Following up an in-depth March 8 story examining federal homeland security grants, the nonprofit Texas Tribune has posted a searchable database online that allows visitors to see how cities and counties in the Lone Star State have used anti-terrorism and preparedness grants since 2003.
The Center for Investigative Reporting made the records available to the Austin-based news organization after obtaining them from the Texas Department of Public Safety using open-government laws. Tribune data guru Matt Stiles built the easy-to-use application that enables visitors to compare grant spending per capita, from tiny Loving County ($1,144 for every resident) to the county surrounding the Texas capital (about $1 for each resident).
The database can also be used to search by community for a detailed list in each of actual purchases totaling more than 25,000 expenditures statewide. In Bexar County where San Antonio is located, for example, authorities spent $350,000 on an armored-response vehicle. In the sample box here you can see a $68,000 "WMD kit," i.e. weapons of mass destruction.
Reporter Brandi Grissom's main story pointed out that big cities weren't the only ones to indulge in such high-priced items. A small county southeast of Dallas with fewer than 8,000 people also scooped up a fortified military-style truck. Grissom's reporting showed that the city of Houston paid professional filmmakers $194,000 for a 22-minute movie on disaster preparedness. Read the story for much more.
An ongoing drug trial in U.S. District Court in El Paso, Texas, provides an uncommon glimpse into the violent battle for Juarez, just across the U.S.-Mexico border. The trial has had as many twists and turns as the Rio Grande, which splits these New Wild West towns into something like Heaven and Hell.
For more than a week in El Paso, witnesses have taken the stand and testified about the world of Mexican drug traffickers. The El Paso Times has reported that their testimony has flashed light on the players and strategies in a vicious turf fight between rival traffickers vying for control of the lucrative smuggling corridor.
The testimony has also skimmed the murkiness of drug enforcement on both sides of the border. At least one witness and even the main defendant have been outed as sources for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who were later arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration for running drugs.
The testimony comes in the trial of two accused drug smugglers, Fernando Ontiveros-Arámbula, whom an ICE agent today said was an informant for the agency, and Manuel Chávez-Betancourt, who refused to cooperate with the government out of fear for his family's safety, according to court records. (For safety concerns, the federal judge, David Briones, ordered that jurors have lunch brought in to them each day.) Witnesses have testified that Ontiveros-Aråmbula worked directly under Mexico's most wanted drug trafficker, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, who leads the Sinaloa drug syndicate, the El Paso Times reports.
The trial has a motley array of characters, from a rooster breeder who stored caches of marijuana in his New Mexico barn to a female trafficker who allegedly survived being shot 15 times to a former Juarez police captain who said all law enforcement in the city and elsewhere in the Mexican state of Chihuahua are on the take, including himself. Among them are several witnesses who have also been indicted or convicted of drug smuggling charges in El Paso and elsewhere and were flipped by the U.S. government to testify against the smugglers.
Among the more intriguing witnesses so far is the former Juarez police captain. Jesus Fierro-Mendez was a 10-year police veteran who ran a counter-narcotics unit, the EPT reports. He left the police department in April 2007 under suspicious circumstances, sources say. Federal agents arrested him at his El Paso home in Oct. 2008. He was sentenced in January to 27 years in prison by a federal judge in Indianapolis.
A quick aside: this former police captain got 324 months for smuggling cocaine into the United States. Most U.S. law enforcement busted for corruption typically get far less prison time. A Pennsylvania Congressman, however, introduced last month a bill that includes stiffer penalties for agents who accept bribes. By comparison, Osiel Cardenas, the notorious former head of the Gulf Cartel, was recently sentenced to 25 years after pleading guilty to drug dealing, money laundering and the attempted murder and assault of federal agents, according to news reports.
The counter-narcotics unit, known as Puma, consisted of young officers fresh out of the police academy who were supposed to be incorruptible, sources say. Little did the rookie cops apparently know that their boss was himself involved in the drug trade.
But Fierro-Mendez's testimony comes with a twist — he was also an ICE informant who, he said, was authorized by the infamous "El Chapo" of the Sinaloa gang to give U.S. law enforcement information about the rival Juarez cartel.
ICE agents in El Paso have walked down this path before, and not just with today's news that the defendant was passing information to the U.S. at the same time he was trying to pass loads of drugs. A law enforcement source said it is not uncommon for traffickers to offer information about competitors.
Another ICE informant was implicated in at least a dozen murders in Juarez around 2003. That informant, Guillermo Ramirez-Peyro, known as Lalo, awaits his fate in an immigration detention center in New York.
Last May, a high-ranking member of the Juarez cartel, who was also an ICE informant, was gunned down outside of his El Paso home. Among the hitmen was another member of the Juarez cartel who was also, allegedly, an ICE informant.
After federal prosecutors rested their case today, defense attorney began their questioning. Explosions expected to follow.
"The City of Corpus Christi hasn't used the $188,000 video screen it bought with homeland security funding in 2008," begins Texas Tribune reporter Brandi Grissom in a March 8 story about federal preparedness and anti-terrorism grants. "But when a hurricane strikes, city officials will be ready to watch footage from surveillance cameras around the area -- if the storm doesn't knock them out, of course."
The Tribune examined thousands of transactions made with federal homeland security grants that were contained in a database turned over by the Texas Department of Public Safety. The Center for Investigative Reporting made the data available to the Tribune after obtaining the records through an open-government request.
Doing so is part of the center's ongoing effort to collaborate with other investigative journalism organizations focused on the public interest. It's also an essential component of our more than year-long push to report on post-Sept. 11 security spending in the United States. You can see the nationwide map we recently unveiled using similar records from around the country here. The Center for Public Integrity partnered with us in constructing the map.
The Texas Tribune and Grissom found among other things that the city of Houston purchased a $1.3 million five-man helicopter and paid $194,000 to a professional filmmaking company for a 22-minute movie on disaster preparedness. A small county 80 miles southwest of Dallas with fewer than 8,000 people acquired a $180,000 military-style armored truck.
Image: Texas Tribune
Over the past 20 years, every unsolved civil rights murder case that has been reopened and successfully prosecuted in the South was the direct result of an investigation initiated by a journalist.
So the FBI’s decision to close, without prosecution or further disclosure, all but a few of the 108 unsolved murder cases it began re-examining three years ago, only highlights the vital need for investigative reporting that can find the truth, tell the stories and fill in the gaps in our nation’s history.
The Civil Rights Cold Case Project (www.coldcases.org), a team of investigative reporters, documentary filmmakers and interactive media producers, is digging into unsolved civil rights murders in the South. Led by the Center for Investigative Reporting and Paperny Films, the project -- which includes Clarion Ledger reporter and recent MacArthur Genius award winner Jerry Mitchell, and Pulitzer Prize winner Hank Klibanoff -- has been focused for more than two years on race murders and crimes primarily in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.
“These cases are not cold when it comes to the relatives and friends of the victims,” said Robert J. Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting. “Our reporting has found that these cases resonate powerfully today. Too many Americans are unaware of the terror of that era and how it has affected our country in terms of race and reconciliation.”
In a Washington Post story, the FBI said that it was discontinuing its pursuit of all but a handful of the cases it believed had great potential for prosecution when the initiative was announced in 2007. Cynthia Deitle, head of the FBI’s civil rights unit, told the Post that agents and prosecutors concluded that almost a fifth of the cases were not racially motivated. In other cases, agents hit dead ends or dead perpetrators. It continues to investigate a few cases.
“While we welcomed FBI involvement in these cases,” said Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, “we always felt that our goals – deep reporting, story-telling and racial healing – had significance and value regardless of whether federal agents and prosecutors felt they could win a conviction. So while the FBI might pass on cases because the killers have died, we remain intensely interested because these stories are compelling and worth telling. There are family members of victims and perpetrators who deserve to know what happened, and there are history books and classrooms that are incomplete without this information.”
The Civil Rights Cold Case Project also urged the FBI to make all the files of the closed cases available to the public without redactions and without the long and difficult processes demanded by the federal Freedom of Information Act.
“There’s no reason now for this history to remain hidden,” Klibanoff said. “And there are compelling reasons for the records to be opened. A perpetrator of a racial murder should not be given special protection from disclosure and scrutiny simply because he had the misfortune of dying before he could be prosecuted.”
The Project also urged Congress to pass legislation that would ease public access to government-held records from the modern civil rights era. Working with Northeastern University Law Professor Margaret Burnham and her Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, Klibanoff has helped develop ideas for legislation that would create an independent review board to examine all those government-held civil rights records and release as many as possible, as soon as possible. The Civil Rights Cold Case Project supports this effort.
Congress acted in a similar manner twice before, both in the 1990s, when it created independent review boards to examine the John F. Kennedy Assassination Papers and the Nazi/Japanese War Crimes Papers; in both cases, Congress declared that the federal Freedom of Information Act had fallen short of its purpose – a situation the Civil Rights Cold Case Project believe exists today with civil rights records.
Sen. John Kerry recently introduced legislation that would create such a board to examine and release papers related to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Kerry’s office has said the senator would favor broadening the bill to include records of all civil rights murders.
The Project’s aim is to secure adequate funding to bring on additional reporters to join the existing team and produce ongoing reporting for newspapers and websites; a series of short and long-form documentaries for public television, in partnership with WNET.org in New York; reporting for National Public Radio; and a groundbreaking website and educational outreach effort that would engage victims’ families and communities in the investigative process.
Klibanoff noted that at least two of the handful of cases the FBI is still pursuing were prompted by Civil Rights Cold Case Project reporters.
Reporting by John Fleming of The Anniston Star led to federal criminal charges against a former Alabama state trooper for the 1965 shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion, Alabama, an act that helped trigger the historic Selma to Montgomery March. The trooper awaits trial.
In Ferriday, Louisiana, weekly newspaper editor Stanley Nelson’s extraordinary reporting on the 1964 murder of black shopkeeper Frank Morris led to a current FBI and local investigation, the posting of a reward and the possibility a grand jury will be empanelled. Nelson, working with thousands of pages of government documents that took nearly two years to obtain and aided by the children of former Klansmen, also has revealed important new information about a violent Klan offshoot, the Silver Dollar group, and its involvement in two other murders: Wharlest Jackson in 1967 and Joe Ed Edwards in 1964. Significant work has been done on those cases by two allies of the cold case project, law professors Paula C. Johnson and Janis L. McDonald, who run the Cold Case Justice Initiative at Syracuse University.
Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi has been responsible since the late 1980s for prosecutions and convictions in some of the nation’s highest profile civil rights cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham church bombing, and the “Mississippi Burning” murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, MS. Mitchell continues to find stories in the 40,000 pages of “Mississippi Burning” documents.
Two other team members, Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen and Thomas Moore, the brother of a young black man abducted and murdered in Meadville, Mississippi, produced documentary reporting that led to the federal prosecution and conviction of a Klansman for the murder – and a public apology by another Klansman.
Project reporter Ben Greenberg continues to break new ground on the 1964 murder of Clifton Walker, who was driving home from work in Woodville, Mississippi, when he was shot multiple times on a lonely road. Greenberg has found witnesses who were long ago believed to have died or disappeared.
“Investigative reporting takes enormous time and resources, and it’s even more challenging at a time when reporters are being called on to help their newsrooms by covering an ever-changing array of topics and stories,” Klibanoff said. “It is our hope that we can attract the resources to free up those reporters and many others who want to join us as we dig out and tell these hidden stories from our difficult past.”
Almost immediately after launching our California Watch Web site in early January, we went to work on changes for our “Phase 2.”
The first results of that work relate to our commenting. And the changes just went live.
It is now dramatically easier to register on our site. That means instead of filling out a longer form, we now are requiring only a few simple steps before registered users can comment on our stories, blog posts and databases.
The flipside is that we have eliminated anonymous commenting. We believe this change adds greater credibility and accountability to the online discussion surrounding our work. We recognize that we might lose some comments. But we think the tradeoff is worth it.
It’s also going to be a lot easier to respond to other comments by simply hitting “reply.” Your comment will appear underneath the comment you're responding to.
Expect other refinements on our commenting area in the near future. We really want to add a rating system, allowing readers to weigh in on other comments. It’s another step we can take to encourage responsible commenting.
In the next few days we are going to announce a special contest/promotion on our site that we hope will be fun and will help elevate the debate. It will work like this: At the end of every month through this summer, our staff will choose the most reasoned, incisive comments that appear on our site. There will be no limit to the number we select. It could be one. It could be 100. It could be any number in between. Comments will be judged on clarity of thinking and persuasiveness. The authors will then be entered into a drawing to win a free iPod Touch. You don’t have to agree with our content to be entered into the drawing. You just have to be thoughtful, focused and articulate in making your argument. We think it’s a fun way to encourage a healthy debate and discussion. Watch for more details soon.
In the meantime, I hope you try out our new commenting system. What do you think about our story this weekend that detailed how state workers are walking away from their government jobs with massive vacation payouts? Or how about our story about DUI checkpoints where police are more likely to seize cars from sober, unlicensed drivers? Our staff is also generating several blog items a day on our California Watchblog, And now a better forum for discussion awaits.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
Almost a half-million people have sought refuge from the drug violence racking the Mexican border metropolis of Juarez, according to a newspaper estimate.
The El Paso Times reported this week that the city of Juarez's planning department have found that 110,000 houses have been abandoned from 2005 to the beginning of 2009.
The paper extrapolates that "based on average family size, about 420,000 people, or 30 percent of the city's residents, have moved out of Juárez, either to other parts of Mexico or to the United States."
Although numbers may be squishy, the paper said local police, real estate agents and demographers "detect an increase in refugees from Mexico living in El Paso."
Some of the "refugees" could be tied to the economy as about 75,000 people have lost their jobs since Dec. 2007, the paper reports. The maquiladora industry, which manufactures or assembles products for international distribution, shed most of those positions.
But another extraordinary statistic the paper reports is that more than 10,000 businesses — about 40 percent of the city's total — have closed out of fear of extortion and assault, according to the Mexican chamber of commerce.
CIR, reporting for The Nation, wrote last year that "Officials on both sides of the border acknowledge these new immigrants but decline to make estimates of how many have fled."
What's interesting about the El Paso Times story is the effort to go beyond the local body count — more than 4,600 killed since 2008 — to quantify the economic and social damage that the violence has had in Juarez.
While the U.S. has pledged $1.4 billion in aid to Mexico and Central American countries to combat the drug trade, there has been little public discussion between the U.S. and Mexico about the social fallout from the related violence, and possible refugees from the drug war.
Elsewhere in Texas, the former head of the infamous Gulf cartel was sentenced behind closed doors in Houston to 25 years in federal prison and ordered to forfeit $50 million, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Here is the press release from the U.S. attorney's office.
Four reporters associated with the Chauncey Bailey Project will be awarded the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage on Wednesday, March 24, at the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The reporters are Thomas Peele, Josh Richman, Mary Fricker and Bob Butler. The four wrote more than 100 stories about the group, the murder, and the police investigation.
Chauncey Bailey was editor of the Oakland Post, who was murdered in 2007 while investigating members of Your Black Muslim Bakery, headquartered in Oakland, California. The four reporters continued to tell the story despite obvious dangers.
The award is named after Ralph McGill who was regarded by many as "the conscience of the South" for his editorials challenging racial segregation. Richman and Butler said they were honored and humbled by the award. Peele said, "To win an award that memorializes the work of Ralph McGill is a high honor."
CIR’s television documentary Justice for Sale, a 1999 co-production with Frontline and Bill Moyers as correspondent, receives a timely rebroadcast on the February 19, 2010 edition of Bill Moyers’ Journal (in an edited version revised to fit the Bill Moyers’ Journal format). It is timely because Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy recently cast the key swing vote in a Supreme Court decision freeing up business and special interest contributions to political campaigns. In the 1999 Justice for Sale broadcast, Kennedy told Moyers of his deep concern about the negative effect of contributions in state judicial elections and warned they can cause the perception or reality that judicial independence is undermined.
Clearly Justice Kennedy’s concerns for judicial elections do not bridge the divide between his warning on that issue and his free-swinging approach to political campaign contributions as shown in his opinion announced last month in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which erased two of the court's precedents and decades of legislative restrictions on corporate and special interest spending in political campaigns. Now it’s up to the legislative branch to go back to the drawing board and attempt to design new campaign finance laws that will create the public perception or political reality that Congress and the President are not the captives of special interests and the highest bidder.
Justice for Sale is one example in a long line of CIR work that examines the influence of special interests and campaign cash on public affairs. Award-winning Frontline documentaries The Best Campaign Money Can Buy (1992) and So You Want to Buy a President? (1996) examined presidential campaigns. A series of stories in Salon.com in 2004 and 2005 examined the influence of corporate and special interests on the federal judicial nomination process: "Courting Big Business," "Big Biz Battles for Bush's Bench," "The Moneyed Scales of Justice," and "Harriet Miers Is All Business." Other stories have looked at issues ranging from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R.Ky) fundraising methods to how local real estate contributions affect zoning and health and safety issues.
Perhaps the one sure bet to come out of the Supreme Court decision to free up special interest money in political campaigns: CIR reporters and others will have their hands full trying to keep up with the resulting stories.
Dan Noyes was executive producer for CIR for Justice for Sale. He is a co-founder of CIR and for 30 years was on CIR's staff as a reporter, then editor, and served three stints as executive director or acting executive director.
At precisely the time California newsrooms are shrinking, the state is experiencing its worst budget and governance crisis in decades.
Come meet members of the California Watch leadership team and other media professionals this Friday at noon at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco as they consider the implications of these simultaneous realities.
Quality journalism is still being done around the state, but in a less sustained way than a decade ago. This is certainly the case nationally as a number of reports have asserted. The downsizing of the news media raises troubling questions about how Californians will be informed about what is happening in the state -- in both public and private institutions that affect their lives in fundamental ways.
I'll be moderating the panel, which will consist of Sandy Close, executive director of New America Media; Stuart Drown, executive director of the Little Hoover Commission; Mark Katches, California Watch's editorial director; Martin Reynolds, editor of the Oakland Tribune; and David Lauter, assistant managing editor/California, Los Angeles Times.
For more information, or to buy a ticket, check out this listing on the Commonwealth Club Web site.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
Here at CIR we are as concerned about a sustainable future for investigative reporting as we are about producing high-impact journalism that is important to you. For more than three decades, CIR has relied largely on foundations to support our reporting. We are hard at work now to identify more diverse funding sources, including building our individual donor base. We know that our readers, viewers and listeners are a diverse group and that, if you chose to support our work financially, you will have equally diverse goals for your giving.
Some of you may be able to contribute $100, $500, or even $1,000 a year to support our hard hitting investigative work (you can do that over here. Others may be interested in supporting a specific investigation, like the Civil Rights Cold Case Project or The Price of Sex. Still others of you may want one simple way to support a variety of sites you like and depend on.
Introducing Kachingle, one of the first crowdsourcing services that you can use to support your favorite online news sites and blogs. Kachingle is simple, user-centric and user-controlled alternative to cumbersome subscriptions, paywalls, and pay-per-article plans some media outlets are considering. It requires virtually no effort on your part - you just become a Kachingler, giving $5 a month through PayPal, and then click the Kachingle medallion on the sites you want to support. No credit cards, no passwords. Kachingle will keep track of your visits to each of the sites you've selected and at the end of each month, your monthly pay-in to Kachingle (minus small service fees) will be distributed proportionally among your chosen sites based on your visits.
We hope you will become a Kachingler, helping to support journalism's future online, including the time and resource intensive investigative reporting that CIR produces. Your support alone won't save investigative reporting but if enough people decide to start supporting the journalism they care about, collectively we have the power to help ensure that this kind of reporting thrives in the future. Once you become a Kachingler, you can share which sites you support with colleagues, friends, and family (and soon Twitter followers and others), and turn them on to the sites you visit.
Consider signing up and beginning to support CIR and the other sites you like today.