A World of Cop Reporters

Napoleon was right: Geography is destiny.

Or maybe, in the never-ending quest for a strong lead, I’m getting carried away. Still, I grew up in Chicago; I’m convinced that has a lot to do with the fact that I became a crime reporter and a crime novelist.

Chicago has a world-class cultural tradition: the music, theater, literature and architecture, the universities and museums. But the city also has a history of crime and corruption, entrenched and intertwined problems that endure to this day. That mix probably explains why it is a great newspaper town. Sidney Hyman told the first story I ever heard about being a crime reporter in the Chicago area. The father of David Hyman, my close friend since childhood, Sid died at the age of 103 after a prodigious life. He was a tank commander in World War II, an author (notably of The American President in 1954), a speechwriter for JFK, a professor. He exuded wisdom, benevolence and good cheer. In the late 1920s, Sid started out as a cub reporter at a tabloid in Gary, Indiana. One day, an editor gave him a big assignment. A fugitive cop-killer wanted to surrender to the newspaper rather than the police. The editor ordered the rookie to bring in the desperado. Worried that he’d been chosen chiefly because he was expendable, Sid went dutifully to the designated spot to meet the murderer. They got in a cab and set off for the newsroom. Noticing how nervous Sid was, the killer patted him on the knee. “Don’t worry, sonny,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

As I got older, I put that story in context. Sid had actually experienced the wild muckraking era that former Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur chronicled in The Front Page after they went to Hollywood. The version of that story directed by Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday (1940), is my favorite depiction of the newspaper world. Hawks had the brilliant idea of making Hildy Johnson a woman and the film a romantic comedy. It still holds up well, especially the machine-gun dialogue. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are outrageously witty, charming and roguish. I like her description of reporters as “daffy buttinskys without a nickel in their pockets.” And I like the scene in which she pounds out a front-page scoop: “While hundreds of Sheriff Hartwell’s paid gunmen stalked through the city shooting innocent bystanders…”

I always kind of knew I was going to write fiction one way or another, but there remained the matter of how to make a living. Journalism struck me as adventurous and idealistic at best, and rarely boring at worst. Because I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s—a violent place at a violent time—I was interested in cops and crime. Because I was the son of immigrants and had traveled, I had notions of becoming a foreign correspondent. It all came together somehow in the end.

Over the course of my career, I have worked mostly overseas or on international issues. I have gotten to know many great reporters, and especially crime reporters. Some of them have worked their way into my fiction. When it was suggested to me recently that I write a piece about crime reporters in fiction, I thought it was a fine idea. Then I reminisced about the investigative journalists I’ve met around the world: their tenacity and courage, their humor and sacrifice.

And I decided to change the idea a bit. I decided to write about some of the real reporters who made such a strong impression on me, whose work and whose lives could be the stuff of fiction.

Here’s a brief tour of places and characters encountered along the way.

Chicago

My first job after college had an old-school feel: copy clerk at the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1984, the Sun-Times was the paper of the city’s working-class ethnics and African-Americans. The Chicago Tribune was the voice of Midwestern suburbia. They competed fiercely. Drunk scribes fought late-night brawls in Billy Goat Tavern, a subterranean bar on Lower Wacker Drive. Copy clerk (“copy boy” in less enlightened times) was an apprentice-style, entry-level post. Most of the duties—walking among desks putting copy on spikes, running errands down a circular stairway to the typesetting room—have gone the way of the horse and buggy. In the newsroom, the reporters worked at rows of stark desks beneath fluorescent lights—no cubicles for this hard-nosed crew—facing the city desk.

The copy clerks sat at a station a few feet away from Art Petacque and Hugh Hough. That was the equivalent of having a front seat for Miles Davis or Michael Jordan. Petacque and Hough were a reporting team who had won the Pulitzer Prize and had covered organized crime and other forms of skullduggery for longer than I had been alive. Petacque didn’t even use a computer. He was a pure hunter-gatherer. He wore wide ties and a comb-over and had an operatic manner. He spent his days on the street or the phone talking to police, prosecutors, judges, politicians, gangsters, lawyers and other big-shots and dirt-bags. “So who was this punk?” he’d boom into the phone in his consonant heavy Chicago accent. “What can you tell me about this punk?” Hough, meanwhile, was serene and dignified. He didn’t talk much. He was the rewrite man, the wordsmith, the deadline poet. In 1958, he wrote this opening paragraph for a story about a catastrophic fire: “Eighty-seven children. And three of the nuns who were their teachers. That, as near as any informed person could tell, was the terrible arithmetic of the fire that swept Our Lady of Angels School just 18 minutes before the day’s final school bell.” I once asked Hough for advice when I did a feature about prominent Italian-Americans. (It was the summer of Geraldine Ferraro’s vice-presidential candidacy and Mario Cuomo’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.) Wanting to make sure a certain businessman was clean, I consulted Hough because he was a human encyclopedia of the underworld. He was helpful and pleasant. His generation of journalists tended to be like that. As the great columnist Mike Royko once said: “Be nice to the copy boy, even if he’s a mope, because he might grow up to be your boss one day.”

Tijuana

In the 1990s, I covered the Mexican border for the Los Angeles Times. I was based in San Diego. My beat was Tijuana, the Mexican state of Baja California and the entire 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico line—the scene of the most dramatic collision and convergence of developed and developing worlds on the planet. Those five years brought a career’s worth of outsized stories: illegal immigration, drug wars, assassinations, political scandals. I had the privilege of working alongside the Tijuana press corps, a fearless and colorful bunch who labored in conditions that made Chicago look like Disneyland. I befriended Dora Elena Cortes and Manuel Cordero, the correspondents of El Universal newspaper. She was bubbly and relentless. He was a martial arts expert with prematurely white hair who taught self-defense at the police academy—the cops respected him because he could kick their asses. He had the hard-boiled habit of referring to newsmakers as “this monkey.” We spent a lot of time hanging out at Bob’s Big Boy, a diner frequented by the symbiotic denizens of the press, politics, security forces and the underworld.

Because lawlessness has overwhelmed Mexico, journalists often find themselves on the front lines of crime-fighting out ahead of police and prosecutors. I remember interviewing 19-year-old Galileo Cortez in a hospital room guarded by police. His father, Dante, was a veteran police reporter. The Tijuana drug cartel had recently killed Dante’s other son, Espartaco, a reporter-photographer who had been learning the trade from his dad. The police weren’t doing much to investigate because the suspects were “narco-juniors”—bored young men from wealthy families who had become gangsters. They were shielded by the double impunity of the elite and the cartels. Dante and Galileo decided to investigate the killing on their own. They convened a press conference to discuss the case. As father and son left their house carrying pistols and bulletproof vests, assassins drove up and opened fire, wounding them both. Galileo managed to shoot back and scare off the gunmen. “They have taken a very dangerous step by attacking my father,” he said. “This is a war. I don’t know where it’s going to end.”

Not all the journalists in Tijuana were warriors. I once saw a federal police commander pay off a reporter with a wad of U.S. currency at high noon on a downtown street. But the spirit of the press corps was epitomized by the weekly newsmagazine Zeta. The Tijuana stringer who helped me on the beat for the L.A. Times, the talented Miguel Cervantes, worked for Zeta. He had endured the days of fear and frenzy in 1988 after gunmen assassinated columnist Hector (Gato) Felix, Zeta’s co-founder, in his car. Suspicion centered immediately on Jorge Hank Rhon, the eccentric billionaire owner of the local racetrack—and a target of Felix’s columns. Hank’s security chief (whom I later met during a visit to the Tijuana prison, which he pretty much ran) and an underling were convicted of the murder, but the authorities never charged Hank. Incredibly, he was later elected mayor. For three decades, Zeta has published an accusatory page with a funereal black background in which Felix demands justice from the grave: “Hank: Why did your bodyguards kill me?”

Jesus Blancornelas, the other founder of Zeta, almost met the same fate in 1997. He ran afoul of David Barron Corona, a Mexican-American ex-convict who led security and combat operations for the Tijuana cartel. Known as Charlie because he looked like the action star Charles Bronson, Barron had recruited several dozen gang members from San Diego to work as trans-border hired guns. I had reported about those American homeboys; Barron worried me. I figured the drug lords and their soldiers wouldn’t go after a journalist. The bosses knew it would be bad for business; the grunts wouldn’t act without an order. But Barron seemed mean and crazy enough to lash out if an article pissed him off. He was a lieutenant with power and autonomy. He had spent years slaughtering people in Mexico and Southern California for the Arellano brothers, sadistic kingpins with allies in the Mexican security forces and the political and business elite. People were so scared of him that he had managed to stay out of the Mexican press. After his crew killed two soldiers working for the federal police, however, someone slipped Barron’s file to Blancornelas. The bespectacled, silver-bearded editor had a shrewd understanding of the hazards of the battlefield. Nonetheless, he decided to go for it. He published an exposé about Barron’s reign of terror complete with a front-page photo, essentially turning Zeta into a wanted poster.

Barron and his crew, a mix of San Diego gangbangers and Tijuana juniors, set up the hit. They ambushed Blancornelas as his bodyguard, Luis Valero, drove him to work in the morning. The hit men cut off the Ford Explorer and sprayed it with 185 rounds. The gunfire killed Valero, who valiantly shielded the editor with his body and pushed him down behind the dashboard. Blancornelas survived, badly wounded. As Barron advanced to finish him off, a stray bullet hit him in the eye and killed him instantly. The others fled. Photos showed the muscular gangster, wearing a maroon sweatshirt and jeans and clutching a weapon, slumped against a wall in a pool of blood—“suspended in time and space forever,” as Miguel Cervantes put it. No one was ever prosecuted in the case. (Or in the murder in 2004 of another Zeta editor, Francisco Ortiz Franco.) With his article, Blancornelas had finally done what the authorities couldn’t or wouldn’t do: bring Barron to justice.

Blancornelas died in 2006 of natural causes. During the last nine years of his life, a truckload of Mexican soldiers accompanied him around town. That’s what it’s like to cover crime in Tijuana.

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires seems more like southern Europe than South America. Italian, Spanish and Jewish immigrants shaped the city’s exuberant, sophisticated culture. A British influence persists in the taste for horses, polo and rugby. The architecture, infrastructure and nightlife make the capital feel prosperous and modern. Nonetheless, the problems of inequality, crime, mafias and corruption are just as bad as they are elsewhere on the continent. I learned that in a hurry when I spent time riding around with the police of Buenos Aires province, the vast expanse of slums and suburbs around the capital, and they kept getting in daylight gunfights. And the case of Jose Luis Cabezas showed me that Argentine journalists play a role that comes with the same power and peril as it does in other Latin American societies.

Cabezas was a photographer for Noticias, a slick and feisty magazine. Like much of the Argentine press, in the mid-1990s Noticias stayed busy investigating a whirlwind of scandal around President Carlos Menem. A mafia with links to the former military dictatorship and Middle Eastern regimes and criminals had infiltrated Menem’s government. The alleged kingpin was Alfredo Yabran, a tycoon of Syrian-Lebanese descent whose business empire controlled airports, postal and cargo services, and security firms. Yabran was as reclusive as he was powerful; hardly anyone even knew what he looked like. In 1996, Noticias tracked him down in the beach resort where he spent the summer. Cabezas was part of the investigative team: a gregarious, hard-charging veteran of the crime beat at 36. After doing surveillance, he snapped shots of Yabran walking bare-chested with his wife on a coastal promenade. The first published photo of the tycoon made a major splash. In January of the following year, a group of assailants operating with paramilitary ruthlessness kidnapped Cabezas in the same resort town. They took him to a field, shot him to death and burned his car and the body.

The mafia-style murder stunned Argentina. It crossed a line. Back then, journalists were more popular in Latin America than in the United States and, to some extent, they still are. Many Latin Americans are frightened to call the police, distrustful of the courts and disgusted with political leaders. They see the press as a rare institution that responds to them, that denounces wrongdoing in their name. There were protest rallies demanding justice in Argentina; posters of Cabezas covered the city; photographers held their cameras high at news events to honor their fallen comrade. I visited the site of the murder to pay my respects. I felt a personal and professional obligation to give the case as much coverage as I could. I stayed in touch with colleagues at Noticias. Hector D’Amico, the editor, was a thoughtful and dogged leader during the storm. He oversaw the magazine’s investigation while working, warily, with the authorities. The case became a labyrinth of intrigue. The police tried to frame a low-level gang for the murder in order to protect powerful interests. “What the Cabezas case revealed in Argentina was incredible,” D’Amico said. “Who are you supposed to trust?”

Noticias made progress, outpacing and spurring the official inquiry. Gradually, the digging by journalists and police revealed Yabran’s high-level network of allies in the government. Prosecutors charged his security chief and officers of the provincial police in the murder. As the net tightened, the tycoon made public denials on television. He forced senior officials to receive him at the presidential palace, while protestors raged outside. In 1998, prosecutors indicted Yabran. He fled to a country house and killed himself when police closed in. The investigation concluded that he had ordered the murder because he was angry at Noticias and wanted to send an intimidating message. Instead, the final message was this: it took a photo—and the death of the photographer—to bring down a powerful and sinister man.

Paris

In Latin America, I got used to seeing journalists guarded by security details. I didn’t expect to see that kind of thing in Paris. But whenever I met with Mohamed Sifaoui, police bodyguards accompanied him. On a day I interviewed him in March 2003, two officers—a man and woman in plainclothes—trailed us as we walked near the Place de L’Etoile. They sat watchfully at a nearby table while we had a drink at a café.

“This is not the best time to give up smoking,” Sifaoui said, lighting up a cigarette.

Sifaoui was 36 at the time. He had a compact build, short curly hair and restless eyes behind round glasses. He had survived the civil war in his native Algeria that killed more than 100,000 people. Islamic terrorist groups had systematically targeted journalists. In 1996, a car bomb blew up Le Soir D’Algerie, the newspaper where Sifaoui worked, killing 37 of his colleagues. He came to France as a political refugee.

That wasn’t why he was in danger in 2003, though. Sifaoui had just finished an undercover project that became the basis for a television documentary and a book titled My Assassin Brothers. He had infiltrated an al Qaeda cell in Paris and spent three months underground with them. It started by chance when he ran into Karim Bourti, an extremist ideologue who led the cell, at a terrorism trial in the Palace of Justice. They realized they were from the same town in Algeria. Sifaoui told Bourti he was a journalist but acted as if he were sympathetic to the Islamist cause. Sometimes he filmed his meetings with Bourti and the others openly; on other occasions, he used a hidden camera. He documented Bourti’s extremist tirades, showing how he recruited holy warriors and sent them to training camps overseas.  Another Algerian in the group had trained with chemical weapons in Chechnya and was arrested by French police for plotting an attack on the Russian embassy in Paris. As Christmas approached, Bourti talked about conducting reconnaissance on targets for a multi-attack terror spectacular. Then police rounded up the cell. Sifaoui gave his footage and testimony to the prosecutors, making himself a marked man. Instead of hiding, he did the rounds of talk shows and kept reporting about terrorism. He became a public figure of credibility and authority: a Muslim denouncing the dangers of Islamic extremism. His warning about the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq turned out to be prophetic.

“The Americans are about to do the stupidest thing imaginable,” he said. “An attack on Iraq will nourish terrorism.”

As had happened with journalists I met in Latin America, Sifaoui’s resilience impressed me. Investigative reporters tend to be obsessive, hard-working and accustomed to pressure. But it’s one thing to worry about making a deadline or getting sued. It’s another to wake up and do your job knowing that this could be the day the dangerous people who have sworn to wipe you off the face of the earth decide to keep their word.

***

The character of Méndez, the Mexican cop-turned-journalist in two of my books, is based on reporters with that kind of courage and defiance. Méndez is an homage to the real-life warriors I have met in places where honest crusading journalists are a dangerous and endangered species.