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Leon Jordan: An enduring murder mystery

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 15, 2010| 2 Comments »

The Star’s Mike McGraw and Glenn Rice had a riveting, A-1 story Sunday about one of Kansas City’s greatest murder mysteries — the July 1970 slaying of civil rights leader and politician Leon Jordan.

The slaying, in which Jordan was gunned down outside his Green Duck Tavern at 26th and Prospect, occurred 10 months after I had arrived in Kansas City.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the murder at the time. I was a general assignment reporter for The Kansas City Times, the morning edition of The Star, and had not been exposed to Kansas City politics. I was busy writing all manner of stories, including a June report on Janis Joplin’s last appearance in the Kansas City area. (I interviewed her in the stands, between shows, at Memorial Hall in KCK. Four months later, she died of a heroin overdose in a Hollywood, Calif., motel.)

Soon enough, however, I got involved in political coverage and in 1971 I was assigned to the Jackson County Courthouse, covering politics and courts. (These days, papers generally have political reporters and courts reporters, and they don’t have the same reporters covering both “beats.”)
As a result, I got deeply interested in both politics and the court system, and I came to understand the significance of the Jordan case. 

Jordan was a co-founder of the renowned political group Freedom Inc., which controlled much of the black vote in Kansas City. The other founder was Bruce R. Watkins, a former city councilman who, in the 70s, was Jackson County Circuit Court clerk. He later ran for mayor but lost to Richard Berkley, who served three terms, from 1979 to 1991.

The two prosecutors who served during my years at the courthouse — first Joe Teasdale and later Ralph L. Martin — each took a stab at bringing the case to resolution. Both failed. Two days after the shooting, Teasdale announced first-degree murder charges against two men, Reginald Watson and Carlton Miller. He dropped the charges 10 days later because…well, he had the wrong guys.

Three years later, Martin announced the indictments of James A. Willis, Maynard Cooper and James “Doc” Dearborn. Willis was later acquitted when his alibi — that he was out of town the day of the murder — held up. The charges against Cooper and Dearborn were dropped. I later covered a case in which Willis, a career criminal, was charged; I think it was bank robbery. I spoke with him several times during the trial, and he was a slick operator, a flatterer. He told me, for example, that he had deduced that I wasn’t a cop because I was “too well dressed.”

There were all kinds of rumors about who killed Jordan and why — everything from politics to sexual indiscretions. Unlike many unsolved murders, however, there was never a prevailing theory about what happened, and there was never an “off-the-record” prime suspect, as far as I knew.

It was just a mystery. One thing wasn’t a mystery, though — how well the murder was planned. The crime occurred about 1 a.m. in steamy weather — temperature 86 degrees — as Jordan left the tavern and walked to his car. As McGraw and Rice reported, three black men drove up in a brown, late-1960s-model brown Pontiac. One of the men fired a shotgun at Jordan, bringing him down. Then, the shooter got out of the car and shot Jordan in the groin and chest as he lay on the sidewalk.

Both the gun and the car, which were found later, had been stolen. Police found partial fingerprints (I guess at least one of the assailants didn’t wear gloves), but a match was never made.

Now, Alvin Sykes, a well-meaning and effective civil rights activist, is pushing hard for police to reopen the case. One problem, however, is that physical evidence, including the murder weapon, has gone missing from the Police Department’s evidence room. Also, there’s no new information.

No less an anti-crime figure than Alvin Brooks, a former police officer and city councilman, is against reopening the case. “Forty years later, do you want to do some things, say some things, and have some things come out that would cause embarrassment, when there is a good chance that the perpetrators are deceased?” Brooks was quoted in the story.

Reading between the lines, I think it’s clear that Brooks doesn’t want to see allegations of sordid affairs and infidelities mar Jordan’s reputation as a civil rights leader and political pioneer. 

I agree. This is one case that, in my opinion, will never be solved. I would sure like to know, however, everything that James Willis knows about that case. For the record, Willis, who is alive, still denies any involvement.

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As you were….

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 2, 2010| 1 Comment »

For me, the most uncomfortable part of The Star’s afternoon news meetings — held every day at 4 p.m. to assess how the next day’s paper was coming together — occurred at the end of the meeting.

It was part of the wind-down, after the various editors had spoken on behalf of their stories and after everyone had weighed in with their opinions regarding which stories should go on the front page.

That’s when the managing editor, or whoever was presiding at the meeting, would say these words: “Any corrections?”

Whenever I  had to acknowledge that I, or someone on the desk I was representing, had a correction for the next day’s paper, I always wanted to curl up in a ball and not be seen. That being impossible, however, I would try to keep my voice steady and state quickly and concisely what the error was and how it occurred. Then I’d try to beat the crowd out of the room. 

In the newspaper business, the journalist who errs — and, by extension, his or her editors — bathes in the waters of ignominy. It is the grade-school equivalent (although no longer imposed on children) of sitting at the front of the room wearing the dunce cap.

With long schooling in the matter of errors, then, I read with great interest readers’ representative Derek Donovan’s column on the editorial page on Sunday, June 27.

It was a very informative column, for readers and reporters alike, because it summed up The Star’s approach to corrections at this point in its history. Donovan made at least two basic points:

1) Readers who are paying attention to such things want to see the corrections run in the same spot every day;

2) When it comes to corrections caused by bad information from a source, the paper should consider changing its style and say that the problem was source related. 

I don’t have a strong opinion about his second point — telling the readers when misinformation from sources was the root of a problem — but I do think that if The Star decided to do that, reporters would be working very hard to convince editors that “sources” were the cause of many problems.

Reporters will do just about anything to stay out of the corrections column. I know because more than once I didn’t self-report errors that no one but me knew about in my stories. 

On the other major issue that Donovan addressed — the placement of corrections — I have very strong opinions.

Donovan was careful — I don’t know why — not to say whether he thought the corrections should always be in the same place. As I see it, when the corrections do not run on the same page every day, when the editors make the readers go looking for them, it tends to devalue the corrections. 

The Star used to run the corrections on A-2 every day. Some time ago — months or maybe a year or more — the corrections began moving around. Donovan explained the variance by saying that the Page 2 design “doesn’t always allow room for the complete list.”

Well, let me tell you, if The Star really wanted to run the corrections on A-2, the page designers could make it happen. They don’t need rulers anymore; the computer does all the math, so don’t give me any page-design excuses.

Taking my basic point a step further, when the paper devalues the corrections, I believe it sends a subtle signal to the journalists that acknowledging errors isn’t as important as it was when they were in the same conspicuous place every day. It reduces the pressure on the journalists to police themselves. 

On Tuesday, I sent an e-mail to Donovan, laying out my theory and asking him if he had any comment. He wrote back: “Nope, I don’t have any comment. I learned the hard way that interacting with anti-Star bloggers is a losing game for me.”

Hmmm. Anti-Star? Me? I don’t think so. Do you sense some defensiveness there? If that’s the prevailing view at The Star — the enemy is right outside the door! — it could go hand in hand with devaluing the corrections. The line of thought (unspoken, of course) could be: “Well, circulation is down, and we’re not getting read by as many people as we used to, so why should we do all these mea culpas on Page 2 every day?”

If that’s the thinking, it’s misguided. I believe it’s important for a paper to own up to its mistakes and to do so very publicly and conspicuously. Put them on the same small platform (Page 2) every day. That’s responsible journalism.

That’s what The New York Times does — puts them on Page 2. Sometimes The Times’ list of corrections takes up 15 or more column inches. But taking responsibility is good for the soul of a paper. Its’ humbling but, at the same time, ennobling.

The Star could stand to follow suit.

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A “big story” built on a shaky foundation

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 28, 2010| 1 Comment »

As it should, The Star is pushing hard to keep the Karen Pletz story alive and moving forward. 

In its zeal to stay ahead of the game, however, I think The Star made a big mistake in its latest story, published Sunday, by granting anonymity to three sources who didn’t deserve it.

The story essentially reported the contents of four letters, written three to five years ago, and sent to Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences board members about Pletz’ $1.2 million salary and her questionable expenditure of university funds.

Only one of the letter writers, physician Maureen Dudgeon, who led the university’s bioethics program, was willing to go on the record. She wrote an anonymous letter to several board members in April 2007 and resigned after the board took no action on her complaints.

Reporter Alan Bavley, The Star’s medical writer, built his story around Dudgeon precisely because she was willing to go on the record. From there, however, the story loses momentum because it devolves into anonymous sources.

The first letter to board members, for example, was written by a university employee in 2005.  Bavley does not say whether the employee signed his name to the letter, although I think we can assume that he did. The letter was sent to two board members, the IRS and the Missouri attorney general’s office.

Bavley wrote: “The writer asked to remain anonymous because of continuing ties to the medical community.”

To that, I say balderdash. If you think about it, it means that the writer of the letter would rather have the medical community regard him as discreet about outrageous conduct rather than someone courageous enough to expose reprehensible conduct. Furthermore, I’m sure that just about everyone who is intimately familiar with the Pletz situation is well aware of the letter writer’s identity. So what’s to hide?

To me, Bavley and his editors should have pushed the letter writer hard to go on the record…or the story should have run without the information.

Same for the third and fourth letters, one of which was sent by a student to board members and the other by a whistle-blower to the university’s auditing firm.

Now, the whistle blower has got to be widely known, otherwise she wouldn’t be a whistle blower. And yet, Bavley granted her anonymity “because of continuing relationships in the Kansas City health care community.”

Cop-out, that’s all you can say — by the whistle blower, Bavley and the editors. Everybody washes their hands and walks away.

As for the student — now a medical resident — she asked that her name not be used “because she feared reprisals.” That’s the oldest, tiredest excuse in the book.

Feared reprisals? From whom? People who would make life difficult for her because she had stood up for what was right? Because she saw obvious problems at her school and wanted to see them corrected? 

Ridiculous.  

Yet, I’ve been in Bavley’s shoes, and I know how difficult it is for a reporter to withhold anonymity. When you’ve got a source talking and the information is flowing — and you’ve already granted anonymity — the last thing you want to do is shut off the spigot.

Nevertheless, Bavley and his editors should have pulled in the reins on their eagerness to get the big, six-column story that they wanted. From the outset, they should have talked about the conditions under which they would grant anonymity, and that issue should have been re-evaluated every step of the way, depending on what the sources were saying and why they wanted to be off the record. Anonymity is not carte blanche; you can seek to change the terms along the way.  

If Bavley could have gotten just one of the three anonymous sources to agree to be on the record, along with Dudgeon, the story would have been much stronger and less gossipy.

Often, a reporter has to become a salesperson — first selling a story idea to an editor, then selling the idea to sources so they will want to participate and, finally, selling sources on the importance of putting their names behind what they believe in. 

In my book, Bavley gets a B-minus for the story and an “F” for salesmanship. Likewise, his editors get an “F” for failing to shepherd the story responsibly.

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McClatchy: Fair value estimate = $0

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 26, 2010| 2 Comments »

The latest edition of Morningstar StockInvestor, a monthly publication of the renowned independent investment and research firm, contains a very grim forecast for the McClatchy Co., owner of The Star and several other newspapers.

McClatchy stock , which traded at about $50 a share when the company bought out Knight Ridder in 2006, closed Friday at $4.28 a share.

Morningstar StockInvestor, which is available by subscription only, opened its review of McClatchy this way:

“Since its poorly timed acquisition of Knight Ridder in 2006, McClatchy has struggled under the multiple weights of declining revenues, high debt, large exposure to troubled housing markets, and the continuing shift of readers and advertisers from print to online. Given the persistence and severity of these conditions, we think equity shareholders are at risk of losing the entire value of their investment.”

Gulp. Those two sentences should make everyone working at The Star and other McClatchy papers, like the Sacramento Bee and the Miami Herald, not only cringe but start looking for new jobs.

While McClatchy and other newspaper chains have tried to paint a rosier-than-real picture of the industry by saying, essentially, “the losses are lessening,” Morningstar throws the tinted glasses aside.

“Our fair value estimate on McClatchy’s shares is $0.”

That’s right, Morningstar analyst John Ayling, who wrote the piece, thinks that the balance eventually will tip from stockholders’  interests to creditors’ interests and that stockholders will be left empty handed.

“McClatchy’s $4.6 billion purchase of Knight Ridder was a bold bet on the future of print journalism,” Ayling wrote. “The acquisition added more than $2.5 billion in debt to McClatchy’s balance sheet. It more than doubled both the company’s portfolio of daily mastheads and its annual revenues. However, in 2007, it took a noncash impairment charge of $3 billion — evidence that McClatchy overpaid for the Knight Ridder acquisition.”

Ayling sees newspaper industry weakness continuing. “During the next five years, we think that advertisers and readers will continue to gravitate away from newspapers and toward the ease and flexibility of the Internet. Internet-based classified ad sites allow advertisers to target readers with specific interests at lower cost than print classifieds.”

I want you to know that as I sit here and write this, I don’t feel good about it at all. One reason is that I bought a significant chunk of McClatchy stock (at about $50 a share) just before I retired in June 2006. Like McClatchy, I wanted to make my own bet on the future of print journalism. I also wanted to demonstrate my confidence in the new owners of The Star.

I remember clearly when McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt came into the newsroom shortly before the deal closed and talked about how he believed things would go well for McClatchy and us, the employees. When I asked him, in front of the newsroom audience, if he was planning any employee buyouts, he said, no, that McClatchy believed in adding people, not subtracting.

At that point, having been thinking about retiring after nearly 37 years with the paper, I knew that I had to make my own arrangements; there wasn’t going to be any golden parachute. A couple of months later, I retired, and the paper paid for a send-off pizza party in the Independence bureau, where I was an assistant metro editor.

I might have been the last person to get a company-paid going-away party.

The memories of that party, which marked a happy culmination of my career, help ease the pain of the subsequent stock-market loss I endured. For McClatchy stock, along with that of other newspaper companies, soon began a steep, steady decline.

In 2008, I sold out at $8 a share.

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Stanley McChrystal, Michael Hastings and the Rolling Stone article they will never forget

Posted in journalism, politics, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 24, 2010| 3 Comments »

With one incredible story, Michael Hastings has etched a place in the annals of journalism. 

Hastings, of course, is the reporter who wrote the Rolling Stone magazine story — not even on the newsstands yet — that brought down Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Afghanistan war commander whom President Obama fired Wednesday. 

Michael Hastings in Afghanistan -- Rolling Stone photo

What Hastings managed to pull off is an amazing journalistic feat. He gained ready access to McChrystal and his team of advisers for a month, after intending to spend just two days with him. During that time, Hastings played the wallflower, like any smart reporter would, while the general and his aides blazed away verbally at Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, national security adviser James Jones and other civilian leaders. 

I had never heard of Michael Hastings before this week. Turns out he is a former Baghdad correspondent for Newsweek and a blogger for True/Slant on Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In 2008, he had a book published — “I Lost My Love in Baghdad” — about the death of his girlfriend, who had joined him in Iraq and was killed in a 2007 ambush.     

If Hastings, who is about 30, wasn’t widely know before, he has certainly catapulted himself into the public eye now.  

When I read this article, I had two primary thoughts: First, I would loved to have been in Hastings’ shoes. And second, how in the world could McChrystal have been so stupid? 

But Hastings’ answers that big question in his story, which will be on the newsstands Friday. Hastings stood by with an open notebook and running voice recorder as McChrystal painted himself as an outsized egoist who had little or no respect for his civilian bosses. (Writer Jack Shafer of Slate has some interesting comments about giving reporters access for full-blown feature stories.)

Interestingly, the damage was done early in the story. A New York Times story says in effect that Obama had seen enough after reading the first few paragraphs.   

The article is appropriately titled “The Runaway General.” More damaging to McChrystal and his team is the subtitle, which reads: “Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.” 

Here are some key excerpts from the article… 

:: “The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict.” 

:: “Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked ‘uncomfortable and intimidated’ by the roomful of military brass.” 

:: “He (McChrystal) also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one meal a day…It’s a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war.” 

:: “Growing up as a military brat, McChrystal exhibited the mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow him throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and Vietnam, retiring as a two-star general, and his four brothers all joined the armed services. Moving around to different bases, McChrystal took solace in baseball, a sport in which he made no pretense of hiding his superiority: In Little League, he would call out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.” 

On Wednesday, Hastings was interviewed by Tom Ashbrook of radio station WBUR in Boston. Here are two excerpts from that interview…   

Q: What was General McChrystal’s response when his top aides were more or less trash-talking the administration?  For example, when an aide called Vice President Biden, “Bite Me” right next to McChrystal, did the general laugh? Was he in on the game? 

A: Oh yeah, no, he laughed, certainly. You know, this is their humor and I think the humor reflects something more. I think reflects a disdain for the civilian leadership in a way.  

Q: Did they know that you were there?  Did they notice you scribbling notes, Michael?  

A: Oh, yeah. I had my tape recorder and notepad out most of the time.  So it was always sort of unclear to me, you know, what was their motivation of allowing me in and all of this access. I think there’s a number of factors that were involved, but I think an important one is that they had had a number of very flattering profiles done on them over the past year, and so they were accustomed to sort of allowing access and having reporters play ball so they could give them more access later.  Well, that’s not really a game I’m interested in playing. 

McChrystal is the last of many big shots to succumb to hubris, and, thank God, reporters have been there many times to take the snapshot while those big shots have exposed themselves. 

Bravo, Michael Hastings!

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Extra cute conference?

Posted in journalism, sports, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 9, 2010| 2 Comments »

Like many other Big 12 fans, I’ve struggled with the question of whether Missouri should switch to the Big Ten Conference, if an invitation is extended. 

In a flash of grammatical and linguistic obfuscation, I found my answer a couple of days ago. In Saturday’s Star, sports writer Blair Kerkhoff reported on e-mail correspondence between two Big Ten officials that shed light on where the Big Ten might be headed in its quest to expand from the current 11 schools. (I know its odd that the Big Ten has 11 schools, but the Big Ten is a brand name that probably won’t change, even if it ends up with 15 members.) 

It was actually the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch that got its hands on the e-mails, and Kerkhoff properly credited the Dispatch. The e-mails were between Ohio State president Gordon Gee and Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany. In his message, Gee informed Delany that he had spoken to a University of Texas official, who had told him that if Texas was asked to join the Big Ten it would have a “Tech” problem. The problem, seemingly, was that Texas would be hard pressed to pull up stakes and leave fellow Big 12 member Texas Tech in the lurch. 

Jim Delany

Here’s where it gets interesting, and curious. Delany — remember, he’s the Big Ten commissioner — responded like this, and I’m quoting word for word, letter for letter: “We are fast-tracking it but need to know the $ and observe contracts. Also need to make sure we leverage this to increase chances of hr additions. Finally double chess # of moving parts including not harming brand as we executy.”  

The first sentence, which is a sentence, is pretty clear. The second, although not really a sentence because it lacks a subject, is nevertheless decipherable. With “hr,” he apparently was referring to “home run” additions to the Big Ten, and Texas would fill the bill. But that last sentence — lacking both subject and verb — left sports writers throughout the Midwest scratching their heads.  

Teddy Greenstein of the Chicago Tribune had this to say: “Is ‘executy’ a typo for ‘execute’ — or some altered version of ‘extra cutey’? And what’s with the chess reference? Either Big Ten power brokers have their own language, or Delany is all thumbs.” 

Here’s my thought. One of the reasons that Missouri reportedly is interested in the Big Ten — besides an influx of money into its athletic programs — is that the Big Ten schools, which include, among others, Minnesota, Northwestern, Penn State and Illinois, generally are a cut above the Big 12 schools academically. So, you would expect the commissioner to be a pretty sharp fellow, wouldn’t you? 

From his e-mail, however, he looks like a guy who butchers the King’s English and doesn’t edit his writing before hitting the “send” button. As a person who respects the nuances of language and grammar, I’ve always understood the importance of double checking what I write before hitting “send.” Of course, I’ve made mistakes and sent messages that I wish I could have back for further editing, but I don’t think I’ve messed up a message of great sensitivity, like Delany apparently did. It’s best to assume that any e-mail you send could end up in the wrong hands and could come back to embarrass you.   

So, that does it for me: Missouri should stay in the Big 12 and avoid the lure of the league where the commissioner can’t spell and has trouble fashioning a complete sentence.

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