The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "celebrity" ...
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Land Flips Sting Taxpayers
The Gwinett County school district is not only Georgia's largest, but arguably its most highly regarded after winning a prestigious award as the nation's top urban district. However, while the district celebrated its national acclaim, the Journal-Constitution began scrutinizing its unusually secretive land-purchasing program. After analyzing all the district's land purchases over the past 12 years, the Journal-Constitution focused on 11 mullti-million dollar transactions, many of them involving prominent and politically connected real estate developers.
Tags: Gwinett County; Georgia; School District; Land Purchasing; Sweetheart Deals
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Double Exposure
The author discovers that a celebrated civil rights photographer actually doubled as an FBI informant in the late 1960s. The author pieces together elements of his undercover work and finds that the informant's work included reporting on the activities of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike.
Tags: spy; FBI; FBI informant; civil rights; confidential
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Treasury Luxury Travel
The Oregonian's investigation spotlighted an obscure corner of state government where Wall Street practices became business as usual, where a set of high-paid employees were granted special exemptions to operate outside the scope of state gift and ethics laws, and functioned with little internal or public oversight. The newspaper revealed that state investment officers charged with monitoring more than $50 billion in state pension investments routinely travel in luxury, paid for by taxpayers and the Wall Street investment managers they are supposed to be overseeing. They stay at high-end resorts and five-star hotels, eat at celebrated restaurants and fly first class. The tab is often picked up by investment firms managing Oregon's investments, who are competing for hundreds of millions of dollars in fees that the pension fund pays annually. The state treasury didn't monitor that travel. It kept no record of the expenses or gratuities provided its employees. And it ignored the potential conflicts of interest.
Tags: State Government; Corruption; Finance; Wall Street; Exemption; Business; Gift and Ethics Law; Travel; State Treasury; State Employees
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Donald T. Sterling's Skid Row Mirage
According to advertisements he distributed in the media, Los Angeles Clippers basketball owner Donald T. Sterling was building a new homeless center in downtown LA. But after L.A. Weekly did some investigating, they found he wasn't close to constructing anything. In fact, he was still looking for a homeless service provider to raise the $50 million needed to build the Donald T. Sterling Homeless Center.
Tags: homeless centers; celebrity; fundraising; construction; false advertising; wealthy; media scam; public relations
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Raid in Svaneti
"A phone call at 3 a.m. to a celebrity woman becomes grounds for a high-ranking policeman (who has a personal relationship with the woman) to use his power and staff to fabricate a criminal case and arrest innocent men who, he suspects, could be the caller." The policeman fabricated a gang and planted evidence to create a case against the three men. This report was banned by all Georgian TV companies because it exposed a high-ranking policeman in fabricating a criminal case against innocents.
Tags: Georgia; EurAsia; fraud; fabrication; criminal gang; evidence; drugs; arms; weapons;
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Burnt Chefs
The California Culinary Academy has recently skyrocketed it's tuition and enrollment, fired instructors and made admission tests more relaxed. With promises of becoming a celebrity chef, graduates of CCA are buried in debt while ending up with $8 an hour kitchen jobs.
Tags: cooking; food; restaraunt;
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"Shorting Cramer" and "Financial Journalsim with R"
This series examines the investment recommendations by Jim Cramer, celebrity analyst and host of CNBC's show "Mad Money." The reporters tested more than 4,000 of Cramer's recommendations from the past 2 years; the investigation found that Cramer's recommendations did not beat the market at all. In fact, viewers would actually do better by betting against Cramer's recommendations. "Financial Journalism with R" is a continuation of the story, explaining data munging and analysis in the refereed statistical computing publication R News.
Tags: Philip Meyer Award; stocks; stock market; stock picks; investment; index funds; R statistics; event study
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The Last Season
Author Eric Blehm tells the story of Randy Morgenson, a park ranger in California's High Sierras mountain range. He lived in the area alone for 28 years, becoming "a celebrated ranger in the National Park Service's most adventurous unit." In 1996, Morgenson disappeared into the mountains, sparking a search that finally found his body years later. Blehm examines the possibility that an increasingly detached Morgenson simply may have not wished to be found, and retraces Morgenson's biography in the telling of this tale.
Tags: Randy Morgenson; High Sierras; National Park Rangers; missing hikers; search and rescue operations; Sierra Nevada Mountains
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Puppy Heartbreak
The website for South-Flordia's Wizard of Claws was known for selling dogs to celebrities along with many other customers, claiming its dogs to be of the best quality. But the dogs people received were very sick and unhealthy, some even dying. Some of the dogs were traced back to the "puppy mills" of the Midwest, where animals are poorly bred under even worse conditions
Tags: Wizard of Claws; puppy mill; pet store; dog; puppy; animal cruelty; breed
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The Dark Side of Whistleblowing
Whistleblower David Durand, celebrated as a hero, reaped $126 million from the feds for ratting on his company, TAP Pharmaceuticals, for billing fraud; then Durand's story fell apart. Reporter Weinberg counters the supposed journalistic tendency to "worship" whistleblowers by showing how federal law provides a profit motive for liars and disgruntled workers -- and even the government itself.
Tags: journalism ethics; business ethics; watchdog; anonymous sources; backgrounding; whistleblower