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 "Florida" ...
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Bad Neighbor Banks: How Big Lenders Spread Blight
Across South Florida, on block after block, homes abandoned in the foreclosure crisis have become eyesores, depressing property values, and posing health and safety hazards for nearby families. The Sun Sentinel investigated and found who was responsible for letting these homes rot: some of the world’s largest banks.
Tags: Hazards; property; banks; public health; public safety
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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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In God’s Name: Abuse at religious group homes in Florida
The Tampa Bay Times shines a light on unlicensed children's homes, operating for years in rural areas out of plain sight and run by zealous operators who believe they answer only to God.
Tags: Religion; religious group; children
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PBPost: Kids In Peril
This series exposed 30 years of inaction and broken promises by state lawmakers who knew that children were at risk in unlicensed summer camps across Florida yet enacted no basic laws to protect them; as a result, kids were sexually abused and many more are put at risk.
Tags: Sexual abuse; summer camps; children
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Sun Sentinel: Speeding Cops
A Miami cop in his marked patrol car set off a public fury in the fall of 2011 when a Florida state trooper clocked him going 120 mph to an off-duty job. Turning to technology and a never-before used tool – highway toll records – the Sun Sentinel produced back-to-back investigations documenting widespread police misconduct and the professional solidarity that allowed it to flourish. In "Above the Law," a three-part series published in February, reporters used police toll records to confirm what many South Florida drivers had witnessed for years: cops were among the worst speeders on the roads, taking advantage of the badge and patrol car to ignore the very laws they enforce. "Short Shifted," a two-part series published in December, used those same toll records to detail how many South Florida cops, paid to serve and protect, were regularly leaving their beats and cities before their shifts ended.
Tags: Police; police speeders
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Workforce Central Florida
The state's Regional Workforce Boards -- 24 private, nonprofit entities -- receive more than $300 million a year in public money to help put people back to work. The story revealed that the regional agencies handed out millions in business deals to companies owned by or controlled by their own board members. The reporters discovered that local elected officials charged with overseeing the boards had abdicated virtually all their authority, sometimes failing to meet for years at a time.
Tags: Regional Workforce Boards; public officials; local government
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Protect and Serve
The investigation of a Florida Atlantic University police officer, who was arrested for allegedly shooting escort Sheri Deann Carter in January 2011. Ho had a history of violence and a rap sheet that included many civilian complaints and battery charges from his wife.
Tags: Police; Florida Atlantic University, Rape, Escort, Sheri Dean Carter
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40mm Grenade Production Problem
A "whistle blower" tip lends the I-Team to investigative whether production problems at a Florida company making 40mm grenades for the U.S. military is resulting in defective parts getting into grenades.
Tags: grenades; military; Defense Department
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Jim Greer: GOP Collateral Damage
An investigation of how the Florida Republican Party including the President of the Senate, The Speaker of the House, and many powerful leaders lied and worked to undermine the Chairman of the Party, Jim Greer, in order to keep Gov. Charlie Crist from getting the U.S. Senate nomination and how it spent millions of dollars in contributions and lied about when it was caught.
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60 Minutes: Hard Times Generation II
A story on the Metzger family, one of many homeless families in Florida that have been forced out of their homes to live in cars or on the street, and how they maintain a normal life despite this unconventional living situation.
Tags: recession; poverty; unemployment; child poverty; homeless; shelter;