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 "Washington Nationals" ...
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Voter Patrol
The NEWS4 I-Team dug through more than 600 phone and email tips to break three major election stories before, during and immediately after the presidential election. About two weeks before the election, we asked viewers to tell us when they saw problems when they voted. The response was immediate. Our two-man team went through every tip and beat out the AP, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and other local stations on the biggest election stories in our area. Our first story revealed absentee ballots sent out in Maryland were missing their second page, which contained the most contested ballot initiatives including legalized gambling, same-sex marriage and the DREAM Act. This story was picked up across the nation and led to statements made by the Maryland Governor and the various interest groups involved in the ballot issues.
Tags: Elections; presidential elections; votes; presidential reporting; ballot issues
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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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The Crown Topples: The Swift Rise and Brutal Fall of Maryland's Latin Kings
An inside look at what happened when a national gang infiltrated two suburban counties. Major findings: in 2007 and 2008, the brother of a brutal gang member started a new Latin Kings "tribe" in Maryland and Washington D.C. The Royal Lion Tribe grew to nearly 200 members and initiated a bloody rivalry with the local branch of MS=13. A group of federal agents took down the gang from the inside after a minor crime brought the new gang into the spotlight.
Tags: Gangs; Gang Violence; Maryland; Royal Lion Tribe; Latin Kings;
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UDC
An exposure of out-of-control spending by the president of the University of District of Columbia, the only publicly-funded university in the nation's capital. The investigation showed how President Allen Sessoms used taxpayer dollars on first-class travel, a luxury automobile and home renovations, all while he was doubling student tuition.
Tags: udc; fraud; washington; taxpayer; dollars;
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Fatal Flights
The nation's medevac programs are dominated by private companies with stiff competition and widespread safety failings. The high rate of accidents in the medical helicopter field is due to entrenched complacency. The Post uproots the severe lack of safety in a field the public typically views as heroic.
Tags: medevac; helicopter; hospitals; safety; Washington Post; patient; rescue; Federal Aviation Administration; National Transportation Safety Board; deaths; crash; medical; flight; crew;
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Wasting Away
Washington, D.C. suffers from the highest rate of AIDS cases in the nation. While the health department awarded more than $25 million to nonprofit agencies to deliver services to ailing AIDS patients, many rendered substandard or no services at all.
Tags: AIDS; disease; Washington, D.C.; nonprofit; $25 million; Health Department; Debra Rowe;
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Follow the Money
Corruption among street agents in the Dominican Republic has been public knowledge, but after a Chicago White Sox assistant general manager tried to bring $40,000 in undeclared cash into the United States a new story emerged: corruption among MLB employees.
Tags: David Wilder; kickbacks; Washington Nationals; signing bonus; Outside The Lines; baseball
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The Cheaters
A 60-Minutes, Washington Post joint investigation found that a small group of people managed to cheat players out of more than 20 million dollars. And that no law enforcement agency in the world is pursing the case. Both playing and running an online gambling Web site is considered illegal in the United States. Than ban is almost impossible to enforce; the sites and the computers that run them are located offshore beyond U.S. jurisdiction.
Tags: internet gambling; poker; cheating; Absolute Poker; Mohawk nation; computer servers; scam; Ultimate Bet;
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WAMU: Inside The Collapse
It's October 2008: major banks are failing, Congress is bailing them out with taxpayer dollars. The public deserves to know how we got into the mess. ABC News Nightline's "Inside the Collapse" was first to expose a top-down, company-wide reckless lending strategy that led to the biggest bank failure in U.S. history: Washington Mutual Bank. Senior Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas got inside Washington Mutual's culture and uncovered what really went wrong using original reporting, an exclusive whistleblower interview, a video of a jubilant company party, exclusive internal company documents, former employee interviews and victim interviews. His piece, as well as a follow-up on World news with Charles Gibson and articles on ABCNews.com, caught the attention of law enforcement. Two days after the piece aired, federal prosecutors announced that because of "intense public interest" they were investigating the bank's activities with assistance from the FBI, FDIC, SEC and IRS. The story was widely reported in the national media in the following weeks.
Tags: Washington Mutual; Securities and Exchange Commission; Internal Revenue Service; Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; FDIC; Federal Bureau of Investigation; economics
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Victory and Ruins
The series revealed how a community's blink embrace of a successful team compromised judges, prosecutors, police agencies, a university and the media. The University of Washington's 2000 team was its last to go to the Rose Bowl, but at least two dozen players on that team were arrested while at UW.
Tags: athlete; football; scholarship; corruption; FERPA; higher education; lawsuit; sports; National Football League