Kill the Messenger (5 page)

Any information that didn't pan out into a full story was dutifully transcribed into the paper's celebrated “Town Crier” section. “It wasn't a very glorious beginning for a reporter, going into a county clerk's office, plopping down a typewriter and checking all the lawsuits,” Loftus says. “But you got a lot of stories that way. Good reporters are supposed to check that kind of thing.”

Another obligation imposed by Trimble was covering high school football games. Every Friday night, six city desk reporters would receive marching orders to fan out to local games. A favorite pastime of reporters stuck with that assignment was to insert clichés into their work that Trimble would often overlook on deadline. For that reason, Webb grew to relish the assignment.

“Every time Gary covered a football game he'd check who had carried the ball for the most yardage,” Loftus says. “And the third or fourth paragraph of every one of his stories would usually contain the phrase ‘Johnny so-and-so carried the ball however many times,
grinding up the yardage like cheap hamburger
.' Gary would always howl when he got a good cliché in there, usually while he was smoking a cigarette behind his typewriter.”

A former Washington, D.C.-based correspondent for the Scripps Howard news agency, Trimble had won numerous awards, including a 1961 Pulitzer Prize, for his reporting. He had forty years of experience in journalism, and liked to point that out whenever he called reporters into his office to berate their work. Trimble says he doesn't remember yelling at Webb, but guesses he did. “I yelled at everybody,” he says.

Trimble says his reporters were always after the big scoop, but were often “as green as they were eager.” One reporter called him at home late one evening, saying that he had been in a convenience store that appeared to be running a mob-tied bookie operation. “People were coming in and saying, ‘Give me five dollars on number four, or three dollars on number two,' ” the reporter told Trimble. “He wanted to call the police right away and have them raid the place,” Trimble says. “I said, ‘You damn well better not do that; we'll assess this in the morning.' Sure enough, it turned out the people were coming in there to buy gasoline.”

“You didn't want to get called into his office,” Loftus says. “If he walked out into the newsroom and pointed to you and said ‘Get in here,' it was going to be a bad day to say the least. You knew you were going to get the speech, and the speech always had the same line: ‘This is the worst piece of shit I have seen in forty years of journalism.' The problem was he was usually right.”

Trimble wasn't especially fond of investigative reporting, but to him no story was too small for painstaking detail. He wanted every possible question in every story answered. After the paper had been sent to the printer each morning,
reporters spread across northern Kentucky looking for news. They knew not to bother showing up the next morning without a well-developed and thoroughly researched story.

Although most of his staff regarded him as somewhat of a tyrant, Loftus says, they also recognized his genius. “There's no newspaper I can think of that was more cognizant of what was going on in its circulation area,” Loftus says. “It had a lot of the qualities of a really good tabloid. Trimble was a brilliant guy, but he had some unique ideas and it was a weird newspaper. He loved tearjerker stories about missing or sick children.”

Such stories inevitably earned darkly humorous unofficial headlines among
Post
staffers. “One story was the ‘Little Blue Ricky' story,” Loftus says. “Little Blue Ricky had some sort of heart condition which caused his complexion to fade and turn blue. Then there was ‘Tiny Mark Stone.' Tiny Mark Stone was an infant who was lost by his mother and nobody could figure out where he was. Trimble couldn't get enough of that story.”

A month after Tiny Mark Stone vanished, police located a dead baby that was almost certainly the missing infant. “But for some reason, maybe the advice of their lawyers, the parents never claimed the body,” Loftus says. “And the police couldn't positively identify the baby because the body had deteriorated. We ran this story called ‘Nobody Wants Dead Baby,' which for some reason strikes me as a really interesting headline when you think about it. Trimble told me to get out there and find out where they were going to bury this kid. I drove out to the county potter's field, this ugly patch of land out there somewhere and we ran this big picture and a caption, ‘Baby To Be Buried Here.' ”

After that particular story ran, dozens of telephone calls came into the newspaper from preachers and funeral directors, all offering their services. “Apparently, Tiny Mark Stone was buried in a proper burial service attended by no less than fifteen reporters and camera crews from every TV station in a fifty-mile radius,” Loftus says.

Another famous—and among his reporters, infamous—Trimble story was “Major the Dog.”

It all started when Tom Scheffey, then the
Post
's statehouse reporter and now senior writer of the
Connecticut Law Tribune
, received a telephone call about a wounded canine. “I wrote this fairly short but heart-wrenching story about this injured puppy with no owner,” he says. “A young woman who was an intern for us volunteered to take over the dog's care for a while. She came back and said we should put this dog out of its misery, but Vance picked up the phone and called a veterinarian and told him to make this dog live. Nobody thought it could be done, but Vance scared this surgeon into performing an operation.”

Trimble assigned Webb to attend the surgery. His story on the operation ran on the front page and featured a photograph of him in the operating room, wearing a surgeon's mask. Major the Dog survived to be adopted by a little boy. “Gary called that story his ‘claim to shame,'” Loftus says. “Everybody had some overplayed tearjerker story at that paper, and that was his.”

Greg Wolf occasionally accompanied Webb on his assignments. He recalls Webb griping about covering traffic accidents or murders and having to interview recently bereaved family members, a task some
Post
staffers jokingly referred
to as the “Good Morning Widow Jones. Well, You Are
Now
” beat. “He said his job was to go to the front door and ask the mother how it felt to have her son stabbed to death,” Wolf says. “He did that once and the lady didn't know about it yet.”

S
HORTLY AFTER HE
joined the
Kentucky Post
, Webb asked Sue to marry him. They were wed in a Unitarian ceremony in Indianapolis on February 10, 1979. “I remember Webb found a Unitarian Church,” Wolf says. “He said he told the minister ‘You can do whatever you want, but I don't want to hear you mention Jesus.'” The wedding reception took place at Wolf's bachelor pad. “We had spaghetti and wine,” Wolf adds. “It was a lot of fun, the best wedding reception I've ever been to in my life.”

After the wedding, Webb and his wife moved to a working-class neighborhood in Covington, Kentucky. “We lived in this place called Seminary Square, where people were trying to fix up these old homes,” Sue says. At the time, she was pregnant with their first son, Ian, and Webb was understandably concerned about her safety. After a thief broke into his car and stole his radio, he rigged up an alarm that would ring inside the house when someone tried to open the car door. “One day it started beeping,” Sue says. “Gary grabbed his rifle and this big black guy was pushing his car down the alley.”

Webb confronted the man. Instead of running away, the would-be thief came toward him, turning away only as Webb pulled the trigger. Bleeding from his backside, the man tore down the alley on foot before passing out. Fortunately, he
survived and was later convicted of trying to steal the car. “The neighbors got Gary a trophy,” Sue says. “After that, everything calmed down much more in the neighborhood.”

Scheffey remembers worrying that his friend might be charged in the shooting. “For a while it was thought they might bring Gary up on charges,” he says. “A lot of defense lawyers said they'd defend him for free if the cops laid a finger on him.” But the cops never charged Webb, who had a license for the gun and was acting in self-defense. “There's a big irony there,” Scheffey says. “Gary was the darling of the black community after the ‘Dark Alliance' story. But did anyone tell them about the incident where he shot a black guy in the ass?”

If Covington had its rough side, it had nothing on neighboring Newport, Kentucky. The city has cleaned up its image in the past twenty years, but in the early 1980s it was known among
Kentucky Post
reporters as “Sin City,” a red-light district for Cincinnati that was known as a mafia town. Monmouth Street, Newport's main drag, teemed with porno shops, bars, and strip clubs, some of which were regular hangouts for
Post
staffers.

The town had a colorful, populist mayor known as Johnny “TV” Peluso, who owned a TV repair shop downtown. He was renowned for passing out quarters to kids in the street whenever an ice cream truck drove by. In the mid-1980s, Peluso went to federal prison for lying to a grand jury and pressuring city employees to misuse public funds.

Shortly after joining the paper, Scheffey says, his colleagues brought him to a Newport club called the Pink Pussy Cat. “There was a dancer there named Savage Sheena
and she needed a volunteer she could go after with her bull whip,” he says. “I was twenty-five and clean cut and obviously not a plant and she took me out of the audience. I don't know what I was doing with a cigarette because I had quit, but she took that cigarette out of my lip from twenty-five feet away without splitting my nose.”

“It was like Vegas, a wild-ass town,” recalls Wolf, adding that he used to visit Newport with Webb when his friend was on assignment there. His favorite hangout was a strip club called the Brass Ass. “There was a juke box on the stage, the girls would come out and put a quarter in the box and dance completely nude,” he says. “It was like watching a gynecological exam from two feet away. Then they'd try to get you to buy a bottle of champagne. Gary interviewed a lot of those strippers. He got to be very popular with them.”

E
ARLY IN HIS
job at the
Kentucky Post
, while covering the police beat in Newport, Webb came across the story that would launch his career as an investigative reporter. On a cold January night in 1978 an unknown assailant walked into an adult bookstore on Monmouth Street, took out a handgun and shot the proprietor, Lester Lee, who died from his wounds at a local hospital. When police searched his pockets, they found a wallet full of business cards, several of which belonged to businessmen connected to the coal industry, and one bearing the name of a State Senator in Ohio.

Scheffey, who had just started studying law, told Webb he'd help him with the story. “I worked with him on some of the early stories,” Scheffey says. “But Gary did the lion's
share of the work. Gary was just enthralled with it. He traced down Lester Lee's story.”

Webb quickly discovered that Lee wasn't just an ordinary porn merchant; he was a reputed mobster who had been on the FBI's ten most wanted list. Lee was also the president of a coal company that didn't seem to have any other employees.

“Lee was basically a con man looking for the next big scam,” Scheffey says. “He wanted to be a big shot. Previously, he had been in speculative stocks, but then he capitalized on the oil crisis.” As Webb and Scheffey discovered, nations without their own oil industry were scrambling to get fuel sources. “Lee realized if you had a corrupt minerals engineer, you could send them proof you had a boatload of coal, get a letter of credit, and cash it before they realized it was a bunch of dirt,” he says. “That's why Lee died: the people who knew what he was up to caught up with him.”

Webb and Scheffey drove north to the state capitol in Columbus, Ohio, and interviewed State Senator Donald “Buz” Lukens, the politician whose business card had been found in Lee's pocket. Lukens, a Republican party activist, had been the Midwest campaign coordinator for Ronald Reagan's first presidential race in 1976. He didn't deny his relationship with Lee. It wouldn't have been convincing if he had, however: Webb and Scheffey confronted him with a photograph of himself, Lee, and Reagan getting off an airplane during a campaign stop.

“Lukens thought it was just fine to be doing business with Lester Lee,” Scheffey says. “Lee was his business associate, partner, friend, and resource. Lee wanted to impress Lukens and got him this plane. The plane was
used in a five-state swing that essentially launched Reagan's first presidential bid.” Scheffey went to Washington, D.C., and asked some questions at the Federal Elections Commission. “You have to report donations of that type of value, and they didn't,” he says.

Lee's murder—and his ties to Lukens and Reagan—formed the basis for what eventually became a goliath seventeen-part series that Webb and Scheffey authored together called, “The Coal Connection.”

“Vance [Trimble] was not crazy about the idea,” Scheffey recalls. “He said, ‘Webb, your trench coat is flapping in the wind.' Trimble discouraged Gary because he felt it was a disjointed international story, but he was doing what almost all editors do: they don't let excited young reporters take months and months or weeks or even unaccountable days to do complex investigative journalism.”

Webb didn't press his case with Trimble. Instead, he and Scheffey worked on the story in their free time for the next two years. The
Kentucky Post
finally ran the story in 1980, shortly after Trimble retired from journalism. The series had three major parts. The first focused on Lee, his coal credit scam, and his relationship to Lukens. The second exposed the fact that Kentucky was the only state in the country where heavy equipment used in coal mining wasn't registered. As a result of the relative lack of paperwork attached to the vehicles, Webb and Scheffey discovered, it was easy to export stolen tractors to other countries. The pair even discovered evidence that some of the vehicles had been shipped by organized crime syndicates to South America as collateral for major cocaine deals.