UNDERCOVER REPORTING Medill School of Journalism VISIONS of the AMERICAN PRESS General Editor David Abrahamson Selected titles in this series Herbert J. Gans Deciding What’s News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time” Maurine H. Beasley First Ladies and the Press: The Unfinished Partnership of the Media Age Patricia Bradley Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality David A. Copeland The Idea of a Free Press: The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy Michael S. Sweeney The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce Patrick S. Washburn The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom Karla K. Gower Public Relations and the Press: The Troubled Embrace Tom Goldstein Journalism and Truth: Strange Bedfellows Norman Sims True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism Mark Neuzil The Environment and the Press: From Adventure Writing to Advocacy UNDERCOVER REPORTING THE TRUTH ABOUT DECEPTION Brooke Kroeger Foreword by Pete Hamill MEDILL SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2012 by Brooke Kroeger. Foreword copyright © 2012 by Pete Hamill. Published 2012 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the Library of Congress. Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Kroeger, Brooke. Undercover Reporting:The Truth About Deception . Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2012. For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit www.nupress.northwestern.edu An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org To my students ] Foreword by Pete Hamill xi Preface xv One Introduction 3 Two Reporting Slavery 15 Three Virtual Enslavement 31 Four Predators 45 Five Hard Labor, Hard Luck, Part One 57 CONTENTS Six Of Jack London and Upton Sinclair 77 Seven Hard Labor, Hard Luck, Part Two 93 Eight The Color Factor 103 Nine Undercover Under Fire 135 Ten Sinclair’s Legatees 147 Eleven Hard Time 171 Twelve Crusaders and Zealots 209 Thirteen Watchdog 233 Fourteen Mirage 257 Fifteen Turkmenistan and Beyond 281 Notes 297 Bibliography 409 Index 471 xi ] Pete Hamill Long ago, during the first year of my apprenticeship as a news- paperman, someone told me that a reporter is the person chosen by the tribe to enter the cave and tell them what lies within. If a furious storm is raging, the tribe might find safety and warmth. But if the reporter does not go deep enough, a dragon might await them, and all could perish. That was, of course, a hopelessly romantic version of the re- porter’s role, but I was young enough to embrace it. As a street reporter, I discovered that the dragon could have many forms, all of them human. There were caves all over the big bad city. And a reporter could see the dragons and their acts in the cold dead eyes of the hoodlum; the corpse of the mutilated girl; the ashes of lives left by arson; the killer’s smirk as he performed his perp walk. Making notes about the who of it, the what of it, the where and how and why. And what the weather was. Then rushing back to the newspaper to write it for the next day’s paper, passing the report to all the tribes of New York. On some nights, I felt as if I were a bit player in some extraor- dinary film noir. There in the shadows of Brooklyn or the Bronx lay various dangers, bad guys and cops, too many guns, and too much heroin. My press card would protect me. Or so I thought. At the same time, I was adding to my sense of the reporter as witness, living a life in which no day was like any other day (or night), and absorbing the lore and legends of my craft. I listened to the tales of old reporters and photographers. I watched movies about foreign FOREWORD xii FOREWORD correspondents, and read many memoirs, biographies, novels by men and women who had worked in dangerous foreign places. In my imagination, I covered wars long before I was in one. Then one day in the Strand bookshop in Manhattan I found a copy of a book by a man named John Roy Carlson. It was called Undercover. I began to read it and found myself in the world of prewar right- wing organizations, pro- Nazi bundists, stone racists, and gun nuts—guided there by this fellow Carlson. He had spent several years infiltrating these groups, posing as an acolyte, listening to their paranoid visions. I checked the clips in the newspaper’s morgue and discovered that his real name was Avedis Boghos Der- ounian, born in Greece of Armenian parents, an immigrant who had grown up in Mineola, New York. Undercover was a huge best seller, at one point topping the New York Times nonfiction lists. More important to a young reporter, it was a chronicle of time spent in the company of dragons. I began to imagine myself changing my identity, donning a disguise, truly living in a melodrama that was about pursuing the truth. That is, I wanted to go undercover, too, and live for a while as a spy in the caves of America. While serving in the U.S. Navy in 1953 in Pensacola, I had seen what the Ku Klux Klan could do in the Southern nights. Could I pass myself off as a recruit in the country’s most enduring terrorist organization? Could I mas- ter a Southern accent? What if I was drinking with some of the hard- core white guys? Would I suddenly lapse into the accents of Brooklyn? And then, of course, reality asserted itself. I worked for a newspaper that was seventh in circulation in a town with seven newspapers. The editors could not afford to send a reporter into the undercover life for months. Or even a few days. But I remained fascinated by the way Carlson had played his dangerous role, wondering whether the technique could still be FOREWORD xiii used. And whether there were others in the history of journalism who had gone undercover. This was a long time before the com- puter, the Internet, Google, Wikipedia. The discovery of certain books depended on chance and luck, wandering through the dusty aisles of used bookstores. I did find my way to the muckrakers, to Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair. But the urgencies of the newspaper present often shoved the past off stage. One major problem I had at the time was that there was no book that even vaguely resembled this superb account by Brooke Kroeger. Here we have the full story, with its roots in the nine- teenth century. Brooke Kroeger (herself an experienced reporter) takes us from reporters posing as purchasers of other humans at pre–Civil War slave auctions all the way to the Washington Post re- porters who gained access to the filthy halls of Walter Reed Hos- pital in 2007. She brings to the story an academic exactitude that is mercifully free of academic jargon. She understands the risks taken by most undercover reporters, both women and men. John Roy Carlson appears in her book, of course, but his role in the larger story is a lot smaller than it once was in my youthful imagination. It is possible that even he was not aware of some of his predecessors. Good reporters named James Redpath, Albert Deane Richardson, and Henry S. Olcott took turns for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in covering the ongoing story of slav- ery. At the time, of course, there were no recording devices; the reporters often scribbled notes with pencils in the pages of slave catalogs. Women, too, are part of the cast in this book. The most famous of the early group was Nellie Bly, but she was not the only female reporter (and falls into Brooke Kroeger’s category of “stunt girls”). One of the fi rst was a long forgotten woman named Helen Stuart Campbell. Beginning in 1880, she wrote about the urban poor us- xiv FOREWORD ing what she learned as a volunteer at a mission, then revealing the miseries of women employed in the needle trades and department stores. Others were to follow, freed from the banalities of writing domestic pieces about fashion and food. Women were reporting from dangerous places in the United States before they were al- lowed to vote. They are doing it now. I suspect that this book will inspire young apprentice journal- ists who still believe in the importance of uncovering the truth, in spite of the risks. The risks may or may not be obvious. And there are other hazards to negotiate. The ethical problems of assuming another identity, of posing as someone you are not, of performing a falsehood—all are very ably covered by Brooke Kroeger. The full story has much to teach us all, both reporters and readers. I wish I’d had something like it when I was young, staring at the mouths of urban caves. xv ] This book unabashedly celebrates the great American journalistic tradition of undercover reporting and offers an argument, built on the volume of evidence, for the restoration of its once- honored place in the array of effective journalistic techniques. Even the most cursory analysis of a century and a half of significant under- cover investigations by journalists makes clear how effective the practice can be. Repeatedly, they have proved their worth as pro- ducers of high- impact public awareness or as hasteners of change. Like almost no other journalistic approach, undercover reporting has a built- in ability to expose wrongs and wrongdoers or per- form other meaningful public service. It can illuminate the un- known, it can capture and sustain attention, it can shock or amaze. The criticism that has bedeviled the practice in more recent years comes from the ethical compromises it inevitably requires, its reli- ance on some of journalism’s most questionable means, and the unacceptable excesses of the few. Deception not only happens in the course of reporting undercover, it is intrinsic to the form. For would- be truth tellers, this is a shaky ground. Yet at its best, undercover reporting achieves most of the things great journalism means to achieve. At its worst, but no worse than bad journalism in any form, it is not only an embarrassment but can be downright destructive. This book suggests that the capacity of undercover reporting to bring important social issues to public attention and thus to motivate reformers to act far outweighs the objections against it, legitimate though they may be. Its benefits, PREFACE xvi PREFACE when used selectively, far outweigh the lapses, which, it turns out, are more of a preoccupation in only some quarters of the profes- sion than they are with the public. The stories I have chosen to highlight in the following pages have been culled from an idiosyncratic collection of sources: prize and award lists; oblique and direct references found with key word searches in various databases, often incomplete, and in books that cite or allude to recent and archival newspaper, magazine, and journal articles and essays; citations in lawsuits and in law reviews and academic journals; and some old- style reeling of the micro- film. Others emerged from cursory mentions in works of media criticism, commentary, history, ethics, or other, often out- of- print journalism texts. To the numerous authors and journalists who informed my thinking and to those on whom I relied the most, I offer special thanks.You’ll find their names in the text, sometimes repeatedly, and in the endnotes and bibliography. Special thanks to those who took the time to speak and message with me at length, including Soma Golden Behr, Barney Calame, Ted Conover, John Davidson, Tim Findley, Tom Goldstein, Chester Goolrick, William Hart, Tony Horwitz, Woody Klein, Paul Lieberman, Lee May, Dick Reavis, William Recktenwald, Ray Ring, Emily Sachar, John Sei- genthaler, Paul Shapiro, Jeff Sharlet, Ken Silverstein, Patsy Sims, Paul Steiger, Vivian Toy, Craig Unger, Bill Wasik, Edward Wasserman, Steve Weinberg, Michael Winerip, and Merle Linda Wolin. Warm gratitude also to academic colleagues at New York University and beyond. Some pointed me to or allowed me to use little- known material; others read and critiqued sections of the manuscsript in draft. Those include Rob Boynton, Ted Conover (also my col- league), Pete Hamill, Richard R. John, Richard G. Jones, Perri Klass, Joe Lockard, Jean Marie Lutes, Mike McIntyre, Robert Miraldi, Doug Munro, Patricia O’Toole, Jay Rosen, William Serrin, Clay PREFACE xvii Smith, Stephen Solomon, and Steve Wasserman. Alex Goren and Gail Gregg were even willing to listen when I needed to read aloud. Superb research assistants helped greatly at various points: Joanna Bednarz, Nicholas DeRenzo, Hilary Howes, Ryann Lie- benthal, William Marshall, Michael Mindel, and Miranda Stanton. Indispensable to the retrieval process were those at the other end of interlibrary loan and in the archives of Investigative Report- ers and Editors, Inc., since so much of this ephemeral record has not been well or fully indexed, let alone digitized. Throughout the project, the support and encouragement of the book’s editor, David Abrahamson, has been exceptional. Thank you, also, to the team at Northwestern University Press, including Rudy Faust, Marianne Jankowski, and Gianna Mosser. Here, too, is a salute to the long memory of veteran journalists and news librarians, which fi gured prominently in the unearthing and amassing of the material, as did the published recollections of the individual editors and reporters mentioned above. Many examples found their way into the book because they are among the best remembered or most controversial undercover projects. Others made the cut because of the investigation’s inventiveness, enterprise, or uniqueness, or the peer or public impact it had in its day. Still others became important because I stumbled on them by chance and could not resist the impulse to share them. Others helped to illustrate larger points. Yet despite nearly four years devoted to the pursuit of the most worthy examples in American history, comprehensive retrieval remains an elusive goal. The long list of undercover projects I have compiled is surely still incomplete. New investigations hit the news as I type. I hope the database created as an extension of this project, found on the web at http://undercoverreporting .org or through the website of the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library xviii PREFACE at New York University, will continue to grow with the help of more sources from the crowd, both across the United States and from abroad. For this unique digital repository, special thanks go to the Bobst team—Brian Hoffman, Monica McCormick, and Alexa Pearce, and, in the early stages, Jessica Alverson—and to Jane Tylus and her committee at the Humanities Initiative of the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU, and to my deans during the past six years, Richard Foley and Jess Benhabib, George Downs, and Dal- ton Conley. All lent vital support to this undertaking, and to me personally. Brian Hoffman designed the site and William Marshall helped give it shape as he loaded the initial material. Both thought carefully about its functionality. In the latter stage of production, Abby Ohlheiser made it even smarter. Literally hundreds of pieces dating from the 1820s have been considered for inclusion, with more surfacing all the time. For research purposes, organization of the material has been sorted by year, by reporter, by method, by subject, by medium, by outlet, by honors, and by whatever documentable impact the work can claim. Chapters are organized roughly by reporting theme. They focus on those few examples that most clearly illustrate the nature of undercover reporting about the subject at hand, or that help support the central argument about the genre and why it mat- ters. Most of the pieces or series noted had important impact or received outsized attention in their day. (Chapter 13 is more of a kitchen sink of noteworthy themes that did not warrant a chap- ter all their own.) Impact and outsized attention mean everything from prizes and awards to best seller lists to heavy coverage in the press to a place in the cultural conversation to legal or ethical challenges to direct spurs to legislation, reform moves, or other forms of response or action. Please note that in the interest of length, much of the long-lost material exhumed for this project PREFACE xix has been reburied in the endnotes, where it is still worth a visit. Browsing the headlines and succession of dates for, say, a Chicago Tribune or Sun- Times series from the 1970s, from initial disclo- sures through to stunning public impact—arrests, trials, firings, institutional shutdowns—provides a parallel narrative along with loud testimony to the method’s reformative power. Turn to the database for the opportunity to find and read the full texts of the stories themselves. The criterion for inclusion in the book and the database is a very wide tent, intermingling all types of media in a twenty- first– century way. The main focus is journalism for significant purpose that re- quired (mostly) physical acts of deception by reporters or their surrogates—anything from shadowing, artful dodges, and blend- ing in with the crowd to radically altered identities. Excluded for the most part are works designated as fiction or works that are at least partly fictionalized, although it is impossible to leave out Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which, the author assures us, is a full- fledged work of unvarnished reportage. George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London receives attention, even though he is not American and his book includes otherwise forbidden com- posite characters. Why include them? Because both Sinclair and Orwell invariably figure in even the spottiest recounting of high points in undercover reporting’s history. They inspire too many imitators to ignore. Speaking of Orwell, a few seminal works by journalists from other countries also were deemed too important or too illustrative to exclude, even though this book primarily focuses on undercover’s American exponents. This project started with no hypothesis but with a keen interest in undercover reporting going back two decades ago to the start of my work on Nellie Bly. Its central argument emerged from as- sembling and analyzing the patterns of these hundreds of projects