Cover stories
Illinois Times
Much of the online archive of IT was rendered practically unreadable when the newspaper website migrated to a new CMS and the paragraph formatting (along with comments and reader ratings) disappeared. Luckily, an editor saved PDFs of some of my cover stories. Some of the links below lead to IT’s new website; others to PDFs.
A family farmer who decides to raise 3,500 hogs in a metal shed believes he’s just expanding his 40-head dairy farm. His neighbors believe he’s destroying their community. This story won the Illinois Press Association award for business reporting in 2008.
In the early 1970s, in downstate Illinois, Ike Mahmood drugged his teenage daughter Aidah, poured gasoline on her, and set her on fire. Aidah survived by jumping out an upstairs window, but she didn’t seek justice until 35 years later. By then it was too late. This story won the 2nd place feature writing award in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies 2007 competition.
My column about Aidah, which ran in the same issue as her story, was probably the single most difficult article I’ve ever had to write.
Cops, strippers, gangsters and dirty lawyers -- there are no good guys in this story, but it was sure fun to write.
The maestra of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra put the temper in “artistic temperament.” But when she offered the orchestra’s personnel manager $5,000 in hush money and a one-way ticket to home to Bulgaria, he talked to me instead.
Don’t ask, don’t tell? Okay, Marty Dwyer didn’t. But he got fired from the military anyway, thanks to a spurned suitor with a well-documented record of lying to police.
Joe Wilkins was a University of Illinois professor and a major powerbroker in Springfield, where he was a consultant to the Secretary of State and the headhunter responsible for hiring the city’s police and fire chiefs. He was on the verge of being appointed director of hometown security when I proved that the military heroics that were his claim to fame were untrue.
Jane Galliher was raped, but the state’s attorney refused to prosecute her attacker. Turns out, that’s pretty common in Springfield, according to one sex crimes detective’s personal database of more than 200 cases.
This story about a mentally ill man who died in police custody won 1st place for feature writing in the national Association of Alternative Newsweeklies awards.
The Springfield Fire Department, with 215 firefighters, had only three African-Americans in 2004, down from a high of 11 during the 1960s, when the department had only 90 men total. It’s odd how civil rights and integration provided SFD the option to stop hiring blacks.
The adoption industry has a sliding scale based on race. The fees to adopt a healthy African-American infant are about one-third the cost of a healthy white infant.
Dallas Morning News
I was amazed to discover that a few of my cover stories from Dallas Life were on Newsbank. Here’s one.
At the height (or is it depth?) of the AIDS crisis, one hospice in Dallas sat vacant, thanks to politics in the gay community.