Lessons in investigative journalism: Carol Marin at TEDxMidwest

Transcriber: Mishal Ali Reviewer: Denise RQ Thank you very much! So, I've learned a lot of lessons as an investigative reporter, and I thought we'd just get right into it. Lesson number one: you could get somebody killed.

(Laughter) I've reported on organized crime for a long time over the years and in 1980 in particular, I covered organized crime in Chicago, and a multi-millionaire mob bookmaker by the name of William "B . J. " Jahoda.

He worked for the Cicero crew. We in Chicago know that back in the day, that means it was Al Capone's territory. He worked for a mob.

What do we say about Rocky Infelice? A really bad guy. It was one of the cruelest, toughest, meanest crews and Rocky Infelice was someone to be reckoned with.

"B" is what we called Jahoda, what everybody called Jahoda. He was a formal newspaper guy, he was a brilliant word-smith. He was an operator, he could do the numbers in his head.

And he could keep books, and count odds and could figure it out. But it was also, at the heart of it, a decent man. Over many profitable years, Rocky get very testy, because they were renegade bookmakers in Chicago.

They were independent guys, they weren't kicking over to the Outfit, and that was a bad thing. Rocky ordered Jahoda to go pick some of those guys up on some ruse or another and then, drop them off. "Drp them off" said Rocky, "and don't look back!

" Well, one of those bookmakers was slaughtered in B. J. 's own kitchen.

It was a bloody mess. He couldn't take it anymore and in 1989, he agreed to be wired up by the feds to take down Rocky and his crew, and believe me, this was a first, this never happened in Chicago. Nobody penetrated the Chicago Outfit and the whole street crew, but Bill Jahoda did, and at great peril.

The first time he put on a wireless microphone, he thought it would be some little tiny transistor radio. It was the size of a pack of cigarettes and they put it in the small of his back. He said it was like a brick.

He said when he went into his first undercover meeting, he felt like a San Diego chicken in a funeral parlor, he thought everybody knew. After six weeks of unbelievable testimony in Federal Court, including that most memorable moment I sat through, when even the judge laughed, because B was describing Rose Laws, a famous Chicago madam, and how she would provide "her girls" to the boys in Rocky's crew. Jahoda called it "horizontal refreshment.

" (Laughter) B. J. Jahoda took down the whole street crew.

Rocky went to prison, B went into hiding, into witness protection. And he decided to give me his first TV interview. We were terrified.

The Mob wanted to kill him. We had to be careful about the meeting place. We decided on a hotel in Wisconsin, outside the northern district of Illinois.

But you know, we don't travel light. So we had 2 camera crews, 3 producers, me, and if somebody watched the Channel 5 news, they could spot me. We were terrified that we were going to get him killed, and I think B was pretty worried about it too.

We didn't get him killed, thank God! And in the interview, I've got to tell you, it was just something! Because people called him a rat, we called the story "Diary of a Rat.

" B. J. Jahoda did his civic duty, and stopped helping people get killed, but it was pretty tough.

And when the interview was almost over, I said: "Do you still everyday fear for your life? " And he said: "Let me just put it to you this way. " "They'd start the party by scooping out my eyeballs with a teaspoon.

" Lesson two: somebody may want to kill you. My next door neighbour called one morning frantically and said: "Who are the guys in your backyard with the weapons under their arms? " (Laughter) It was a long story, but it begins with a guy named Jeff Fort.

Fort is in federal prison now, he's been in and out for these many years. But even to this day, he remains one of Chicago's most feared and most notorious gang leaders. He was a child of the Great Migration.

He came up from Aberdeen, Mississippi, in the 50s, to Woodlawn on the South Side of Chicago. And it was odd, because he was skinny, semi-literate at best, but he was magical. He was a leader.

He led thousands of followers in the 60s and 70s, and they called him "Angel. " And in the Lyndon Johnson War on Poverty's years, Jeff Fort got some of that federal money, about a million dollars, that went to community organizations and people with natural leadership. And he scammed the government, stole the money, went to federal prison.

But smart enough to realize in federal prison that religious organizations experience a level of constitutional protection. So he went: "Aha! I will form a religion, not a gang!

" It came to be known as the El Rukns, a Muslim religious organization. And out of prison Jeff came back to the streets of Chicago with his El Rukns. The Rukns were not just deadly, they were small, they were secretive.

And the government had a hell of time penetrating them and tried for many years. Jeff quickly went back to prison on a different charge, it was was a drug charge. And besides being a religious leader, he was very good on a pay phone.

And so, from the pay phone in another joint, for 3500 hours of wire taps, the feds were listening in, as he instructed his followers to make a deal with Muammar Gaddafi. And they go to Libya. Because they are Muslims and will get to know Gaddafi.

And for 2. 5 million dollars, Jeff's group promises promises that they will commit acts of domestic terrorism and shoot airliners out of the sky. And the feds got him.

And he was in terrible trouble in that trial. In the meantime, I'm doing a documentary on him, it's called "Angel of Fear. " And the phone rings at home, and it's an El Rukn hitman named Billy Doyle and El Rukn hitmen don't call reporters at home, so I knew I was in trouble.

I called NBC, I called the feds and I called the police. I didn't want to call anybody, because as a reporter, you belong to nobody's club. NBC sent in security, the feds and police were watching the house.

The security system that was installed came with a panic button that looks like a garage door opener, and if you punch it with your finger, it creates a class-one emergency and cops come to your house. One morning, I am in the tub, with my six month old son, and my two-year-old comes into the bathroom and goes: "Look, mom! " (Laughter) I knew I had 30 seconds to either take my mascara out from under my eyes or put on a robe, because in 30 seconds the cops were at the door, the doorbell was ringing.

When I opened the door, there were two men in firing position, they had run through the wet cement next door, where they were relaying sidewalks, cement was on their shoes. . .

And I said: "I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry! I really am sorry!

" Next day, I called Jeff's lawyer, and I said: "Tell him he made a really bad mistake in doing this. " The lawyer said: "Jeff says he's sorry. " But I knew I had to say sorry to somebody else.

Early the next morning, I packed up the kids, baby on my back, Josh next to me. We get a cab, we go to Dunkin' Donuts, get 12 dozen donuts, put them in the cab, drive to the 18th district. A hooker and a drunk hold open the door as they've been let out of the tank.

We go into the 18th district I put Josh up on the desk, and I said: "Josh, tell the sergeant that we are sorry. " (Laughter) And the cop, who had an Irish brogue, of course, goes "Oh ma'am, don't be so hard on the boy! " (Laughter) Lesson number three: prepare to be unpopular.

Over the years, we've done stories on the most popular people in our midst. That would include Michael Jordan at the pinnacle of his career, Barrack Obama at the beginning of his historic ascendancy to the presidency. And we are currently at The Sun-Times engaged in yet another story about the nephew of the Daley clan and whether he got special consideration in an altercation resulting in the death of a young man in 2004 for which he had not been charged.

All three of those stories have generated great controversy for us. Jordan's charity was designed really as a public relations thing for him; giving money to the needy was only a tiny percentage of it. Obama had a well-connected fundraiser named Tony Rezko whom he didn't want talk about during that first campaign, and we did.

It took 18 months to persuade him to come to our editorial board and explain it. There's been a special prosecutor appointed in the case of the Daley nephew and the young man who died, David Koschman. There has been push-back on all of these stories, from all kinds of people, but we did the stories anyway, because it is a privilege to be a reporter.

In exchange for that privilege, I always tell journalism students, that you give up some of your normal rights as a citizen. Which means you don't belong to a political party, you don't belong to a special interest group, and sometimes, you don't get invited very many places to dinner, because people don't want talk to you. And you know what?

That's OK. Lesson number [four]: prepare to get more credit than you deserve. In 1997, I quit my job at NBC and so did my co-anchor, Ron Magers.

At that time, NBC was under quite a different management, they're gone now. But they had decided to jazz up our newscast, and they believed that doing that would be best accomplished by hiring Jerry Springer as a commentator whom we would introduce on the 10 o'clock news. Ron and I felt it would forever wreck the integrity and credibility we'd built.

We protested that it would be a mistake. We lost, they won. We quit.

Our audience went on revolt, called in so many calls, they melted down the switchboard. ten thousand calls came in, and voom. Ron and I got a lot of attention.

National new stories were done about us, we're given credit, praise and all that. The fact of the matter is that people quit their jobs every day on principle. I got 2000 letters, easily, one of them from the wife of a DCFS, Department of Children and Family Services worker, a guy who refused to relocate battered children in a shelter in Chicago because he believed they would be sexually prayed upon there.

He was fired. I went to the grocery store one day, and the butcher there, his name was Bruno, told me how he, the sole support of a wife and kids, refused, at another store he worked at, to short-weigh meat, put his thumb on the scale. And he was fired.

The social worker and the butcher didn't got all that press that we got, didn't get the attention, nobody wrote a story about them. And they took risks that were far greater than we did, for rewards that were far less than Ron and I experienced. The day after I quit NBC, there was a letter left for me at home.

No post mark, no real return address. It was from B. J.

Jahoda, who picked it up on the news. He was somewhere in witness protection, and the letter read: "Dear Doll, sometimes, we just have to walk away. Love, B.

" Lesson five. . .

be prepared for what you cannot prepare for. There's a sense of mission for most of us in my business, a sense or purpose. Like an emergency room nurse that runs in when something happens, or a firefighter who hears the fire call and goes.

It's not just because you're supposed to do it, because you trained to do it. It's because you want to do it, because you believe in doing it. On 9/11, I was in New York, working for "60 Minutes," and "60 Minutes II.

" Like a classic Midwesterner, I'm in there way early, because New Yorkers come in later. And there are monitors, of course, everywhere in those places. And there are only of couple of us there, and someone screamed out "Oh my God!

" as they saw on TV the first plane hit the first tower. I'd been a reporter long enough to know when something big happens, you get there, you get there as fast as you can, because police lines will close around it and you won't get close enough to see as much as you need to see. I headed down to the WTC armed with my trusty phone.

By that time, the second tower had been hit. And I'm on the West Side highway, as thousands are streaming this way, I remember one of them said: "Stop, turn around! " In this crazy sense of invincibility you have when you do the work you do, I said: "CBS news, don't worry!

" (Laughter) And I kept going. I assumed my cell phone would work, but thousands of cell phones frantically calling jammed every system. I was on the West Side highway when I saw the first tower fall to the ground.

And I kept going. I got around by West street and there is ash on the ground and there are firefighters, and I showed them my ID, and one of the firefighters said: "Just walk down the middle of the road, because there is falling stuff. " And there were stretchers, but nobody was on them and paramedics were waiting.

And that's when, as I'm walking down, I feel the ground rumble. And the firefighter ahead of me turns around, screams "Run! " I could see a fireball come out of the base of the building, probably the ignition of jet fuel, as the building began to collapse.

But you don't have time to look at those things. I turned, I fell, he grabbed me by my waist, threw me on my feet. And we ran, and he had the foresight to spot another building that had a marble overhang, and he slammed me against it, and he covered my body with his.

I could feel his heart banging against my backbone, because it was pounding so hard. The morning light had turned completely black in a second. There were particles everywhere.

You know, there were particles of people, and desks, and buildings, and pens and things, and we couldn't see. Couldn't see your hand in front of your face, because it was so black. I thought to myself, this is really how firefighters die.

It isn't the flames, it is the smoke, because you can't breathe. The firefighter, once we felt that the building was down, handed me off to a New York City police officer, who literally, held my hand, as we put our hands over our faces to try to keep going, try to find more and more light, to find our way out. I didn't think to ask the firefighter's name.

I did not ask the firefighter to tell me who he was. And that haunts me to this day. What kind of reporter was I, you know, that I didn't think to get his name!

I got everybody else's after that. I got the police officer's, I got the people who put the oxygen on me. I got some paramedics who got me half way down the street.

I got the name of the bus driver who let me hijack his bus to take me to the CBS broadcast center. Just not the firefighter's name, not his. I don't know if he survived.

He turned back, and went back to the site of the second fall. I've looked for him, I've written letters to authorities, I've told this story like this often in hopes that someday, somewhere, someone will know who he is. I got on the set, at CBS, sat down next to Dan Rather, covered in dust, and I reported what I'd seen.

The biggest lesson I have learned of all, every story, every day, every year that I do this. . .

Is that it is a privilege to be a reporter. To do this work. Thank you very much.