1 David Freed JOUR S-599 Capstone 26 July 2017 STRONGER TOGETHER: GROUP REPORTING AND THE PUBLIC’S RIGHT TO KNOW By the spring of 1976, Don Bolles had grown weary of investigative reporting. The irregular hours. The phone threats. The fear of libel suits. The indifferent and sometimes timid editors. After more than a dozen years of exposing organized crime and corruption in Phoenix for the Arizona Republic, Bolles was relieved to be finally leaving the beat, moving on to cover the state legislature. That was the anguishing irony of it, his friends and fellow reporters would lament, that someone had murdered him when he was no longer a threat. Some said the 47-year-old journalist should have ignored the news tip that led to his assassination. But even as he sought to distance himself from his craft, Don Bolles and investigative reporting were inseparable. And so, when a man called whom he’d never met, claiming to have incriminating information about an Arizona congressman in bed with the mob, Bolles did what he always did with potential sources. He suggested they get together face-to- face. The caller said his name was John Adamson. The two men made plans to meet in the lobby of the upscale Hotel Clarendon (now the Clarendon Hotel and Spa) in downtown Phoenix. Adamson, however, never showed. After waiting 15 minutes, Bolles returned to his white Datsun 710 compact. As the father of four backed out of his parking space, six sticks of dynamite taped to the car’s frame under his seat 2 detonated. Bolles would languish in agony for 11 days as surgeons amputated both of his legs and an arm in a desperate but ultimately futile struggle to save his life. Journalists are killed gangland-style for doing their jobs in places like Russia and Latin America, not in America. That was the perception, anyway, before Bolles was slain. Word of his death blew like a chill wind through the nation’s newsrooms. Would organized crime now declare open season on reporters? Would journalists be less willing to pursue the truth, without fear or favor, if they knew their own lives were at risk? At Long Island’s Newsday in New York, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and reporter Bob Greene was determined not to let that happen. No stranger to writing powerful exposes on organized crime, the legendary Greene was determined to avenge Bolles’ murder by showing bad guys everywhere that if they killed one reporter, others would target them like heat-seeking missiles. More than three-dozen reporters did just that in the immediate wake of Don Bolles’ death. Greene organized an unprecedented, eclectic confederation of mostly newspaper journalists from large newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Detroit News, and the Miami Herald, and from tiny ones like Ohio’s Elyria Chronicle and the Washington Wenatchee World. A sprinkling of radio and television newsmen joined as well. In all, 38 reporters from across the country would ultimately convene in Phoenix, most on unpaid leaves, with a single goal in mind: To carry on the investigative work of a slain colleague few of them had ever met. Known as the “The Arizona Project,” their collective efforts would give rise to a then-fledgling organization 3 called Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., (IRE), which stands today among the nation’s foremost resources for journalists whose forte is in-depth, socially redemptive stories. Greene and his team converted a penthouse suite in downtown Phoenix’s Adams Hotel into a makeshift newsroom. They called themselves the “Desert Rats” and embraced the motto, “Deep and Dirty.” It was “All the President’s Men” meets “Spotlight,” with a dash of “The Magnificent Seven” thrown in. Journalism had never seen anything like it. I certainly hadn’t. After Greene learned that a massive land fraud scam that my reporting partner and I were investigating in Colorado had ties to mob activities in Arizona, we were invited to join the team. I became its youngest member, a 21-year-old rookie fresh out of college. Nothing I had studied in journalism school could have prepared me for what I was to experience in Phoenix. I found myself in the company of hard-charging, hard-drinking, old- school newsmen straight from “The Front Page,” as caustically funny as they were shockingly unorthodox in their pursuit of the truth. Together, we tailed mobsters, surveilled gun-runners, and met with clandestine sources in dive bars and down dark alleys. I learned by watching them the tenacity and resourcefulness demanded of the craft of reporting, our inviolate obligation to confirm the facts through multiple sources, and to reconfirm them. I learned the focus and patience required when digging through stacks of records, the polite but persistent, never-take-no-for-an-answer approach when dealing with bureaucratic file clerks, the gentle cajoling and careful building of trust in handling fearful, unwilling sources--the notion that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. I learned the 4 importance of transcribing and organizing my notes after an interview, so that I wouldn’t forget crucial details. More than anything, I learned never to be satisfied in my search for answers. In the end, we produced a body of work laying bare a city and a state that, as Don Bolles had worked so valiantly to expose, was awash in corruption. We also generated no shortage of controversy. Reporters traditionally are an independent lot, fiercely competitive in their zeal to scoop each other while furthering the public’s right to know. Some journalists who didn’t come to Phoenix ridiculed those of us who did. They said we had threatened the very foundations of a free press by banding together. Maybe we did. All I know is that in the more than 40 years, we journalists can count on one hand the members of our tribe who’ve been murdered in the United States for trying to tell the truth. “It bought an insurance policy for reporters,” says Myrta Pulliam, a Pulitzer Prize- winning investigative reporter from the Indianapolis Star who was one of the original Desert Rats. “And that was the whole idea to begin with.” There’s little denying that American journalists are under siege today. Amid declining audiences and revenues, relatively few individual news media outlets can afford to field the kind of ambitious, spare-no-expense kind of investigative teams that were prevalent when I was starting out. Opinion polls consistently show a majority of the public views reporters with suspicion. Much of that venal sentiment is fueled by President Donald J. Trump and his supporters’ constant vilification of journalists as enemies of the people, purveyors of “fake news.” If you’re a reporter, it’s easy to feel under siege, and to embrace a circle-the-wagons mentality. 5 Which is why a look back at the Arizona Project and the lessons it afforded couldn’t be timelier. As more newspapers and television newsrooms shed jobs, it simply makes sense to work together, to ensure that the kind of in-depth reporting we undertook in Phoenix continues. Little did we know back then that our unprecedented call to journalistic action would serve today as a model of sorts for partnerships like ProPublica and The New York Daily News, or the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, both of which won Pulitzer Prizes this year. Investigative reporters are a proud and righteous tribe, practicing a craft that affords an essential service to a free society. They serve in essence as sheepdogs, standing watch over the opportunistic and the corrupt, barking truth to power. Don Bolles understood the role of investigative reporting as well as anyone. Those who toiled beside him and called him friend describe him as having been utterly selfless in his all-important pursuit of the truth. He would’ve been among the first, they say, to applaud the kind of collective, team journalism being practiced increasingly these days. Detectives who investigated Bolles’ murder were confident they solved his slaying. Three suspects went to prison, including Adamson, who police said planted the bomb. Not everyone, however, is convinced that all the guilty were caught. It is a murder mystery, some believe, that may never be solved. *** I graduated from Colorado State University on a sunny Saturday in May 1976 and went to work the following Monday covering night cops for the Colorado Springs Sun, a feisty underdog daily in what was then a competitive, two-newspaper town. Don Bolles was blown up 6 in Phoenix less than a month later. I read on the wires how Greene was putting together a reporting team to carry on Bolles’ work, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time, immersed in my fledgling career, hoping to pass probation. That would soon change. Neither of us can recall specifically when, but sometime that summer, my college buddy and fellow reporter at the Sun, Steve Wick, learned that Phoenix authorities had contacted detectives in Colorado Springs about a possible Colorado connection to Bolles’ death. The Desert Southwest at the time was rife with flagrant real estate scams. Bolles had investigated and reported on many of them. According to Wick’s law enforcement source, a land sales company with rumored links to organized crime figures in Arizona was operating out of a high-rise office building south of downtown Colorado Springs. At my prodding, Wick, then 25, persuaded our editors that he needed help on the story. We were assigned to work together. It didn’t take long to hit journalistic pay dirt.