John C. Behren; The Typewriter Guerrillas

 GERARD O'NEILL

 (Becomes less convivial as each story progresses)

 Boston Globe Spotlight News Team members can tell when things are normal for their editor and investigative colleague, Gerard O'Neill.

He becomes “less convivial as each project progresses, he admits.  But then understand.  Theyve been there before, too.

Gerards projects whether they are urban housing or phony vocational schools blot out his days and consume his energy.  Sometimes they leave him so exhausted he begins to question himself and the original thesis.  Each experience, furthermore, can take its toll on interpersonal relations. 

We follow a fairly consistent pattern after deciding that there is a story, he says, outlining the work of the team.  Usually it is based on a tip.  We begin by building a composite profile of the subject, keying on business interests, relatives, and personal life.  Among the invariable public record sources we use are the Registry of Deeds to check land holdings, corporate records to determine business relationships, and vital statistics to chase down family trees.  Then we cross-file everything.

At that point, he continues, the team is ready to talk with people.  We start with known enemies of the subject who, many times, are at least tangentially involved.  One approach usually is to help us or else.  Its not something we enjoy using but sometimes its necessary.  It also serves to disconcert the main subject who will hear from his friends and have loads of time about his turn.  Then we have the main confrontation interview.

The interview can be explosive “most frequently a tense atmosphere“ because of the teams strategy.  We go armed to the teeth.  We usually have 95 percent of the information needed and the interview is to try to catch the subject lying; explain things we are not totally sure of and to obtain quotes for the story in the hope it will have the subject trying to explain away the unexplainable “ things we can contradict with other sources or documents.  If he lies, we let it be and contradict the subject in the story."

The Globe reporters go to the interview convinced they have the upper hand.  It follows months of groundwork.  But our approach is totally low key.  We have evidence that may indicated wrongdoing on our part, But we want to give you this opportunity to correct any misunderstanding we may have is our kind of approach.  We go in with confidence that we know what we want to do, yet we try to avoid looking arrogant.  We always at least try to avoid looking arrogant.  We always at least try to use a tape recorder and we always have two reporters present at the interviews.  Sometimes we take documents and pictures to press a point and unnerve the subject if we have to.

Does the strategy work?

The results show it does.  In 1972, the Spotlight Team “ O'Neill, Timothy Leland, Stephen a. Kurkjian, and Ann DeSantis “ won the Pulitzer special local reporting award and Sigma Delta Chia's distinguished public service prize for its exposure in Somerville, a community of 95,000 on Boston's north side.  It was an impressive feat for the Boston reporters if you consider the competition.  It was the year Richard Cooper and John Machacek won local reporting recognition for the superb stories in the Rochester Times”Union about the Attica prison riot and it was also the year the New York Times and reporter Neil Sheehan were honored for their efforts in publishing the Pentagon Papers.  Said the Sigma Delta Chi judges, however, of the merits of the Globe investigation:  It brought the eventual indictment of three former mayors, the local auditor, and public works chief.  Perhaps more important, it prompted strong citizen support of the current mayors efforts to reform the city's government.

The Spotlight team become interested in Somerville problems when a citizen's group charged that community officials were allowing patronage and favoritism to influence the awarding of contracts.  Spotlight members spent three months investigating the group's charges and digging further into Somerville affairs.  The found more than they bargained on as a result.  They uncovered a decade of corruption that said Sigma Delta Chi judges later, helped push this town to the brink of financial collapse despite one the highest property rates in the state.

It was the kind of time-consuming, mind-boggling examination that can exhilarate and exhaust at the same time.  Globe investigators culled six thousand public records and interviewed one hundred twenty persons before the first of six stories appeared in February 1971, disclosing what the citizens group had feared: political favoritism toward certain contractors, conflicts of interest in tax assessments by some office holders and questionable practices in dispersing municipal finances.  The Spotlight stories brought action.  Within months, a grand jury had handed down one hundred nineteen counts of the conspiracy against nineteen people and four companies.  At the same time, the Massachusetts Legislature, shocked by the disclosures, (hello ted) drafted legislation aimed at controlling expenditures in localities throughout the state.

The Spotlight-on-Somerville series was the first of four investigations the team worked on in 1971 and all produced either legislative measures or follow-up inquiries by law enforcement offices.  Tim Lelands Spotlight concept, introduced in England observing the London Times successful insight operation, had surpassed expectations in the Globe newsroom.

TRACERFREELANCE Note: This TRACER TIP entry was due to Party reprisals against the reformist administration formentioned.  The presummed sources of the leak.  The aftermath not subject to the Boston Globe Spotlight scrutiny spanning decades.  Criminal  partisan scapegoating of thier families, friends and children as well as other innocents not envolved, with either the investigation nor the aledged subject ever since. Which the I have personal knowledge of as a result of a private investigation commencing 20 years latter and why I am TRACER today.