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:
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The Deadliest Place in Mexico
The Juarez Valley, a narrow corridor of green farmland carved from the Chihuahuan desert along the Rio Grande, was once known for its cotton, which rivaled Egypt’s. But that was before the Juarez cartel moved in to set up a lucrative drug smuggling trade. “The Deadliest Place in Mexico” explores untold aspects of Mexico’s drug war as it has played out in the small farming communities of this valley. The violence began in 2008, when the Sinaloa cartel moved in to take over the Juarez cartel’s turf. The Mexican government sent in the military to quell the violence — but instead the murder rate exploded. While the bloodshed in the nearby City of Juarez attracted widespread media attention, the violence spilling into the rural Juarez Valley received far less, eve as the killings began to escalate in brutal ways. Community advocates, elected officials, even police officers were shot down in the streets. Several residents were stabbed in the face with ice picks. By 2009, the valley, with a population of 20,000, had a murder rate six times higher than Juarez itself. Newspapers began to call the rural farming region the “Valley of Death.” This investigation uses extensive Freedom of Information Act requests, court documents, and difficult-to-obtain interviews in Spanish and English with current and former Juarez Valley residents, Mexican officials, narcotraffickers and U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials, to reveal that many of these shocking deaths were perpetrated with the participation of Mexican authorities. It shows scenes of devastation — households where six members of a single family were killed, without a single police investigation. It uncovers targeted killings by masked gunmen of community activists and innocent residents for speaking out against violence and repression facilitated by corrupt military and government officials. And it gathers multiple witnesses who describe soldiers themselves, working in league with the Sinaloa cartel, perpetrating violence against civilians. "The cemeteries are all full. There isn't anywhere left to bury the bodies," one former resident said. "You'll find nothing there but ghost towns and soldiers."
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Counting Kids Out
"Counting Kids Out" exposed years of systemic cheating in Columbus City Schools, Ohio's largest school district. The rolling investigation has uncovered widespread fraud that likely resulted in higher-than-deserved report-card grades; inflated graduation rates; and bonuses for school workers who did not actually deserve them.
Tags: Columbus City Schools; cheating; fraud; graduation retes
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City Hall Heist
How a humble city utilities dept. worker stole $1 million from City Hall, with no one noticing. His fellow employees had no idea that mild-mannered "nice guy" Joe Phan was a millionaire and - relying merely on a rubber stamp, an ATM machine and a willing bank - was depositing stolen city checks into his personal account at the rate of more than $360,000 annually. Seattle Weekly dived into the story explaining for the first time who Phan was, how he pulled off a million-dollar heist, and how it could happen again.
Tags: City utilities department; city hall; theft
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Hospital at Risk
My investigation of the Minnesota Security Hospital, a state-run facility that provides psychiatric treatment to nearly 400 adults deemed "mentally ill and dangerous," uncovered high rates of violence and injuries of employees and patients at the facility, a critical shortage of psychiatrists, and widespread confusion among employees about what to do when a patient becomes violent. I found that much of confusion was the result of the abrasive, threatening management style of head administrator David Proffitt, who was hired in 2011 to reform the facility. I began investigating Proffitt and found he was hired without a basic background check. I uncovered many troubling details from Proffitt's past, including domestic violence, a PhD from a now-defunct online degree mill, a forced resignation from his previous job as the administrator of a private psychiatric hospital in Maine, and other failings. The state ordered Proffitt to resign and the Minnesota legislative auditor began an audit of the department's hiring practices. The assistant commissioner of the Department of Human Services who led the hiring search also resigned. The governor proposed $40 million in renovations to address safety concerns. Regulators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration visited the facility for the first time in 21 years. The facility also implemented new training for employees to reduce violence. My investigation of the facility continues.
Tags: Psychiatrists; domestic violence; injuries
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WSJ China's Troubled Transition
During his years in China, British businessman Neil Heywood cut a rather eccentric figure, cruising around Beijing in a silver Jaguar with “007” license plates and boasting implausibly about his connections to senior Communist Party officials. When he was found dead in a second-rate provincial hotel room in November 2011—of “excessive alcohol consumption,” according to local authorities—he was immediately cremated and seemingly just as quickly forgotten. Forgotten, that is, until Wall Street Journal reporter Jeremy Page began digging into the case. Using his wide network of local and foreign contacts, the Beijing correspondent discovered that this was much more than a sad case of expat overindulgence. It turned out that Mr. Heywood was in fact very close to the wife of Bo Xilai, a Communist Party rising star—and that he had told friends he feared she might do him harm. The investigation lifted the lid on the extravagant, and often lawless, private lives of the country's elite—a forbidden topic for Chinese media, and one rarely touched on by the foreign press. Mr. Page’s reports, devoured by China’s vast population of Internet users, sparked massive public debate and may even have altered the course of China’s once-a-decade leadership transition.
Tags: Bo Xilai; China; Communist Party; death
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Startribune:The Day Care Threat
Children had been dying in Minnesota child care at an alarming rate and state regulators and industry leaders had overlooked the problem until our reporting laid bare a series of safety failures that led to the spike in deaths. The reporters made dozens of public record requests and analyzed hundreds of cases to uncover wide problems in the state’s in-home daycare system. They almost all the deaths occurred at in-home daycares, which have more lax regulations than centers. The series also uncovered dozens of cases of sexual abuse, gun violence and negligence that harmed children in the state’s in-home daycare system. It revealed how Minnesota has some of the weakest training and supervision rules in the country for these in-home daycares. The reporters also discovered that critical safety records that would help parents identify problem providers were not accessible to the public. The response to the series was swift and sustained. State regulators implemented changes to improve infant safe sleep practices and they are planning legislation this session to shore up some of the safety problems. The series also highlighted how the lack of information about child care deaths is a national problem.
Tags: Child care; safety; daycare system; sexual abuse; gun violence; negligence
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Bronx Prosecutors Drop Staggering Loads of Cases
A nine-month investigation by WNYC’s Ailsa Chang revealed that people accused of crimes in the Bronx have a greater chance of walking away without charges than anywhere else in New York City. Chang’s two-part series shows that the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office declines to prosecute thousands more cases than do the four other District Attorney offices. And the main reason is a troubling internal policy that no other prosecutors’ office in the city follows: In the Bronx, a case is dropped if a victim doesn’t cooperate within the first 24 hours after an arrest. Bronx prosecutors declined almost one quarter of all their cases in 2011. That’s nearly four times the average rate Manhattan and Brooklyn prosecutors declined cases.
Tags: Crimes; charges; prosecutors; declined cases; victim cooperation
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Murder, Money and Politics
A $54.5 million program touted by Illiinois Gov. Pat Quinn to reduce violence consisted of teens handing out fliers to promote inner peace, take field trips to museums, march in a parade with the governor and even attend a yoga class to reduce stress. Two years after the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative began, the murder rate was nearly 20 percent in Chicago.
Tags: broadcast; violence; stress; neighborhood; murder rate
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Mercury News: Loss of Trust
The San Jose Mercury News IRE contest entry "Loss of Trust" consists of an original two-part series published July 1 and July 2, 2012, and the series' remarkable aftermath. The series exposed the eye-popping fees charged by private professionals working as court-appointed conservators and trustees for dependent adults in Silicon Valley - exorbitant rates that together with attorneys' fees threaten to force their vulnerable clients onto government assistance to survive. Within days of publication, the Santa Clara County Superior Court launched an overhaul of its local rules, and state legislation was pledged for the coming year to rein in the abuses.
Tags: Conservators; Trustees; attorneys; overcharged fees
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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