The murder is the message
Richard Behar will present “China in Africa: The New Scramble?” as the fourth lecture in this year’s E. N. Thompson Forum on World Issues. An award-winning investigative journalist, Behar writes about the career of his mentor Robert W. Greene and the future of investigative journalism with passion and insight.
When I heard the news in 2008 that Bob (“Big Daddy”) Greene had died at age 78, I walked around with this real feeling in my gut like he’d been murdered and I’d been mugged. After a few hours of this bizzarity, it finally dawned on me why this seemed like such an injustice: His legacy was, and still is, being hacked to death—day after depressing day.
Sadly, given the times we are living in, you may never have heard of the man. But Robert W. Greene was unquestionably one of the greatest figures in American investigative-reporting history—right up there alongside Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Edward R. Murrow. Full of piss and vinegar until his final days, he would rant and rave—few listened —about how today’s cutbacks in long-form, high-quality journalistic probes were degrading our democracy. As he once told me, the founding fathers didn’t give us the First Amendment “to publish apple pie recipes.”
Greene’s life is worth noting because it is such a stark sign of how much has changed, and what that means for American and global journalism. As the longtime assistant managing editor of Newsday, Greene assembled our country’s first full-time investigative team at a national newspaper—“The Greene Team”—only to live long enough to watch the Pulitzer-winning unit torn to shreds by the paper’s accountants. He was the first to track the mob ties of Teamster Jimmy Hoffa. In the 1960s, he was the first reporter on the scene in Philadelphia, Miss., hours after three civil rights workers were murdered. A decade later, he was placed on Nixon’s “enemies list” because of his Newsday team’s probes into the president’s business interests. (Nixon counsel John Dean testified that he initiated an IRS audit of Greene to teach him a “lesson.”). And, in the 1980s, he anchored the first TV news show produced by a U.S. newspaper and broadcast from the city room. Individually or as a team leader, Greene received more than 50 journalism awards and honors. When he died, he was at work on his third investigative book.
Perhaps Bob’s greatest achievement, which he and I discussed in much detail, was leader of the “Arizona Project” —a collection of journalists from 27 media outlets that poured into Phoenix after Arizona mob reporter Don Bolles was dynamited to death in 1976. The reporters were on loan from TV and radio outlets and newspapers ranging from the Boston Globe, Miami Herald and now-defunct Washington Star, to the Albuquerque Journal, Tulsa Tribune and Kansas City Star, among many others. Dubbed the Desert Rats, they published a brilliant 23-part series on organized crime and political corruption that was proposed for a special Pulitzer, led to major reforms in the state and, in the words of then attorney general Bruce Babbitt, “dragged Arizona kicking and screaming into the 20th century.”
No one had ever done such a collective venture before, or since. That undertaking, which the American Society of Journalists and Authors called “the finest hour in American journalism,” was my inspiration for launching Project Klebnikov after the American investigative reporter and Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov was taken out in a salvo of bullets in Moscow in 2004. In fact, the Arizona Project (and Newsday’s Greene Team) was an inspiration for a whole generation of now-out-of-work investigative reporters.
In the fall of 2005, I rented a car in Manhattan and drove out to see Big Daddy at the Old Street Pub in his Smithtown, Long Island community. He limped from arthritis and no longer had the 300 pounds that he carried in the days when he would obliterate steaks, lobsters and mobsters with equal relish. But, at 75, the man once dubbed the “Buddha with the computer mind” was as sharp as the day he led his people into the Arizona desert. “Nothing is insurmountable,” he said as we nibbled our Cobb salads at the pub. “Put the word out to the people on whom you’re working: ‘Your corrupt facet of the Russian society represents the kind of people who killed Klebnikov. We will continue to broadcast his work and expand it and multiply it and we don’t care what crooks fall into our net. And we won’t let up until those in your society who think it’s okay to kill a reporter get the message loud and clear: ‘Never again! You tried to stop his work and that’s why we’re here.’ That’s what we did in Arizona.”
Bob then elaborated on the reasoning behind his Arizona venture as this: “We were trying to put enormous pressure on the corrupt aspects of Arizona society with two thoughts in mind. First, we wanted to deliver an object lesson that you don’t fuck around with the lives of reporters, because everyone with dirty hands will suffer, including the mob. If you kill a reporter, the work will multiply. In that way, the project was also an insurance policy for other investigative reporters. Second, if all this pressure is put on, maybe something will pop up out of it—some major revelation or reform.”
I miss Greene’s hard-boiled advice, especially his lifting me up during those times when our Russian project seemed too daunting. (Bob had agreed to serve as an advisor to it.) After all, in a society addicted to the likes of a piteous Britney Spears, tweeting and Twittering, and lately the sexual mores of a man who hits a golf ball for a living, the silencing of my colleague Paul —the first American journalist ever murdered in Russia—was a story without a Nielsen audience.
In Russia today, investigative reporters are in fact being whacked on a regular basis, with impunity and without the cases being solved or even properly investigated by officials. This not only frightens American news bureaus in Moscow into avoiding many important assignments, it sends a message that has a domino effect throughout the former Soviet region: That killing reporters is a viable way to keep political corruption and economic crime hidden. The net result? We all know less about what is really happening under the surface in one society after another.
In Russia, there are almost no investigative journalists left—they are either dead or lying low. I once asked Anna Politkovskaya, one of Russia’s top reporters, if she would help assemble a group of her best colleagues to work alongside us at Project Klebnikov. She said she’d be glad to help, but that it would be almost impossible because the number of highly skilled, honest and brave Russian investigative reporters could be counted on one hand. A year later, she was murdered, too.
In China, a different solution is at work: For a decade now, the People’s Republic has been the world’s largest jailer of journalists. (I will be speaking about this and many other China-related matters at the University of Nebraska in late January.) Here in America today, many of our best investigative reporters are not being shot or imprisoned —just pink-slipped to death as their projects are now deemed too expensive to pursue. What’s more, large media companies now routinely and quietly settle libel cases—even when the stories are accurate—rather than endure the huge financial burden of defending them.
“Most publications are risk-averse today,” Bob once said to me. “They figure, why should they risk lawsuits. But a good investigative reporter is gonna provoke suits, while a good corporate lawyer—and I don’t mean a libel lawyer—is gonna say, ‘Let’s not have suits.’ They don’t appreciate the position the press maintains in a free society. We’re the last resort for the people. We’re serving our constituency and our function in society by tackling crime, corruption and incompetence. Why have a First Amendment right if they [nation’s founders] didn’t think that we needed protection when we sought to reveal problems in society?”
Bob was a larger-than-life character—in some ways evoking “The Front Page,” that 1920s fast-paced comedy about Chicago reporters. In an era where today’s gutless wonders crumble like milquetoasts before their editors in the hope of not being forced to take that severance package, Greene stood out as an oversized symbol of a kind of rugged integrity that keeps journalism honest.
According to former Newsday editor Tony Marro, Greene once pounded on a wall so hard during an argument with editors that he sent pictures crashing off the wall of the publisher’s office next door. (Who would even raise their voice to an editor nowadays, let alone slam a wall?) He once warned the head of an insurance company that if he paid out any money to cheaply settle a libel case that he (Greene) wouldn’t sign any apology and would instead tell the world “that you all wimped out.” When Newsday’s bean-counters banned staffers from flying first class, Greene literally measured the size of a coach seat and the size of his not-inconsiderable posterior—and informed the bosses that he’d continue flying in the front of the plane. And then there’s the time he fell asleep at his desk with a cigarette in his hand and caught his pants on fire.
Ironically, just one day after Greene’s death, the $450 million “Newseum”—a seven-story, high-tech, interactive temple that celebrates news gathering—opened its gates in Washington. Had Bob lived to witness it, I think he might have wanted to pound the museum’s walls hard enough to be heard in Nebraska. What a helluva time for the major media to build a shrine to itself—an unspeakably costly monument to that which is crumbling financially. Many of the country’s largest news corporations forked over $5 to $15 million apiece for the project —money that each of those entities could have used to pay a quarter-century of salaries for a talented five- to 10-member Greene Team.
When Big Daddy died, I never uttered the words “rest in peace,” because I knew he wouldn’t —given the investigative to-do list that is piling up like weeds in the homeland. (I guess the editors in the sky are having to deal with him now.) As for me, it feels like a lonelier country today without him. So each time I wade through all the shallow shlock in our papers, and watch TV’s alleged news shows, and marvel at a cyber universe where everyone’s a journalist (and his own editor, too), I imagine Greene is close at hand—spinning in that grave that isn’t large enough for him.
Behar’s lecture will take place Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2010, at 7:00 p.m. at the Lied Center for Performing Arts, 12th and R Streets, Lincoln, Neb. All lectures in the E. N. Thompson Forum on World Issues are ticketed events. Tickets are free and guarantee you a reserved seat. You may reserve your Thompson Forum tickets for lectures by contacting the Lied Center at (402) 472-4747 or (800) 432-3231. You may also pick up tickets in person or download a ticket order form from the Thompson Forum Web site, http://enthompson.unl.edu, and order by mail or fax (please call for the fax number). The lecture will also be streamed live on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Web site, http://www. unl.edu.
The opinions in this essay are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Thompson Forum or other sponsoring organizations.
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