Word: hud
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...short answer: sleeping. Almost 5,000 reporters prowl the nation's capital, and during the Reagan era, many Washington insiders knew what any inquisitive reporter should have known: HUD, with its million-dollar contracts, was a feeding trough. "Everybody who talked about HUD knew there was money to be made," says Republican political consultant David Keene. Despite recurring gossip about payoffs and even some hard evidence, the nation's best TV news organizations, newspapers and newsmagazines -- including TIME -- failed to report the corruption at HUD until last spring, when an internal investigation jump-started the story. The entire episode says...
...least one reporter picked up the scent early on. In December 1986 Joan Jacobson, a housing reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun, received a tip: Rhode Island developer Judith Siegel was throwing James Watt's name around HUD offices in Baltimore in connection with a low-income-housing rehabilitation project that Siegel wanted to develop in Essex, Md. Like any good reporter, Jacobson started asking questions. Why would the former Interior Secretary, now a Wyoming-based businessman and a professed enemy of Big Government, be involved in such a project? Jacobson started combing every public file on the 312-unit...
...turned out, Jacobson's source was right. Watt had received a $300,000 consulting fee from Siegel for making eight telephone calls and holding a 30- minute meeting with HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce to ease the way for the project. Siegel claims she does not recall talking with Jacobson in 1987. "You think I'm going to risk five, six or seven hundred thousand dollars talking to somebody on the Baltimore ((Evening)) Sun?" asks the developer today. Local housing officials, curious about Watt's involvement, were cheering Jacobson along. "I wanted her to find the facts," says Maryland community-development...
...Washington-based national press missed the warning signs altogether. In July 1988 Multi-Housing News, a trade publication, ran an extensive story on influence peddling in HUD's Moderate Rehabilitation program, spelling out, with almost every detail except the malefactors' names, the $2 billion scandal that has since emerged. Reports from HUD's own inspector general sounded similar tocsins. But none of Washington's investigative journalists seemed to be listening. Part of the reason was that news organizations had tired of HUD after reporting the massive Reagan budget cutbacks at the agency in the early 1980s; once most...
While sources went uncultivated and leaks dried up, the capital's best reporters were caught by other stories, like allegations against former Attorney General Ed Meese and the Iran-contra scandal. HUD remained the gulag of Washington journalism, a backwater with an obscure chief administrator they dubbed "Silent Sam" Pierce. There was a distinct lack of glitz and glamour about the HUD beat. "We were looking elsewhere," explains syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. "We don't have enough eyes to look at HUD. The very name HUD says dullness, dullness, dullness...