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 "confidential" ...
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Maywood Confidential
On the evening of Oct. 23, 2006, as a premature snow fell in parts of the Chicago area, Maywood (Illinois) Police Officer Tom Wood pulled his marked SUV to a dimly lit corner known for drug sales, rolled down his window part of the way and began talking to somebody, likely a person he knew. Within minutes gunfire exploded from the street, ripping through the car and hitting Officer Wood in the head and elsewhere, killing the 37-year-old father of five almost instantly. More than six years later, the murder is still unsolved, and an eerie pall has been cast over the official investigation, and Maywood itself. The nonprofit Better Government Association (BGA) and WFLD-TV/FOX Chicago set out to determine what happened – why Officer Wood was killed and why the official investigation into his death had failed to produce an arrest or criminal charges. In a figurative sense, our findings (which form the basis for our entry) indict not a person, but a culture of corruption and apathy in Maywood that may have contributed to Officer Wood’s death, and certainly played a role in the subsequently botched homicide probe.
Tags: Murder; police officer; corruption; homicide
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'Perversion files' show locals helped cover up
On June 14, 2012, following a civil trial, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that decades of the Boy Scouts’ confidential files would be made public. They would first need to allow the Scouts and plaintiffs’ attorneys time to redact the files of sensitive information. Given a months-long head start, editor Terry Petty and reporter Nigel Duara began the process of negotiating the unredacted files from a longtime source. The negotiations took two months and required the guarantee of an embargo. In August, they received a CD with 20,000 pages of perversion files. Duara and Petty combed through the files, looking for patterns. The Scouts’ concealment of the abuse has been reported before, beginning with an exhaustive series in the early 1990s from the Washington Times. But the AP team found something else: Locals helped. County attorneys, newspaper editors, mayors and police officers were all detailed in the files helping keep the Scouts’ name out of charging documents and off the front page. Indeed, a local county attorney proudly reported to Scouts leaders that he quashed an investigation in which a man confessed to sexually abusing two brothers “to protect the name of Scouting.”
Tags: Boy scouts; abuse; record
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Platts: Oil and Gas Drillers Want ‘Confidential’ Wells
It’s no secret that oil and natural gas production is booming in North Dakota. But there are indeed countless secrets — technical, strategic and otherwise — associated with many of the wells that are being drilled in the Roughrider State. North Dakota maintains something called a “Confidential Well List.” Under state law, certain information about the 1,800-plus wells on this list -- such as production levels, geographical data and engineering specifications – is kept from the public for six months. North Dakota regulators argue that there are legitimate reasons for keeping this data from the public, such as encouraging so-called “wildcat” drilling operations in remote or undeveloped areas where little or nothing is known about the subsurface geology. But other oil and gas-producing states are sharply curtaining their use of such policies, saying they are outdated and conflict with the principles of open government. Wyoming, for example, recently revised its policy on the grounds that granting confidential status without good reason was inhibiting “the timely dissemination of well information to the public.”
Tags: Oil; gas; natural resources; fraud; oil wells
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Green Energy Going Red
In this series of original and exclusive investigations, CBS documented the fate of $90 billion dollars in green energy stimulus tax spending and dug in to find out why it did not produced the promised results: a boom in green energy technology and products accompanied by a burst in employment. In Solar Scorching, we identified eleven green energy companies besides Solyndra that together got billions of tax dollars, only to declare bankruptcy or suffer other serious financial issues. Since our initial report, the number of failures has risen dramatically. CBS exposed the fact that the government secretly knew what a poor investment some of these companies were, even before it committed taxpayer billions. We obtained exclusive documents showing one project had confidentially been rated as a “junk bond,” but the government committed $43 million tax dollars anyway. It went bankrupt.
Tags: Taxes; green energy; Solyndra; taxpayers
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Fallout: The True Story of the CIA's Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking
Using confidential documents from government sources and dozens of interviews with key players, the authors revealed how for more than a quarter of a century, while the Central Intelligence Agency turned a dismissive eye, a globe-straddling network run by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan sold the equipment and expertise to make nuclear weapons to a rogues' gallery of nations.
Tags: government sources; Central Intelligence Agency; Pakistan; CIA; Tehran; nuclear weapon
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Wayne County Confidential: Government Run Amok
In Michigan's largest counties, WXYZ-TV exposed a secret $200,000 severance paid to Turkia Mullin, the county's outgoing economic development czar in September while employees endured 20% pay cuts.
Tags: Severance
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Wayne County Confidential: Government Run Amok
This investigation exposed a secret $200,000 severance paid out to a government employee while others endured a 20% pay cut. WXYZ found that the severance was never disclosed to county commissioners, who are supposed to approve all payments of $50,000. The reporting caused the county to cancel 16 other severance payments for voluntary resignations, including one for up to $350,000.
Tags: severance payments; voluntary resignation; breaking news; broadcast
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Fallen Angel: Joe Gustafson lives above the law in North Minneapolis
Using public documents, confidential sources and internal information from law enforcement, the reporter told the secret history of one of North Minneapolis' organized crime rings.
Tags: Hell's Angel; bondsman; Big Joe; Little Joe; Beat-Down Posse; kidnapping; drug ring
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Birthdates Controversy
Government agencies and legislators in Oklahoma had fought unsuccessfully to make the birth dates of public employees confidential despite state open records laws. The investigation found that the state makes millions of dollars selling birth dates of regular citizens.
Tags: birthdates; open records; public employees; union; public
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"Confidential Informants"
NPR investigates the world of confidential informants and the partnership that forms between them and the U.S. government. This specific case involves an informant who was moving up in the ranks of a notorious Mexican drug cartel. At the same time the informant was getting paid to provide crucial information to the U.S., he was also helping capture, torment and kill drug rivals. The U.S. was aware of his actions and did nothing.
Tags: Mexico; drug cartel; FOI; U.S. Immigration; ICE