the top. The Teamsters union would indeed see much of its power collapse in the years after the story ran. “But they were still in their muscle period then,” says Weaver. The series, “Empire: The Alaska Teamster Story,” ran through December, with organizational charts on trusts and funds and investments spread across pages.

Compared to the Los Angeles Times’s Crime-Wave-Strangles-Alaska take, this series was characterized by a low-key approach. The first-day story by Weaver and Porterfield was headlined “Teamsters: How Much Power?” It started:

Teamsters Union Local 959 is fashioning an empire in Alaska, stretching across an ever-widening slice of life from the infant oil frontier to the heart of the state’s major city.

Secure under the unquestioned leadership of Secretary-Treasurer Jesse L. Carr, the empire has evolved in just 18 years into a complex maze of political, economic and social power which towers above the rest of Alaska’s labor movement—and challenges at times both mighty industry and state government itself.²⁵

A Standing-O in Juneau

While the Daily News was proud of the project, a Pulitzer Prize was hardly something it expected. For one thing, no Alaskan paper had ever won one. For another, the project was mainly explanatory, with no laws passed and no one convicted as a result. There had been some wrongdoing noted, but its real service was in giving shape and dimension to something that was previously unknown. “The union was big and powerful, but it existed only in myth,” says Weaver. “How big? Once you gave it an actual shape, by describing the extent of its investments, the cross-directorships that they occupied, the techniques they used for negotiations, then it became real.”

But the Pulitzer jury said in its report that the Anchorage Daily News “drove its way into the operations of the powerful Teamsters Union in Alaska to show the union’s impact and influence on the whole spectrum of the economy and the politics of the state at a critical time of booming growth. The presentation was made fairly and dispassionately and without sensationalism, well conceived, well written and well presented. It is a remarkable performance by a small but vigorous daily newspaper.”

Had the jury report been made public, the next sentence would have particularly cheered the Anchorage staff. “Our jury for Category 1 [Public Service] also had an entry by the Los Angeles Times covering essentially the same subject—the Teamsters in Alaska. However, it was our conclusion that the Anchorage Daily News’s performance and product was the more meritorious and did qualify more fully for the Prize that we are recommending.”

After the Pulitzer board announced that the Anchorage Daily News was its gold medal winner, champagne in the newsroom began a three-day celebration. Then came a standing ovation in the House of Representatives in Juneau when the award was announced. “For Alaska to win a Pulitzer was a big deal. The other paper even wrote a very generous editorial congratulating us,” Weaver says. “I bet even Jesse Carr loved the idea that he was a big enough dude to lead to a Pulitzer.”

Kay Fanning’s courage in taking on the project and the Teamsters became clear only later. At Pulitzer time she was actually a few months away from an announcement that the paper was nearly broke. “Still, instead of kissing up to the power structure in Anchorage, she gave us a flashlight and sent us looking in the shadows,” according to Weaver. He believes that the prize “probably saved the Anchorage Daily News, because I’m not sure McClatchy would have bought it if it hadn’t noticed it for its Pulitzer-winning.” (Fanning later became editor of the Christian Science Monitor and the first woman president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.)

Soon the paper would pass the Times to become the state’s largest paper. “And the Daily News staff would learn, by winning another Pulitzer, that lightning really can strike twice,” he says. The second prize, also a public service award, would come in 1989 for a very different kind of story—a sensitive and powerful account of the anguish of alcoholism and suicides suffered by native Alaskans.

1976—The Anchorage Daily News for its disclosures of the impact and influence of the Teamsters Union on Alaska’s economy and politics.²⁶

A Trainee Dies, the Marine Corps Lies

Editor Joe Murray was in a grumpy mood when walked into his office at the Lufkin News early on Monday morning, March 15. It was supposed to be his day off, but work beckoned. And there in the waiting room outside his office was an old advertiser, probably with a gripe. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, man, whatever goes on in the paper, they come to the editor.’ We’d probably run his ad upside down or something,” Murray recalls. But it was not about an ad at all.²⁷

J. A. “Bo” Bryan was related to a Lufkin, Texas, marine recruit who was the subject of an obituary about to be published in the News. Bryan believed that the truth of his relative’s death was being covered up by the Marines.

The official word was that twenty-year-old Private Lynn “Bubba” McClure had died from head injuries suffered during close-combat training at the U.S. Marine Corps recruit depot in San Diego. “But Bo Bryan starts telling me this story, and it’s a horror story,” says Murray. It started with the description of his grand nephew, who had never succeeded in anything and was quite possibly retarded, but who had inexplicably been accepted by the Marines. Family members, told that it was a simple training accident, didn’t believe it—in part because of the extent of the injuries that had killed young Bubba. And the injuries that Bubba’s stepfather had observed when he visited McClure in San Diego before he died didn’t seem consistent with a simple training accident.

“I was sitting there listening to him, and thinking, ‘What am I going to be able to do about this? I’m just one person. We’re just one little paper. How long is this guy going to keep talking? I’m a busy editor,’” says Murray. But then Bryan paused and looked right at him. “I’ll never forget that moment, and what he said: ‘They beat that boy’s brains out—literally.’ It sent a cold chill down my spine.”

Bryan had been selected to represent Bubba’s extended family because he was one of the few relatives with an education and had gotten results from Murray before. Years before, when Bryan’s home-building enterprise had run into some environmental problems, the Lufkin News had run an item recounting the state’s complaint. An unhappy Bryan had come to the office to tell his side and had gotten satisfaction. He trusted Murray to do the right thing again. Maybe there was something the News could do. The editor assigned reporter Ken Herman to look into the situation.

“We used to joke about how there were only two people there—me and Dwight Bailey—and they don’t usually let the janitor write stories. So it was me,” says Herman. Murray made a joke of it too, remarking that he only had three reporters, so he had assigned one-third of his staff to the case.²⁸

Oft-Told Tales

Murray and Herman have recounted the tale many times. Pulitzer Prize projects quickly become the stuff of legend at a newspaper—and especially at a small one like the News, then part of the Cox newspaper chain. Still, each telling can bring out powerful emotions about events that moved people long ago.

Herman vividly remembers standing beside Bubba McClure’s open casket as he was reporting on the funeral. “He was a slight young man, and he looked very un-Marine-like,” says the reporter, who was only a year older. “The feeling was of this child in the proud uniform of the United States Marines.” His first story, that Tuesday, was fifty-four short, hard-hitting paragraphs appearing under the headline “Marine McClure buried: He died trying to prove he was one of those ‘few good men.’” It began:

Lynn (Bubba) McClure, 20, joined the Marines to become a man and make his family proud of him.

“I can’t wait to show you my uniform,” he had written his mother.

Today, wearing that dress blue uniform, he was buried in a flag-draped casket.

As he was lowered into his grave, two questions puzzled his family and those who knew him.

—How did the tenth-grade dropout, considered “slow” by those who recall him, pass the Marine Corps entrance exam?

—What drew this slightly built youth into the rigors of Marine Corps boot camp where he was fatally injured in a training exercise?

Those who knew him said his brief life was scarred by failure and frustration.

Apparently he saw the Marines as the end of that failure. But three weeks after arriving at the San Diego Recruit Depot his hopes ended.²⁹

Based on interviews with family and friends, the story examined the strange circumstances of the enlistment of the five-foot-six, 125-pound youth who seemed to have significant disabilities. It quoted Bo Bryan: “When I first heard he was in the Marines, I thought they meant the Merchant Marine.” McClure had also been in trouble with the law, with a police record for reckless damage and public intoxication. They should have turned up on a Marine Corps background check and kept him out of the service, Herman and Murray knew, even if he had somehow managed to pass an entrance exam.

McClure had failed both Army and Marines exams eighteen months earlier. Details of his enlistment and the test that he apparently passed were not available. The Marines would not comment except to provide bare details of the training accident. In another section, the story offered heart-wrenching snippets of four letters home that McClure had “scrawled in a childlike penmanship.” The first announced his enlistment to his unsuspecting mother. The last arrived the same day they were notified of his injury. He had written, “I been in boot camp about two weeks and it’s making a man out of me quick.”

A Cover-Up Unfolds

The News kept its focus local and sensitive to the family. The unbylined piece the next day said that the prior article had been “authorized by the young man’s mother”—a notation, says Murray, reflecting some readers’ concerns that the paper appeared to be playing up McClure’s disabilities. The story also quoted local congressman Charles Wilson, an Annapolis graduate who took a deep interest in the case. In talking with Representative Wilson, Herman got the feeling that McClure’s death reflected what Wilson saw as weaknesses in the all-volunteer military.

The next Herman byline quoted a private investigator retained by the family who said McClure had been beaten to death with “continued blows.” In pugil-stick fighting, recruits wear protective gear, including a football helmet and a face mask, although they are no guarantee against injury. The circumstances of McClure’s enlistment, which involved his passing a second recruitment test in Austin, remained a mystery, although the story did note that a General Accounting Office study just released had raised questions of “recruiter malpractice and fraudulent enlistment.”

The next News story, reported and written by Murray, sprouted from a moment of competitive exasperation. It also added a dramatic national angle. Herman was off for the weekend when his editor saw an Associated Press story come across saying that Marine investigators were blaming the town of Lufkin’s law enforcement community for withholding information that could have invalidated McClure’s enlistment.

“You cannot imagine how the ground was cut out from under me when that story came out of the AP from Washington,” Murray says. The Lufkin News’s treatment of the McClure case and the congressional studies by then had attracted some national press. But the News had not expected to lose its edge like this. Murray’s obvious next step was that “We had to find out who the Marines had been talking to here.” The answer astounded him. He reached a Marine public affairs officer in New Orleans. “It was a Saturday,” says Murray. “I got him at home, and he came in from his yard. By then I was real disgusted, but his job was to make the media happy.” And in a convoluted way, he did that with the News.

Going into the office and checking the records to show who in Lufkin had been contacted about McClure, the public affairs man called Murray back with the information. A “Johnson” in the sheriff’s department and a “Ms. Walker” at the Lufkin police station had provided the confirmation that McClure had no police record. Murray called the local police and sheriff himself to ask these Johnson and Walker characters how they could have gotten it wrong. “There wasn’t anybody by those names,” he says. Someone in the marine recruiting office had made Johnson and Walker up to cover the fact that no call had ever been placed to check on McClure’s record. When it turned out the Marines had lied on the report, Murray says, “you can imagine how I felt…. I thought, I had ’em.”

It is a cautionary tale for journalists seeking the truth, as well as for bureaucrats trying to cover their tracks. “Had the Marines taken that one more step and called to check themselves, they would have found out,” Murray says. “But they stopped asking questions when they heard what they wanted to hear.”

The headline on his story read “Fake Names Found in Marine Reports.” It began: “The use of fake names has opened up the possibility of a cover-up in the investigation, and U.S. Rep. Charles Wilson said Saturday he would seek to find out if the recruitment records were deliberately falsified to protect those responsible for McClure’s recruitment.”³⁰ The story delivered another detail: not only had McClure passed a second recruitment test in a second city—after dismally failing the first in Lufkin—his score on the second test had been so high that McClure “was put in charge of the recruit detachment sent from San Antonio to San Diego.” The News never figured out how the high score occurred, but clearly, says Murray, either someone took the test for him, gave him the answers, or changed his score. “We know his IQ didn’t increase.”

As the reporters did further interviews and private and government investigations, a complex picture of malfeasance began to take shape. The young marine with the learning disability had found himself placed in a “motivational platoon” in San Diego, where punishment was meted out through heavy menial labor and pugil-stick fighting sessions. On the day Bubba McClure was injured, he had been forced to fight seven men. No officer was present despite U.S. Marine Corps requirements. Eyewitnesses said that McClure had refused to fight while a drill instructor goaded the other recruits to pound him from all directions until he curled up in the dirt screaming, “God, make them stop.” Knocked unconscious, he had a five-gallon bucket of water poured on him in an attempt to revive him. He remained in a coma until he died more than three months later.

Murray wrote editorials that conveyed a personal, small-town feel in siding with the family in its search for the truth beyond the lies. Ken Herman resumed his coverage on the news side. It was to have a bitter ending. While Congress launched hearings on recruitment techniques—and eventually tightened standards for the military—a marine court-martialed in McClure’s death was eventually acquitted on charges of “involuntary manslaughter, assault, maltreatment of a recruit and violating an order to conduct close combat drills only with supervisory officers present.” Murray says, “Maybe it was the biggest lesson in life I ever had.” No matter how well you do in your job, the results in a courtroom can turn everything around.

Murray entered the McClure series in a statewide competition and got a good result: second place. (The editor of the winning Texas paper later jokingly told him, “We should have entered for the Pulitzers, too.”) But the Lufkin stories had attracted the attention of Pulitzer Prize administrator John Hohenberg, who wrote to the News suggesting that it enter. The letter amazed the newsroom. “You simply don’t ignore that kind of letter. In fact, we have it framed in the newsroom,” Murray wrote in submitting the entry before the February 1 deadline. The submission was barely postmarked on time. The paper did not have a copier, and Murray had to poke a pocketful of dimes into the machine at the library.

The public service jurors unanimously picked the Lufkin News over the Philadelphia Inquirer, which was number two for its reporting on a state hospital for the mentally ill. “A small newspaper, with limited resources, chose not to settle for the official explanation of a local marine’s training camp death,” jurors said of the News. “What might have been a routine obituary became instead a search for better answers and, in time, because of the newspaper’s efforts and determination, the cause of fundamental reform in the recruiting and training practices of the United States Marine Corps.” The board agreed with the jury’s first choice.

By the time of the Pulitzer announcement, Herman had taken a job at the Dallas office of the Associated Press and was home with his parents. The timing is now meaningful to him because he was to lose his father not long after the prize was announced. “It was a grand moment,” Herman says. On top of that, the job offers began to come in from other news organizations, including the Philadelphia Inquirer. Ultimately he decided to stay at the AP.

The Brooklyn-born Herman, who had only been in journalism for six months when he started working for Joe Murray, credits his old boss with bringing out the best elements of his youth yet teaching him to temper his emotions for the sake of the story. “This is what Joe did,” Herman recalls. “He kept me thinking that there is another side, or two or three, to this. Maybe I went a little far in drawing this emotional picture. It was a matter of not piling it on. You don’t have to keep hitting people with it.” He would have been happy with any Pulitzer, “but I happened to know that this was the Pulitzer of Pulitzers,” says Herman. “It’s the same one that Woodward and Bernstein got.”

1977—The Lufkin (Tex.) News for an obituary of a local man who died in Marine training camp, which grew into an investigation of that death and a fundamental reform in the recruiting and training practices of the United States Marine Corps.³¹

From “Terrible” to Great

The Philadelphia Inquirer was a grand experiment for Eugene L. Roberts Jr., the North Carolina-born editor once called by the New York Times’s Harrison Salisbury “the best journalist living and breathing in the U.S.A. and probably the world.”³² Roberts had moved north to Knight Ridder’s Detroit News as a labor reporter and later as the Metro editor. He then jumped to the Times in 1965, where he covered the civil rights movement with insight and intelligence, served as a Vietnam correspondent, and was promoted to national editor. Knight Ridder executive Lee Hills had tried to woo Roberts back since he left Detroit. In 1972, Hills made Roberts an offer he couldn’t refuse: take over the Inquirer. It was a job most sane editors would have refused in a heartbeat. Roberts had half-jokingly told Hills over the years that he would leave the Times only to run some newspaper that the world thought was beyond rescue. At lunch one day, Roberts remembers, Hills said to him: “I have the very newspaper for you.”³³

Steve Lovelady, a Wall Street Journal page-one rewrite specialist who was among Roberts’s first Philadelphia hires, recalled that the new editor used a variation of Hills’s same improbable “lure” to get him to move from the Journal to the Inquirer. “It was a terrible paper, just an awful paper. It was so bad that after he talked me into going to work there, and then sent me a week’s worth of papers, I was appalled and called him up to renege. I told him, Nobody, not even you, can salvage this dog.” Roberts responded breathlessly, “Yeah, isn’t it great!”

Then he turned up the heat on Lovelady. “You’ve already worked on a great newspaper; anybody can do that,” Roberts told him. “This is the only chance you’ll ever get to take a piece of shit and turn it into a great newspaper.” The Journal rewrite man sat with those slowly drawled Roberts words for a minute. “It was a pretty compelling argument, if you bought the premise that he was going to succeed,” said Lovelady. “But the first year I was there, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think, ‘What have I done?’”³⁴

FIGURE 17.2 The Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor Eugene Roberts in 1977. Source: Inquirer staff photo. Used by permission of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

During the eighteen Roberts years, the Inquirer did plenty. The paper or its journalists won seventeen Pulitzers between 1975 and 1990—including two gold medals, one in 1978 and one in 1990.

Inside the “Roundhouse”

Bill Marimow still recalls the strain of climbing to the common pleas courts building’s ninth floor—and smelling the clerk’s foul cigar—even though it has been nearly thirty years now. There in the fetid haze of Room 951, Marimow and fellow Inquirer reporter Jonathan Neumann slogged through records of “suppression hearings” showing how many confessions had been thrown out against defendants on trial for murder.

A source had given them a computer printout—a somewhat novel document for reporters in 1977—listing instances of judges approving defense motions because they believed the cops had beaten confessions out of the suspects. Mostly the beatings were administered in small interrogation rooms of “the Roundhouse,” as police headquarters is known.

While that is how the Inquirer story started, underlying the investigation was Gene Roberts’s newsroom management approach. Roberts encouraged and supported reporters who came up with enterprise stories that could make a difference in the community.

Marimow had been hired by Roberts’s predecessor, John McMullen, a good editor who for two years was in the unenviable position of “shrinking the paper to greatness” through cutbacks ordered by Knight Ridder, as the reporter puts it. (The technique would be tried again in the years before Knight Ridder sold out to McClatchy in 2005.) Roberts, though, was unique. As a newsroom presence “he was an unadulterated pleasure,” Marimow says. “I always used to wonder why he wasted so much time talking with me, one of the least-experienced reporters at the Inquirer.” When Marimow was on the labor beat, Roberts once spent forty-five minutes explaining how, in his Detroit days, he used to carry four separate notebooks into meetings with the United Auto Workers leader. The notebooks helped him prepare for various profiles or analyses he had in the works. “I remember thinking, ‘This guy is crazy; I’m never going to be able to do that,’” says Marimow. “The fact that I can remember the talk with such specificity, though, tells you about the influence he had.”³⁵

Any reporter bringing a good story idea to Roberts or Metro editor John Carroll would get time to pursue it, says Marimow, who was later to become the Inquirer’s editor. (After his first Inquirer stint, Marimow and Carroll would later work together at the Baltimore Sun, where Carroll was the editor before his move to the Los Angeles Times.) Younger reporters like Marimow and Neumann, then in their twenties, also had no fear of their story being assigned to others with more experience.

The police brutality story came up from the beat—a perfect expression of Gene Roberts’s philosophy about the best journalism not being top-down. “That means that, as an editor, you have to have a sense for listening, as opposed to simply giving assignments,” Roberts says. Keeping the original reporter on the story simply follows—as it did for Ben Bradlee in letting two young Washington Post reporters keep plugging on Watergate. “If you steal that story, and give it to a senior reporter, you could imagine what’s going to happen,” says Roberts. “People aren’t going to come up with ideas.”³⁶

Neumann and Marimow had each been involved with earlier stories analyzing court issues and police problems, and Marimow had recently covered a murder trial during which the defendant confessed and was convicted—before someone else admitted to the killing. Police, it seemed, had beaten a confession out of the defendant and had also beaten various witnesses to make the case stick. (A federal grand jury eventually began looking at the wrongful conviction.)

Marimow had moved to city hall from the courts during the trial, with Neumann taking over. So they both had that bizarre case in their minds—along with lots of other ideas about the dysfunctional Philadelphia police force. “Toward the end of 1976 Jonathan and I put our heads together. What he had seen covering the courts, and what I had seen, suggested a closer look.” And in January 1977 they began reporting what became known as the “Homicide Files.”

They knew that records could help them document the cases being thrown out because suspects were beaten into confessing. Marimow visited a common pleas court source to see if such records might be available. “Presto, bingo, ala kazam, my source gave me a computer print-out.” It was something new to him.

The printout showed that 17 percent of cases involved an illegal interrogation. So Marimow and Neumann began their climbs up to the ninth floor to that smoky records room to read transcripts of the actual suppression hearings. Beatings, threats, medical records, eyewitness testimony—all of it was revealed in the files. “Interestingly, most of the judges never ruled on whether there had been abuse,” Marimow says. Instead they ruled out the confessions as the inadmissible “fruit of the poisoned tree” without disciplining the abusive police. Marimow then began interviewing judges to establish why.

The two reporters also realized the need to understand the pressures that homicide detectives faced on the street and in the station house. Some abhorred the brutal police tactics but lived with them anyway. Selecting three interviews from a number they conducted, the reporters assembled a sidebar for the first “Homicide Files” installment on April 24. Under the headline, “At the Roundhouse: How Detectives Compel Murder ‘Confessions,’” the article began:

It can be said with certainty that two things happened in the 22 hours between Carlton Coleman’s arrest and his arraignment last October.

One is that he was interrogated by homicide detectives. The other is that his health went from good to poor. When it was all over, he spent the next 28 days hospitalized for injuries of the abdomen, arms, shoulders, chest, calf, spine and back.

Medical problems are not rare among those interrogated by the Philadelphia Police Department’s 84-member homicide division. In fact, a four-month investigation by The Inquirer has found a pattern of beatings, threats of violence, intimidation, coercion and knowing disregard for constitutional rights in the interrogation of homicide suspects and witnesses.³⁷

Two paragraphs later came a statistical hook: “From 1974 through this month, judges of the Common Pleas Court have been asked to rule in pretrial hearings on the legality of police investigations in 433 homicide cases,” the story said. “In 80 of those cases, however, judges have ruled that the police acted illegally during homicide interrogations” with documentary evidence of coercion ranging from X-rays to photographs.

A Powerful Image

Gene Roberts had been struck from the beginning by an anecdote he heard from the reporters about a case in which “the interrogating officers had an old ornamental sword, and stabbed a person in the testicles with it,” he says. “It sounded so outrageous and bizarre that you know that if we could definitively prove it, it would certainly get people’s attention.” The sword incident appeared in the thirty-ninth paragraph but jumped out at readers. It was explained that a twenty-three-year-old black suspect had been “stabbed in the groin with a sword-like instrument and blackjacked on his feet, ankles and legs until the blackjack broke in two.” The four detectives doing the interrogation, as well as the suspect, were all named in the article.

The sidebar containing the detective interviews, which like all the stories carried the Neumann and Marimow bylines, presented mixed reactions from detectives. All had agreed to talk only if their names were not used. One said:

I’m not going to defend the Police Department now. No way. I work on my own. There’re people there [in the homicide division] I’d refuse to work with.

We’ve got a new breed of guy now. Years ago we’d sit there [in the interrogation room] and talk with the defendants. The detectives used to think with their heads, not their hands. They were good, damned good, and they got the evidence clean.

Now, all they care about is statements [from suspects]. I think statements are bull———.

Part two was headlined “How Police Harassed a Family.” It started with the case of a home invasion—conducted by law officers—and it was accompanied by pictures that a family member had taken of a stormtrooper-like entry by armed police. Parts three and four examined the reasons police were not being charged with beating suspects even when the evidence was overwhelming.

Neumann and Marimow weren’t finished. Reader response to the first series assured that. “We were deluged with calls about police in Philadelphia just beating people up on the street,” Carroll remembered. Marimow adds, “People were saying, You guys missed the boat. You ought to take a look at what’s happening on the street.” As the second series showed, what was happening was as severe as the Roundhouse beatings. Yet a federal prosecution against three police officers, which grew from that second series and was supported by numerous witnesses, resulted in the police officers’ acquittal.

“Jonathan and I were devastated, because we believed the citizens were telling the truth.” In yet another measure of Roberts’s commitment to supporting his reporters, he and Carroll took the two staffers to a consolation dinner. “Gene was talking to us about how during the civil rights movement in the South juries were returning verdicts that had nothing to do with reality.”

Other things were competing for Roberts’s attention. Mayor Frank L. Rizzo (a former police chief) “virtually declared war on the paper,” Roberts says. Further, a union sympathetic to the mayor and the police was jamming truck bays to keep the paper from getting out. These became supporting arguments to be included in Roberts’s Pulitzer Prize entry—as were the columns in the rival Philadelphia Bulletin that had ridiculed the Inquirer reporting and sided with the police.

For Roberts, the Inquirer’s first gold medal was particularly sweet because it recognized the entire staff’s work turning around the paper. Individuals had won three Pulitzers by then, but the paper had missed out on public service—the category that Roberts associates with the courage displayed by Southern editors who opposed the Ku Klux Klan and who supported the law during school desegregation.

The irony, he says with a laugh, is that the Inquirer’s accomplishments, in a way, sprouted from the depths that the publication reached in the 1960s. He never would have had a free hand to test his managerial vision at a successful paper, Roberts says, because “success breeds conservative thinking and non-risk-taking. Nobody wants to screw up a good thing.” In Philadelphia, “they were willing to try anything,” he says. “It’s wonderful when newspapers are desperate enough to try good journalism.”

1978—The Philadelphia Inquirer for a series of articles showing abuses of power by the police in its home city.³⁸