The Center for Public Integrity

On Saturday, April 7, 2012, one of the most extraordinary broadcast journalists in American history died at the age of 93. Mike Wallace piqued those in power for more than half a century, nowhere more famously than on the CBS News program "60 Minutes," between 1968 and 2008.

I first met Mike in 1984, when he called me out of the blue one day and asked if I had any interest in working for "60 Minutes." I had been an off-air investigative reporter at ABC News in Washington for more than six years, and I was restless. Within weeks, I had quit my job and moved my wife and daughter to the New York area. I worked as a producer for Mike Wallace at "60 Minutes" for roughly five very exciting and very difficult years, before quitting abruptly in late 1988. Why I broke a four-year contract and left — and how and why I later started the Center for Public Integrity — is a story for another day.

But my favorite investigative exposé with Mike at "60 Minutes" — and there were many great, poignant moments in which the powerful wilted under the lights and his fearless, tenacious questions — was actually my last piece as an associate producer to him, working closely with Lowell Bergman, eight years older than me, who I had met and worked with at ABC back in 1979. I proposed that we produce an investigative segment about a corrupt public school superintendent in Appalachia.

U.S. authorities have located international fugitive Kyung Ho Song in his native South Korea, more than a decade after he fled Illinois to avoid being tried for drunken driving and reckless homicide in an accident that killed a 43-year-old single mother.

The search for Song was reactivated last spring after the Chicago Tribune contacted prosecutors and police about the dormant case. Even though U.S. authorities discovered Song’s location in December, they have yet to formally request help from South Korean officials, and it is not clear when or if Song might be extradited back to Illinois.

His case provides another glimpse into the gaps and lack of coordination in the criminal justice system that allow border-crossing fugitives to avoid prosecution.

Law enforcement officials would not comment on why there was no progress in the case for so many years, but one official suggested that it languished because of a lack of communication among the police, county prosecutors, federal agents and Justice Department officials. All played some role in pursuing Song, but none seemed to take stewardship of the extradition effort and push the case.

The Tribune's “Fugitives From Justice” series, an examination of more than 200 international fugitives cases from northern Illinois and thousands more nationwide, spotlighted Song's case in November. Tribune reporters then teamed up with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to try to locate Song. 

Independent of authorities, Tribune and ICIJ reporters in recent weeks found Song in a glass and concrete high-rise apartment in Yongin, a quiet residential suburb about an hour and half’s drive from the capital city of Seoul.

During four interviews, the once-prosperous shoe store owner, who is now 73, bemoaned how his life had unraveled since his flight.

“I am such an unlucky guy,” Song said.

In the aftermath of receiving an F grade on the State Integrity Investigation for corruption risk, Maine’s governor and state leaders plan to take legislative action. Maine ranks 46^th among the 50 states.

Gov. Paul LePage said in a statement that his office has been reviewing data from the State Integrity Investigation and already introduced a bill earlier this year to improve the state’s lax financial disclosure requirements. The proposed legislation calls for legislators and executive branch officials to report whether their outside private organizations received state contracts.  

“This is the direction we need to move in to improve Maine’s grade,” LePage said. “It’s clear that many states struggle with this issue. However, it is an issue that I will continue to work on improving on behalf of the Maine taxpayer.” The bill has been approved in committee, but has not yet reached the Legislature for a vote.

As reported in the State Integrity Investigation, the state doled out millions — nearly $253 million between 2003 and 2010 — to organizations affiliated with lawmakers and public officials. None of that information was disclosed, nor was it required to be.  

The Federal Trade Commission today took up a case that had thwarted state authorities for years, accusing an Internet payday lender with ties to Indian tribes of illegally deceiving borrowers.

The agency is asking a federal judge in Nevada to order AMG Services of Overland Park., Kan., to stop the deceptive practices and pay back borrowers who its says got cheated.

“The defendants have deceived consumers about the cost of their loans and charged more than they said they would, said Malini Mithal, the FTC’s assistant director of financial practices. “The FTC is trying to stop this deception and get refunds for consumers.”

While the company has won arguments in state courts that it has tribal sovereign immunity, allowing it to make loans even in states that restrict or forbid payday loans, that protection doesn’t apply to the federal courts. Court records suggest the business has made more than $165 million, charging interest rates as high as 800 percent on small loans. Borrowers have complained in droves about the lender’s tactics. Law enforcement authorities have received more than 7,500 complaints about the business, the FTC says.

Among the defendants in the lawsuit is Scott Tucker, a professional race-car driver from Kansas City, Kan. Tucker became a millionaire from the payday-lending business he started more than a decade ago. When state investigators started digging into the company’s practices, Tucker came up with a plan to sell the business to three Indian tribes while continuing to run the company and to collect most of its profits, according to recent court records filed in Colorado.

The Center for Public Integrity and CBS News jointly investigated and exposed Tucker’s involvement in the tribal payday lending business in September.

Delaware lawmakers have launched a new legislative effort designed in part to improve the C- grade the state received on lobbying disclosure from the State Integrity Investigation. The First State’s grade ranked it 22^nd among the 50 states in that category.  

The bill would require lobbyists to disclose the number of each bill or resolution on which they lobbied. The measure also calls for electronic filing of expenditures and registration forms by lobbyists, and requires the state’s Public Integrity Commission to post reports online “to allow public to review such information organized by bill, resolution, lobbyist, employer and subject.” 

In a press conference Wednesday, Senate President Pro Tem Anthony DeLuca (D-Varlano), called the proposed legislation a “big step” for public accessibility.

“If you look overall at what we’re trying to accomplish, and you look at the electronics involved in this and the fact that we’re going to be getting an updated system that the public can easily access, that is a major thing,” DeLuca said.

But the bill does not address several areas in which Delaware lost points in the State Integrity Investigation. Delaware lobbyists would still not be required to disclose their salary or overall compensation — only expenses related to food, travel, gifts and entertainment. And oversight would apparently not be affected. On a State Integrity Investigation scorecard question about effective monitoring of lobbying disclosure, Delaware scored only 16 percent. 

Declaring “manufacturing is back,” Vice President Joe Biden gave a rosy — but not entirely accurate or complete — picture of U.S. manufacturing at a March 28 campaign stop in Iowa.

• Biden overstated — by 1.1 million — the number of manufacturing jobs lost before President Obama took office. He said the U.S. lost 5.8 million manufacturing jobs “during the 2000s, before we came in.” But that figure includes 2009 — Obama’s first year in office. The U.S. lost 4.7 million such jobs “before we came in.”
• Biden also cherry-picked his job figures when he declared the U.S. has added “430,000 new manufacturing jobs just since 2010.” That’s true. But since the start of the Obama administration in January 2009, the U.S. has 661,000 fewer manufacturing jobs — despite the recent job gains.
• In fact, manufacturing jobs represent a disproportionate share of job losses since Obama took office. In all, the U.S. has lost a net 864,000 non-farm jobs since January 2009 — a decline of one half of 1 percent. But manufacturing jobs are down 5 percent since then. One recent study found that at the current pace, it will take until 2020 for the U.S. to recover the manufacturing jobs lost since 2007.

Biden spoke about U.S. manufacturing to hundreds of people at PCT Engineered Systems in Davenport, Iowa. He brought this message: “Ladies and gentlemen, I come here today with a very, very simple message: Manufacturing is back. Manufacturing is back.”

But, in describing the economic situation the Obama administration inherited, Biden overstated the number of manufacturing jobs that had been lost before he took office.

Biden, March 28: "During the 2000s, before we came in, 5.8 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the United States of America."

A new ad from the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC Restore Our Future plays a game of gotcha politics. It grabs a comment from Rick Santorum — “I don’t care what the unemployment rate’s going to be” — out of context to frame an attack on the former senator’s record on economic issues.

In context, Santorum was making the point that the election was about something bigger — more “foundational” — than just the economy, that it was about less government intrusion into the private sector. And that his campaign “doesn’t hinge” on the unemployment rate.

The Restore Our Future TV ad airing in Wisconsin begins and ends with a clip of  Santorum saying, “I don’t care what the unemployment rate’s going to be. It doesn’t matter to me.”

In between, the ad attacks Santorum for his votes to raise the debt ceiling five times, his votes for earmarks including the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, and his vote against a national right-to-work law. We’ll get to those, but let’s start with the quote that anchors the ad.

Narrator, Restore Our Future ad: "On the economy, Rick Santorum says … "

Santorum: "I don’t care what the unemployment rate’s going to be. It doesn’t matter to me."

Santorum did, in fact, utter those words during a 40-minute speech at a campaign rally in Moline, Ill., on March 19. (You can hear it here, at about the 34:15 mark).

In the speech, Santorum talked about repealing the health care law and regulations enacted by the Obama administration that he said represent a fundamentally different view of the role of government in America from his.

That’s when he dropped the unemployment comment. Here’s a fuller context: