There are two kinds of journalists in the world, and really only two. There are the people who go out and get the stories, and there are the people who talk about them.
The stories here have been gone out and gotten. They are original. Many were in plain sight, but no one else saw them. Others were pulled from bureaucracies and companies determined that they not come to light. Many navigated PR or legal minefields.
The purpose of this site is to give news professionals and others a quick overview of my work over two decades of reporting and writing. It is intended to allow the work for speak for itself, but permit me nonetheless a quick introduction.
I joke that the stories here run the gamut from public corruption to white-collar crime, but in fact the work ranges fairly widely. The heart of the site is the "portfolio" section, which displays scans of stories (in reverse chronological order, roughly) with an excerpt and occasionally, a link to the full text. Readers will find vigilant coverage of high-profile beats, including Ground Zero reconstruction and Eliot Spitzer's insurance probes, along with scoops, features and takeouts on subjects as diverse as rock climbing and real estate, insurance and contracting. I recommend "Edifice Complex" and "Take and Give" under WSJ; "Rhode Island Life" and "Empire" under Projo; "AIG" under Washington Post; "An FOB and the MOB" under The Washington Monthly. And, don't skip the Providence organized-crime section.
Generally, the stories explore the meeting point of government, business and the law and the behavior of people caught there. The goal of these investigative narratives is to combine original reporting with story-telling elements of character, scene and detail to create impact. And in fact I've had some luck. The stories on this site have led to criminal indictments of a former governor, a police commander and four sergeants and contributed to those of a sitting state Supreme Court chief justice and a former state House speaker. A series on eminent-domain abuse, meanwhile, has been credited in Congressional testimony and elsewhere with sparking the current national debate on the topic. One series led to a Pulitzer Prize.
The good story, I believe, is investigative, at least in the sense that it looks behind an idealized façade to reveal the reality beneath. Tension and surprise result from the gap between the purported reality – the aura projected by, say, a judge's robes or a corporate PR operation -- and reality itself – the chief justice skimming a slush fund or an executive diverting assets to companies he controls while his subordinate chest-bumps an uncooperative director.
Journalism's best and least-understood asset is that it's fun. It's fun because the news is fun, and the news is fun because the gap between appearance and reality – with all its tension and surprise -- is everywhere. Enjoy the site.