Word: hud
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...Kemp aide insists that the energetic Secretary is "holding up great" under the double strain of the cleanup while seeking to fulfill his own vision of what his department should accomplish. But with a third congressional inquiry of HUD about to begin, Kemp's visions are likely to remain on hold. More Republican political embarrassment also seems inevitable. One of the House subcommittees said it intends to question Carla Hills, now the U.S. Trade Representative and a former Secretary of HUD, about her efforts to help a mortgage company and a developer get HUD contracts...
PRESS: How reporters missed the HUD story...
...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...