The Irish Problem

I wuz robbed by the St. Petersburg Times.

Right there on the Dec. 12 front page was a story written with all the breathlessness of a scoop. Unfortunately (for the Times), it was a story that I had repeatedly penned for more than seven years.

I'm not upset with Susan Taylor Martin, the writer who perpetrated the offense. Her beat is the world, she's seldom in the Tampa Bay area, and she says she hadn't seen my Weekly Planet stories — which were bona fide scoops.

But her editors and colleagues knew about my stories. I have talked with some of the Times folk about why they never picked up on the story. The repeated explanation, with a lot of hemming and hawing, was that the story wasn't important. Martin has proven the worth of my reports, so at least for that, thanks.

The question remains: Why didn't the Times (or the Tampa Tribune) do the story years ago?

And, I am soooooo amused at how the issue lays bare the Times' inability to admit that it sometimes goofs, in this case failing to give credit when credit is due. Presiding over that Cult of Infallibility and Inerrancy is Paul Tash, the latest member of the Times Elite Boys Club to rise to the top of the feudal heap they call management.

Here's the background: In early 1998, two federal prosecutors approached me. They told me how upset they were that Bobby O'Neill, the head of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney's Office, co-owned a Hyde Park Irish bar, Four Green Fields.

The bar had hosted fundraisers for Sinn Fein, an Irish political party often said to have a "military wing," the murdering, bombing, bank-robbing Irish Republican Army. In fact, there are no "wings." The Irish justice minister a year ago exposed the fact that Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams, Martin McGuiness and Martin Ferris are on the IRA military council — which destroys the make-believe that there is a firewall between the political party and the terrorists.

A third federal law enforcement officer later told me about O'Neill, so I figured this must be a hot bit of water cooler gossip at the U.S. Attorney's Office. I wrote a story. And another story. And another story. And another story. And many, many more stories.

The heart of the reports was that O'Neill was leading the prosecution against Sami Al-Arian, who was accused of raising money for, and praising the cause of, a terrorist group. Which is exactly what O'Neill's bar was doing. Heck, some of Four Green Fields' Sinn Fein shindigs featured that bold lad, terrorist-in-chief Gerry Adams.

Now, I've been an assignment editor at daily newspapers — including the Tampa Tribune. That was back in the days of real journalism, when an editor who heard that a G-man in charge of prosecuting terrorists is also funneling cash to terrorists would have jumped from his seat, chomped his cigar and yelled: "Get me a reporter. No, dammit, get me a half-dozen reporters. This is a helluva story!"

But the Times and the Tribune … well, they whistled Dixie. For years.

It was understandable for the Trib. The paper's Michael Fechter has been widely viewed as a public relations conduit for the feds' crusade against Al-Arian. The Tampa paper wasn't going to bite the hand — even if shortchanging the public was the price.

But the Times? A very small part of the reason is that the bosses there don't like me much — I've exposed more than a few blemishes in the paper's self-professed perfection. I guess professional vendetta overcame news judgment, and they let O'Neill alone.

A bigger factor is that the Times is as much in the business of giving cover to the U.S. Attorney's Office as the Trib. Despite some clear indications of misconduct among the prosecutors in several cases, the two daily newspapers, with all of their resources, have remained cheerleaders for the feds.

Even after the prosecutors lost a stunning defeat in the Al-Arian case — a clear victory for civil liberties — the faux liberal Times in an editorial castigated Al-Arian for what the paper depicted as an unworthy win. The Times editorial neglected to note the serious deficiencies in the government's case, other than benevolently stating the feds were good at connecting dots. (No, the feds never had a case.)

Noteworthy, the Times chided Al-Arian for his angry words from more than a decade ago — but the paper somehow has missed the same sort of hateful language that emanates from the Irish bar owned by O'Neill. Substitute "Brits" for "Israelis" and Al-Arian's words are almost identical to the songs and slogans at Four Green Fields.

Like I said, the Times can't claim it didn't know about what goes on at the tavern. Heck, Martin's editor, Bill Duryea, has even written on the IRA bashes at Four Green Fields (although not about O'Neill's complicity).

Three years after my reports began, the Times did once mention — 29 paragraphs into a happy-news puff piece on Four Green Fields — that O'Neill owned part of the bar. However, there were no tough questions for the barkeep of a tavern popular with many Times scribes. O'Neill was allowed to claim the bar wasn't "pro-IRA," which would have been belied by even a casual look at the hate-Britain posters on the walls, some of which recruited support for Sinn Fein. Al-Arian, of course, was accused of providing similar boosterism for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Martin's Dec. 12 story was pretty good, although she got a few things wrong. (Martin apparently didn't know — maybe her bosses intentionally didn't tell her — that O'Neill had been Al-Arian's Torquemada for years. Martin described him in the story as remote from the case.)

"All my reporting on this was independently done and any records cited were verified by Bill Adair, our Washington bureau chief, going to the Justice Department and looking at them himself," Martin said in response to a gripe I e-mailed her.

Martin did become aware of my work three days before her story was printed. The U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman, Steve Cole, in a backhanded compliment, told her that the Planet and "disgruntled (federal) employees" were keeping the story alive.

The Times didn't mention my many, many stories, and the newspaper should have. This is an era when words such as "ethics" and "transparency" dominate newsrooms. The Times is owned by a journalism school and think-tank, the Poynter Institute, that champions ethics. Not giving credit to another journal's investigation is, well, just plain unethical. Sort of like mentioning Watergate without nodding at the Washington Post.

Here's where we get to a second story. Martin impugned my stories on O'Neill because I used "anonymous" sources. The Times has a policy against anonymous sources.

The truth is that the paper does use such sources. It just deceives the readers about them.

I'd prefer to name all of my sources — but people fear retaliation. Both the Times and the government can be very vindictive. I do tell readers when I'm citing Mr. Anonymous, and I describe the source as fully as possible.

In comparison, last June, the Times reported: "[C]ontroversial federal prosecutor Jeffrey Del Fuoco is out of a job." The Times didn't say how it knew that — it used what we hacks call the "voice of God," which is a cheap, dishonest way of not telling the readers that an anonymous source, one in this case with a political agenda, was behind the story.

The newspaper, as it turned out, was dead wrong. (Two months later, del Fuoco did quit.)

The Times ran a correction on the June account — but it was as mendacious as the story. The correction acknowledged that del Fuoco wasn't fired — but never told you how the newspaper so badly screwed up. It's that Tash Cult of Denial.

So, I'll stick with my sources, anonymous when necessary. And the next time the Times needs help with a scoop, give me a call. Maybe you'll get all of the facts right.

Want to read the real scoops by Senior Editor John Sugg on the federal prosecutor who owns a bar that raises money for terrorists? See Sugg's blog at www.johnsugg.com.

This article appears in Dec 21-27, 2005.