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 "criminal past" ...
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Bales: Army suspect in Afghan shooting was liable in financial fraud
On the day that tips arose about a U.S. soldier who may have strafed two Afghan villages, I left the office for a flight to Tacoma. Within 48 hours of the soldier’s being identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, I and two colleagues broke the news that the emerging hagiography of Bales drafted by family and attorneys had more to it than the story of a soldier who enlisted at the ripe of 27 driven by outrage over the 2001 terrorist attacks—and then broken down by an unrelenting cycle of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Our story started with pure spidey senses: Bales’ s family and lawyer said he had left a stockbroker’s career to enlist, as they explained his call to serve. Yet he had not finished college and clearly had financial troubles, I had determined. And he was active in brokerage in the late 1990s in Florida I learned by checking assorted online records—which raised my suspicions about the quick-money penny stock trading that was commonplace then. Based on those instincts, while also doing the running daily story from Bales’ Army base in Washington state, I had checked some online brokerage records and enlisted Julie Tate to look at others and run through civil and criminal filings in Ohio (Bales’s home state and then nationally). Within an hour, I had found one suspicious record and Julie had found others and we were off on a 30-hour run of investigative reporting and boots on the ground interviews that yielded the breaking news of Bales’s more complicated—and less laudatory—past in the period just before he joined the Army. We located and I interviewed an elderly couple who had lost substantial savings in accounts managed by Bales and received copies of detailed financial records that corroborated their claims and showed Bales as the account manager. We also peeled back corporate records for a now-shuttered firm run by Bales and his brother with backing from a longtime friend and reached him to further flesh out the checkered professional history of the Staff Sgt. at the center of an explosive, fast-moving and intensely competitive story. The story demanded intense investigative reporting that netted notable results in far far less than 30 days of a breaking event.
Tags: U.S. soldier; Afghanistan; military draft; terrorist attacks; deployment
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Locked up
A USA TODAY investigation found that the U.S. Justice Department was using its legal authority to decide who gets locked up for how long in ways that reward the guilty and punish the innocent. Our examination found that government lawyers were trying to keep dozens of men who they conceded were “legally innocent” imprisoned anyway. We found that the Justice Department had kept accused sexual predators locked up for years past the end of their prison sentences on the basis of faulty psychological assessments. And exposed a brazen pay-to-snitch enterprise that illustrated how the government rewards its informants — often hardened criminals — with shorter prison sentences.
Tags: U.S. Justice Department; lawyers; sexual predators; criminals; prison sentences
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Fraud on the Job
KING 5 dedicated nearly a year to dig into the complex world of the federal minority contracting program. The program is intended to remedy past and current discrimination against minority and women-owned contracting businesses who want a shot at working on federal highway projects. But instead of fostering equal opportunity, KING found staggering fraud and abuse in the taxpayer-funded program. The investigative series titled “Fraud on the Job" was born. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) is responsible for administering the program. WSDOT contracts with a small state agency, the Office of Minority and Women’s Business Enterprises (OMWBE) to certify which contractors qualify as "disadvantaged business enterprises" or DBEs. They also make sure that once in, the companies aren’t cheating or becoming too big to qualify. The state’s share of billions of federal highway funds comes with some strings attached, including a requirement that a certain percentage of money spent on transportation projects be reserved for minority-owned firms. The results of the “Fraud on the Job” series were swift and extraordinary. Two days after the first story aired, the governor ordered the Washington State Patrol to conduct a criminal fraud investigation. She also ordered a top-to- bottom review of OMWBE. Two weeks later, the governor asked the director of OMWBE to resign. Another top manager quit and another was fired. Two of the companies KING exposed as defrauding the government were removed from the DBE program by the state. State and federal legislation is now being drafted to stop the cheating. And now the FBI and the Inspector General of the U.S. Dept. of Transportation are investigating.
Tags: fraud; government; tax; taxpayer; fund
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Digital Footprint & Sunshine Law
Our investigation led to a politician's resignation and criminal charges using social network search engines, traditional online databases and open records requests to identify his criminal past and as many as seven females who were pictured in nude photos, harassed, stalked or suffered cyber identity theft.
Tags: broadcast; criminal past; politician; resignation
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Sex offender, other felons ran camps for homeless kids
This investigation "found that Palm Beach County officials paid a convicted child molester, drug dealers, thieves and other people with criminal records nearly half a million dollars in public money to run summer camps for homeless, foster and impoverished children during the past three years."
Tags: child safety; sex offender; criminal records; child care; criminal background; camp; child welfare
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The Hidden Life of Guns
The investigation details the way guns move through society, from retail sales to street crimes. The Post set out to break the secrecy imposed by Congress and an examination of how gunes are used in crimes. Their investigation included creating a database of more than 35,000 guns traced to crimes; a comprehensive database of 511 police officers killed by firearms; lists from confidential sources of the top 12 gun dealers who have sold the most weapons trace from Mexican crime scenes over the past two years.
Tags: guns; gun laws; crime; gun dealer; illegal gun trade; Mexico; criminal statistics; Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; National Shooting Sports Foundation; Tiahrt Amendment;
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True Crime
This story examines the "real impact of crime in Memphis-the city often rated as the Most Violent and most crime-ridden in America in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports". This series was built off of a never before created database, which held every criminal arrest made in Memphis in the past 10 years. It consisted of "about 1 million records from the past decade".
Tags: law enforcement; criminal; police department; statistics; records; victims; crime-ridden; violence; neighborhoods
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Professional Victim
This journalistic investigation is about using an agent by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Prosecutor General's Office as a "victim." The office uses the "victim" in order to forge various criminal cases. There had always been rumors that the police used such agents, but the public in the country of Georgia did not have any real information about these agents. The faked victim in this case was Vagarshak (Gaikovich) Loris-Ruso. He has been used by the General Inspection of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in order to "disclose" criminal cases of bribery. From July 2004 to 2007, he took part in six criminal cases. The journalists became interested in his past and found him in four other criminal cases. The investigation showed that he had been cooperating with the police and helped them to arrest undesirable people. The investigation consisted of two parts. The first part of the story was about Alexhandre Mkheidze, and his detention, trial and verdict. In this case, Vagarshak admitted to cooperating with the police and receiving money for it. The second part of the investigation is about eight other criminal cases and shows the accusation, official grounds and certain objections for each case.
Tags: Georgia; international journalism; bribery; police departments; misconduct
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Who's Watching Your Kids
Several lifeguards hired by the City of Memphis to work its pools were convicted criminals. The city hadn't conducted pre-employment background checks on "temporary employees" prior to 2007.
Tags: criminal past; felony; firearm; endangerment; job application; swimming pool; recreation;
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The Federal Contractor Misconduct Database
The Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD) is a Web-based resource that tracks the civil, criminal, and administrative misconduct of the federal government's largest suppliers of goods and services. POGO created the FCMD to ensure that the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars the federal government awards every year in contracts (over $530 billion in fiscal year 2008) go to companies with solid records of responsibility, integrity and performance. POGO developed the FCMD because government contracting officers are required by law to award contracts to responsible vendors only but lack a centralized repository of information on vendors' misconduct histories. To make decisions that are in the best interest of the public and prevent fraud, wasted and abuse, the government must have as much information as possible reflecting the past performance and responsibility of prospective vendors. The FCMD provides this information free to the public in a concise and user-friendly format. The FCMD spotlights each of the top 100 federal contractors. It complies each contractor's instances of misconduct -- actual and alleged -- dating back to 1995. In addition to misconduct instances, the FCMD includes primary source documents and links to the contractors' Web sites, annual reports, SEC filings, and lobbying and campaign finance information. Search and sort features allow users to search the data for key words, or to organize the data in interesting ways. The FCMD is an evolving resource. POGO continually adds and updates instances and contractor information. POGO also periodically updates the contractor list to reflect the most current fiscal year ranking. Each year, the roster of contractors will change, but POGO will keep all old rankings on a special archive page so that eventually the FCMD will include hundreds of contractors.
Tags: government contracts; computer-assisted reporting; database work; government oversight; misconduct