The murky world of online gambling

A joint project by The Washington Post and 60 Minutes explores the world of online gambling.  The industry clears $18 billion annually, but exists in murky legal territory.  One group of online poker players had to take it upon themselves to unearth a $20 million cheating scam.  But they could not turn to U.S. officials for help because online gambling is illegal in the United States and the two sites involved, Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, had their servers offshore. The Post and 60 Minutes raise questions about the "integrity and security" of this billion-dollar industry.

A report by Marc Beja and Adam Playford of Washington Square News (at New York University) brings to light issues with NYU's reporting of campus crime statistics.  Due to how the school defines campus addresses, only three of NYU's 21 undergraduate dorms qualify as on-campus.  "The tightly confined Clery map covers the buildings immediately around Washington Square Park, including many of NYU’s largest classroom buildings.  But of the residence halls, where the overwhelming majority of crimes occur, only Hayden, Goddard and Weinstein residence halls are included in the map."   A two-month investigation by WSN shows statistics are drastically skewed to make the university seem safer than it actually is because the majority of residence hall crimes are categorized as "non-campus" incidents.

Expanding on an article published in October, ProPublica's Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, in conjunction with the Los Angeles Times, have found that the California nursing board has been slow to revoke or suspend the licenses of registered nurses with criminal backgrounds in the state. The board relies upon nurses to report their own criminal backgrounds. Even in cases where nurses did disclose past criminal charges, the board often took months or years to act on that information.

Mayor Ron Dellums said late Tuesday he is asking state Attorney General Jerry Brown to conduct an independent probe of the police department’s handling of journalist Chauncey Bailey’s killing in August 2007. Read the Chauncey Bailey Project's online story or see the related video story from KTVU-Oakland, Calif..

For JudicialReports.com, Mark Lagerkvist examined the “paradox cloaked in robes” that allows New York judges to accept large campaign gifts from lawyers who have pending cases in their courts.  The initial story focused on one law firm that gave $157,000 candidates for Supreme Court – including five-figure contributions to nine sitting justices.  The follow-up explored the complexities and contradictions in a system that “could have made Rube Goldberg turn green with envy – or campaign cash.”

An analysis of Kansas City police department complaint records by Michael Mansur of The
Kansas City Star revealed that the vast majority of complaints result in no action. Four percent of complaints referred to Internal Affairs were sustained against officers, a number far below the national average of 10 percent. In response to The Star, the Police Department reported that it disciplined 21 officers on its 1,420-member force last year in response to citizen complaints, and fired one officer for jamming a nightstick into the mouth of a handcuffed man.

Thomas Peele, Bob Butler and Mary Fricker of The Chauncey Bailey Project -- a collaboration of those continuing the work of murdered Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey -- report that that the lead homicide detective assigned to the slaying ignored evidence that pointed to a broader conspiracy to kill Bailey.

A six-part investigative series by The Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) details the booming global trade in illegal cigarettes. Since 1999, the ICIJ has tracked the illegal tobacco trade, and found corporate collusion with the criminal networks diverting tobacco shipments to black markets around the world.  Crackdowns starting in 2004 have resulted in over $2.75 billion in penalties and pledges by international tobacco companies to help fight trafficking.  Despite these efforts "the massive trade in contraband tobacco continues unabated. Indeed, with profits rivaling those of narcotics, and relatively light penalties, the business is fast reinventing itself...The stakes are formidable. Experts estimate that contraband accounts for 11 percent of all cigarette sales, or about 600 billion sticks annually. The cost to governments worldwide is massive: a whopping $40 billion to $50 billion in lost tax revenue during 2006."

The Dallas Morning News spent months looking at Dallas County's 19 DNA exonerations as well as current felony cases in an investigation that highlights flaws in the witness identification process.  Despite known problems with eyewitness testimony, police and prosecutors still rely upon it to secure convictions.  "The fallibility of eyewitness testimony revealed by DNA exonerations in Dallas County and nationwide is not a relic of the past. Police and prosecutors still depend on the same discredited identification procedures to ensure convictions today. "

ProPublica's Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, in conjunction with The Los Angeles Times, have found over 115 cases in which the state of California did not seek to restrict or revoke nursing licenses until the nurses had three or more convictions. Twenty-four of the nurses had five convictions, and crimes ranged from Medicare fraud and drug possession to violent crimes such as sexual offenses and attempted murder.