Kill the Messenger Read online

  After that particular story ran, dozens of telephone calls came into the newspaper from preachers and funeral directors, all offering their services. “Apparently, Tiny Mark Stone was buried in a proper burial service attended by no less than fifteen reporters and camera crews from every TV station in a fifty-mile radius,” Loftus says.

  Another famous—and among his reporters, infamous—Trimble story was “Major the Dog.”

  It all started when Tom Scheffey, then the Post’s statehouse reporter and now senior writer of the Connecticut Law Tribune, received a telephone call about a wounded canine. “I wrote this fairly short but heart-wrenching story about this injured puppy with no owner,” he says. “A young woman who was an intern for us volunteered to take over the dog’s care for a while. She came back and said we should put this dog out of its misery, but Vance picked up the phone and called a veterinarian and told him to make this dog live. Nobody thought it could be done, but Vance scared this surgeon into performing an operation.”

  Trimble assigned Webb to attend the surgery. His story on the operation ran on the front page and featured a photograph of him in the operating room, wearing a surgeon’s mask. Major the Dog survived to be adopted by a little boy. “Gary called that story his ‘claim to shame,’” Loftus says. “Everybody had some overplayed tearjerker story at that paper, and that was his.”

  Greg Wolf occasionally accompanied Webb on his assignments. He recalls Webb griping about covering traffic accidents or murders and having to interview recently bereaved family members, a task some Post staffers jokingly referred to as the “Good Morning Widow Jones. Well, You Are Now” beat. “He said his job was to go to the front door and ask the mother how it felt to have her son stabbed to death,” Wolf says. “He did that once and the lady didn’t know about it yet.”

  SHORTLY AFTER HE joined the Kentucky Post, Webb asked Sue to marry him. They were wed in a Unitarian ceremony in Indianapolis on February 10, 1979. “I remember Webb found a Unitarian Church,” Wolf says. “He said he told the minister ‘You can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to hear you mention Jesus.’” The wedding reception took place at Wolf’s bachelor pad. “We had spaghetti and wine,” Wolf adds. “It was a lot of fun, the best wedding reception I’ve ever been to in my life.”

  After the wedding, Webb and his wife moved to a working-class neighborhood in Covington, Kentucky. “We lived in this place called Seminary Square, where people were trying to fix up these old homes,” Sue says. At the time, she was pregnant with their first son, Ian, and Webb was understandably concerned about her safety. After a thief broke into his car and stole his radio, he rigged up an alarm that would ring inside the house when someone tried to open the car door. “One day it started beeping,” Sue says. “Gary grabbed his rifle and this big black guy was pushing his car down the alley.”

  Webb confronted the man. Instead of running away, the would-be thief came toward him, turning away only as Webb pulled the trigger. Bleeding from his backside, the man tore down the alley on foot before passing out. Fortunately, he survived and was later convicted of trying to steal the car. “The neighbors got Gary a trophy,” Sue says. “After that, everything calmed down much more in the neighborhood.”

  Scheffey remembers worrying that his friend might be charged in the shooting. “For a while it was thought they might bring Gary up on charges,” he says. “A lot of defense lawyers said they’d defend him for free if the cops laid a finger on him.” But the cops never charged Webb, who had a license for the gun and was acting in self-defense. “There’s a big irony there,” Scheffey says. “Gary was the darling of the black community after the ‘Dark Alliance’ story. But did anyone tell them about the incident where he shot a black guy in the ass?”

  If Covington had its rough side, it had nothing on neighboring Newport, Kentucky. The city has cleaned up its image in the past twenty years, but in the early 1980s it was known among Kentucky Post reporters as “Sin City,” a red-light district for Cincinnati that was known as a mafia town. Monmouth Street, Newport’s main drag, teemed with porno shops, bars, and strip clubs, some of which were regular hangouts for Post staffers.

  The town had a colorful, populist mayor known as Johnny “TV” Peluso, who owned a TV repair shop downtown. He was renowned for passing out quarters to kids in the street whenever an ice cream truck drove by. In the mid-1980s, Peluso went to federal prison for lying to a grand jury and pressuring city employees to misuse public funds.

  Shortly after joining the paper, Scheffey says, his colleagues brought him to a Newport club called the Pink Pussy Cat. “There was a dancer there named Savage Sheena and she needed a volunteer she could go after with her bull whip,” he says. “I was twenty-five and clean cut and obviously not a plant and she took me out of the audience. I don’t know what I was doing with a cigarette because I had quit, but she took that cigarette out of my lip from twenty-five feet away without splitting my nose.”

  “It was like Vegas, a wild-ass town,” recalls Wolf, adding that he used to visit Newport with Webb when his friend was on assignment there. His favorite hangout was a strip club called the Brass Ass. “There was a juke box on the stage, the girls would come out and put a quarter in the box and dance completely nude,” he says. “It was like watching a gynecological exam from two feet away. Then they’d try to get you to buy a bottle of champagne. Gary interviewed a lot of those strippers. He got to be very popular with them.”

  EARLY IN HIS job at the Kentucky Post, while covering the police beat in Newport, Webb came across the story that would launch his career as an investigative reporter. On a cold January night in 1978 an unknown assailant walked into an adult bookstore on Monmouth Street, took out a handgun and shot the proprietor, Lester Lee, who died from his wounds at a local hospital. When police searched his pockets, they found a wallet full of business cards, several of which belonged to businessmen connected to the coal industry, and one bearing the name of a State Senator in Ohio.

  Scheffey, who had just started studying law, told Webb he’d help him with the story. “I worked with him on some of the early stories,” Scheffey says. “But Gary did the lion’s share of the work. Gary was just enthralled with it. He traced down Lester Lee’s story.”

  Webb quickly discovered that Lee wasn’t just an ordinary porn merchant; he was a reputed mobster who had been on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Lee was also the president of a coal company that didn’t seem to have any other employees.

  “Lee was basically a con man looking for the next big scam,” Scheffey says. “He wanted to be a big shot. Previously, he had been in speculative stocks, but then he capitalized on the oil crisis.” As Webb and Scheffey discovered, nations without their own oil industry were scrambling to get fuel sources. “Lee realized if you had a corrupt minerals engineer, you could send them proof you had a boatload of coal, get a letter of credit, and cash it before they realized it was a bunch of dirt,” he says. “That’s why Lee died: the people who knew what he was up to caught up with him.”

  Webb and Scheffey drove north to the state capitol in Columbus, Ohio, and interviewed State Senator Donald “Buz” Lukens, the politician whose business card had been found in Lee’s pocket. Lukens, a Republican party activist, had been the Midwest campaign coordinator for Ronald Reagan’s first presidential race in 1976. He didn’t deny his relationship with Lee. It wouldn’t have been convincing if he had, however: Webb and Scheffey confronted him with a photograph of himself, Lee, and Reagan getting off an airplane during a campaign stop.

  “Lukens thought it was just fine to be doing business with Lester Lee,” Scheffey says. “Lee was his business associate, partner, friend, and resource. Lee wanted to impress Lukens and got him this plane. The plane was used in a five-state swing that essentially launched Reagan’s first presidential bid.” Scheffey went to Washington, D.C., and asked some questions at the Federal Elections Commission. “You have to report donations of that type of value, and they didn’t,” he says.

>   Lee’s murder—and his ties to Lukens and Reagan—formed the basis for what eventually became a goliath seventeen-part series that Webb and Scheffey authored together called, “The Coal Connection.”

  “Vance [Trimble] was not crazy about the idea,” Scheffey recalls. “He said, ‘Webb, your trench coat is flapping in the wind.’ Trimble discouraged Gary because he felt it was a disjointed international story, but he was doing what almost all editors do: they don’t let excited young reporters take months and months or weeks or even unaccountable days to do complex investigative journalism.”

  Webb didn’t press his case with Trimble. Instead, he and Scheffey worked on the story in their free time for the next two years. The Kentucky Post finally ran the story in 1980, shortly after Trimble retired from journalism. The series had three major parts. The first focused on Lee, his coal credit scam, and his relationship to Lukens. The second exposed the fact that Kentucky was the only state in the country where heavy equipment used in coal mining wasn’t registered. As a result of the relative lack of paperwork attached to the vehicles, Webb and Scheffey discovered, it was easy to export stolen tractors to other countries. The pair even discovered evidence that some of the vehicles had been shipped by organized crime syndicates to South America as collateral for major cocaine deals.

  Sheffey now feels that the drug dealing was rather tangential to the basic story they were trying to tell, but thanks to his colleague’s passion for detail, “The Coal Connection” marked Webb’s first journalistic venture into not only organized crime, but Latin America’s booming cocaine trade. To get that part of the story, the two reporters drove out to a federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky and interviewed a colorful crook named J. R. Durham about the black market in mining equipment. On the way there, Scheffey’s car broke down. “Gary got out and fixed the problem in five minutes,” Scheffey says. The interview was worth the trip. “Durham was just laughing up his sleeve about all the people he had ripped off.”

  The third series of articles in “The Coal Connection” exposed how President Richard Nixon had created a tax incentive for coal companies to write off losses. “The tax scam people were quick to realize that if you funded a business with advance royalties, and then your company goes bust, the IRS would let you write off the loss on a dollar-for-dollar credit,” Scheffey says. “It was a very powerful tax shelter, and there were all these doctors and mafia-tied individuals and companies who were funding them and getting all these tax benefits.”

  When Reagan came through the Midwest on his 1980 presidential campaign, Webb and Scheffey dogged his campaign throughout Ohio, trying to ask the candidate about his relationship with Lukens. They never got the interview. According to Scheffey, Reagan’s campaign spokesman quit rather than answer Webb’s questions.

  Lukens went on to become a U.S. Congressman in 1986. Three years later, an Ohio television station filmed him at a McDonald’s restaurant talking with the mother of a sixteen-year-old African-American girl whom Lukens had paid for sexual favors. He pled guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor, spent thirty days in jail, but refused to give up his seat. The following year, an elevator operator at the U.S. capitol building accused him of fondling her. In 1995, Lukens was convicted of five counts of bribery and conspiracy and sentenced to thirty months in federal prison.

  After the series ran, the Kentucky Post submitted “The Coal Connection” for a Pulitzer Prize. It didn’t win one, but did receive the 1980 Investigative Reporters & Editors award. Scheffey and Webb flew to San Diego with their wives to accept the award. “The New Republic featured our series on their back page, so they must have thought it was significant,” Scheffey says. “But that was it. It wasn’t the last time Gary’s stories didn’t catch on in the major media.”

  One journalist who did catch on to Webb’s work was Walt Bogdanich, an investigative reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer who went on to work for 60 Minutes, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Bogdanich was investigating the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Northern Kentucky, which he described as “an illegal gambling house run by old-line mob people,” some of whom were in Cleveland. While talking to other reporters about the story, one of them recommended he contact Webb, who had just written a great exposé on the Kentucky mafia.

  Bogdanich says he was immediately drawn to Webb. “He was a very funny guy,” he says. “He had this very cynical sense of humor which I share. I found him to be a delight to be around. I made it my job to try to get him to come to the Plain Dealer.”

  FOUR

  The Big One

  IF THE KENTUCKY POST is where Gary Webb learned how to become an investigative reporter, it was at the Cleveland Plain Dealer where he truly blossomed. Webb arrived at the 500,000-circulation daily—one of the largest and most venerable newspapers in the Midwest—in 1983. Coming from a small-town daily paper to a regional powerhouse was no small achievement, but Webb didn’t get the job just because he had an insider like the Plain Dealer’s Walt Bogdanich on his side.

  With five years of daily reporting experience and an award-winning investigative series on his resume, Webb won the job purely on his own merits, says Bogdanich, now an editor at the New York Times. New hires had to share computer terminals, and Webb’s computer buddy was Tom Andrzejewski, a thirty-five-year-old Clevelander who had joined the paper as a copyboy fresh from high school, working his way up the ranks to a reporter desk deep inside the newsroom, in a cramped corner known as the “quadrant.”

  Webb would later write about Andrzejewski in the introduction to his 1998 book, Dark Alliance, although not by name. “I was assigned to share a computer terminal with a tall, middle-aged reporter with a long, virtually unpronounceable Polish name,” Webb wrote. “To save time, people called him Tom A.”

  Andrzejewski, Webb recalled, liked to curse. Instead of saying “yes,” in answer to a question, he said, “fuckin’-a-tweetie.” He referred to recalcitrant public officials and editors he didn’t like as “fuckin’ jerks.” But what Webb remembered most about Andrzejewski was how he answered the phone. He would point at it, wink at Webb with facetious intuition and declare, “It’s the Big One.”

  “No matter how many times I heard that, I always laughed,” Webb wrote. “The Big One was the reporter’s holy grail—the tip that led you from the daily morass of press conferences and cop calls on to the trail of The Biggest Story You’d Ever Write, the one that would turn the rest of your career into an anticlimax.”

  Now president of The Oppidan Group, a Cleveland public relations firm, Andrzejewski fondly remembers Webb as a Jeff Foxworthy look-alike who constantly talked about sports cars and motorcycles with the paper’s auto reporter, who once gave Webb a bubble-wrapped engine part as a prank gift. The joke was that the part belonged to a Buick—the last type of car in the world Webb would ever drive.

  “Gary was a hotshot investigative reporter,” Andrzejewski says. “But he was also really fun. He had a great sense of humor in a very classic journalist skepticism-bordering-on-cynicism kind of way.” Webb also had his serious side. “He was an honest industrious guy, but with an edge, especially when it came to exposing corrupt public officials or inept government agencies.”

  Another denizen of the quadrant was Steve Luttner. Recruited from the Columbus Citizen Journal, he was one of about a dozen reporters, including Webb, who were hired by the Plain Dealer to beef up investigative coverage of state government. Still a reporter at the paper’s Columbus bureau, Luttner recalls the paper’s 1950s-era Cleveland newsroom as the journalistic equivalent of a third world sweatshop.

  “It was a dump,” Luttner says. “It had an open floor and no air circulation and people smoked in there. Gary sat behind me for a year and a half.” Luttner recalls Webb as a hard worker who was constantly on the telephone, chasing story leads. “He used to say that the system rewards persistence,” he recalls. “Gary was always looking for targets. He would lock on to something and not let it go.”

  If Webb
wasn’t at his desk, he was in the law library researching cases and government codes, which he would then angrily recite chapter and verse in conversations with any official who refused to cooperate with him. “He would bludgeon people at agencies if he was getting any resistance from them,” Luttner says. “I’ve never seen a more dogged reporter in thirty years.”

  Not everybody in the newsroom appreciated Webb’s intensity or his perceived self-righteous approach to his job. Webb could seem preachy when he ranted about crooked politicians. His view of ethics was black and white; there was no excuse for breaking the law, however obscure, and it was his mission as a reporter to expose such injustices, no matter how petty or technical. “I agreed with him,” Luttner says. “But he could be a little uppity about that. I figured it was because he was the son of a Marine sergeant.”

  Now a doctoral candidate at Ohio University who left journalism six years ago, Tom Suddes had been at the Plain Dealer for just over a year when Webb arrived. “He had an in-your-face spirit of journalism,” Suddes says. “He felt we weren’t here to nurture people, we were here to raise hell, and I shared that view.”

  Webb often came to Suddes, who was known as a bipedal encyclopedia of Ohio politics, for advice on researching his stories. “One of Gary’s great qualities as a reporter was that he had a great ability to pick brains,” Suddes says. “He was never afraid to ask for guidance on how to find information. He was wonderful about ferreting out documents.”

  According to Suddes, Webb wasn’t as straight-laced as other reporters. He had a Metallica sticker on his computer and liked to blast heavy-metal music from a tape deck while typing up his stories. Webb also enjoyed pulling pranks on his colleagues. There was an aquarium in the newsroom, and when one of the goldfish died, he and another reporter fished it out of the tank, wrapped it in some tissue paper and surreptitiously put it in the mailbox of a journalist at a competing paper who was digging into Cleveland’s organized crime syndicates. The fish bore an ominous mafia-style warning: “Back Off.”