Category: Narrative Reporting

The History of IRE

Leave a comment

Investigative Reporters and Editors | 2015

Chapter 1 – Desert Rats
Phoenix, Arizona – June 1976

Reporter Don Bolles was invited to speak on a panel at the first IRE Conference in Indianapolis.

Bolles was an investigative reporter, the lone-wolf type, the kind who would attach a piece of Scotch tape to the hood of his blue Datsun to make sure that nobody had tampered with his engine.

By 1976, he’d left the investigative beat and become a state capitol reporter. Fellow reporters at The Arizona Republic noticed that his days were less stressful and his drinking less intense.

But Bolles’ investigative itch never quite subsided. When he received a telephone call from a man named John Adamson who claimed to have a tip connecting Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and prominent state GOP figure Harry Rosenzweig to mafia-associated land fraud, Bolles agreed to meet.

“John Adamson … Lobby at 11:25 … Clarendon House … 4th and Clarendon,” Bolles wrote in his office calendar.

On June 2, Bolles walked into the Clarendon House lobby. After he waited for 15 minutes, Adamson called to say the source fell through. Bolles headed back to his car.

When he entered his car, a bomb planted underneath detonated.

Bolles lasted 11 days in the hospital before he passed away. He died days before the first IRE Conference.

Indianapolis – 1976

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, reporters in different cities had been scrutinizing illegality and corruption. IRE was the brainchild of a group of journalists that gathered in Indianapolis.

“There was a lot of ferment going on at the time, a lot of people becoming aware of investigative reporting,” said Jim Steele, an IRE member since the beginning. “A lot of people pin it to Watergate, but the impetus really came from the Vietnam War and the critical journalism that came up in the coverage of the war.”

In February 1975, that nationwide effervescence of investigative reporting was condensed into IRE during an organizational meeting in Reston, Virginia.

“It was exciting, it was fun, it was interesting,” Myrta Pulliam, IRE cofounder, said of the Reston meeting. “Everybody had their own idea of what that is, and we had to mush all of that into something that would work.”

Investigative reporters often felt the unhealthy side effects of their craft — being isolated from other journalists and hovering above the line between diligent and paranoid. IRE was an effort to pool together resources from investigative reporters across the country and create a network of information and collaboration.

The first conference in 1976 drew more than 200 journalists eager to share tips, strategies and drinks.

“There was tremendous excitement about the possibilities at that first meeting,” Steele said.

But even with the simmering excitement that accompanies the beginning of a movement, a dark undercurrent shaded conversations in hallways between panels and lectures.

Bolles’ absence had a palpable presence in that Indianapolis hotel. A fake tip and a car bomb — that could have been any conference attendee’s fate.

After a growing number of conversations about their Arizona colleague, the IRE journalists made an unprecedented decision. They would go to Phoenix and finish Bolles’ reporting.

The reporters didn’t descend upon Phoenix to solve Bolles’ murder. Rather, they went to prove a point and buy an investigative reporting insurance policy: You can’t kill a story by killing a reporter.

To read the rest of the story, visit the IRE website.

Leave a comment

The place where no one has a name

Vox Magazine | 4 May 2016

Missouri’s stretch of Interstate 70 is a lonely one. I often make this drive to get from Columbia to Kansas City and take the time to ruminate on my life. Sometimes, a car passes me, and I look over, curious about whether that driver is also lost in thought about his or her own life: regrets, work deadlines, past loves. Two anonymous lives, strangers confined within our cars, passing by on the interstate.

Tonight, I’m headed somewhere else, a strip club marked by a neon fuchsia XXX sign. From the outside, the building looks like a small warehouse with pink walls. One semi-truck and a few cars are parked in the lot. I walk inside through a small, empty entryway. One door leads to a shop with aisles of porn. Another door opens to the strip club.

Before I walk inside the club, a second door opens. A short man with a ponytail, whom I recognize as the bartender, welcomes me inside. I’ve been here before, identifying myself as a journalist working on a story about I-70. The bartender wouldn’t give me his full name then, and he doesn’t now. He won’t tell me the dancer’s name either. The establishment refuses to reveal true identities. Secrets dwell here.

He recognizes me, too, and informs me that though I am a reporter, I am not welcome to take notes or recordings. The bartender offers me a drink — non-alcoholic, as Missouri strip clubs are banned by law from serving booze.

The dancer is wearing lacy pink underwear, a matching bra and a long necklace that hangs between her breasts. She sways her body, her feet in transparent platform shoes, to Marcy Playground’s 1997 “Sex and Candy” in a dark room lit by dim disco lights.

Five men sit around the stage where she dances. One is a middle-aged man who stares as if he could burn himself into her body, as if she just might secretly know the answers to all of his problems.

The dancer shimmies off her bra, and her breasts are fully exposed. She leans down to the first man and pulls his head to her chest. She giggles, turns to the next man, pulls him from his seat and spanks him.

The men throw bills onto stage. The dancer controls their attention. They control her income.

She slips off her boyshorts, but underneath, she wears a black thong. The same law that bans alcohol also prohibits fully nude dancers.

Six years ago, the state legislature passed a law imposing several restrictions to sexually oriented businesses, including strip clubs. But the law doesn’t just prevent nudity and booze. It also requires strip clubs to close from midnight to 6 a.m., dictates that the stage is six feet from patrons and forbids strippers from touching customers.

Aside from not serving alcohol and closing at midnight, this strip club isn’t a stickler for the rules.

The nudity rule isn’t simple, either. The dancer wears heels, a thong and a necklace. But the Missouri lawdefines nudity as “the showing of … the female breast with less than a fully opaque covering of any part of the nipple or areola.” The dancer’s breasts are fully exposed.

I’ve called state agencies without success to find out how strip clubs are regulated. Representatives from the Missouri State Highway Patrol and state and local divisions of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services could not answer my questions. The Missouri Department of Tobacco and Alcohol Controlchecks that strip clubs follow the no-booze rule but doesn’t enforce other parts of the law.

For the men and the dancer, the law doesn’t mean much. For her, it’s a job. And for them, an escape.

I watch the dancer lean down and speak to an older man. I can’t quite hear what they are saying, but she’s laughing, and though his cratered face looks as if he has seen fair share of unhappiness, he’s smiling now.

She is a savior of sorts. He doesn’t know her real name. She likely doesn’t know his.

They are strangers, just passing by one another.

A decade later, Katrina survivors say New Orleans is still in recovery

Leave a comment

Columbia Missourian | Aug 29, 2015

COLUMBIA — Idella Anderson Casby arrived in Mexico, Missouri, on Sept. 3, 2005, after water crashed through the levees and flooded her hometown of New Orleans.

After her kitchen roof caved in and she waited three days in vain for electricity to return to her home and the government to come to her rescue.

After she guided her 72-year-old father, who needed a walker, for 15 hours on the journey from Louisiana to Missouri.

Mexico seemed strange, Idella recalled.

Almost no traffic. No one out on the street.

“And they didn’t have very many streetlights,” Idella said. “I had never seen a place this peaceful and quiet.”

Idella traveled to Mexico, a town of 11,500 northwest of Columbia, to be near her son. She wasn’t the only one in the family to head for Missouri. Nearly 40 more made the trip.

Most eventually went back to New Orleans. But 10 years after Katrina became one of the deadliest hurricanes ever recorded, Idella and her husband, Terry, will not return to Louisiana.

The city, they say, is still crippled from Katrina. And Mexico is home.

The storm hits

Terry and Idella Casby were not getting along on Aug. 29, 2005, the day the levees broke. In fact, they had separated.

Idella, then 46, stayed at home to care for her father. She lived in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi. The house was four blocks away from the levees meant to protect her family.

When the storm hit, Idella expected the power to come back within a day. She lit a candle and waited.

After three days, she saw her neighbors evacuate and leave the streets empty. She grabbed a few things — a box of crackers, some clothing for her and her father, Raymond — and stuffed them in a garbage bag.

They planned to leave New Orleans, but as she recalled later, the lines were long and disorganized. Since her father was ill, she approached a group of police to ask for directions. But when she tried, they pulled out their guns.

“Nine guns were pulled out on me,” Idella recalled. “The National Guard. All I seen was four over there (on the left), four over there (on the right), and one in the middle with a bigger gun. They said, ‘Go back! Go back!’ So I just walked slowly.”

She’s still not sure why the police officers drew their weapons. It probably had something to do with the confusion that followed the storm. Police were normally meant to keep order, but the circumstances were far from normal.

Stores and houses were empty, and residents without power grabbed whatever was abandoned. Some neighborhoods were submerged in water. No one knows how many Louisianans were killed by the storm, but government estimates total about 1,500.

Both Idella and Terry saw bodies on the street.

“It was kind of horrific, actually,” said Terry, who was staying at his son’s house two miles north. “There was an old folks home across the street, and they had a couple of bodies, floating there. Why they didn’t get those people out, I don’t know.”

After that, he fixed his mind on one thing — making sure his family stayed alive. His son had an infant at the time, and Terry set off to find food and other supplies.

“It wasn’t like I was stealing nothing, but a cop said, ‘The city is closed down’,” Terry recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean, the city is closed down?’ He said, ‘If you got children, you better go up to that store and get you some Pampers and milk.'”

After three days with no sign of the power returning and no indication of law and order, Idella and Terry set out for Texas in their neighbor’s van. After arriving in Houston, they traveled north on buses to be with their other son, who lived in Missouri.

It was a tough trip, Idella remembered. She helped her father switch three different buses, assisted him with the restroom, fed him.

But her only thought was, “I got my daddy.”

Safe haven in Missouri

Idella made the journey first, with her father and her sister, while Terry stayed behind in a Salvation Army shelter in Texas.

When they arrived in Mexico, they stayed in her son’s home for a few days. It was full. More than 10 people were sharing the three-bedroom house. Idella slept on the sofa.

She soon discovered that her in-laws had arrived from New Orleans. They settled into a few homes, including the one belonging to Birdell Owens, the family matriarch known as “Birdie.”

Eugenia Owens, her daughter-in-law, remembers the house packed to the brim with brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews. Community members donated food, and she said she cooked enough okra gumbo to feed the 40 family members who had fled Katrina.

“Everybody was upset because they had to leave their homes, of course, and they didn’t know if they could go back,” Eugenia said.

Still, she said, a general feeling of comfort settled in, as the family found itself in something of reunion.

Churches helped, as did the American Red Cross and the Mexico Housing Authority. But more than anything else, Idella remembers the kindness of locals who donated everything from living room furniture to coats for the Missouri winters.

“We really saw love, we saw love,” Terry said. “The people saved the people.”

He arrived Sept. 15, after spending two weeks in and out of shelters in Texas. Given a $2,500 voucher by the Red Cross, he bought a plane ticket and flew to Missouri before a second hurricane, Rita, hit the Gulf.

When Terry got to Mexico, he and his wife reconciled.

The two still quarrel, trying to best each other to prove their points. Idella calls Katrina a tragedy; Terry prefers the word catastrophe.

But, Terry said, the hurricane ultimately healed their hearts.

“It really brought me and her back together, really,” Terry said. “I checked on her after the storm hit. I said I was checking on her old man, but I was worried about her.”

Ten Years Later

Idella and Terry returned to New Orleans a month after Katrina to grab their last few possessions.

They recovered the family photographs and high school diplomas that now hang on their walls. Idella also framed a portrait of her father, who died five years after he left New Orleans.

These days, the Casbys are not happy with the way Katrina is remembered, or the way their city is regarded.

In May, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced that the city is “no longer recovering, no longer rebuilding.”

Instead, he said, “We are creating.”

To the Casbys, who visited New Orleans in July, this is only true for some.

“In some areas, excuse me, but high-class areas, they probably think it’s back,” Idella said. “But it will never be back to the way it was before.”

That’s one reason Idella says she will not return.

Another reason is that the Casbys could not possibly afford it: “The rent is sky high, and the houses are not built the way they should be built,” Idella said. She also said there’s too much crime for her to feel safe.

In contrast, almost everyone else in her family did leave Missouri and return to New Orleans. One family moved to St. Louis. Only a few stayed in Mexico.

Even Birdie, who died in 2009, returned to New Orleans, where she was buried in McDonoghville Cemetery.