Kill the Messenger (6 page)

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.”

Much of Webb's early reporting at the
Plain Dealer
involved improprieties at the state medical board. Walt Bogdanich had already written a series about the medical board. Webb picked up where he left off, exposing cronyism in the organization and, more importantly, the board's routine refusal to discipline doctors. Through public records requests, Webb obtained complaints from patients and tracked the board's failure to adequately investigate them.

Greg Wolf remembers Webb telling him about some of the more egregious cases where the medical board failed to discipline errant doctors. Webb got the address for a physician who he discovered was prescribing more diet pills than any other doctor in the country. The doctor ran a clinic out of his house that was open twice a week. Webb drove there, and saw a line of people waiting outside. Webb weighed only 160 pounds, but it was wintertime, and Webb wore several layers underneath a bulky winter jacket. When he got to the front of the line, the doctor asked him what was wrong.

“I'm fat,” Webb responded. The doctor didn't ask him to take his coat off, but put him on a scale and gave him a bottle of pills. Webb returned two days later. “What do you want?” the doctor inquired. “More pills,” Webb said. “What happened to the other pills I gave you?” the doctor asked. Webb wasn't counting on being recognized. He shrugged helplessly. “I had a party,” he said.

As Webb told Wolf, the doctor asked no further questions and simply gave him another prescription. Another doctor Webb investigated was rumored to be mentally unstable. “Gary went out to her house and she was out in the garage with a hose, washing down the floor, and it was already
immaculately clean,” Wolf says. “He asked her what she was doing and she said, ‘I am sluicing away the poison.' ”

Apparently the doctor believed her contractor was trying to kill her. To prove it, she pointed at her car, which was splattered with mud stains. “The bombs! The bombs!” she said. “She thought the mud stains on her car were from bombs,” Wolf says. “She was nuts and the medical board knew it and didn't do anything.”

In 1984, Webb teamed up with Bogdanich to uncover a conflict of interest scandal at the Cleveland-Cuyahoga Port Authority. Cleveland sits on Lake Eerie; its docks unloaded shipping containers that came in through the Great Lakes from all over the world. All those containers needed insurance. A former school board president named Arnold Pinckney sat on the board of directors of the Port Authority. Pinckney also ran an insurance company and had sold $2 million worth of insurance to the Port Authority.

Pinckney had recently been appointed campaign manager for Jesse Jackson's first presidential bid. His lawyers held a press conference to denounce the article as “woefully incomplete” and full of factual errors. The
Plain Dealer
refused to retract the story. “He was indicted and convicted, then pardoned, because he was such a popular guy,” Bogdanich says.

The Port Authority story was the first and last time Bogdanich collaborated with Webb. “He went off in his direction and I went in mine,” he says. “We were both pretty strong-willed people.” Bogdanich recalls arguing with Webb over certain details of a follow-up story Webb planned to write about Pinckney. “I thought he was too certain of a particular fact,” he says. “He came to a conclusion that I didn't
agree with. I just walked away, saying, ‘Gary, It's your story.' It was a minor fact, but it showed how strong-willed he was.”

Shortly after the Port Authority story ran, Bogdanich was transferred to the Columbus bureau of the
Plain Dealer
. Webb followed soon after, and they remained friends.

Bogdanich recalls going over to Webb's house frequently for dinner or to watch a movie. Webb's favorite film was
Caddyshack
.

“To understand Gary, you have to appreciate that Rodney Dangerfield character, this boisterous guy throwing around tip money in a country club,” Bogdanich says. “Webb didn't suffer fools gladly, or people who were pompous, although some people criticized Gary for being that way himself.”

One night, while sitting at a bar in Columbus, the two paid tribute to Dangerfield by creating a public nuisance in a stuffy setting. “This bar was where all the lobbyists hung out,” Bogdanich says. “We got roaring drunk and started talking loudly about how we were going to buy a bunch of state senators. We just figured that's what people talked about in that place. We laughed so hard we had tears streaming down our faces.”