In this San Francisco Chronicle MediaBytes column, Dan Fost reports on CIR's 25th anniversary and it's role as San Francisco"s last haven for investigative reporters.
With his ahead-of-the-curve reporting from Vietnam for Time magazine and influential management stints at the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Examiner, Frank McCulloch was one of the great journalists of the past 50 years. Unfortunately, far too few people know that.
Over the past year, as the conflict in Iraq slid from a quick victory into an uncertain quagmire, Frank McCulloch watched closely as a new generation of journalists began questioning the country's justification for war. Thirty-eight years earlier, McCulloch had seen his own generation reach a similar turning point.
At the time, McCulloch was Time magazine's Southeast Asia bureau chief. He had come to Vietnam in 1963 at the request of Time Editor Henry Luce to "sort out the mess we're in over there," as Luce had put it to him. A former Marine who had missed action in World War II due to a heart murmur, McCulloch arrived in Asia hungry to witness combat and confident that America's preeminent military could get the job done quickly. By 1966, however, a deep skepticism was sinking in, and he began openly doubting his country's presence in Southeast Asia. Evidence of real progress was hard to come by, casualties continued to mount, and McCulloch had come to realize that the government's assessments could not be trusted.
"The similarities between Vietnam and Iraq are damn few, but that's the big one," McCulloch says with trademark bluntness. "The real difficulties of the Iraq endeavor--not to mention the motives for going to war in the first place--were largely ignored. It points to a fundamental weakness in American journalism. Why didn't it occur to somebody to challenge these assertions early on?"
His skepticism about Vietnam, at a time when the nation, his editors and many journalists still thought the U.S. was winning the war, set McCulloch apart, and made him, according to fellow Vietnam reporter David Halberstam, "a legend...one of its best reporters." He was willing to let the facts overrule his personal bias and the conventional wisdom of the day.
Today McCulloch is 84 and lives in a retirement community in Santa Rosa, California, an hour north of San Francisco. His modest apartment is decorated with relics from his years in Asia, including a bust of the Buddha from Vietnam's Cham dynasty, unearthed by bombs dropped from a B-52. The large bookshelf that dominates his living room holds histories of the news organizations--Time-Life, the Los Angeles Times, the McClatchy papers and the San Francisco Examiner--that he played a key role in shaping.
McCulloch's largely unsung career spans a half-century during a pivotal era in journalism. As an investigative reporter, he exposed political connections to the mafia and brushed off death threats from mob bosses. During the Vietnam War, he aggravated President Lyndon Johnson. His editorial leadership transformed the Los Angeles Times, where he went toe-to-toe with Robert F. Kennedy over reporting on the Teamsters. He fought and beat a dozen serious libel actions, establishing legal precedents that still protect journalists. Along the way he cultivated millionaire Howard Hughes as a source, wrote the first cover story on Thurgood Marshall--before he was a Supreme Court justice--and helped bring down another member of the high court.
McCulloch is most remembered as "a journalist's journalist." Completely bald since his 30s, he looked like the former Marine he was. McCulloch was tough but at the same time showed a decency and easy laughter that made him one of the most well-liked and respected men in journalism.
For all this, the name Frank McCulloch probably doesn't ring a bell for most journalists under 40. After an extraordinary career that shaped investigative reporting, war reporting and First Amendment protections, he may qualify as one of journalism's least-known legends.
McCulloch was born the son of pioneer cattle ranchers in Nevada's Fernley Valley in 1920 and might have become a professional baseball pitcher if journalism hadn't caught his attention in college. "Fast but wild, watch" read his scouting report at the time, but after two years of semipro ball, his father told him he had to go to school.
Entering the University of Nevada in Reno uncertain of his career path and struggling to pay tuition, McCulloch took a job at the campus newspaper that led to stringer work for United Press and the Associated Press. In 1941, the day after graduation from Nevada's journalism school, he arrived at the San Francisco offices of United Press dressed in mismatched clothes and carrying an old green rattan suitcase. "I thought that the folks in San Francisco were the friendliest I'd ever seen because they were all smiling and laughing," McCulloch recalls with a grin. He had his first byline before he had found a place to live. He earned $15 dollars a week.
McCulloch enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942, but what he calls a "bogus" heart condition kept him stateside. He spent the war writing up the heroic deeds of soldiers for the Marines' public information office in San Francisco. After the war, McCulloch returned to Reno to write for the Reno Evening Gazette, where he got his first taste of investigative reporting, delving into how the mafia was surreptitiously acquiring gambling licenses in Las Vegas. It was where McCulloch learned his legendary ability to cultivate sources--"I started out covering the police beat, which taught me how to talk to people who could become sources," he says. "I made a lot of good friends in the FBI." Sources handed him gambling license applications as they came in and McCulloch investigated them for mob ties. "We had a lot of lovely stuff, death threats," he says. " 'You be careful,' [Las Vegas-based mob figure] Johnny Roselli said to me one day. 'You keep going with this story, you will be very sorry.' "
Lou Cannon, a Nevada reporter who went on to be a political writer for 26 years at the Washington Post and a Ronald Reagan biographer, recalls, "All of us who were journalists in Nevada in those days aspired to be like Frank. He seemed to me to have all the journalistic virtues: He was skeptical. He was fair. He was kind to those less fortunate. He met the test of 'afflicting the comforted and comforting the afflicted.' "
After another stateside stint in the Marines during the Korean War, McCulloch got his start at Time as a stringer in 1951. Two years later he was hired as a full-time correspondent based in Los Angeles.
Later, while serving as Time's Dallas bureau chief early in the civil rights movement, McCulloch wrote about and traveled extensively through the segregated South, an experience he would later describe as scarier than his time in Vietnam. In 1955, he wrote a Time cover story on a little-known black attorney named Thurgood Marshall who had just won Brown vs. Board of Education.
But Murray J. Gart, former chief of correspondents for the Time-Life News Service, who passed away shortly after this interview, says it was McCulloch's decency as a person that made him different in the newsroom. "The care and attention he paid to his staff went well beyond the story of the moment. He cared passionately about his fellow reporters and everyone who ever worked for him loved him for it."
In the mid-1950s, McCulloch set his sights on interviewing the eccentric and notoriously reclusive Howard Hughes, one of the world's richest men. McCulloch says he told Hughes' PR man, "I know I'll never get to see the man, but let me give him 100 written questions. I'll give him a chance to be as careful as he wants."
To McCulloch's surprise, about a week later, his phone rang and an unfamiliar voice on the other end said, "This is Howard Hughes."
"I said some wise-ass thing like, 'Yeah, and this is Mohammed,' " McCulloch recalls. "He said, 'No, this is Hughes.' "
McCulloch estimates that he wrote 10 to 20 pieces on Hughes. Over the next 20 years Hughes would occasionally call McCulloch with a tip, or just to talk. It was one such call years later that helped McCulloch uncover one of the most reckless publishing frauds of the time.
In 1960, when Otis Chandler, son of Los Angeles Times owners Norman and Dorothy "Buffy" Chandler, was named publisher of the paper, he hired McCulloch as a managing editor.
The Times then was not much of a newspaper: small, lacking in imagination and unabashedly conservative. "It was an instrument of the Republican Party, and an acknowledged one," McCulloch says. "The City Hall reporter at that time was a Republican lobbyist. That's how bad it was. Norman and Buffy paid very little attention to the newspaper as a totality. Norman published it, but he saw it as a business enterprise."
But Otis Chandler, just 32 at the time, had big plans for the paper. "I felt the Times was way behind where it should be for the city and the way the area was developing," Chandler recalls. "I thought if we put the paper together editorially, we could become one of the best papers in the country." Chandler replaced 18 of the 19 department heads and brought in a wave of more progressive journalists, such as McCulloch, to make Chandler's vision a reality.
McCulloch infused a new energy and passion for complex stories and substantially stepped up investigative reporting at the paper. In 1961, he proposed a series that would put him head-to-head with the Chandlers, the advertisers and the paper's largely Republican readership. It was an exposé of the John Birch Society, a secretive conservative group with a growing membership intent on "rooting out the communism threat" in the United States. The group's founder, Robert Welch, published an influential newsletter in which he accused prominent people across the country of having ties to communists. Welch also was a close personal friend of Otis Chandler's uncle and had disapproved of the recent changes at the newspaper. When approached, Chandler recalls saying, "Let's go for it. Take whatever resources you need and go all over the country."
McCulloch oversaw what became a carefully worded five-part series by reporter Gene Blake exposing the group's ideological origins and its growing influence across the country. Otis Chandler followed the series with a strident front-page editorial denouncing the society for "smearing as enemies and traitors those with whom we sometimes disagree." Chandler says 30,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions in one week. But despite the cancellations, overall sales of the paper were only slightly affected, and advertisers who left quickly came back.
It was just the start for McCulloch. On a hunch one day in 1961, he called over reporter Jack Tobin and pointed to the Santa Monica hills surrounding Los Angeles. "Find out who owns them," McCulloch instructed. Tobin dug for weeks into public records, turned up nothing and was sent back to keep digging. What eventually emerged was a series of more than 30 stories over two years on the Teamsters Pension Fund, which was being used to buy properties all over the United States for the mob.
Soon McCulloch was getting threats from both Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was building a case against Hoffa. McCulloch recalls the day that Kennedy came by the Times for a reception with the paper's executives. When McCulloch, unaware of Kennedy's ongoing investigation into Hoffa, told the attorney general about the pension fund story, McCulloch recalls Kennedy grabbing him by the lapels, saying, "'You're gonna stop this! You're going to spoil my case against Hoffa!'"
McCulloch was unfazed. "I said, 'Well, General, I'll stop it if the man standing over there--my boss--tells me to. Otherwise I won't.' And Otis Chandler stood with me."
While Chandler doesn't recall this specific episode, he says it sounds like a number of similar run-ins with Kennedy at the Times. "If [Bobby Kennedy] didn't agree with you, he'd get in your face," Chandler says. "Bobby could be 10 feet tall when he wanted to. It certainly didn't scare Frank and it didn't scare me....
"Frank was a brash, young, in-your- face editor...one of the most remarkable people we had the privilege of hiring."
Bob Gibson, who was foreign editor during McCulloch's time in L.A., says of the boss: "He was such an inspiration to everybody in the newsroom. His verve and vitality was very contagious. He had a dynamic effect on the newsroom, from the copy boy on up. Everybody."
It would take a call from Henry Luce, perhaps the most influential journalist in the country at the time and McCulloch's old boss at Time, to pull McCulloch away from Los Angeles and cast him into the Vietnam War, which was just beginning to boil. "He said did I know anything about that mess out in Southeast Asia? And I said no I didn't," McCulloch recalls. "I was flattered when he called."
In 1963, Luce hired McCulloch to serve as chief of all Southeast Asia bureaus for Time, based in Hong Kong. McCulloch, who already had 22 years of experience at the start of the war, was quickly admired by the younger reporters in Vietnam.
"Frank was a generation older than most of us," says "60 Minutes" correspondent Morley Safer, then the 33-year-old bureau chief/correspondent for CBS News in Saigon. Safer met McCulloch in the early stages of the war when there was only a small group of reporters there. "Most of the guys from the World War II era were stodgy, but Frank was psychologically closer to our generation than the 'old farts' generation, looking at the war from the 1960s, instead of the 1940s."
Safer says McCulloch was a formidable bureau chief. "He was a very scary guy, the journalistic equivalent of a Marine Corps drill sergeant," he says. "He could sometimes terrify the guys working for him with his bullet head. He demanded that they get it absolutely right, but at the same time had a remarkable understanding of the problems his reporters faced." Safer recalls, "In his gruff way, he was very compassionate. He was a real soft-hearted guy. Vietnam was not a place where soft-heartedness wasn't obvious."
Initially positive on the war and the job the U.S. troops were doing, McCulloch became disenchanted earlier than most. "Laos is one of the loveliest lands on earth," he wrote in Time in 1964, "and it is a bitter travesty that such a land and the gentle people who inhabit it should be caught up in a war they are ill-prepared to fight but cannot be allowed to lose."
He watched as new arrivals went through the same cycle of disillusionment, and he provided a silent consolation that, along with McCulloch's bald head, earned him the nickname "Buddha."
Zalin Grant, who worked as a reporter for McCulloch in Vietnam, writes in an e-mail: "He was the most respected and best-liked journalist of the war--which of course is ironic because few in the general public have ever heard of Frank, but that's because he didn't have an ounce of self-promotion in his body."
At the peak of McCulloch's four years there, the Southeast Asia bureau of Time-Life was filing 50,000 words a month via teletype. McCulloch's old friends in the Marines more than once put him months ahead of his competitors, but he found that getting these stories into the magazine was a war of its own. His story about the massive build-up of troops in Vietnam, which he learned of four weeks before it became public, was denied by President Lyndon Johnson personally, and Time killed it. Later, Time Inc. Editor in Chief Hedley Donovan told McCulloch he had received a call from Johnson. Tired of seeing his war plans in the magazine, Johnson told the editor, "Donovan, this is the President of the U-nited States....You've got that little bald-headed guy walking around in the tropical sun with no hat on. He's addled. You better get him out of there."
McCulloch's dispatches became increasingly meditative. He maintained it was unrealistic to expect reporters to remain detached, objective observers during a war. "This is a war of agonizingly slow progress for the U.S. and deep set frustration for everyone," he said in September 1965. "I don't know anyone who is not emotionally involved, and this makes reporting much more difficult for you have to rein yourself in before you are committed to a static position in an ever-changing situation."
In January 1968, McCulloch was pulled out of Asia. Dick Clurman, chief of correspondents for Time-Life, decided that after four years in Vietnam without getting killed, McCulloch's "odds had run out." Says McCulloch: "That was the official reason, but my reporting was too consistently negative on the war and the administration may have put pressure to drive me out."
"When Frank McCulloch leaves for Washington he will be missed by everyone from U.S. generals to Saigon shoeshine boys," wrote Managing Editor George P. Hunt in a farewell report published in the December 15, 1967 issue of Life. "For Frank is one of the deans of Vietnam reporting, and one of the most respected journalists in Asia."
After returning to the U.S., McCulloch became chief of the Washington bureau of Life magazine, then published as a weekly. As part of his orientation, Dick Stolley, the departing Washington bureau chief, gave him a tour of the White House. Walking down the hall, they ran into Lyndon Johnson. "Dick Stolley started to introduce me and Johnson says, 'Yeah, I know. I know him. I know him all the way from Texas.' And gives me sort of a limp hand, shaking, puts his hand on his hips, barreling down at me says, 'I know I gotcha, didn't I?'"
"I don't know whether he was joking, or whether he really thought after that much time he'd [chased] me out of Vietnam," McCulloch says.
Like many vets, McCulloch had returned to an America that had lost interest in the war. "Everyone was covering the protests, but nobody was paying any attention to the war," he says. "That's what outraged me. The casualties were still goddamn heavy, so I arranged to get one week's KIA [killed in action] list three days early. I sent a message all around the states to bureaus and stringers: 'I'll be coming at you with names, and I want you to get the pictures.' We got all but nine photos of all those that had been killed in Vietnam in one week, some 341 or so. Page after page of all these young faces. Close-ups. Plus one on the cover."
The provocative piece, much like the Portraits of Grief series the New York Times would run after September 11, sent a ripple through the country, and is one of the stories McCulloch is most proud of. "That brought the war back to life," he says. "Lyndon Johnson said later that it was that photo spread that had made remaining in Vietnam impossible."
In 1969, McCulloch moved to New York to head Time-Life News Service's bureau, where he organized an investigative "dream team"--Denny Walsh, Sandy Smith, Bill Lambert and Russ Sackett. "This was the best investigative team U.S. journalism ever had," says McCulloch with unabashed pride. "Among them they had 60 years of experience that they brought to bear." The team's investigative reporting led, among other things, to the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas and exposure of President Johnson's accumulation of Texas broadcasting licenses while in public office.
Sandy Smith credits McCulloch for the level of reporting they were able to do. "For much too short a time, Frank McCulloch stood alone in the Time Inc. hierarchy as an executive who encouraged investigative journalism," he recalled in a letter. "If a reporter convinced McCulloch that the sources of information were good and the story was straight, McCulloch would push it into Time magazine."
Two important libel suits brought during these years, Cerrito vs. Time Inc. (1969) and Cervantes vs. Time Inc. (1972), established key precedents empowering journalists with reportorial privilege to protect their sources and write more freely about public figures.
The magazine won Cerrito vs. Time Inc. around the time McCulloch started as bureau chief. Time reporter Sandy Smith had identified Joseph Cerrito as a head of the Cosa Nostra crime family in San Jose, California. Cerrito in turn sued Time for libel and argued that because he was not a public official or public figure, he could sue for damages without proving "actual malice." Smith refused to reveal the sources of his information, a clause he had built into his contract with Time-Life to protect "the known and immediate danger to his informants should their names or identity become known." The court sided with Smith and Time.
Three years later, Time Inc. got hit with a multimillion-dollar suit, Cervantes vs. Time Inc., brought by St. Louis Mayor Alfonso Cervantes. In Life's "The Mayor, The Mob and The Lawyer," reporter Denny Walsh accused the mayor of maintaining business and personal ties with the mob. Cervantes tried unsuccessfully to compel the courts to force disclosure of the identity of Walsh's informants at the FBI and the Department of Justice. The magazine won again.
Lowell Bergman, an investigative reporter with the New York Times and PBS' "FRONTLINE," says today's journalists owe many of their protections to these victories. A few years later, Bergman personally benefited from McCulloch's generosity and experience fighting libel suits.
In January 1972, Howard Hughes suddenly reentered McCulloch's life and sparked one of the most publicized investigations of the 1970s. Clifford Irving, an American expat author, sold a biography of Hughes to book publishers McGraw-Hill, and Life bought the magazine rights to the story. Irving claimed to have met repeatedly with Hughes and to have secured his cooperation for the project. The same day word of the book project appeared in the press, McCulloch, who was presumably the last journalist to have interviewed Hughes at length, got a surprise call from the millionaire. "I never in my life met anybody called Clifford Irving," Hughes told him.
The Irving story quickly grabbed national attention, and journalists across the country began investigating the author. None was able to successfully discredit him, and his claims to have met with Hughes were backed up by 1,000 pages of convincing interview transcripts. Life decided to go to press with a lengthy defense of Irving's story. Seventeen hours into the printing of the magazine, which detailed some of Irving's exploits, McCulloch and L.A. Times reporter John Goldman found Irving sick, exhausted and scared at his lawyer's house in New York. Irving admitted the whole affair had been an elaborate fraud. The 1,000 pages of interview notes were based on McCulloch's own records of meetings and conversations with Hughes, which Life had provided to Irving secretly. "Cliff grinned, and said, 'Yeah, but it was sure a pisser while it lasted,' " says McCulloch. "He was the greatest con man I ever met."
The Life edition was stopped before it hit newsstands, and an expose of Irving's fraud was rushed out in its place.
McCulloch left Time-Life News Service in the spring of 1972, just months before Life magazine shut its doors. He moved to Palo Alto, California, and worked at an education magazine, but quickly missed the pace of daily news. One night in 1975 he told his wife, Jakie, "I'm going to die of boredom, but I can't bring myself to ask Time magazine or the Los Angeles Times for a job." The next morning he received a call from C.K. McClatchy, editor of his family's Bee papers in California, with an offer.
McCulloch worked as the managing editor of the Sacramento Bee, and in 1980 he was appointed executive editor of all five McClatchy papers: the three Bee papers, the newly acquired Anchorage Daily News in Alaska and the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Washington (see "Is McClatchy Different?" August/September 2003).
Under McCulloch's leadership, McClatchy papers ran investigative stories that brought at least seven serious libel lawsuits, all of which the paper fought off successfully, but at no small expense. In November 1979, the Sacramento Bee published a story alleging that California Attorney General George Deukmejian failed to conduct a thorough investigation into charges that Lt. Gov. Mike Curb was associated with organized crime figures. The Bee was sued for that piece unsuccessfully.
In 1981, it was sued over a story that never ran. The year before, the Wall Street Journal accused McClatchy papers of killing an investigative story because the subject, John Garabedian, was a potential buyer of a McClatchy television station in Fresno. The Bee's unpublished article, which had been leaked to the Journal, detailed Garabedian's alleged involvement in an attempt to bribe a deputy district attorney in a case involving shady land deals. At the same time, Garabedian was in negotiations with McClatchy in a deal worth $13.5 million.
McClatchy and McCulloch denied the story was killed because of the pending sale. Rather, prior to publication, company attorneys had determined that, while accurate, the story might not survive a libel suit, McCulloch says. They turned out to be wrong: Garabedian filed a $500,000 libel suit against McClatchy, the Wall Street Journal and nine individuals for reporting that never made it into a McClatchy paper. The suit was unsuccessful.
Then, in November 1983, three McClatchy papers simultaneously published articles about Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, who had been a chairman of the Republican National Committee and would become chairman of President Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection committee. The stories alleged that money was illegally skimmed from a Carson City casino then owned by Laxalt and referenced ties to mob figures. Laxalt sued the Sacramento Bee in 1984. Once again, McCulloch prevailed.
"I must say at this distance, I sometimes wonder whether all the money that was spent to defend the libel suits that I created, and all the energy that went into it, whether it was a good tradeoff or not," McCulloch says. "I'm not so sure now. I'll bet you that very few people remember the stories per se. They remember the libel suits, but I don't think they remember the stories."
But, he adds, "Would I do it again? Yeah, I'd do it again."
McCulloch continued to mentor reporters, even those who didn't work for him. In 1976, Lowell Bergman was named in a $30 million libel suit for a San Francisco Examiner story about a Chinatown murder. Bergman had contributed as a freelance reporter to the story, which had been published under the byline of staff writer Raul Ramirez. Bergman worked at Rolling Stone at the time, and the newspaper's lawyers took the position that they did not need to defend him when the city cops involved in the murder case named both reporters in the suit. Outraged, Ramirez joined Bergman in mounting an independent defense.
Paul Avery, one of the veteran reporters at the Examiner, told Bergman to talk to his former colleague Frank McCulloch, then managing editor of the Sacramento Bee. McCulloch "couldn't have been warmer or more volunteering," recalls Bergman. "It's very rare in this business to find an executive at a paper that would help someone, especially a reporter that doesn't work for him. Frank had no hesitation to lend his name to a group forming to help defend us nor to challenge another news organization by speaking on my behalf to the Hearst Corp.," the Examiner's owner. Bergman and Ramirez spent the next 10 years fighting the case all the way to the California Supreme Court. In 1986, the court ruled in their favor.
McCulloch showed the same unhesitant support for many others. In the '80s, Kathleen Newton, who has known McCulloch for years, mentioned to him that she was thinking of getting an MBA. "He told me without hesitation: 'That's great! You could be a publisher!,'" she recalled in an e-mail. "I will never forget those words. It was the first time that anyone (other than my mother) had ever voiced that kind of confidence in me. As a result of his encouragement, I went on to get an MBA and became a publisher and am [now] owner of the Oregon Coast Newspapers."
It was while McCulloch was at the Sacramento Bee that he got his last phone call from his old source Howard Hughes. As McCulloch recalls, Hughes' assistant said, "'Well, we're on the plane, and Mr. Hughes wants to talk to you.' " After a pause, the assistant came back on and said Hughes wasn't able to talk.
The next day the Associated Press reported that Hughes had died on his plane on the way to Houston for medical treatment.
In 1985, McCulloch turned 65 years old. "I asked C.K. McClatchy if I should retire at 65 and he said yes, to my utter astonishment." So, at McClatchy's request, McCulloch retired--for a week.
The newly retired McCulloch was commissioned to write a magazine story on the Hearst legacy in San Francisco, and he went to the San Francisco Examiner to talk to its new publisher, William Randolph Hearst III. There he ran into his old friend David Burgin, who had just become the paper's editor. "We went to the Washington Square Bar and Grill," Burgin recalls in an e-mail, "the big media hangout where Frank was interviewing me for the magazine piece he was writing. By the time the interview was over, [McCulloch] had been hired [as the Examiner's managing editor] and I had blown the magazine piece."
McCulloch turned out to be a godsend, says Burgin. "But at the time, publisher Will Hearst chewed me out for hiring someone 'so old.'.. How quickly young Hearst changed his tune. Frank was there virtually running things in the newsroom for another six years."
Hearst has a different recollection: "The minute it was a plausible idea, it didn't take any deliberation at all to hire him," he says. "It's a little like someone telling you that Pelé is willing to play a little more soccer and are you interested."
When McCulloch was hired, Hearst had been publisher just one year and was in the process of trying to revive the Examiner. As he had at so many publications before, McCulloch brought sound news judgment and an eye for pieces that were longer, more analytical and better written. "I didn't give Frank enough credit for having brought that to the paper," Hearst admits. "But as I look out now at the American newspaper scene, I realize how unique Frank was in bringing that to the papers he worked on..... I can't give you three names who would be the McCullochs of my generation."
Charles Cooper, who worked with McCulloch at the Examiner and is now managing editor for production at the Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey, says: "Whether directing a project, or a single story, his first thought was about running down the truth of an issue--never worrying about marketing, demographics or newsroom politics. It was about what's right, what's the right thing to do. Don't fudge, don't stop short, don't bend the truth."
McCulloch retired for a second and final time in 1991, though you'd still find him occasionally in the Examiner newsroom or at the Center for Investigative Reporting, where he was an adviser on a Polk Award-winning investigation of savings and loans. He still has "newsroom dreams almost every night," he says.
When war began in Iraq, McCulloch jokes that he had a bag packed and was waiting by the phone. This time, neither the Marines nor a paper called. But those who know him still seek out McCulloch's advice. "We had unconditional faith in his judgment," says Cooper. "Still do. One of my most valuable journalism tools is Frank's phone number."
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Jason Felch is a fellow at the Center for Investigative Reporting and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS' "FRONTLINE" and "FRONTLINE/World." Marlena Telvick is an independent reporter based in San Francisco and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS' "FRONTLINE" and "FRONTLINE/World."
It was a late afternoon in April, and hot fog was creeping in from the coast. Lima?s colonial Plaza de Armas was relatively calm for a change: a din of grinding gears and hawker?s cries was in the air, as was a strong smell of diesel fumes and old cooking oil, but there were no jeering strikers, and there was no sting of tear gas. In front of the iron gates of the presidential palace, riot police stood listless ? striking coca cultivators would not arrive from the highlands for another ten days. A clutch of dirty shoeshine boys lolled on the steps of the cathedral. A dozen passersby gathered in a small arc around a newspaper kiosk, feeding on the shrill headlines of the latest political scandal. I was here to meet Enrique Zileri, the director of Caretas, Peru?s leading newsmagazine, and godfather to three generations of Lima?s top journalists. Caretas?s offices, an aging, thick-walled embodiment of Peru?s fourth estate, dominate one corner of the plaza. In recent days, the prime minister had referred to Peru?s press as the country?s most powerful sector, and one observer had told me offhandedly that the press here filled the space left by the absence of real political parties. As Zileri and I walked through the plaza to have a late lunch, he told me that Peru ?is a country of myths and the myths here are more important than reality.?
Zileri was trying to explain the fate of Peru?s president, Alejandro Toledo, who had risen from shoeshine boy to Stanford economist, from opposition leader to Peru?s first president of indigenous background. But since taking office three years ago after the collapse of Alberto Fujimori?s decade of authoritarian rule, Toledo?s myth had been pierced by a string of scandals that now threatened his government ? and perhaps Peru?s return to elected democracy.
I thought Zileri?s observation might also help explain the crisis that was gripping the Peruvian press. In September Caretas had published an article accusing a journalist ? Cecilia Valenzuela, Zileri?s prot駩 and the director one of Peru?s most respected investigative television programs ? of using wiretaps to further her investigations. The Caretas story turned out to be wrong: the young reporter who wrote it later confessed to inventing the key interview. She was fired, and the episode quickly became known as Peru?s Jayson Blair moment. But it had sent a bolt through Lima?s tight-knit group of top journalists, who during the 1990s had stood at the forefront of the fight against a repressive government while their colleagues and bosses were coerced and bought off. It provoked a debate ? argued in public forums and ethics boards, on editorial pages and over the airwaves ? that had left them divided, and, perhaps, burst another myth.
The essence of that debate was whether different standards should apply to journalists under a dictatorship and a democracy. Should hidden cameras, illicit recordings, stolen documents, and paid sources be outlawed now? Were journalists still attacking the government as if it were Fujimori?s dictatorship, as some thought, or had some reporters lost their critical attitude toward this government? Had investigative reporting been replaced by petty tabloidism, or was today?s corruption just more easily exposed? Should journalists be concerned if their reporting leads to a crisis of governability? Were those who helped expose an authoritarian regime now in danger of toppling a democratic one?
Surprisingly, Zileri, whose magazine aggressively opposed Fujimori?s regime, is one of the loudest critics of a new trend in journalism that has emerged with the return of democracy: denuncialogia ? an obsession with denunciations. ?It trivializes investigative journalism. It generates a frenzy of aggression,? Zileri said. ?It creates in the population a sense that the country is in chaos, that we can?t be governed by a democracy.?
How did Zileri explain this apparent collapse in serious but measured reporting, given Peru?s new democratic freedoms, a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, a new freedom of information law, and the proliferation of new independent media outlets? He conceded with a twisted smile that serious investigative reporting might in fact be harder under a democracy than under a dictatorship. ?It?s like an orchestra of voices now.? In the silence of authoritarianism, he says, ?it was much easier to hear the noise.?
During the 1990s, Peru witnessed the creation of one of the most extensive state-run networks of corruption in Latin American history, known here universally as the mafia. The don of that mafia was Fujimori?s Svengali-like national security adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos. When a corruption scandal forced Montesinos and Fujimori to flee the country in 2000, a trove of Montesinos?s secretly recorded videos surfaced and exposed the depth of his corruption. Montesinos was captured and returned to Peru to face trial, and those videos form the backbone of the legal case against him and over 1,300 others who have been connected to his crimes.
As the videos document, Montesinos maintained control through Peru?s intelligence apparatus, and reached deep into the courts, the military, the Congress, the police, and the private sector. But nowhere was that control more complete than in the media, which by the end of the decade had been swallowed whole by Peru?s national intelligence service, the SIN. The current crisis of the press is in large part the legacy of this deeply corrupted past. To get a sense of its scope, I caught a taxi to El Callao, where Montesinos is now standing trial. The trial is expected to run for another year.
The taxi sped south along Lima?s coastal freeway, sandwiched between the city?s high sandstone cliffs and a rocky, rubble-strewn beach. The smell of sewage and shellfish drifted through the window. We turned inland, crossed the dry Rimac River and entered the industrial neighborhood of El Callao, once a separate city but today just an extension of Lima?s eight million-person sprawl. Shantytowns thinned into farmland, and we came to the high cinderblock walls of El Callao Naval Base, home to the maximum-security military prison that Montesinos had ordered built a decade ago to hold the country?s terrorists. For three years it has held Montesinos, who spends his days in an isolation cell. He is charged with commanding death squads; corrupting Peru?s judicial, political, and financial institutions; rigging elections; selling guns to Colombian terrorists; protecting drug traffickers; and stealing as much as $1 billion of state money. He and forty co-defendants also are accused of systematically buying editorial control of the country?s television stations and popular press.
The charges stem from the late 1990s, when Fujimori was campaigning for a third five-year term and the obstacles to reelection were significant: the third term was constitutionally barred, a declining economy had left people restless, and a strident political opposition was increasingly vocal. Montesinos knew that control of the media would be crucial. He focused his efforts on two primary targets: television, which reached deep into the rural and uneducated populations; and the prensa chicha, the fourteen-cent tabloids whose headlines blared like banner advertising from kiosks across the country.
Montesinos already had substantial leverage over the country?s main television stations. Advertising had declined, leaving the stations deep in debt and the state as the country?s primary buyer of ad time. Tax reform had also left most television stations with huge debts to the government. Starting in 1999, Montesinos began to invite television executives into his office in the SIN for a talk. The negotiations were simple: You owe the state money, Montesinos said. I can either shut you down or I can forgive some debts, and even give you some operating money. In exchange, the owners were required to clear their coverage of Fujimori?s reelection campaign with Montesinos, and help ruin the credibility of opponents. One by one, the broadcasters took the deal.
One of Montesinos?s secret videos shows the owners of Channel 2 being offered $500,000 a month to ban appearances of the political opposition on their channel. Channel 4 owners got $1.5 million a month for similar cooperation. Another video shows Montesinos counting out $350,000 in cash to Channel 5?s proprietor. The owner of Channel 9 received $50,000 to cancel a bothersome investigative series called Uncensored, directed by Cecilia Valenzuela. By the end of 1999, Montesinos had editorial control over Channels 2, 4, 5, 9, and 13. Channel 7 was already state-owned. One of the country?s two cable channels, Channel 10, had been secretly purchased for the armed forces. That left just one independent station in Peru: Channel N, a twenty-four-hour cable news outlet that reaches barely 5 percent of the population.
The second major news source for Peru?s impoverished majority was the prensa chicha. Chicha refers to the popular culture of Lima?s millions of displaced Andean Indians, who fled their mountain villages during the Shining Path?s rural terror campaign of the 1980s and ?90s, which left 60,000 dead. Hundreds of thousands of migrants flooded Lima in those years, and there, among the second and third generations of urban migrants, the culture of chicha took root. Named for the corn and yucca beer typically made by Andean Indians, chicha has come to represent a vibrant popular culture of tinny cumbia music, doleful lyrics, bright neon colors, and a peculiar street jargon. To Lima?s elite, the word is synonymous with tacky.
The prensa chicha?s front pages follow a formula: a scandalous banner headline, a nearly naked woman, and close-ups of a bloody car crash or murder scene. Sex, death, horror. Montesinos saw in the prensa chicha an ideal vehicle to communicate with the country?s poor.
As the 2000 elections neared, he developed a strategy to co-opt the prensa chicha. To fund the operation, Montesinos siphoned millions of dollars from the intelligence budgets of the armed forces. He offered prensa chicha owners about $3,000 for every front-page headline. A small office in the Intelligence Services became a news factory: during morning meetings, Montesinos and his advisers would agree on the next day?s headlines. The ?news? was then sent out via encrypted fax to the owners, who laid out the front pages and sent a proof back to the SIN for final approval.
According to prosecutors, Augusto Bresani, Montesinos?s liaison with the prensa chicha, decided to open his own line of tabloids, with one innovation: realizing that their purpose was served by the headlines alone, Bresani stopped wasting money on content. His tabloids were reduced to full-page headlines followed inside by a three-line story wedged among three pages of ads. Soon, the number of chicha publications had exploded. El Chino, El Tio, El Men, La Chuchi, El Mananero, La Yuca, El Popular, Repudica, Diario Mas, El Chato ? all screaming in unison.
Ironically, it was the near total repression of the mainstream press that fostered some of Latin America?s best investigative reporting. I spoke with Gustavo Gorriti, one of Peru?s top investigative journalists, in his office in a sprawling colonial house in Lince, a wealthy neighborhood near downtown Lima. The house serves as the offices of Instituto de Defensa Legal, a Peruvian nongovernmental organization where Gorriti is now a journalist in residence. He is returning to journalism after serving as an adviser to Alejandro Toledo, whom he now refers to sarcastically as ?God?s gift to Peru.? Gorriti, who is in his mid-fifties, has never been one to mince words. ?The essential struggle of the 1990s can be construed as the struggle between spies and journalists, with information as the battleground,? Gorriti tells me. ?And the journalists won, again and again and again.?
Gorriti?s own career can be seen as a prolonged battle with Montesinos, whom Gorriti first exposed in an investigation for Caretas in 1983, when Montesinos was merely a well-connected drug lawyer. Throughout the 1980s Gorriti investigated the terror war that was consuming his country, publishing an authoritative book about the Shining Path in 1990. That same year, Montesinos became the adviser to Peru?s newly elected president, Fujimori. By April 1992, when Fujimori, at his adviser?s behest, ordered tanks into the streets, dissolved the Congress, and announced an ?autogolpe,? or ?self-coup,? as Peruvians called it, both Gorriti and Montesinos were in their prime.
That April night, as he sat finishing a dispatch on the coup for Spain?s El Pais, armed men climbed over Gorriti?s garden wall. He was held incommunicado in the basement of army intelligence headquarters, near an incinerator where investigators with Peru?s Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found human remains. After fifty hours of being officially ?disappeared,? he was released, thanks to an international outcry. He spent much of the next few years in exile in the U.S. and Panama, where he continued to uncover Montesinos?s crimes.
After the 1992 coup, the number of newspapers, magazines, and television stations that criticized the government shrank until only a handful of independent journalists were left. Still, they were able to uncover many of the regime?s crimes, and are today credited with playing an important role in its fall.
In late 1993, Cecilia Valenzuela, then a young Caretas reporter, published an investigation that linked Montesinos to a death-squad responsible for two recent massacres. The day after the piece ran, a box appeared in the elevator of the Caretas office with Valenzuela?s name on it. Inside was a chicken, slashed and bloody, wrapped in black tape with an enlarged photo of Valenzuela tied to it. A week later, on her birthday, flowers were delivered to Valenzuela?s desk by a messenger. The card inside read, ?You?re going to die, bitch.?
In July 1997, Channel 2 reported on Montesinos?s inflated income and, later, that intelligence services had been tapping the phones of 200 opposition politicians and journalists. The station?s Israeli-born owner, Baruch Ivcher, had his Peruvian citizenship revoked, and his right to own a television station along with it. Control of Channel 2 passed to minority shareholders, who quickly ended investigations.
In 1998 Angel Paez, an investigative reporter at the left-leaning daily La Republica, began publishing articles about suspicious arms acquisitions by the armed forces in which associates of Montesinos were skimming large commissions for faulty equipment. Soon after, Paez was accused of being a traitor to his country in a vicious campaign by the prensa chicha. In 1999 the opposition paper Liberacion published documents that showed Montesinos had $2.6 million stashed in Peruvian bank accounts. In March 2000, investigative reporters at the cautious El Comercio, the country?s oldest paper and last remaining broadsheet, revealed that Fujimori?s reelection campaign had forged over one million signatures to enroll in the coming elections.
Fujimori won the second round of elections uncontested when Toledo withdrew in protest, but the network of control that Fujimori and Montesinos had built was starting to unravel. In August 2000, the two announced the bust of an international arms trafficking ring that had sold 10,000 assault rifles to Colombia?s FARC guerrillas. The day after the press conference, Cecilia Valenzuela began publishing an investigation that named Montesinos as the mastermind of the deal. Three weeks later, a video ? the first of the Vladi-videos, as they would be called ? was broadcast simultaneously on Channel N and in Congress, showing Montesinos giving an opposition congressman $15,000 to change political parties. The game was up. Montesinos fled the country eight days later, and was eventually captured and extradited to Peru. Fujimori fled in November 2000, faxing his resignation from Japan, where he remains today, plotting his political comeback. ?They were investigations that completely shook up the political situation and put reality in a new light,? Gorriti told me. ?For me, that is what defines good investigative reporting.?
One of the legacies of Montesinos?s governance-by-espionage has been a society obsessed with surveillance.
?Now everyone records telephone conversations, everyone uses hidden cameras,? said Julia Maria Urrunaga, former investigative editor at El Comercio and now a director at the Institute for the Press and Society. On a daily basis, Lima editors receive a stream of clandestinely recorded conversations, documents, and photos of everything from petty love affairs to President Toledo?s private phone conversations. ?Everyone wants to be a little Montesinos,? Urrunaga said.
This, coupled with the government?s political bungling, has generated a seemingly endless supply of scandals from Toledo?s first days in office. First, it was the presidential salary, which Toledo raised from $3,000 to $18,000 a month. (A public outcry eventually forced him to lower it to $3,660.) Then it was his repeated refusal to recognize Zarai Toledo, whom the press had identified as his illegitimate daughter. (In 2002, after years of denials, Toledo recognized her.)
Over the past six months, denuncialogia has gripped the capital like a fever. The head of the cabinet quit in December after being accused in the press of homosexuality. In January the vice president resigned when the media published photos of him in an intimate embrace with his young girlfriend. (The girl?s father allegedly received a tax break.) The president?s personal attorney resigned the same day after a secretly recorded audio tape revealed his conversations with a member of the Fujimori regime. In March Peru?s intelligence agency was closed when its seventh president in two and a half years resigned after his implication in an alleged $7 million land sale fraud. (He had been on the job just two days, replacing the former president, who was forced to resign after documents were leaked suggesting he was plotting against the interior minister.) As I arrived in town, the First Lady was embroiled in a scandal about the mismanagement of public funds, Toledo?s approval rating hovered in the single digits, and his sixth cabinet in thirty-two months in office was in danger of collapse.
His supporters, and some journalists, are quick to blame the press.
Lima journalists are ?a bunch of monkeys with machine guns,? says Fernando Yovera, a veteran reporter who, like a number of other top journalists, left the profession to advise Toledo during the 2000 campaign. He now works for the Congress as a liaison between the press and the government. ?For ten years journalists were mute, now they can?t shut up: everyone is guilty of everything! They use headlines like firing squads.?
Emerging out of this flood of denunciations ? or perhaps the force behind it ? is a new form of journalism: the wildly popular hybrid of the prensa chicha and serious papers epitomized by Lima?s three-year-old leading tabloid daily, Correo. ?I like to call it serious sensationalism,? said Juan Carlos Tafur, the director of Correo. I met Tafur on a Saturday morning at his home in the leafy coastal suburb of Barranco to talk about the changes in the newspaper industry that had made Correo, almost overnight, the most-read paper in the country.
Lima?s newsstands have been dominated by two types of newspapers: the forty-five-cent ?serious? papers, which sold as many as 100,000 copies a day in the 1980s, and the fourteen-cent prensa chicha. But in the 1980s and 1990s, the flood of poor Indian migrants coupled with a series of economic and educational crises transformed Lima?s population, giving rise to a new readership. A growing class of the educated but poor ? students, retired people, government workers ? were left without a paper that spoke to their reality and met their budget. Readership of the serious papers went into free fall.
Correo emerged in November 2000 amid the political turmoil that followed the collapse of Fujimori?s government. Suddenly there was a tabloid that looked chicha and cost fourteen cents, but covered politics and social issues aggressively. Within months of Toledo?s taking office, Correo was one of the few papers openly critical of his government. The paper?s coverage reflected its hybrid origins: articles were short and to the point; big photos and info boxes summarized the facts quickly. Sprinkled throughout was a difficult-to-distinguish mix of serious investigation and uncorroborated attack.
It sold fantastically. To the surprise of many in the industry, Correo had tapped into a population of readers utterly frustrated with Toledo that other papers had either missed or ignored. Soon Correo?s circulation, driven by banner headlines and daily scandals, surpassed even the staid El Comercio, the longtime leader of Peru?s serious press. A wave of imitations flooded the newsstands, led by Peru21, published by El Comercio?s owners and a direct knock-off of Correo?s format. Like Correo, these other ?serious tabloids? were harshly critical of Toledo?s government. Today, in a niche that did not exist three years ago, there are seven ?serious tabloids,? with new ones appearing regularly.
Correo?s success ? and the tabloid phenomenon it has spawned ? were met with criticism almost immediately. At first the attacks were personal, directed toward Tafur and the paper?s owners, whom critics called ?sashimi-eaters? or ?kimono-wearers,? references to their connections to Fujimori?s regime. As Correo matured and improved, its critics focused more on the paper?s style of journalism, accusing it of sloppy sensationalism disguised as investigative reporting.
?Sensational? It?s true; I treat every piece of news as a scandal. Our headlines scream at you,? Tafur admits. ?Imprecise? Sure, we?ve committed errors. When you turn up the volume, you get some distortion.? But he?s not convinced that the investigative journalism of the ?90s was any better. ?What exactly did they expose?? Tafur asked. ?More than great investigative journalism, I think it was the content of the denunciations that was different. There was an authoritarian government, a major terror campaign, and vast corruption. That?s why they think it was so great. But basically they were accusations, just like today.?
And Tafur doesn?t buy into the notion that the rules have changed now that Peru is under a democracy. ?The only difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is a change in shells. Inside, nothing has really changed, and the press shouldn?t anesthetize itself.?
Even those who disagree with Tafur?s type of journalism envy his bottom line. At a time when most serious papers are running a net loss, Correo has proved remarkably profitable. ?The expensive papers are pachyderms,? he says. ?I think Correo and Peru21 are the future of the press here.?
If there is a television equivalent of the Correo phenomenon, it would be Cecilia Valenzuela?s weekly program, La Ventana Indiscreta. I visited her at the Channel 2 studio on a Sunday night to watch a live broadcast. In the center of a large sound studio bathed in orange light, Valenzuela sits at a glass table, where she interviews the week?s newsmakers. Seated in a semi-circle around her is her team of six young investigative reporters, whose quick, edgy video reports form the main segments of the ninety-minute show. In the background is a comical bust of Toledo.
The ?indiscrete window,? the show?s name, refers to the window of the presidential palace; the program offers its viewers a glimpse into the world behind that window. But at times, Valenzuela?s critics say, the show can be as indiscrete as its subject matter. Like the ?serious tabloids,? La Ventana Indiscreta reaches out to a mass audience by mixing humor, irony, sarcasm, and scandal with serious investigative reporting and political coverage. Valenzuela?s commentaries between segments are often opinionated and scathing, at times going beyond the facts. The show?s reports are filmed with small, handheld digital video cameras that give it a hidden camera feel. Techno music drives many of the segments to a conclusion that, more often than not, exposes some corruption, big or small, in the political class. While highly regarded for her attacks on Montesinos and Fujimori during the 1990s, Valenzuela has drawn criticism from her peers now for her harsh criticism of Toledo?s government, and the form those attacks take. The criticism, Valenzuela feels, comes from those who believe Peru has changed fundamentally from the days of the Fujimori regime. In her view, it hasn?t. ?The majority of journalists, and Peruvians in general, thought that with the shift from dictatorship to democracy, things would change from night to day. They thought the city would suddenly smell differently. But it still smells like shit,? Valenzuela tells me. ?Those who have power in my country always abuse it. Corruption in Peru is endemic: it wasn?t just the dictatorship of Fujimori, it has to do with the political class in this country.?
Like Correo?s Tafur, Valenzuela is in her early forties, a younger member of Lima?s journalism elite, which is dominated by men in their late fifties and sixties, and she largely dismisses what her older colleagues see as a decline in the quality of Peruvian journalism. Revealing corruption in Toledo?s government simply doesn?t require profound investigation, she argues. ?Under Fujimori, there was incredible corruption, but the corrupt people were very efficient. This government is inhabited by the most incapable, inept group of people we?ve seen in years. Every time you scratch the surface, a terrifying smell of putrefaction comes out.?
The crisis in the press is merely a reflection of the larger crisis in Peruvian society, she claims. ?Now nobody believes in anything: in politicians, in journalists, in priests. That doubt is healthy. For now, we have the right to feel our pain, to live our sorrow, to expiate our faults. I don?t know how long that will last. After the doubt, confidence will come back, and we?ll have to see who demonstrates credibility. I think this is a very healthy thing for the press. It will only make us better.?
On my last day in Lima, striking coca cultivators descended on the city to demand the president?s resignation, and once again, the sting of tear gas mixed with the smell of diesel fuel and cooking oil in Lima?s Plaza de Armas. The papers again were filled with scandal, calling for the head of the interior minister. Congress had gathered the signatures necessary for his censure, and by the end of the day the most popular member of Toledo?s beleaguered cabinet was forced to resign.
?There should be a coup,? my taxi driver told me on the way to the airport. ?We need a strong hand in power. Peru is like a tree that is growing crooked: someone has to straighten it out.? Earlier in the week, a major United Nations study showed that 54 percent of Latin Americans said they would prefer an authoritarian government if it improved their economic situation. Another poll found that Fujimori would place first if elections were held tomorrow. Toledo?s approval rating threatened to sink below the 8 percent it had clung to in recent weeks.
My taxi driver?s comments made me think of something Gustavo Gorriti told me as I was leaving his office, a warning not to underestimate the ?mafia?: ?People eventually feel a nostalgia for the whip, the saddle, and the spurs,? Gorriti said. ?They want to be ridden. It?s the perverse inheritance of the caudillos [Latin American feudal lords]. It?s the democracy that never had the chance to sink its roots in. Thanks to the idiot we have in the palace, thanks to the embarrassment of the Congress we have, but thanks also to the bad journalism being done, we run the risk that after ten years of struggle, we?ll have to fight again, bleed again, start all over again.
?People should realize that if the mafia once again governs Peru ? they have high hopes of doing so, and it is very possible ? they will make sure this time they don?t make the mistakes of last time, allowing the independent journalists to operate as we did.?
Two months before my visit, television cameras covering the opening of Montesinos?s trial for media corruption had by chance captured a chilling moment that drove home Gorriti?s warning. Surrounded by prosecutors, judges, guards, and the media, Montesinos scribbled a note on a pad of paper and casually tilted it toward a co-defendant, the owner of a popular tabloid sitting next to him. Captured from behind by a camera, the note read: ?Tomorrow raise the drug issue.? The next morning the tabloid carried a banner headline, the latest dispatch from a mafia intent on making a comeback: NEW VIDEOS DOCUMENT TOLEDO'S DRUG ABUSE!
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Jason Felch is a fellow at the Center for Investigative Reporting. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and Legal Affairs.
