Word: zekman
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That is what investigators from the Better Government Association and a team of Chicago Sun-Times reporters headed by Pamela Zekman and Pamela Warrick discovered after a five-month undercover probe of six of the city's 13 legal abortion clinics. Two of the clinics performed admirably, the investigators say, but four others, which together do one out of every three abortions in the Chicago area, are assembly-line outfits concerned only with making money...
Chicago reporters have traditionally spent as much time hanging around bars as they have muckraking. But not even in The Front Page did any of them ever combine both pastimes so ingeniously. Last January Sun-Times Reporter Pamela Zekman (who has shared two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting) got Editor-in-Chief James Hoge's O.K. to buy and operate a bar. In May, having joined forces with the Better Government Association, a local citizens' group that works with journalists and others fighting corruption, the Sun-Times made a $5,000 down payment on a seedy tavern near...
...August, EGA Chief Investigator William Recktenwald, 36, an ex-cop, and Zekman, 33, were at the Mirage, serving up beer (and bribes). Also staffing the bar were Sun-Times Reporter Zay Smith, 28, who boned up for the story with a five-day stint at bartending school, and EGA Investigator Jeff Allen, 28. Sun-Times photographers, posing as repairmen, filmed the payoffs from a concealed loft...
...team found that many victims and witnesses were reluctant to talk. Says Zekman: "People were afraid of the police department. We had to convince them that we were sincerely trying to pursue a social evil." Whenever this reticence was broken down, the team took extraordinary precautions to document material. To reduce the chances of reporting errors, key interviews were conducted by two newsmen. Injured victims were asked to provide medical records and given lie-detector tests. People with police records were dropped, as were witnesses whose accounts proved to contain even the smallest inaccuracies...
...month task physically and emotionally exhausting. Emmett George was shocked to discover that race was relatively unimportant in police brutality: "I found that there are a lot of black officers involved. Some of the most sadistic people were black, and those people need to go off the force first." Zekman was so moved by the case of the deformed boy whose mother had been beaten during pregnancy that she has arranged corrective surgery. The team rarely took a weekend off and usually worked double shifts. Jones last week was sending the four on vacations, hoping that their effort to police...