Most states have their incorporation records on computers, but not Rhode Island. Twice, the secretary of state had persuaded the legislature to put money for computers into his budget. Both times, he’d spread the sugar around by ordering them from a local middleman, the brother of the House Appropriations Committee chairman, instead of directly from the manufacturer. Both times, someone leaked the delivery time to an interested party. Both times, the delivery trucks got hijacked. The way I heard it, the Tillinghast brothers pulled the jobs and fenced the computers to Grasso for twenty cents on the dollar.
That’s why I was standing at the counter thumbing through paper records again. Along with a few vague remarks under the heading “Purposes of Incorporation,” the documents listed each company’s address and the names of its officers and directors. The addresses were all Providence post office boxes. I didn’t recognize any of the names. Under Rhode Island law, the people behind a corporation could remain anonymous and often did. The names filed with the state could be anyone from the cast of The Sopranos to a dozen winos from the Pine Street gutter.
Then I looked again and realized I knew the directors of one of the companies: Barney Gilligan, Joe Start, Jack Farrell, and Charles Radbourn—the catcher, first baseman, second baseman, and best pitcher for the 1882 Providence Grays.
I scrawled it all in my notebook, but I couldn’t see anything in it.
When I crossed Westminster Street to fetch Secretariat, it was getting dark, the end of a typical day in the life of L. S. A. Mulligan, investigative reporter: A personal attack from the mayor. A fruitless interview with a source. A tedious records search that produced nothing unless you wanted to count the eye strain and dripping sinuses.
I used to get discouraged by days like this, but over the years I’ve learned that it seldom comes easy. You spend long working days listening to idiots drone on at public meetings, getting lied to by cops and politicians, chasing down false tips, having doors slammed in your face, and standing in the rain at 4:00 A.M. watching something burn. You get it all down in your notebook, every detail, because you can never be sure what might turn out to be important. And then you get drunk and spill beer on your notes. Unless you’re one of the few who lands a job at The New York Times or CNN, the pay is shit, and no one will ever know your name.
Why does anyone do it? Because it’s a calling—like the priesthood but without the sex. Because unless somebody does it, McCracken is right and freedom of the press really is just for suckers. Me? I do it because I stink at everything else. If I couldn’t be a reporter, I’d be squatting on the floor at the bus station hawking pencils out of a tin cup.
Sometimes it pays off. A few years ago, a source tipped me to a hot pillow joint in Warwick where the mob occasionally repaid the state police commandant for his frequent acts of kindness. I spent five weeks staking it out, surviving on Big Macs and caffeine, and peeing in a Mason jar. I sang along to my Tommy Castro and Jimmy Thackery CDs so many times that I learned the lyrics by heart. I gained eight pounds, got a bad case of the Red Bull shakes, and was still there holding a camera with a long lens when the commandant rolled up in his Crown Vic. A half hour later, two hookers in halter tops arrived to keep him company.
The best photo showed him standing in the open motel-room door, a half-naked hooker behind him blowing him a good-bye kiss. His hair was mussed, his tie was undone, and he was reaching down to zip his gaping fly. The paper ran it three columns wide at the top of page one, and for a week it was the talk of the town.
If this were Connecticut or Oregon, he might have been in a fix. But this is Rhode Island. He’s still on the job.
20
Logan Bedford’s insistent tenor blared from the TV over the bar. “Remember Sassy? She’s the big loveable mutt who supposedly walked all the way across the country to be reunited with her owners. Well, wait till you hear what really happened. You’ll be shocked!”
With that, Channel 10 Action News broke for commercial, and we all returned to drinking and swapping stories about other newspaper screwups. I was on my fourth Killian’s. Ulcer be damned; tonight I needed beer.
Logan had called the newspaper for comment, tipping us off to what was coming, so we’d fled the grim visage of the city editor and found a place more suitable for our gallows humor.
We’d been at it for nearly an hour already, Gloria kicking off the game of can-you-top-this by swearing that the small North Carolina paper where she got her start once reported a cat show with the headline NORFOLK PUSSY BEST IN SOUTH.
Abbruzzi had the floor now, spinning a tale about her days with the AP in Richmond, when a reporter trying to get literary with a weather story wrote, “Jack Frost stuck his icy finger into Virginia Tuesday.”
Sean Sullivan, a night-side copy editor for forty years, chipped in with a story about the drunk who covered Pawtucket City Hall for us back in the seventies. Not about to let the city fathers cut into his drinking time, he’d skip the council meetings and drop by the newsroom of the rival Pawtucket Times later to peek at their story. One day, the Times’ city-hall reporter banged out a fake lead about three councilmen and the police chief resigning after admitting they’d bought an old motel with city money and turned it into a brothel. Next morning, it was in our paper under the drunk’s byline. The big news in the Pawtucket paper was the council debate over whether to hire two more crossing guards.
“Took years, but we eventually lived that one down,” Sullivan said, “so maybe we’ll eventually live Sassy down too.”
Unless you’re a member of the tribe, you have no idea how hard journalists take mistakes. Sure, the business occasionally attracts a fraud like Jayson Blair, the reporter who got fired for making stuff up at The New York Times. But the lies they tell hurt the rest of us, and so does every honest mistake that makes readers doubt what we print.
“If you write ‘Blackstone Street,’ which is in the poor part of town, when you mean ‘Blackstone Boulevard,’ which is in the rich part of town, no one will believe anything in your story,” my first city editor, the legendary Albert R. Johnson, once told me. That mistake cost me three nights’ sleep.
As we waited for Logan to come back and shock us, it was Veronica’s turn to tell a story.
“My first job after college, I had the police beat at a little paper in western Massachusetts. The editor, an old fart named Bud Collins, wouldn’t print the word rape. Thought it would offend the sensibilities of our delicate readers. He insisted we write criminal sexual assault instead. One day, I used rape in a quote. I mean, you don’t change quotes, right? When my story came out, it had the victim running down the street screaming ‘Criminal sexual assault! Criminal sexual assault!’ ”
We all howled, but the commercial was over now, and the foxlike face of Logan Bedford was smirking again above the bar.
“I’m here with Martin Lippitt in the Silver Lake section of Providence,” he said, the camera angle widening to show a thirty-something standing beside Logan. “Martin, please tell us what you know about the amazing dog named Sassy.”
“Well, it’s like I told you. Her name isn’t Sassy. It’s Sugar. And there’s nothing amazing about her at all.”
“Sassy is really Sugar?”
“That’s right, Logan. See, I left her with some friends for a couple of weeks to go snowboarding in Vermont, but she managed to get away from them. Didn’t wander far though, just a few doors down.”