Investigative coverage of mafia at U.S. News

Dave Kaplan kicked off his new Bad Guys blog on USNews.com this week with two entries on what the Mafia's been up to since 9/11. Part One reveals its involvement in a new "Pizza Connection" case that links up the Sicilian and American mobs. Part Two reports on how the Mafia remains active in a half-dozen US cities, and is moving from murder and extortion to Internet and stock fraud. His blog promises a steady stream of investigative columns on terrorists, mobsters, war criminals, drug dealers, embezzlers, crooked cops, scam artists, bureaucratic bunglers, and abusers of the public trust."

The Las Vegas Review-Journal is running a series entitled "The Long Shadow of 9/11" in which they've localized the big-picture security issues facing the nation. The stories include an examination of how local police have poured vast resources into anti-terrorism policing; how the FBI has sent national security letters to casino-hotels to access guest information; and how Nevada and Utah have had among the most cases per capita in the nation categorized as terrorism-related.

Andrew Tangel and Mike Chalmers of The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal found that sex offenders in the state of Delaware have been inadequately monitored. By mapping "the addresses of more than 1,200 moderate- and high-risk sex offenders, 1,900 child care centers and 350 public and private schools", Tangel and Chalmers found hundreds of instances where sex offencers were living within 500 feet of day cares - but day care centers don't count as schools under Delaware's lax version of Megan's law. They also found that 40% of sex offenders do not keep their addresses up-to-date in the system. Included in this report are details on how this investigation was done.

Nancy Phillips and Craig R. McCoy of The Philadelphia Inquirer report on the troubling trend of police officers in Philadelphia using their status to extort sex. "Most police departments do little to identify the offenders, and even less to stop them. Unlike other types of police misconduct, the abuse of police power to coerce sex is little addressed in training, and rarely tracked by police disciplinary systems. This official neglect makes it easeir for predators to escape punishment and find new victims."

Jeremy Kohler, of the St. Lousi Post-Dispatch, uncovered the identity of the doctor responsible supervising Missouri's lethal injection procedure. Banned from practicing in two hospitals in the state, charged with malpractice over 20 times and having received a public reprimand in 2003 by the state Board of Healing Arts, Alan R. Doerhoff has overseen lethal injections since 1995 for the Missouri Department of Corrections. Troubling is the fact that the Attorney General Jay Nixon's office not only signed off on Doerhoff's reprimand, but simultaneously protected him by fighting to keep his identity hidden in death penalty appeals. In a recent case questioning whether the state's lethal injection protocol was consitutionally humane, Doerhoff "described it in terms so troubling to a federal judge that he ordered it halted. The doctor testified anonymously that he is dyslexic. That he sometimes confused names of drugs. That he sometimes gave inconsistent testimony. That the injection protocol was not written down, and that he made changes on his "independent authority.""

Eric Nalder and Lewis Kamb of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer uncover more police abuses in a continuation of the "Conduct Unbecoming" series. In their latest installment -- focusing on a specialized King County Sheriff's unit assigned to police the Metro regional transit system -- Nalder and Kamb, with assists from P-I beat reporters, turned out a quick-hitter investigation off a daily news story involving officers' controversial arrests of demonstrating bicyclists. In three weeks, the reporters used personnel documents and arrest, incident and complaint reports to supplement interviews with whistleblowers and other resources for this one-day package. Computer-assisted reporting specialist Daniel Lathrop complemented the print package with interactive online maps showing the most troublesome security spots along Metro's transit routes.

The Times Herald-Record's Michael Levensohn conducted an exhaustive investigation painstakingly detailing how a local businessman, Donald Boehm, looted an estate of millions of dollars and has become the focus of a police investigation in the most notorious unsolved killing in the region. The reporting for this story began in April 2004 with the bankruptcy filings of three of Boehm's companies. In the two years since, Levensohn conducted dozens of interviews and reviewed thousands of pages of court filings, contracts, property and bank records, correspondence and other documents to report this story.

Following the announcement of murder charges against a New Orleans doctor and two nurses on duty in the wake Hurricane Katrina, CNN
continues its Emmy-nominated investigative series, "Death at Memorial Hospital" with exclusive interviews with siblings of the accused Dr. Anna Pou, who maintains her innocence. "In October, CNN reported exclusively that after deteriorating conditions -- with food running low and no electricity -- some medical staff openly discussed whether patients should be euthanized," says a CNN.com report by Drew Griffin, produced by Kathleen Johnston.

Maurice Possley and Steve Mills of the Chicago Tribune reviewed thousands of pages of court records and found that Texas may have executed an innocent man in 1989. "<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/broadband/chi-tx-htmlstory,1,781241.htmlstory?coll=chi-news-hed 16 years after Carlos De Luna died by lethal injection, "the Tribune has uncovered evidence strongly suggesting that the acquaintance he named, Carlos Hernandez, was the one who killed [Wanda] Lopez in 1983." There is no definitive DNA or crime-scene evidence to clear De Luna, but reporters uncovered serious flaws in the investigation that were never presented to the jury.

Melvin Claxton of The Tennessean has a three-part series on the price of murder in Tennessee, finding that "homicides cost state and local governments more than $110 million each year. The bill for Nashville alone, which has accounted for 17 percent of the state's homicides over the past two decades, exceeds $18.7 million annually." The paper's analysis of police and judicial costs puts the average murder case at $626,648.