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by Alison Burdo, The Press of Atlantic City

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Press of Atlantic City. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Last fall, amid the second year of the pandemic, Atlantic City’s casino executives painted a dire picture for New Jersey’s Legislature. Their brick-and-mortar properties were struggling. And despite thriving online gaming businesses, casinos said they were losing most of that revenue to companies that operate the internet gambling sites.

If policymakers didn’t cut casinos’ tax burdens, industry leaders forecast “grave danger” ahead. The state Senate president went further, warning that four of the city’s nine casinos could close.

The pitch worked. Fearing closures and layoffs, legislators moved quickly to deliver tax relief, few questions asked. “All good by me,” said Gov. Phil Murphy, who signed it on Dec. 21, one day after both chambers passed it.

The legislation altered the formula that determines how much casinos pay the city, its school district and the county to operate. And under the changes, companies will collectively pay those entities $55 million less than they otherwise would have this year — cuts that will disproportionately impact Atlantic City, the distressed capital of the state’s gaming industry.

The problem? Although the casinos cried poor, business is back.

As they pushed for tax relief, gaming companies were already on the rebound from the pandemic slump, recording profits above 2019 levels. The casinos’ parent companies were also spending billions of dollars to purchase online gaming companies, acquisitions that will help assure them more revenue from online wagers, according to a Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica review of state and federal financial filings, as well as public statements by casino representatives.

The industry in Atlantic City reported roughly $767 million in gross operating profit in 2021, its best year in more than a decade. But, as a result of the change in the law, it will pay $110 million in a key local tax — the smallest amount in the history of the five-year-old levy and $20 million less than the year before. (See how we calculated casinos' tax burden.)

“How do you do a tax decrease of that magnitude while they’re registering those kinds of profits on their books?” said Jim Kennedy, former executive director of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, the state agency that oversees the investment of gaming tax revenue for economic development projects.

The debate centers around a taxing program known as PILOT, or payment in lieu of property taxes. The plan was adopted in 2016 to resolve the costly fights that casinos waged with Atlantic City to dispute their property assessments, battles that nearly bankrupted the city. Instead, each casino now pays a share of an industrywide assessment calculated based on the prior year’s total gaming revenue. Since the system was implemented, Atlantic City has received the largest share of PILOT, with payments making up about a third of the city’s annual budget. But this year, the casino companies didn’t want to see their PILOT levies rise, in part because a separate tax break was simultaneously expiring.

The upturn in business for the casinos contrasts sharply with the reality of Atlantic City, which has been struggling to emerge from near financial ruin since 2016, when New Jersey imposed a state takeover. This year, at a time of high inflation and rising costs, the city of 38,000 estimates it will get $91.7 million from local taxes on casinos, $5 million less than it did last year. That might not sound like a lot of money for a city, but leaders had expected this year’s casino tax revenues to rise compared to last year. In fact, had lawmakers not changed the tax law, Atlantic City would have seen $133 million this year — $41 million more than the city is actually getting, according to state and city projections.

Casino PILOT Payments Are a Big Part of Atlantic City’s Budget Source: City of Atlantic City, Revenue and Finance Department

And by most metrics, Atlantic City needs the cash.

More than a third of its residents, who are mostly Black and Hispanic, live in poverty. Its infant mortality rate is alarmingly high, and its children have higher levels of lead in their blood than kids almost anywhere else in New Jersey, according to the most recent state reports. In the shadow of the gleaming casino towers that dot its famous four-mile boardwalk lies a single full-service grocery store.

Atlantic County, which has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation, could also feel the pinch. The new tax formula will result in approximately $19.3 million less than expected coming to the jurisdiction over the next five years, county estimates show. County officials, who are suing the state to maintain their share of tax revenue, say the reduction will hinder several public health programs and services for veterans, seniors and disabled residents.

For its part, the industry defends the new law.

Joe Lupo, head of the Casino Association of New Jersey and president of Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City (Edward Lea/The Press of Atlantic City)

In response to our reporting, Joe Lupo, head of the Casino Association of New Jersey and president of Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City, said the soaring revenue figures give a distorted picture of the industry’s health because its online partners get a large chunk of the money from internet gaming. “Failing to adjust the PILOT would have resulted in egregious, inappropriate, and inequitable taxes for any industry, let alone an industry that is still fighting to recover from COVID-19,” the group said in a statement.

The industry’s most recent financial reports, released by state regulators last month, show revenue from in-person gambling has surpassed pre-pandemic levels.

MGM Resorts International, the parent company of the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, the market leader in Atlantic City, also defended the changes to PILOT. “We take our position as a large employer and community leader seriously and have devoted significant efforts and resources to Atlantic City’s economic success and future,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Our priority when it comes to taxation is ensuring it’s structured so that each operator is contributing its fair share.”

Former state Sen. Steve Sweeney, the South Jersey lawmaker who led the legislative push last year, stood by his actions. “Casinos would have closed,” he said in an interview. “We did the best we could in a bad situation. We saved Atlantic City, we got it back on its feet.”

Murphy, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

For local and state officials, though, the new PILOT law has renewed questions in a long-running debate about whether Atlantic City is being shortchanged, despite policymakers’ promises from more than four decades ago that legalized gambling would help revitalize the beleaguered community.

“There is a difference between being a good partner and getting taken advantage of,” said City Councilman Jesse Kurtz, a Republican representing the 6th Ward, who opposed the legislation.

A New Tax System for Atlantic City A vacant lot. Atlantic City has seen limited investment in infrastructure and services while casinos have sought to reduce taxes owed to the city. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

Since the first New Jersey casino opened in Atlantic City in 1978, the city’s fortunes have been tied to gaming. The industry expanded rapidly, growing to a dozen properties, nearly all along the city’s world-famous boardwalk, and recording year-over-year gains for nearly 30 years. Taxes on casino operations, as well as related fees, sent billions to the state. Money also flowed directly to Atlantic City in two other forms: property taxes, which became the single largest source of municipal revenue, and another tax dedicated to financing community projects. The latter levy, known as the investment alternative tax, or IAT, was created in 1984 to ensure the industry invested in Atlantic City amid concerns that casinos were bilking the city.

But, over the past decade and a half, a slew of challenges upended the industry’s growth: the global financial crisis in 2008, Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and the expansion of legalized gambling in nearby states. As casino revenues dropped, gaming companies began successfully challenging their property tax bills. County records show their collective property valuation plunged from a high of $13.7 billion in 2008 — when 11 casinos were open — to $3.2 billion in 2016 — when only seven properties were operating. As a result, local tax revenue plummeted and municipal debt ballooned, mostly to cover the costs of property tax refunds owed to casinos. (Today, about two-thirds of Atlantic City’s $456 million debt burden comes from bonds sold to cover those refunds.)

That debt limited the city’s ability to invest in infrastructure and services, including its fire department, which has been borrowing neighboring communities’ trucks while awaiting new equipment. The city also reduced the size of its police force, cutting dozens of officers.

With the city on the brink of insolvency, gaming companies hatched an alternative tax plan, pitching it for several years before it gained enough support in Trenton to pass in 2016. For the next decade, instead of paying traditional property taxes, casinos would make payments based on other factors, including how many hotel rooms they have and their gross gaming revenue.

A billboard for Caesars Sportsbook, a gaming app, sits atop a corner market. More than a third of Atlantic City’s residents live in poverty. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

The legislation, drafted in part by the Casino Association of New Jersey, set the collective amount due in 2017 at $120 million, and for each of the remaining nine years, it tied the total PILOT payment to industry performance: If the industry saw a drop in revenue, payments would also decline.

For the businesses and Atlantic City, the new system held clear advantages. Casinos would no longer challenge their property taxes in court, saving both sides time and money. And they could bank on predictability, penciling in the amounts owed for each of the next 10 years.

The 2016 legislation also included a separate tax break for gaming companies, an incentive to convince all the casinos to participate in the PILOT system. It gave casinos a discount on the investment alternative tax that they paid to finance community projects. The change would hurt Atlantic City in the short term, but lawmakers ensured that the cuts wouldn’t last forever: The tax break would expire halfway through the PILOT program, with the city seeing the full tax benefit again in 2022.

Then-Gov. Chris Christie signed the PILOT bill into law in 2016. Seeking to avert New Jersey’s first local government bankruptcy since 1938, he also placed Atlantic City under state control — a move that gave the state authority over large parts of local government, including its budget.

But the bad times didn’t last for the casinos. Two shuttered properties, the Trump Taj Mahal and the Revel Casino Hotel, changed ownership and then reopened in mid-2018 as the Hard Rock and the Ocean Casino Resort, respectively. Meanwhile, online gaming blossomed, injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the industry. Legalized in 2013 — with the requirement that computer servers be based in Atlantic City — the sector nearly quadrupled its revenues in New Jersey in just six years, growing from $123 million to $483 million in 2019. The climb accelerated in the back half of 2018, aided by the legalization of sports betting in the state.

Rolling carts outside Bally’s Casino, whose parent company has spent billions since 2020 to build out its online gaming business. The success of online gaming has injected hundreds of millions into the industry. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

As a result, gross gaming revenue climbed in 2018, and then again in 2019. So did the PILOT payments, which reached $152 million in 2020, far more than the initial $120 million, which the industry had expected to be a kind of ceiling.

At the same time, the temporary break on the investment alternative tax was scheduled to expire, meaning companies would have to begin paying their full share again in 2022.

To some industry leaders, the PILOT program was starting to look like a bad bet.

They turned to a key ally.

Gaming Industry Pushes for Change

For more than a decade, Steve Sweeney lorded over New Jersey politics as the president of the state Senate. Long considered the second-most-powerful person in the state, behind the governor, the South Jersey Democrat brokered deals on everything from schools to public pensions to renewable energy.

But last year, amid a Republican wave, he met his political end in a stunning upset, falling in the November election to a little-known truck driver with no political experience. With only months left in his post, he returned to Trenton to address unfinished business. On his agenda: tax relief for the gaming industry.

Specifically, Sweeney had sponsored legislation to exempt all online gaming revenue from the PILOT formula.

Then-state Sen. Steve Sweeney at a news conference in Trenton on Nov. 10, 2021. Before he left office, he pushed for tax breaks for casinos. (Matt Rourke/AP Photo)

The bill was a response to industry leaders, who had spent months publicly downplaying their online windfall. Hard Rock’s Lupo led the effort, making a key claim: that casinos’ technology partners were gobbling up the bulk of online wagers.

In general, a spokesperson for the Casino Association of New Jersey said, just 20% to 25% of the total online revenue in New Jersey was attributable to casinos’ own platforms. But, according to the Press of Atlantic City/ProPublica review, that number is poised to rise over the course of the PILOT program, as gaming companies increasingly make moves to reduce or eliminate third-party costs.

At a press conference in late November, Mayor Marty Small of Atlantic City backed the industry’s push to change PILOT.

“We’re guaranteed to be in no worse position than any previous year,” Small said.

At his side was his adviser, Steven P. Perskie, a former judge and onetime state lawmaker who authored the Casino Control Act legalizing gaming in Atlantic City. Perskie cited what he called a “comprehensive” financial analysis of PILOT taxes conducted by the state. “The impact of the increases that would take place in 2022 would put a significant portion of the industry in extreme financial distress,” he told reporters.

The new PILOT bill would help prevent that, Perskie said.

To be sure, the change would mean less in PILOT funds for Atlantic City. But the mayor reasoned that the loss would be offset by an increase in investment alternative taxes; the break that casinos had received on the levy would sunset as planned in 2022. But Small’s prediction would ultimately turn out to be wrong. The city’s proposed annual budget shows that this year, the two revenue streams combined are expected to total $5 million less than in the prior year.

Small did not respond to a request for comment, and Perskie declined to answer written questions from the news organizations. Neither provided evidence of the PILOT analysis they cited.

But as the legislation moved through the statehouse, other local officials, like Dennis Levinson, Atlantic County’s executive, took notice of the new financial reports being released by the Division of Gaming Enforcement, the state agency responsible for regulating casinos.

While the city’s nine casinos saw a 5% drop in in-person wagers through the first 10 months of 2021 compared with the same period in 2019, online gaming had pushed their gross revenue to $3.5 billion. In terms of gross operating profit — which regulators describe as “a widely-accepted measure of profitability” — the industry reported $592 million through the first three quarters of 2021, putting it on pace for its best year in at least a decade.

Revenue Has Jumped in the Atlantic City Casino Industry

While in-person gambling declined dramatically when COVID-19 hit, online gaming has been booming. It now accounts for a growing portion of total revenue for the casino industry.

Note: Revenue in 2022 inflation-adjusted dollars. Source: New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement.

Citing the gaming reports, Levinson asked Murphy to oppose the PILOT legislation.

“It is confounding that the casinos can claim they are suffering while all reports indicate they are setting revenue records,” Levinson wrote in a Dec. 2 letter. That same day, Moody’s Investors Service issued a credit opinion of Atlantic City that said, “City management is not aware of any plans to close further casinos.”

In his letter, Levinson also said changing the tax formula would violate a previous settlement agreement with the state that spelled out how much PILOT tax revenue Atlantic County would receive through 2026 — and he threatened to sue if the bill became law.

Levinson said the governor never responded. Murphy, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

Big Action, Few Questions in the Legislature New Jersey’s Democrat-controlled legislature moved quickly to cut casinos’ taxes. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

The legislation gained momentum in early December when Sweeney made his case to the state Senate’s Budget and Appropriations Committee.

“We are risking four casinos closing,” he told his colleagues. “And that’s why this bill was proposed.”

The casino industry is the largest employer in Atlantic County, with more than 19,000 workers, and such a downturn would shutter roughly half the gaming properties. Some senators worried aloud about losing jobs; when four casinos closed in 2014, nearly 9,000 employees were laid off. None of the lawmakers, however, pressed Sweeney for evidence, and the bill sailed through the statehouse with little debate.

Indeed, the General Assembly committee spent less than four minutes on the bill to change PILOT during its Dec. 13 hearing. Nearly half that time was used by Sue Altman, state director of New Jersey Working Families Party, a progressive coalition that opposed the bill.

“We are sick and tired of watching big and successful and profitable industries like casinos pay less than their fair share in taxes,” she said.

Ocean Casino Resort looms in the distance across town from low-slung homes. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

Peter Chen, an analyst with left-leaning think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective, agreed. “The formula adopted by lawmakers in 2016 takes into account the possibility of adverse financial conditions,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers. “It’s unclear why new changes are needed to reduce the amount casinos pay, beyond what current law provides.”

The committee members did not address the criticisms in the hearing, and just one spoke before voting. “I do have concerns about this bill,” the vice chair said, without detailing those worries. Nevertheless, he and eight other committee members approved the bill, which went before the Democrat-controlled Legislature a week later.

In the end, just four Democrats opposed the legislation, including state Assembly members Vince Mazzeo and John Armato, both of whom represented Atlantic City and a large part of Atlantic County. Armato’s defection was especially notable because he had been the sponsor of the Assembly version of the PILOT bill. In an unusual move, he had his name removed from the legislation before the final vote. “For me to move forward, I needed a lot more information, and I wasn’t getting it, which made me very uncomfortable,” he told The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica.

“When Are We Going to Get Our Fair Share”

Today, New Jersey is reckoning with the fallout from the new law.

Levinson, the Atlantic County executive, made good on his threats to sue the state, alleging that the new PILOT formula could put several county programs at risk, including its opioid response, flu and COVID-19 vaccination initiative, and transportation services for senior citizens, disabled residents and veterans.

A judge in late February ruled in favor of Atlantic County, finding that the state violated the terms of its previous settlement agreement — a ruling that was upheld by the municipal court last month. The state, however, has not conceded, and plans to appeal.

Atlantic City has seen few improvements since the alternative property tax system began. Its budget remains flat, comparable to past years, as chronically high poverty and unemployment rates persist.

In March, Small, who supported the PILOT law despite the loss of revenue, was in Trenton, seeking more gaming money for his city. He asked lawmakers to back legislation that would send a sports wagering tax to Atlantic City instead of a state agency. The money would then be used to provide property tax relief to local residents, who have seen their tax rates rise over the past decade.

“We redid the PILOT bill, which I supported,” he told lawmakers. “But people are looking at when are we going to get our fair share of the pie.”

The Atlantic City Boardwalk as seen through the windows of The Playground mall. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

Indeed, the fallout from the legislation is now driving a larger debate about New Jersey’s gaming taxes, nearly all of which flow directly to the state, not Atlantic City.

Republican state Assembly member Don Guardian, a former Atlantic City mayor now in his first term representing Atlantic City and Atlantic County in the statehouse, said he plans to convene representatives from the city, county and state, as well as the gaming industry, to study the casino tax structure. Industry observers consider New Jersey the country’s most casino-friendly state after Nevada. “Let’s start taking into account that the world has changed,” Guardian said. “You need to go back and look at the whole issue.”

Meanwhile, some of the state lawmakers who initially supported the PILOT change are now questioning why it was necessary. “As more and more data started coming in on the health and vitality of the industry, it became clear to me that the idea the casinos were going to close was more talking point than truth,” said Democratic state Sen. Troy Singleton, chair of the Senate Community and Urban Affairs Committee.

During a Senate committee hearing in March, state Sen. Vince Polistina, a Republican representing Atlantic City and Atlantic County who voted against the bill in December, was more pointed with his colleagues. The new law, he said, “was done based on the premise of a charade.”

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Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research.

by Alison Burdo, The Press of Atlantic City

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Press of Atlantic City. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When New Jersey officials passed sweeping tax cuts for Atlantic City’s casinos last year, they offered broad claims but little evidence.

At issue, they said, was just how much the industry’s taxes were going to rise under the system that determines how much casinos pay in lieu of property taxes.

“We are risking four casinos closing,” said then-state Senate President Steve Sweeney, without providing specifics.

Likewise, former Judge Steven P. Perskie, an Atlantic City adviser and the former state lawmaker who authored the Casino Control Act legalizing gaming, predicted dire consequences. “The impact of the increases that would take place in 2022 would put a significant portion of the industry in extreme financial distress,” he said, citing a “comprehensive” financial analysis conducted by the state.

But when The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica sought that financial analysis from the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, which is tasked with direct oversight of Atlantic City, the agency would not produce it. In an interview, Sweeney also declined to provide evidence of potential closures, saying it would be clear “if you do your homework and you look at the increase that some of these casinos were facing.”

So that’s what we did.

Over the past few months, The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica filed a series of public records requests with local and state agencies to help calculate the casino tax liabilities that the state refused to reveal.

Our analysis centered on two taxes, one called PILOT, which stands for payment in lieu of taxes, and the other called the investment alternative tax.

PILOT was designed to replace typical property taxes beginning in 2017, after casinos repeatedly challenged those annual assessments, and the money collected under that system was distributed to the city, its school district and the county. And the investment alternative tax was a longstanding levy, devoted to community investment in Atlantic City and elsewhere in the state, that casinos had received a temporary break on. Each was set to rise in 2022, largely because casino revenues were up.

To determine what the industry would have paid under the original PILOT system, before the law was changed last year, the news organizations collected three key data points on each casino: gross gaming revenue, including money from online gaming; number of hotel rooms; and acreage. We then plugged those figures into the formula outlined in the 13-page tax law and confirmed the results with the state. What we found cast doubt on officials’ claims of financial ruin. (For a detailed methodology, see the last section of this story.)

According to our analysis, the gaming industry’s nine properties would have collectively owed $165 million in PILOT in 2022, a $35 million hike compared to 2021. Two of the city’s nine casinos would have actually seen a decrease in their PILOT.

Casinos Will Pay Millions Less in PILOT Under New Legislation !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

by Alec MacGillis

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By the end of our first afternoon of deliberations in the jury room up the narrow stairs from the courtroom, the water cooler was running low, the lock on the bathroom door kept sticking and the wheezing HVAC system was making it even harder to make out the audio in a crucial jailhouse phone recording. We were also nowhere close to a consensus on whether or not Domonic White was guilty of attempted murder and lesser charges in the 2021 shooting of Chris Clanton in the presence of Clanton’s 5-year-old son.

It was hardly unusual for a jury to struggle to come to an agreement. What made this case unusual was the context provided by the victim’s identity. Clanton was an actor on “The Wire” and is now appearing on “We Own This City,” the new HBO miniseries produced by the creators of “The Wire” and based on Baltimore journalist Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book about an eye-popping police corruption scandal exposed five years ago.

At the heart of the new series, which began airing one week before the trial, was the profound damage that police corruption had done to community trust in law enforcement. “Now, even if you find the witnesses and have a case,” says one cop in the second episode, “now when you need to get 12 people together to make a jury, 12 people to believe that you aren’t lying on the witness stand about who shot Tater or who robbed the Rite Aid, they look at you and remember when some other cop lied on them about their son or brother. The lawyers will tell you that you lost the city juries on that stuff.”

We were now those 12 people, charged with assessing testimony by members of that same Police Department to decide who had shot an actor from the television show that was dramatizing this corruption.

It was more than I had bargained for when I had reported for jury duty at the Circuit Court for Baltimore City two days earlier. I had never been selected for a panel, likely in part because I am a journalist, which is often enough to prompt a lawyer’s request for dismissal. This time, I had been chosen, and I had not minded. I was overdue to serve that basic civic duty, and it happened that I’m in the midst of reporting on the nationwide resurgence in gun violence. It could only help to get perspective from within the jury box, a corner of the criminal justice system that we hear far less about than other aspects of the system.

But now, at the end of the first day of deliberations, I had a more pressing concern. By the luck of the draw, I had been seated first on the jury and had thus been appointed foreman. I had no idea what exactly that role entailed, beyond reading out an eventual verdict, but a hung jury sure sounded like failing at the job, however it was defined. And after more than three hours of inconclusive deliberations, that seemed like where we were headed.

Clanton, 36, had come to testify on the second day of the trial. He entered with the bearing of a man distinctly displeased to be there. He made his way across the high-ceilinged courtroom in torn gray jeans and a beige jacket over a lavender hoodie, with a thick beard, passing in front of his alleged assailant, who sat placidly in rimless glasses, cleanshaven in a tie and white shirt.

Even before Clanton identified himself and disclosed his TV roles, the mere fact of his presence was notable. In Baltimore and many other cities around the country, it is not at all uncommon for shooting survivors to refuse to identify their attackers to the authorities. It’s the most extreme manifestation of the no-snitching ethic — don’t tell the cops who the shooter was even if you’re the one who was shot — and it’s a big reason why the closure rate for nonfatal shootings is even lower than it is for homicides. But here was Clanton, come to testify against a man he had once considered a close friend.

We jurors had already heard from one of the two officers who responded to the shooting just before 7 p.m. on April 29, 2021. Kaivon Stewart and his partner had just shared a pizza at a 7-Eleven on Belair Road, in a mostly Black working-class section of northeast Baltimore, when they heard a gunshot close by. Stewart, who was at the wheel, headed southwest down Belair and, on a small side street called Eierman Avenue, the officers saw a man with a gun standing over another man lying on the ground, as if poised to shoot. They were not close enough to identify the shooter, beyond the fact that he was a Black man dressed all in black.

They pulled into Eierman and jumped out of the cruiser. The shooter ran off into an alley to the right, heading northeast. Stewart ministered to Clanton, who had been shot in the left ear. He was bleeding heavily but was conscious.

Parked on the street close to where the victim was found, Stewart said, was a blue 2007 Pontiac G6 with the engine still running. Inside the car was a cellphone with a lock screen photo of a couple that, police would later determine, was the woman to whom the car was registered and her fiance, White, who is 39. Not among the items recovered: a gun or any shell casings.

Then came Clanton’s testimony. Glowering, he related what had happened on the evening in question. He had been visiting his mother’s house nearby with his five-year-old son. He had walked down Belair with his son to get him a drink at the 7-Eleven. On the way, someone Clanton knew had called out from a porch on Eierman to let him know that he soon wanted another haircut from Clanton, who does occasional barbering on the side.

Clanton and his son had walked up to the porch, where a small group of men was gathering, among them White. White, whom Clanton called Nick, had been a good friend of Clanton’s when they were young men, Clanton testified, but they had barely seen each other in the decade since a friend of theirs had been killed. Clanton said he was “genuinely happy” to see White after so long but felt an immediate “tension” from him.

Not understanding why he was getting “the cold shoulder,” Clanton said, according to my notes, he followed White down from the porch toward the running car. “I figured if I could get him by himself, he would open up.”

“Whassup?” he said he kept asking White. “I ain’t seen you in a minute.”

“You know what’s up,” White responded, according to Clanton.

They came down to the side of the Pontiac, Clanton testified, with his son trailing, behind the car’s trunk. Clanton pressed again for an explanation of what was bothering White. Then, Clanton said, White pulled a handgun out of his waistband.

“I turned real fast because I thought, if this guy is going to kill me, my mother got to see something,” Clanton said, referring mordantly to his desire to preserve his face for an open-casket funeral.

Lying on the ground after being shot, with White standing over him, Clanton said he heard the siren of the arriving cruiser. “I ain’t never been so happy to see police in my life,” he said. Everyone had scattered. All Clanton was thinking about, he said, was his son, who had been pulled to safety by a neighbor.

A day or two later, after he was released from the hospital, detectives came to his home and he identified White as the shooter. Clanton described the medical fallout: Doctors had made his ear whole again, but he still had bullet fragments in his head that they decided were too risky to remove, and he suffered occasional seizures.

It was time for the cross-examination from White’s attorney, Roland Brown, a veteran defense lawyer with a bearish build and assured manner. After a few perfunctory niceties toward the shooting victim, he needled Clanton, asking whether he had been drunk or high when the shooting occurred, asking if he was really sure it was White whom he had followed off the porch.

Clanton bridled. “I know exactly who shot me,” he said. “I have to deal with this every day. We were all best friends. I didn’t know he was feeling some kind of way toward me.”

As a kid growing up in Baltimore, Clanton’s eighth-grade social-studies teacher was Ed Burns, the homicide detective-turned-teacher who was a co-creator of “The Wire,” alongside David Simon. On “The Wire,” Clanton played Savino Bratton, who appeared in Season One as an enforcer for drug kingpin Avon Barksdale and then in Season Five working for successor kingpin Marlo Stanfield. In that season, Savino joined others in the Stanfield crew in hunting for legendary stick-up man Omar Little, before being fatally shot by Little.

On “We Own This City,” Clanton has switched sides. He’s now playing a police officer, Brian Hairston, who is not shy about challenging untoward behavior by fellow officers. In the first episode, he is with Danny Hersl, a notoriously rough officer, when Hersl gratuitously beats up a suspect. “Look, I’m canceling that jail wagon and calling for a fucking ambulance,” Hairston tells Hersl angrily.

“What the fuck?” Hersl says. “Throw a Band-Aid on him in Central Booking. He’s all right.”

“You banged him, Hersl,” Hairston says. “Fuck if I’m going to have him dumped in a jail van bleeding and have Marilyn Mosby indict my ass.”

Mosby is the Baltimore state’s attorney who, in May 2015, brought charges against six of the officers involved in the arrest and transport of Freddie Gray. (Gray died, his spinal cord nearly severed, seven days after being moved, shackled and unbuckled, in a police van.) None of those charges resulted in conviction, but they loom over the events portrayed in “We Own This City.” They are cited repeatedly as the excuse used by many cops in deciding to hang back on the job, even as violence surged to unprecedented levels following the riots after Gray’s death.

That general apathy, in turn, is cited as the reason why the officers of the unit at the heart of the corruption scandal, the Gun Trace Task Force, were given such a long leash. “Simply put, Hersl and guys like him get out of their cars and they make arrests,” a judge says in the first episode. “And that’s more than you can say about too many police in this city who are collecting a paycheck.” Or as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the head of the corrupt unit when it reached its apex of depravity — stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars, planting drugs and guns on suspects, filing wildly fraudulent overtime claims — puts it in the fourth episode: “As long as we produce, as long as we put those numbers up, they don’t fucking give a shit about what we do. We can do whatever the fuck we want.”

That aura of haplessness around the Police Department has lingered since the scandal was exposed, as the city’s homicide rate has remained elevated at the levels it spiked to after the protests over Gray’s death. So it was hardly surprising that Brown, White’s defense lawyer, tried to capitalize on that perception of the police in trying to bring us jurors over to his side. He wasn’t trying to get us to disbelieve the police because they were untrustworthy; rather he was trying to get us to dismiss the evidence because it was the result of inadequate effort.

He grilled the lead detective on the case, Anthony Forbes, over his failure to find witnesses to the shooting. Why had he not tried harder to canvass that block of Eierman? Was it because he was too “starstruck” by Clanton and thus willing to go simply on his word?

Brown also took that tack to try to dismiss a seemingly damning piece of evidence that came up during the prosecutor’s questioning of the detective, a phone call on a recorded jailhouse line one day after the shooting from an incarcerated 20-year-old man named Darian White to the man that the detective said was his father, Domonic White. Why, Brown asked, had he not gone to the Division of Vital Records to confirm that Darian was the son of Domonic? Brown did not offer evidence to suggest that the two Whites were not related. The intent was simply to raise doubt and to underscore that Forbes and his fellow officers were lazy clock-punchers.

We got to hear the phone call the next day. It was scratchy, but I could make out a father telling his incarcerated son that “shit got ugly yesterday,” which is why he was going to have to “turn myself in” or let the police come get him. He also expressed affection and concern for his son and told him that “I was getting ready to go a different route” the day before but that his son had been “on my mind.” “That’s the only reason I didn’t do it,” the father said.

It was the defense’s turn to call its only witness, Mark Pratt. (Domonic White himself would not testify in his own defense.) Pratt was a longtime friend of White’s and a cousin of his fiancee. Pratt was hanging out with White at a small shopping plaza before the shooting, as security camera footage showed, and then drove behind him to Eierman to buy marijuana for an NFL draft-watching gathering.

He offered a completely different account than had Clanton. There was no tension between Clanton and White, he testified. Instead, what happened was this: As the group on Eierman was getting ready to split up, two young men in black face masks appeared from the alley to the left, coming from the southwest, and approached Clanton. One of them shot him, and when the police came, the pair ran back the way they had come, down the alley to the southwest.

The prosecutor, Veronica Colson, challenged Pratt over why he had not mentioned these two young men when asked by the police at the scene if he had seen anything, and why he had also not come forward about them after he heard that his good friend had been charged in the shooting a month later. She did not challenge a factual contradiction between his account and that of Stewart, the responding officer: that the man with the gun had run up the alley to the right, to the northeast, in the opposite direction of what Pratt was now offering.

The details of the gunman’s alley escape became more relevant in Colson’s closing argument, when she played for the first time some additional security-camera footage showing White emerging (with no gun visible), about 30 seconds after the shooting, from the other end of the alley — consistent with the police account — and strolling off across Belair Road.

In his closing argument, Brown began by reminding us that Clanton was an actor, seeking to raise doubts about the veracity of his testimony. And he zeroed in again on the corner-cutting in the police investigation. “Were you impressed by the shooting detective?” he said.

There is a moment in jury selection in Baltimore where the judge asks the assembled citizens if any of them has been a victim of gun violence or has an immediate family member who has been a victim of it, or has a family member who has been charged with gun violence. Invariably, more than a third of the people stand up.

I’ve been stunned by this moment every time I’ve seen it, even though I shouldn’t have been, because the response is in line with what you would expect from the numbers. Since the start of 2013, when I returned to Baltimore for my second stint living in the city, there have been 2,916 people murdered there, and more than twice as many have been wounded in nonfatal shootings. This is in a city whose population has fallen from 621,000 to 585,000 over that time. The toll is even more concentrated if considered through the lens of neighborhoods and race. The Black share of Baltimore’s population is 63%; the Black share of the city’s homicide victims is typically over 90%.

So overwhelming is the response to that question that answering yes is not disqualifying for service. Instead, Judge Charles Blomquist called each person who answered in the affirmative up to the bench to talk with him and the lawyers about how the experience might inform their perspective as jurors. The same went for another screening question, about whether our views of the police would keep us from being impartial in weighing their testimony.

The jury selected for White’s trial was not racially proportionate to the city, as is often the case in a city where so many Black citizens are disqualified from service for past criminal history. Eight of the 12 of us were white, alongside three Black women and one Puerto Rican woman. This stood in contrast to the major players in the trial: the defendant, victim, both lawyers and three police officers called to the stand were all Black.

It did not take long after we ascended to start our deliberations, though, to discover that there was a whole different level of diversity when it came to a task like this. Baltimore is an overwhelmingly progressive Democratic city, a place that voted 87% for Joe Biden in 2020. But perspectives range widely when it comes to the local issue that most consumes public attention — public safety — and that range does not break down neatly along racial or class lines.

Soon after we got started, five jurors made clear that they had serious doubts about the prosecution’s case. They didn’t find Clanton credible. Several noted that he was, after all, an actor, while several others said that he wasn’t being candid about whatever beef had fueled White’s anger, or that they simply didn’t like how he had come across. “He was arrogant and braggadocious,” said one of three young white women on the jury. “I didn’t buy his act.”

Above all, though, they wanted more evidence, and for this these jurors blamed the police. Why had the police been unable to recover a gun? Why had the detective not tried harder to find other witnesses? Heck, why had the police not tried harder to catch the shooter in the first place? “If I’m going to be involved in sending someone to jail for a long time, I’m going to need hard evidence,” said the one Black woman who was inclined to acquit.

The skeptical jurors were not suggesting they did not trust what the police were saying. Rather, they were adopting the critique offered by the defense: They were criticizing the police for not having done their job better. It was a striking dynamic, given that this may have been one of the rare cases where the presence of cops likely saved a man’s life. But it fit with the dynamic described on “We Own This City” — a department succumbing to indifference and thus lackluster at doing its job, whether for reasons of self-pity or self-protection.

This was the local context for the jurors’ reluctance to convict White. But it nonetheless startled several members of the jury who were convinced of his guilt, a group that included the two other Black women on the panel. Members of this group kept coming back to the main pieces of evidence: the victim’s testimony, which was seemingly corroborated by the responding officer’s account of the gunman’s flight into the alley; the camera footage of White emerging from that alley; and the recorded jailhouse phone call. Wasn’t that enough?

By day’s end, it wasn’t, and we headed home.

Never had I been more depressed in my work as a reporter than when covering the Gun Trace Task Force trial, in 2018, for an article that examined the broader unraveling of order in Baltimore. The cause of the despair was the impunity that the trial had laid bare, that the officers had for years been able to operate in a world where nothing mattered, in a moral void.

I was thinking again about impunity at home after our inconclusive deliberations. A man had been shot in the ear in the presence of his 5-year-old son, one of 728 nonfatal shootings in the city in 2021. Baltimore police generally solve only a fifth to a quarter of nonfatal shootings, and the state prosecutes only a subset of that subset. In this case, though, the person who had very nearly been killed in the shooting had decided to give a name to the police. This was not an easy thing to do in this city, and even more difficult was then having to come to court with the former longtime friend whom he had identified as his attacker sitting just a few feet away, and tell the story again, to an appraising jury and aggressive defense lawyer.

The next morning, back in the jury room, I tried, haltingly, to articulate my thoughts about Clanton’s decision to testify and the weight it seemed to deserve, given the difficulty in taking that step and the other evidence that corroborated his account.

But the jury was still stuck in the same divide it had been in the previous day. With seemingly little to gain from more discussion, we watched more of the camera footage from along Belair Road, which served the purpose of raising additional questions about the account provided by Mark Pratt, which did not match up with it in several respects.

Still, several jurors were reluctant to accept Clanton’s version. The Black woman inclined to acquit offered personal background to explain why she was not willing to take Clanton’s account at face value: When she had tried to break up with a boyfriend, he had cut himself badly and told the police that his girlfriend did it to him; she had been charged in the incident, she said, and exonerated only after she taped a call from him admitting to the ruse.

A young white man inclined to acquit pushed back at a couple of the jurors favoring conviction who thought it was suspicious that White had not returned for his phone and his fiancee’s car after the shooting. If you’re a Black man in Baltimore with a history of encounters with the police, he said, you may decide to stay away even if you were not involved. And the Puerto Rican woman on the jury kept coming back to the failure of the police to provide additional evidence to buttress Clanton. “The police need to step it up,” she said. “The police had a job to do.”

The insistent demand for more evidence, particularly more witness testimony, provoked one of the two Black women who were inclined toward conviction. Speaking up for the first time, she related her own story: Nearly three decades ago, she had been shot in the back on the street by two stray bullets fired by a 14-year-old boy. She had barely survived, and the effects of her injuries lingered to this day. But no one on the crowded street had been willing to identify the shooter, she said. The whole experience left her with a visceral grasp of why no one else from Eierman had come forward to back up Clanton. “No one would come testify for me,” she said.

By noon, I sent a note to the judge asking what to do if we couldn’t reach a decision. He summoned us to the courtroom and told us to keep going. After lunch, we did. Even more talked-out by this point, we decided to play the recording of the jailhouse call one more time.

With each replaying, we were able to make out more of the scratchy exchange. We heard the father on the call accepting that he would have to face some consequences for what had happened the day before. “What comes out of that, it is what it is,” he said. “I know I’m going to have to sit for a little bit.” We heard him elaborating on why he had not gone a “different route” during the incident, out of a desire not to spend many more years separated from his son. “I’m going to keep it a thousand with you,” he said.

Somehow, hearing the call yet again, and being able to make out more of it, had an effect on several of the jurors who had been inclined to acquit. The conversation drifted to the various charges and the distinctions between them: In addition to attempted murder, White was also charged with first-degree assault, reckless endangerment and various firearm-related offences. It became clear that several of the jurors inclined to acquit White for attempted murder were more willing to entertain his guilt for first-degree assault. As they saw it, there were still enough questions about what transpired between the two men that they couldn’t conclude that White had actually been trying to kill Clanton. But they could accept that he had done him great harm.

One by one, the five jurors who had started out with major doubts about the prosecution’s case came around to conviction for first-degree assault and the lesser charges. At about 4 p.m., we let the judge know we had reached a verdict. As we waited to be called down, there was sudden levity in the room, an unspoken sense that after veering close to a rupture, we had managed to come together.

We filed downstairs, to a courtroom that was fuller than it had been at any point in the trial, though there was no sign of Clanton himself. I gave the verdict on each of the charges. White and his lawyer, Brown, reacted with restrained displeasure. We dispersed with barely a word; the camaraderie was left upstairs. But out on the street, I saw the juror who said she had been framed by her boyfriend, sitting on a bench awaiting a westbound bus. I got her attention, and we exchanged a nod and smile.

And that was it. It was early May in Baltimore, the most beautiful time of year in the city. There had by that point been 116 homicides so far in 2022, up 15% from the year before. The following week, a man with an assault rifle would fire 60 rounds on a block in East Baltimore while killing another man and injuring three others. A couple days after that, a pregnant woman would be killed along with the father-to-be; their baby, delivered from the dying woman, was left in critical condition. A day after that, a high school junior would be fatally shot at an after-prom party.

And two weeks after that, a man accused of fatally shooting the widely admired co-founder of the city’s violence-interrupter program, Safe Streets, would be acquitted of murder, despite having been found with the gun used in the killing and despite cellphone data putting him in the area. “Not enough evidence,” said one juror afterward.

It was a refrain I had heard on the White jury, too. But our jury had something that the latest jury did not: a victim alive and willing to testify.

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Correction

June 1, 2022: This story originally misstated the fatalities of a shooting. A father-to-be was killed, not left in critical condition.

by Richard A. Webster, The Advocate | The Times-Picayune, and David Hammer, WWL-TV

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Advocate | The Times-Picayune, and it was also co-published with WWL-TV. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The state of Louisiana is pausing efforts to collect money from thousands of homeowners who accepted hurricane recovery grants and used them for repairs rather than elevating their houses. The decision comes after news outlets presented the state with evidence showing that its lawyers have stepped up the pace of court filings even as the state hopes to wipe away the lawsuits entirely.

Jay Dardenne, the head of Gov. John Bel Edwards’ Division of Administration, said Monday that the state has agreed to settle a related lawsuit against a company that ran the recovery program after Hurricane Katrina. If the federal government approves that agreement, he said, the state would drop the suits against homeowners who didn’t follow the rules on how they spent elevation grants.

An investigation by ProPublica, The Advocate | The Times-Picayune, and WWL-TV found evidence that some of those people were told they could use the $30,000 grants on repairs instead. Years later, the state sued about 3,500 families — roughly 1 in 9 grantees — demanding the money back.

Dardenne said he was troubled by evidence gathered by the news organizations showing that the law firm Shows, Cali & Walsh, which represents the state, has accelerated its efforts to collect tens of thousands of dollars from each homeowner.

With the state on the cusp of a solution, “there’s no reason to try and take any more cases to judgment,” Dardenne said.

He said the state is waiting for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to approve a proposed settlement between the state and the company it hired to manage the federally funded Road Home recovery program from 2006 to 2009.

In 2016 the state sued that firm, ICF Emergency Management Services, accusing it of mismanagement. A mediator helped the two sides come to an agreement in late 2020.

The state wants to send the money it expects from that settlement to HUD to satisfy its obligations for Road Home grants that weren’t spent according to the rules. If HUD agrees, the state will drop its lawsuits against homeowners and cease collection efforts in cases that have gone to judgment, Dardenne said.

“I think we’re inching very close to that happening,” Dardenne said.

Dardenne said he and Edwards have spoken with HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge about accepting the proposed ICF settlement. When asked if he believes Fudge is in favor of dropping the suits, Dardenne said, “I do.”

A HUD spokesperson declined to comment on that characterization, but said, “HUD continues to work with the state.”

Meanwhile, the litigation continues.

In New Orleans, home to almost half of the elevation lawsuits, lawyers filed almost as many motions for judgment in a recent six-week span as they had in the first three and a half months of the year.

Lawyers with Shows, Cali & Walsh filed 42 motions for judgment from January to mid-April, according to court records. Over the following six weeks, they filed 38 motions seeking roughly the same amount — $1.2 million.

About half of the filings in both periods were for default judgments, a ruling that can be imposed when a defendant fails to respond in court. Such judgments result in liens on the properties, preventing them from being sold until the debt is paid.

Dardenne said the state has not sought to speed up recovery efforts. He said any increase in court filings likely reflects the timeline of individual cases.

Among those targeted was New Orleans homeowner Celeste Matthews. The same day she was featured in news stories by ProPublica, The Advocate | The Times-Picayune and WWL-TV that detailed the lawsuits, the law firm notified her that it would pursue a default judgment against her.

Celeste Matthews shows the siding she had installed after Hurricane Katrina. Matthews received a Road Home grant to elevate her Gert Town home in New Orleans but used the money for repairs instead. (Sophia Germer/The Advocate | The Times-Picayune)

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Democrat whose district includes much of New Orleans, where many of the lawsuits have been filed, said last week the state should put such filings on hold.

“Conversations are getting more frequent and focused in these past few weeks in the work to end the injustices of the Road Home program,” Carter said. “The state should not continue, and is not required to, keep exacting these punishing actions against my constituents.”

Louisiana Seeking $103 Million From Homeowners

The lawsuits stem from Road Home elevation grants that were awarded to about 32,000 homeowners whose houses were damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. A majority lived in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

The money, typically $30,000, was supposed to be used to raise homes off the ground to prevent future flooding.

An investigation by the news organizations found that the state Office of Community Development and its contractor, ICF, mismanaged the program. They distributed grants without verifying that people were eligible, according to the testimony of a top state official. Some homeowners said Road Home representatives told them they could use the money to rebuild.

HUD, which funded the program, found widespread noncompliance with grant requirements. The agency told the state to recover any misspent funds, leading to the lawsuits.

The state is seeking $103 million in the elevation lawsuits. So far, it has recovered about 5% of that from 425 families. Any money recovered would be returned to HUD.

The news organizations’ investigation sparked anger and calls from housing advocates and politicians to end the lawsuits. The New Orleans City Council passed a resolution calling on the state to drop the lawsuits.

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Russel Honoré, who led federal troops into New Orleans after Katrina and is now an environmental advocate, called the state’s legal actions against its own residents a “travesty.”

“The house-raising issue after Katrina was a mess from the day it started,” he said.

Watch the Report

WWL-TV reports on Louisiana pausing collection efforts in elevation grant lawsuits.

State “Anxiously Awaiting” HUD Response

The state and HUD have been talking for years about what to do about people who didn’t elevate their homes. Documents provided by the state to the news outlets show the solution hinges on the resolution of the state’s lawsuit against ICF.

In its lawsuit, the state alleges ICF committed “numerous breaches” of its contract, citing errors in handling files, deciding who was eligible, calculating grants and handing out the money. At one point, the state estimated ICF handed out more than $137 million in grants that were either miscalculated or paid to ineligible homeowners, though Dardenne said that figure has decreased.

ICF has denied those allegations in court. Spokesperson Lauren Dyke has said the firm “worked within the policies put in place by the state.”

Shortly after the state sued ICF, the two sides entered settlement talks and eventually came to an agreement, documents show. The amount of the settlement was redacted in documents provided by the state.

Pat Forbes, executive director of the Louisiana Office of Community Development, which oversaw the Road Home program, wrote HUD in May 2021, asking if the proposed settlement would end the state’s liability for ineligible grants. A HUD official responded with steps the state must take to close out the program. Four months later, Forbes asked for an update. HUD said it should have an answer by March.

When that deadline passed, Dardenne wrote Fudge and Carter, saying the state and ICF were “anxiously awaiting” HUD’s answer.

In an April letter to Dardenne, a HUD official said issues with the state’s recordkeeping system had delayed the agency’s response. However, the official said the agency was analyzing the data and its analysis would be provided to HUD’s Office of Inspector General. After that, the letter said, HUD would be able to provide “sound guidance” on the proposed settlement.

HUD’s decision will determine what happens with the suits, Dardenne said.

When the ICF case is settled and HUD closes out the Road Home program, “all the pending cases are going to be dismissed,” he said. “The judgments are not going to be pursued. I mean, this would end everything.”

Homeowners Say They Were Pressured to Agree to Payment Plans

Two homeowners and an attorney representing two others said lawyers representing the state tried to strong-arm them into agreeing to payment plans. None of their accounts stem from efforts to collect this year.

Alice Sanders, who lives on Social Security, said Mary Cali, a senior partner at Shows, Cali & Walsh, “badgered” her into signing a $200 monthly payment plan last May and said Sanders would lose her home if she didn’t. Sanders did not have an attorney.

“It leaves me with no money. I can’t even buy my own groceries or medicine,” said Sanders, an associate minister who lives in Baton Rouge. “It’s a sin, what they’ve done against their own residents.”

Cali said that claims she pressured homeowners are “patently false. I have never threatened a homeowner with the loss of their home, and I find such allegations offensive.”

Forbes said he has “no reason to believe” the state’s attorneys threatened anyone or insinuated the state would take their home. The state will not foreclose on homeowners to collect these debts, he said.

Attorney Jennifer Jones said two families being sued by the state told her John Walsh, another senior partner in the firm, pressured them to sign agreements, called consent judgments, to repay the money. Jones, who only took on the families as clients later, said neither had a lawyer at the time.

“That’s a disgrace, for a plaintiff’s lawyer to be doing that to someone who is unrepresented,” Jones said. “They don’t know what the lawyer is telling them.”

Walsh did not respond to a request for comment.

Donna Hilliard, who contacted the news organizations after the investigation was published, said she, too, was a victim of the law firm’s aggressive tactics.

Left: Hilliard at her home in New Orleans. Right: Hilliard has filled her home with sculptures of turtles, which she says she loves because they symbolize patience and longevity. (Sophia Germer/The Advocate | The Times-Picayune)

A tree pierced her roof during Hurricane Katrina, but the home never flooded. The house was already a couple feet off the ground, so when she and her husband, Honoray, were offered Road Home money in 2007, they checked a box saying they didn’t want an elevation grant.

And yet, two years later, the Road Home program awarded them the elevation money. Hilliard said she never planned to raise her house, but a Road Home representative told her not to fret.

The state sued the Hilliards in 2021 because they had not raised their home.

Hilliard said she was “bullied” last year by three attorneys, including Cali, who told her she should agree to a payment plan.

A longtime hospice nurse, Hilliard was having her own health problems at the time. She was undergoing chemotherapy, and she and her husband couldn’t afford a lawyer.

So they signed an agreement in February to pay the state $250 a month for five years, with a $15,000 balloon payment due at the end. Now 56 and using a cane, she doesn’t know how she’ll afford it.

“I just want them to stop it now, so that I could be able to live whatever time I have left without that hanging over my head,” Hilliard said. “I don’t look for nobody to do nothing for me. When you do me wrong, just fix it.”

Did You Get the Help You Needed After a Hurricane or Tropical Storm? We’re Investigating Disaster Relief.

by Jenny Deam

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When a Texas law enforcement official last week laid out how police waited in the halls of Robb Elementary School while children trapped with the gunman pleaded for help, my mind went back to 23 years ago.

April 20, 1999. I remember it all too clearly. Two teenagers methodically murdered 12 classmates and a teacher inside Columbine High School in Colorado, and even though police swarmed to the scene quickly, they stayed outside, waiting. Those within hung a sign in a window to alert officers below: “1 bleeding to death.” The SWAT team ignored it. When officers finally searched the building, they found the body of Dave Sanders, a teacher shot hours before.

Patrick Ireland also was waiting for help as he dragged himself 50 feet across broken glass in the school library after being shot three times, including twice in the head. The then-17-year-old propelled himself out a second-story window, captured on live television by news crews in helicopters. He became known as the “boy in the window.”

Law enforcement response to mass shootings was supposedly overhauled after Columbine to no longer wait before storming a building. Society, too, supposedly turned introspective, drawing a line of demarcation. Lots of talk of never again. Back then it was my solace — as a reporter, a mother, a human. The image of terrified children with their arms raised was surely part of never again.

But in the more than two decades since that promise has turned into an American myth.

In a journalism career that has taken me from Colorado to Texas to Washington, D.C., I have covered seven of these shootings, some in the chaos of the moment, some in their aftermath.

Columbine. Platte Canyon High School. Virginia Tech. Deer Creek Middle School. Aurora movie theater. Arapahoe High School. Santa Fe High School.

I have written thousands of words about them over the years, searching for ways to convey the massive damage to a public who thinks it could never happen in their community. None of my words ever came close.

I carry with me the anguished faces and voices, a kind of personal shrapnel that can never be dislodged. I suspect every reporter on this duty does.

I think of the carful of teenage boys who circled the parking lot of Gateway High School in Aurora, Colorado, five times throughout the day July 20, 2012. They hung from open car windows shouting to anyone who would listen: “Where’s A.J.?” “Has anyone heard from A.J.?”

They had been chasing social media rumors all day to find their friend in the hours after a gunman sprayed bullets into a packed movie theater. They knew A.J. had gone there to see the midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

They called hospital after hospital and continued to return to the high school, now set up as a gathering place for the family members of the missing. The last time I saw them it was starting to get dark, 20 hours after the shooting. The hope I saw earlier had been replaced with dread.

Alexander Jonathan Boik, 18, an aspiring artist, was among the 12 people who died in the massacre.

I think of Reagan Weber, the seventh grader who lived just a few blocks away from me. She was shot and wounded Feb. 23, 2010, when a man opened fire on students at Deer Creek Middle School in Jefferson County, Colorado. All three of my kids went to Deer Creek, not that year but the year before and after.

I sat with Reagan’s father, Craig Weber, in their living room the day after the Aurora theater shooting. He quietly talked about how worried he was about her, watching closely for signs of reignited trauma. He spoke of feeling helpless. Earlier that day, Reagan’s older sister texted “I love you” to her as word spread across Denver of the massacre. By coincidence, Reagan was in a midmorning showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.” Reagan texted back, “I’m terrified.”

I think, too, of Whitney Riley matter-of-factly rattling off the questions she asked herself after hearing the first gunshots at Arapahoe High School on Dec. 13, 2013. Riley, along with six other students and two teachers, had crammed into a tiny sprinkler supply room, no bigger than a closet. She wondered if she should confront the gunman? Should she run, and if she did, would she stop to help the wounded even if it meant sacrificing her own life?

I watched Whitney’s father stiffen as his 15-year-old daughter talked about how this had simply become part of her adolescence. It was Whitney’s second school shooting in three years. She had been at Deer Creek.

I think of Andrew Goddard sitting in a darkened hospital room at the bedside of his son, Colin, who had been shot four times in a Virginia Tech classroom. Andrew described how blood seeped out of bullet holes in Colin’s shattered body and spread across the sheets and pillowcases. The face of the shooter seemed to glare down from the television above his son’s bed. Goddard said he made a silent pact with the universe in that moment that if Colin were allowed to survive, he would do everything he could to make sure no other parent had to feel what he was feeling.

I also remember the Aurora movie theater 911 calls, played in a courtroom. In the background of those frantic calls was an odd thumping boom like the bass of a rap song turned up too high. I remember the collective gasp as everyone, including me, realized the sound was the rhythmic blasts of semiautomatic weaponry picking off people inside the theater.

The language and way mass shootings are reported has evolved in my time of writing about them. Mostly gone is the “thoughts and prayers” cliché. In the Aurora aftermath, parents of the victims started the “No Notoriety” campaign, chiding the news media to stop writing more about the gunman (and they are almost always male) than the victims, elevating murderers to the celebrity status they craved. That has stuck.

Now there is a new discussion making the rounds of newsrooms. Have we sanitized the carnage? Last week, Vanity Fair posed the question of whether it is time to post images of what gunfire actually does to bodies. I understand the impulse to shake the nation’s conscience, and maybe that is what we now need. But the reality of those pictures would be horrifying. In the hours after the Columbine shootings, parents still waiting for word about their children were asked to bring dental records to help identify the dead.

When my editor first suggested I write this piece, I was hesitant. Anything I have felt pales to the lifelong grief of the survivors, witnesses and families of the slain. And other reporters have covered more and seen worse. Some say our part of this now familiar dance is ghoulish. I cannot disagree. But I think, too, it is crucial.

Two decades in, though, I am no longer naïve. I no longer believe in never again.

by Robert Faturechi

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The South Dakota attorney general has closed its investigation into billionaire T. Denny Sanford for possession of child pornography and is not filing charges, according to a notice the office sent to a judge Friday.

The office “has completed its investigation” and “has determined that there are no prosecutable offenses within the jurisdiction of the State of South Dakota,” deputy attorney general Brent Kempema wrote.

The attorney general’s office provided no details on how that decision was made or whether Sanford is being investigated in any other jurisdictions or by federal authorities.

“Mr. Sanford appreciates the public acknowledgement by the SD Attorney General’s office” that the office’s Division of Criminal Investigation “has concluded its investigation and they have found no prosecutable crime,” one of Sanford’s attorneys, former South Dakota attorney general Marty Jackley, told ProPublica.

In 2020, ProPublica first reported that South Dakota authorities had started investigating the state’s richest man and had referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Earlier this year, South Dakota officials acknowledged Sanford was still being actively investigated by federal and state authorities.

The Department of Justice declined to comment about whether its probe was still open.

The investigation of Sanford started with a tip from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, court records show. The center is a private nonprofit that operates a tip line where people and companies can report images of suspected child sex trafficking and abuse. The organization’s staff reviews the tips and refers them to law enforcement.

Investigators obtained five search warrants in 2019 and 2020 for Sanford’s email, phone and internet data. It’s unclear what, if anything, investigators found in the searches.

ProPublica won access to the search warrants after more than a year of litigation that reached the state’s highest court. Sanford unsuccessfully asked the courts to conceal the search warrants, which are supposed to be publicly accessible under state law, and to block ProPublica’s reporting.

ProPublica is continuing a legal effort to obtain other records filed with the court that detailed why there was cause for those warrants. Sanford is fighting to keep those records private.

Sanford’s attorney has previously said that Sanford’s email account was hacked and being used by someone else.

In a new filing Friday, another of Sanford’s lawyers said a forensic examination of Sanford’s email account “uncovered the specific name of an individual other than the Implicated Individual having gained access.”

“Further evidence includes corroborating evidence of hacking,” Sanford’s attorney wrote, without providing any details.

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by Irena Hwang

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When I was assigned to a ProPublica collaboration with Oregon Public Broadcasting last year, I was excited to dive into a topic that was totally new to me: fish hatcheries. Over the past two centuries, development has decimated wild salmon and steelhead trout populations in the Pacific Northwest. First overfishing, then hydropower development, destroyed a key component of the local ecosystem, and with it the traditional ways of life for some of the Northwest’s Indigenous people. To address plummeting fish stocks, the U.S. government has poured billions into a network of hatcheries to literally mass-produce fish.

My task was to perform a first-of-its-kind comprehensive analysis of these publicly funded salmon and steelhead trout hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest. As someone who, for years, kept a faithful inventory of my freezer using Google Sheets, I thought this sounded like a reasonable goal. Heck, maybe even a good time. (In hindsight, this may explain why I have so much trouble making friends.)

It was not a good time.

Our investigation ultimately found that the hatchery system built to prop up vulnerable fish populations was failing.

We didn’t find this out with a comprehensive, hatchery-by-hatchery analysis. Our initial idea for how to start the analysis turned out to be impossible. But in the process of discovering that, I learned a little more about how data reporting and science can be tightly intertwined, and about the importance of recognizing the difference between the two. When I missed that distinction, I ended up with a project that spun out of control.

Tag, You’re (Not) It

Like many data reporting projects, this one started with publicly available data. My co-reporter, Tony Schick at Oregon Public Broadcasting, part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, sent over a link to a database of tiny metal tags that had been embedded in millions of juvenile salmon and steelhead trout in the Columbia River Basin. The database contains tons of detail about hatchery fish, including the hatchery where they were produced and where they were released into rivers. You can also use the database to get details about the fates of those fish, whether they ended up in a commercial fishing net in the ocean or in a tribe’s ceremonial catch, or, for the lucky few, back at a hatchery spawning ground. (Congratulations on attaining your biological imperative, fish!)

Grouped by production year and hatchery, the data seemed perfect for revealing how well each of the 29 publicly funded facilities was doing in its goal of breeding fish that could make it to the ocean, where they finish maturing, and then survive the trip back upriver to breed again. I thought it would tell us who the winners and losers were in the hatchery Olympics.

My next step was to interview as many fish data experts as I could. I was a little overwhelmed with the details that had initially excited me, and I wanted some guidance on what data fields and criteria I should use to assess each of the 29 facilities. Within months, I went from knowing zero fish biologists to a whole school of them, and I ran my idea of building this comprehensive database past them.

It should have been a red flag that none of my interviewees immediately said, “Oh yes, what a great idea, please do.” Instead, I got a lot of cautionary looks.

Approximately 873 pages into a pile of reports the experts had shared with me, I began to understand why. I realized that in the world of hatcheries, there is no one metric for success. Each hatchery seemed to have a different target for the number of juveniles it released. Each also seemed interested in measuring different characteristics of spawning adults. And some hatcheries counted fish who were caught in the ocean as a success while others were only concerned with fish who survived long enough to return to the river. A few hatcheries I researched were analyzing fish genetics, which helps scientists keep tabs on the trajectory of a certain population through time and geography.

(Laila Milevski/ProPublica)

This lack of standardization was frustrating, but it also made sense because individual hatcheries and programs often have different goals. A hatchery charged with rehabilitating an endangered salmon population will want to count something different than a hatchery that’s creating a supply for sport fishing.

That fact helped explain another thing I noticed in the reports: Some of them didn’t seem to be about a single hatchery. Instead, they referred to programs that the hatchery participated in. Brood stock might be collected at one location, their eggs fertilized at a different place, with juveniles moved to yet another facility to mature, and finally transported to a fourth site for release. The hatchery analysis idea had gone bust.

One Fish, Two Fish, Trends Across Entire Groups of Fish

With some serious holes now poked in my initial idea, I decided to revisit a data portal that various hatcheries staffers had mentioned. Maintained by the Columbia Basin Research center at the University of Washington, the portal reports data about a different type of tag than the ones I was initially looking into. The first group of tags, called coded wire tags, are relatively low-tech and can be embedded in a lot of fish; this sounds like a good thing, except the tags have to be removed from the fish’s snout in order to be read, a process that the fish will not survive. This means that tags are typically collected from fish that have died naturally or after being caught. The data from Columbia Basin Research, by contrast, is based on a type of microchip known as a passive integrated transponder, or PIT, which can be easily detected by a sensor as the fish pass by. If you’ve ever paid a highway toll using an EZPass, you and a fish swimming through a dam in Oregon have more in common than you think.

I’d initially dismissed PIT tag data because I knew that far fewer fish are being tagged with those tags than with coded wires. But the research center’s PIT tag data had two main advantages. For one thing, the fish were grouped by population, defined by species, geography, migration season and history. (Over the decades, dams have had a profound effect on fish populations: Out of nine historic groups of sockeye previously recorded around the Snake River, only one group has survived the building of the dams.) Now that my hatchery-focused approach had imploded, populations seemed like an ideal way to look at how fish were doing.

The research center’s data was also grouped by the location where the tags were scanned, which made it easy to pick a single place and then compare multiple fish populations that passed that spot, even if they’d been grown or released in different parts of the Columbia River Basin. Choosing a point near the mouth of the Columbia River would allow us to see how many of the fish who made it down to the ocean survived to adulthood and began the journey back upstream.

This estimate of ocean survival is by no means comprehensive. But it is a quantity that one of the University of Washington researchers described to me as a snapshot of the “return on investment” of hatchery activities.

This, at last, was the tag data we were looking for.

Angling for Answers

As helpful as the Columbia Basin Research portal was, questions remained, like what counts as success.

There was one figure that kept popping up in large-scale reviews of the hatcheries system. In 2003, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a federal agency developed to help balance hydropower and conservation priorities in the Pacific Northwest, determined that adult fish would have to return at an average rate of at least 4% to rebuild salmon and steelhead populations. In other words, for every 100 juvenile fish sent to the ocean, four would have to return to fresh water and get a fair shake at spawning. That benchmark has been reviewed and affirmed by independent panels of experts multiple times since its adoption, and it has been cited numerous times by fish biologists in peer-reviewed publications.

But even if we had a benchmark, we still had to decide what time period to look at. When we talked to experts, time and again they mentioned that, like anything in nature, fish survival is extremely volatile. For the same reason that I base decisions about socializing on rolling averages of COVID-19 data, rather than on the statistics reported for a single day, it makes sense to consider fish population survival over multiple years, rather than comparing one year’s survival rates to another’s. So what time span should we look at, and why?

Climate and ocean conditions, which matter a lot for these fish, have tended to follow yearslong trends. On the advice of researchers, we chose two time periods to analyze: The years 2008-2013 represent some of the best Pacific climate conditions seen in recent history, while 2014-2018 were some of the worst, and, conveniently, the most recent complete data available for our fish.

So we went with it. Instead of the database of hatchery-by-hatchery performance we’d initially envisioned, I ended up with just 16 numbers: two for each of the eight salmon or trout populations we focused on, with each number representing how things have been for the fish in a recent good period and in the most recent available period, which was bad.

The Once and Future Fish

It was a bit disappointing to report just 16 numbers after months of work. There is so much more to fish biology that I learned from my chats with all those experts.

But the numbers I reported were important: They showed that between 2014 and 2018, none of the fish populations met the 4% population-restoration benchmark. Even when conditions were good, between 2008 and 2013, only two out of the eight populations managed to have more than 4% of their members make it back to fresh water as adults.

Simple as they are, these numbers are an important way to get the conversation started and to raise hard questions about hatcheries. Were these facilities, intended to out-game nature, working? Would they be effective in the changing climate? And if not, how can we keep generating power through dams on the Columbia River and still fulfill U.S. treaties that guaranteed fish to the Indigenous people of the Northwest?

(Laila Milevski/ProPublica)

The more work I did to get that handful of numbers, the more I realized that the comprehensive study of hatcheries we’d initially envisioned sounded suspiciously like a Ph.D. thesis on wildlife ecology. Tempting as it might be to start another doctorate, I backed away from that initial goal, and in hindsight it was the right decision.

Because sometimes the best thing a data reporter should do isn’t a super-ambitious, large-scale analysis. More detail doesn’t always mean more insight, or give you the best takeaway from a story. Sometimes data reporting means slogging through thousands of pages of reports and connecting the dots on existing research about a topic so you can present just a handful of telling numbers.

This project reminded me that the second word in my job title, reporter, is just as important as the first.

Correction

June 6, 2022: This story originally gave a mistaken impression of the circumstances under which coded wire tags are removed from fish. The tags are taken from fish that are already dead, not from living fish that are killed by the process.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A special prosecutor has charged Alaska’s former acting attorney general with three counts of sexual abuse of a minor for having sex with a 17-year-old girl he coached on a high school mock trial team in May 1991.

The charges were filed Friday in Alaska state court in Anchorage against Clyde “Ed” Sniffen, who served as acting attorney general from August 2020 to January 2021. Gov. Mike Dunleavy asked the Department of Law to appoint an independent investigator to review the case after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica first reported in January 2021 that a woman had accused Sniffen of sexual misconduct.

Sniffen resigned as the newsrooms were preparing the article. In his resignation letter, Sniffen wrote that he had decided to step aside “after discussions with family, and for personal reasons.” Sniffen’s attorney declined comment and said he would not make his client available for an interview.

Dunleavy had appointed Sniffen as his permanent attorney general, subject to confirmation by the Legislature, days before his resignation. At that time, the governor said Sniffen “has a long and proven record of leadership within the Department of Law and I am proud to appoint him to serve as our state’s next Attorney General.”

Sniffen replaced former Attorney General Kevin Clarkson, who resigned after the Daily News and ProPublica reported he had sent hundreds of questionable texts to a female colleague. In his resignation letter, Clarkson wrote, “I regret that my actions and errors in judgment in interacting with a state employee have become a distraction to the good work and good people working in the state’s and your service.”

Former Acting Alaska Attorney General Ed Sniffen (National Association of Attorneys General)

Nikki Dougherty White, now 48, told the news organizations that Sniffen first had sex with her during a mock trial team competition in New Orleans and continued their sexual relationship upon returning to Anchorage. Those allegations form the basis for the felony charges filed Friday.

White had come forward publicly for the first time after learning that Sniffen had been appointed attorney general.

Reached by phone Friday, special prosecutor Gregg Olson declined to discuss the details of the charges. White also declined to comment.

The Department of Law, in a statement issued late Friday, said: “Within 24 hours of learning of the allegations against Mr. Sniffen, this office acted to appoint a special prosecutor in the interest of justice, fairness, and transparency. Now that the charges have been filed, the special prosecutor will continue to make decisions independent from the Department of Law to bring the case to resolution.”

The Law Department statement continued: “The allegation that Mr. Sniffen took advantage of his authority to engage in sexual acts with the victim is disturbing and disappointing. As attorneys who work on behalf of the State to hold people accountable, we expect to be held to the same level of accountability. This further compels us to be advocates for victims, and more importantly, clearly emphasize our role is to ensure justice for every Alaskan.”

Anchorage police investigated the case, interviewing White and other former members of the mock trial team who joined Sniffen on the trip to New Orleans.

Friday’s criminal complaint, which was first reported by the Alaska Beacon, focuses on Sniffen’s alleged actions in Alaska, following the New Orleans trip. Sniffen is accused of having sex with White, who is identified by her initials in the complaint, three times between May 13 and May 28, 1991.

The complaint says the offenses took place at the homes of Sniffen’s friends and at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage. Sniffen was 27 years old at the time.

Under an Alaska law enacted in 1990, months before Sniffen and White traveled to New Orleans, it was illegal for an adult to have sex with a 16- or 17-year-old whom he or she was teaching, counseling or coaching. (In many other instances, the age of consent in Alaska is 16.)

Olson said the charges carry a maximum of five years in prison each. Because of the timing of the alleged offense, Sniffen would not be required to register as a sex offender if convicted, he said.

by Megan O’Matz

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Cole Wist was a Republican state House member in Colorado with an A grade from the NRA. Then, in 2018, he supported a red flag law, sponsoring a bill to allow guns to be taken away — temporarily — from people who pose an immediate threat to themselves or others.

Wist lost his seat in the legislature that year in the face of an intense backlash from Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a gun rights organization in Colorado that boasts it accepts “no compromise” as it battles “the gun grabbers.” The group campaigned against him, distributing flyers and referring to him on social media as “Cole the Mole.”

Wist, an attorney, doesn’t regret trying to enact what he considered a measured response to an epidemic of gun violence in the United States. He acted after a mentally ill man in his Denver suburb killed a sheriff’s deputy. The bill didn’t pass until after Wist was out of office and his successor, Tom Sullivan, shepherded it through. Sullivan is a Democrat who lost his son in the Aurora theater massacre.

Wist left the Republican Party this year, citing the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection as the reason, and is now unaffiliated with any political party. Days after the slaughter of 19 children and 2 adults in an elementary school in Texas, ProPublica talked to Wist about the challenges ahead as proponents once again work to enact gun reforms.

Colorado is one of 19 states, including Illinois, Florida and Indiana, that have red flag laws, sometimes called extreme risk protection orders. Texas does not. After the Robb Elementary School murders on Tuesday, a bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate agreed to negotiate over possible anti-violence measures, including expanding red flag laws.

In Colorado, a spokesperson for the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners called Wist “a sellout” on Friday and said the organization had no choice but to work against him. “At the end of the day, my goal is to hold politicians accountable regardless of whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat,” said RMGO’s Executive Director Taylor Rhodes.

Rhodes called the assault on the elementary school a “massive terrorist attack” but said gun control is not the answer.

“We protect everything in our nation that’s valuable with guns. We protect our banks with guns, courthouses … our homes. We protect them with guns.” The group’s logo includes an image of a firearm that resembles an assault rifle.

This interview with Wist has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about why you introduced the legislation in Colorado.

Every time we have an incident like this, people tend to go into their camps. We’ve got some folks who say we should ban certain kinds of guns or expand universal background checks or any other number of policy proposals to try to eliminate guns from society. On the other hand, you have folks who say no, these are mental health issues, this is an indication of a larger mental health crisis in the country. But you know, I don’t really hear a whole lot of policy solutions from those folks. So in an effort to try to pair concerns about mental health and the combination of mental health crisis with access to firearms and weapons, I started investigating extreme risk protection orders and how they’ve been passed in other states. And one of the first states in the country to do this was Indiana. And I don’t think you’d really think that Indiana is a hard left state, by any means. … And ultimately, I decided to sponsor legislation relating to extreme risk protection orders.

When you served in the state legislature, the Republicans controlled the state Senate and Democrats had the House. What was the makeup of your district?

I represented a district that at that time was predominantly Republican. It had historically elected Republican legislators, but it was a suburban district becoming more purple. And, you know, look, when you’re elected to represent a district in the legislature, you’re not just elected by the people that voted for you, you’re elected to represent everyone in the district, and that includes unaffiliated and Democratic voters.

Who opposed you when you ran for reelection in 2018?

So there’s a group called the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a very active gun rights organization. They targeted me or targeted my race for campaign activity and actively worked against me. … They put flyers on people’s doors, including my own door, and used their resources to campaign against me.

An image from the “Rocky Mountain Gun Owners - Official Page” on Facebook. (Screenshot taken by ProPublica)

Are the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners similar to the National Rifle Association?

I think they characterize themselves as being the no-compromise gun rights organization. So I would characterize them as certainly more aggressive on gun rights issues than the NRA, and the NRA is the more well-known organization, the one with more resources. But in Colorado, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners is the gun rights group that seems to have the most sway. They’ve been successful in recalling a couple of legislators here.

Did it seem like they sacrificed your seat to send a message to other lawmakers to stay in line?

I guess that’s a fair interpretation, that you either stay in line and vote the party line on this issue, or they will remove you. And that’s what they did. I mean, there were other factors in play in 2018. That was also the midterm election of Donald Trump’s first term in office or his only term in office. … So there were more issues in play than gun policy. But it was certainly a group that worked against my reelection and didn’t help. … It might have been enough to suppress turnout on the Republican side for me.

What was the reaction from the GOP leadership to your sponsorship of the red flag bill?

I was the assistant minority leader in the state House at that point. There was an effort to strip me of that leadership post. That effort failed. I think there’s some reluctance in Republican circles here to take on groups like the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners for fear of getting primaried, for fear of having them work against you. And I suppose people may look at my experience as being something that deters them from even having conversations. I introduced a bill that was very controversial. In those circles, even being open to conversations about gun policy or gun safety legislation creates risk for folks in Republican circles here. So, if your objective is to stay in office for a long time and continue to get reelected … you don’t cross that line.

In the aftermath of Uvalde, what does your experience suggest about the likelihood of our politicians enacting some measures to prevent future atrocities?

I see some of the same signs happening again, in the aftermath of this event, where everyone sort of retreats to the corners. And some people are calling for banning certain kinds of guns and changing the purchase age for certain kinds of guns. If you try to ban AR-15s, I think that’s a policy solution that some people think is something we should do. I don’t agree with that. We’ve got millions of guns already in the possession of gun owners across the country. How much of an impact are you going to have if you ban certain kinds of guns at this point? I think a better discussion is to talk about why people commit these kinds of violent acts with guns and other weapons. … And so I think red flag laws and legislation that focuses on trying to reduce risk and talking about why these kinds of events happen is the most productive conversation for us to have. Let’s give law enforcement and families tools that they can use.

But one of the things that’s lost in this conversation is that — I’ll talk specifically about Colorado — we have one of the highest suicide rates in the country. We also have one of the highest percentages of gun ownership in the country, and the highest percentage of suicides here are committed by guns. So when folks are going through a severe mental crisis, yes, there’s a risk that they might go commit a homicide, but there’s probably a greater risk that they’re going to hurt themselves. So I think there’s this way of characterizing red flag laws as confiscating guns and trying to hurt someone’s constitutional rights. But instead, I think it’s something that’s being used to help protect that person, to prevent them from harming themselves and prevent them from harming family members.

Can you describe the toll this experience took on you and your family?

I received threats as a result of going through that process. And that was very stressful for my family. I don’t miss that part of public life. And, you know, social media and other things have made being in office very difficult. And folks can say just about anything and do say just about anything. So I can choose to do a couple of things. As a private citizen, I can kind of retreat from this and not talk about it, or try to do what I can to raise awareness and just try to encourage folks to come together. I don’t know that you’re ever going to change everyone’s minds. But we don’t solve problems unless we talk to each other and not talk past each other. And every time we have an incident like what happened in Texas this week, there’s sort of the initial, let’s talk, let’s come together, let’s talk about this. But I’m just amazed at how quickly everyone just sort of retreats to the same old political position. I hope this time is different.

by Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When Hawaii lawmakers moved this month to pump $600 million into the state’s Native Hawaiian homesteading program, they said they wanted to help those who are most in need. The problem: They didn’t say whom, exactly, they had in mind.

Now, the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the agency that oversees the long-troubled program, faces the difficult task of setting priorities and crafting a plan for how to spend the single largest injection of funds in the history of the century-old initiative. Under the program, anyone who is at least 50% Native Hawaiian is entitled to lease land for $1 a year and to either build or buy a home there. DHHL officials could use the new appropriation for a variety of measures, from developing residential lots to acquiring land to offering mortgage and rental subsidies.

At issue is how to help two different groups languishing on a waitlist of nearly 29,000 people. One is made up of Native Hawaiians who can afford a home but face a long line for DHHL housing. The other is made up of those who can’t.

In 2020, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica found that the homesteading program was leaving behind thousands of low-income beneficiaries in that second category, in part because DHHL was developing new subdivision housing that was too expensive for them to afford. The average price was $300,000 to $400,000.

In positioning the $600 million bill for final passage, legislators amended it to give DHHL greater flexibility in deciding how to spend the money, including deleting a provision that allocated the bulk of funding to 17 planned projects totaling about 3,000 lots — a provision that would have helped those ready to purchase units that had yet to be built.

Legislators said they gave the agency more latitude so it could better address the wide range of needs and preferences of people on the waitlist. “DHHL is in a better position to do that, not the Legislature,” House Speaker Scott Saiki said.

For its part, DHHL said it is reviewing legislative reports and testimony, including written comments from beneficiaries. “Our goal is to signal to the community what implementation will look like as soon as possible,” department spokesperson Cedric Duarte said.

Gov. David Ige is expected to sign the $600 million legislation, and the department has until Dec. 10 to submit a spending plan. But because Ige’s term ends in December, implementation will fall to the next administration.

Native Hawaiians are not waiting though.

Leaders of the two largest beneficiary organizations said they do not trust the department, which has been blasted by federal and state watchdogs for mismanagement over the years, to craft an effective plan. Those groups, the Sovereign Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations and the Association of Hawaiians for Homestead Lands, have teamed up to develop their own. The spending roadmap, those leaders say, must be developed by the people who own the land trust, have suffered from the long waits for homesteads and will be directly affected by how the money is used.

“It’s time for nonbeneficiaries to mind their manners and sit down,” Robin Danner, chair of the council, said in an interview. “We beneficiaries are taking responsibility.”

This month, the two groups held the first of a series of meetings to gather feedback from beneficiaries. And if early conversations are any indication, the organizations will have to reconcile divergent views among Native Hawaiians. Some say any financial aid should first go to those on the waitlist who otherwise cannot afford to purchase a home.

Oahu beneficiary Gregory Ah Yat, who turns 70 in August, has been a renter all his adult life. He has been on the waitlist since the late 1980s and passed on several potential lease offerings over the years because he couldn’t afford them. He favors DHHL providing need-based aid. “I know some people will still grumble, but that’s the purpose of the help,” he said.

The legislation does permit DHHL to use an applicant’s income to set priorities on who to help, and it authorizes the department to provide down-payment, mortgage and rental subsidies to waitlisters, though the department must first establish guidelines for such assistance.

But others think help should be offered uniformly, based strictly on an applicant’s position on the waitlist. They want to see the money used to develop more housing, which typically costs the program’s beneficiaries roughly half the market price because they are not paying for the land — a valuable benefit in a state with one of the hottest real estate markets in the country.

Liberta Hussey-Albao, 78, said she first applied for a homestead in the 1970s and remains on the Kauai waitlist even though she owns a home there. Hussey-Albao wants the homestead for her adult son, who also lives on Kauai but is not a homeowner and doesn’t meet the blood-level requirement to be on the waitlist; beneficiaries must be at least 50% Native Hawaiian.

If DHHL bases financial assistance on need, some applicants who have waited decades for a homestead will be passed over, depriving them of something they are entitled to, according to Hussey-Albao. “Let’s be fair,” she said. “Those on the top of the list are old and dying.”

Either way, policymakers have another key factor to consider: a tight deadline. The legislation requires DHHL to allocate the $600 million by June 30, 2025; any remaining money must be returned to the state’s general fund. “If even $1 of this lapses because it went unused, I think that will be a disaster,” said state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, co-chair of the Legislature’s Native Hawaiian caucus. “Maybe there's some hyperbole there, but you get what I’m trying to say.”

by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

For nearly a decade, U.S. officials watched with alarm as a shadowy network of Russian mercenaries connected to the Kremlin wreaked havoc in Africa, the Middle East and most recently Ukraine.

A number of them now say they wish the U.S. government had done more.

President Vladimir Putin has increasingly relied on the Wagner Group as a private and unaccountable army that enables Russia to pursue its foreign policy objectives at low cost and without the political backlash that can come from foreign military intervention, U.S. officials and national security experts said.

In recent years, governments in the Middle East and Africa hired the fighters to crush insurgencies, protect natural resources and provide security — committing grave human rights abuses in the process, according to U.S. officials and international watchdogs.

In Syria, Wagner fighters were filmed gleefully beating a Syrian army deserter with a sledgehammer before cutting off his head. In the Central African Republic, United Nations investigators received reports that the mercenaries raped, tortured and murdered civilians. In Libya, Wagner allegedly booby-trapped civilian homes with explosives attached to toilet seats and teddy bears. Last month, German intelligence officials linked Wagner mercenaries to indiscriminate killings in Ukraine.

The U.S. was slow to respond to the danger, and it now finds itself struggling to restrain the use of the mercenaries across the globe, according to interviews with more than 15 current and former diplomatic, military and intelligence officials. Unilateral sanctions have done little to deter the group. Diplomacy has stumbled.

“There was no unified or systematic U.S. policy toward the group,” said Tibor Nagy, who served the State Department for nearly three decades, most recently as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs until 2021.

Tibor Nagy (Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images)

The Kremlin officially denies any connection with the activities of Russian mercenaries abroad, and much about Wagner’s structure and leadership remains unclear. But experts say that Wagner’s top officers have participated in meetings between foreign leaders and top Russian officials. They also say the Russian air force has transported Wagner fighters to launch the group’s international missions.

Wagner has spread around the world, particularly in Africa, because it presents an enticing package to leaders of embattled nations, experts said. It offers to quash terrorism and rebel threats with brutal military crackdowns, while rallying public support for their government clients through disinformation campaigns.

U.S. officials said they have felt underequipped in trying to curtail the mercenaries’ incursions, in part because American diplomacy in Africa has been gradually stripped of resources over the past three decades. Some also said the U.S. was slow to appreciate the severity of the Wagner threat before it became a formidable weapon in the Kremlin’s arsenal.

In Africa, American efforts to persuade governments not to work with Wagner have generally been late and ineffectual, the officials said. U.S. diplomats have been surprised when Wagner arrives in a faltering country, leaving them scrambling to counter the group’s influence with limited tools and incentives.

During the Cold War, America’s policy of containing the spread of Soviet communism led to a substantial investment in courting African leaders, offering developmental aid, university exchange programs, even concerts. But when the Berlin Wall fell, so too did the U.S. government’s interest in the African continent, the officials told ProPublica. Embassy staffs shrank; programs shriveled.

“America’s soft power is unbeatable, but it needs to be deployed,” Nagy told ProPublica. “The quiver is empty.”

Nagy and other current and former high-level State Department officials said embassies in Africa tend to employ few public diplomacy officers, with barebones staff that must juggle everything from routine visa issues to terrorist threats.

“That doesn’t leave a lot of time for a thin staff to develop the expertise or the relationships necessary to have or pursue a robust engagement strategy,” one senior State Department official said about efforts to steer foreign officials away from Wagner. “The ability of a fairly junior diplomatic officer to build a relationship with the Cabinet member who’s going to be making the decision — that is just not realistic in most cases.”

The State Department declined to comment. The Pentagon and the Kremlin did not respond to questions for this story.

The most visible U.S. effort to keep Wagner out of a specific country transpired in Mali, where the mercenaries arrived last December to fight jihadists rampaging in the north. Malian President Assimi Goïta had recently come to power in the latest of a series of coups that prompted international sanctions.

Before Wagner landed, Gen. Stephen Townsend, the head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, traveled to Mali to meet with Goïta. “I explained that I thought it was a bad idea to invite Wagner,” Townsend told Congress in March. “Wagner obeys no rules. They won’t follow the direction of the government.”

But the entreaties from Townsend and other U.S. officials were unsuccessful. Former diplomats say the effort was part of a troubling pattern where American officials parachute into complex situations equipped with little more than talking points. Africa Command declined to comment.

The Americans were telling the Malians not to work with the Wagner group but offering no meaningful alternatives, said J. Peter Pham, who served as the first-ever U.S. special envoy to the Sahel region until last year and maintains close contact with Malian and other African officials.

“You either have concrete programs of assistance, or you have personal relationships and diplomatic capital built up over the years that you can call upon,” Pham said. “Many American officials, often of middling rank, are often dispatched with neither.”

In March, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that Wagner mercenaries had participated in the torture of civilians, including by electrocution, while working with Malian soldiers. Last month, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report accusing Russian fighters of participating in a massacre of roughly 300 civilians during a military operation. The killing began at a crowded cattle market on March 27 and continued for several days. In a statement, State Department spokesman Ned Price said, “We are concerned that many reports suggest that the perpetrators were unaccountable forces from the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group.”

The Malian government has said that the Russians are helping their military as formal instructors, and that their army killed 203 “terrorists” and arrested 51 more during the operation. The Malian Embassy in the U.S. did not respond to requests for comment.

The Wagner group first attracted public notice in 2014, during the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. Its mercenaries fought alongside Russian federation forces, attacking Ukrainian forces in the still-contested Donbas region.

Gary Motsek, then a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, was alarmed by the emergence of what seemed to be a new breed of Russian mercenary.

For years, the Pentagon had been aware of Russian military contractors disregarding international law, Motsek said in an interview with ProPublica. But the contractors had mostly been consigned to securing oil tankers and other Russian assets. Now the Wagner Group was in combat, like a private army.

“Looking at the growth of the Wagner Group, it was clearly a missed opportunity” from roughly 2008 to 2010, Motsek said. “We should have made it a priority.”

At the time, Motsek led a Pentagon office that helped create international standards for private military contractors. He said the office focused on voluntary compliance and companies active in American warzones. When the Russians chose not to sign on to the standards, he was not aware of any effort to rein them in.

“It was probably my fault, more than anyone else, because I was the only one working on this on an almost daily basis,” Motsek told ProPublica. “We never went and said, ‘Let’s control these guys.’ I didn’t have the mandate to do that. And I guess I didn’t have the vision.”

American officials say Wagner operates through a web of shell companies controlled by the Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, a food industry magnate with close ties to Putin, sardonically referred to as “Putin’s Chef.” Prigozhin has vehemently denied his involvement in the group, supposedly named after the German composer — a favorite of one of the mercenaries’ alleged commanders. Efforts to reach Prigozhin were not successful.

Yevgeny Prigozhin (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

The U.S. sanctioned Prigozhin in 2016 and the Wagner Group in 2017 in response to their role in the Ukrainian conflict. Prigozhin was subsequently indicted for his alleged involvement in meddling with the 2016 U.S. presidential election through the troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.

Experts say the Wagner Group appears to be paid in proceeds from natural resources like oil, gold and diamonds in countries where they are fighting. The Kremlin has used them as a cheap alternative to Russian armed forces.

“Russia has opened up military operations in two continents, for the first time since the 1980s,” said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University. “The tip of the spear is the Wagner Group.”

In 2015, Russia sent its military to fight in the Syrian civil war on behalf of the dictator Bashar al-Assad. It was the Kremlin’s first armed intervention outside former Soviet territories since the end of the Cold War. Soon, Russian Federation forces and fighters from Wagner and other mercenary groups helped tilt the war in Assad’s favor.

On Feb. 7, 2018, Wagner mercenaries and Syrian soldiers carried out an assault on a U.S. special forces outpost near the town of Khasham, hammering the American position with artillery rounds as the Russians and Syrians advanced. Americans responded with airstrikes in a four-hour battle, killing an estimated 200 combatants. No Americans died.

Joseph Votel, a retired four-star general, was then the head of U.S. Central Command. In an interview, he told ProPublica that he believes the assault was financially motivated, and that Wagner sought control of an oil field near an ongoing U.S.-led counterterror operation.

But Votel said U.S. commanders regarded the fight as an isolated incident rather than a significant development in souring relations between the two nations.

“I didn’t particularly dwell on it,” Votel said. “I wasn’t pressed on it. What happened, happened.”

Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said Russian military successes in the Syrian conflict represented an “inflection point for Russia.”

“They saw how quickly they could gain influence in a region where they’d had relatively little influence,” Siegle said.

In 2019, Wagner began to fight in the Libyan civil war, supporting a campaign by the warlord Khalifa Haftar to overthrow the country’s internationally recognized government. Haftar had appeared to be faltering, but, together, Wagner and rebel fighters launched a new offensive that brought their combined forces to the outskirts of Tripoli.

At the top levels of American foreign policy agencies, alarm bells were beginning to sound.

“We were watching it change the course of the war,” David Schenker, then assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said in an interview with ProPublica. “This was the beachhead. Wagner was the landing party.” Haftar’s attempt to retake Tripoli ultimately stalled after Turkey intervened on the opposing side. But if Haftar had succeeded, Schenker worried, Russia could have been rewarded with “a base on NATO’s southern flank.”

Schenker said he believed the most immediate potential countermeasure was to push the European Union to impose sanctions on Wagner and crack down on its finances. But he said many of his colleagues in the U.S. government and in Europe didn’t view that as realistic.

“I really pressed hard for a designation from the E.U. What’s complicated is that Russia routinely goes and assassinates dissidents in foreign countries,” he said. “People weren’t interested in angering Putin. Putin for these guys is like Voldemort.”

The E.U. did not impose sanctions on Wagner until December 2021.

In response to questions for this story, E.U. spokesperson Nabila Massrali said the E.U. aggressively sanctioned Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine and sanctioned Wagner “to take tangible action against those threatening international peace and security and breaching international law,” noting that all sanctions require unanimity among member countries.

As the Ukrainian conflict drags on and the Kremlin becomes further isolated from the global economy, experts say that Wagner is likely to play an increasingly important role in Russian foreign policy. The Wagner Group’s expansion could help Russia evade the impact of sanctions, entice governments to support it in the U.N. General Assembly and secure strategic positions in its fight against the NATO alliance.

Economically, Russia pales in comparison to superpowers like China and the United States. But in the Wagner group, officials said, Russia has found a cheap and novel foreign policy tool that America has yet to find a way to address. Client governments appear to absorb most of the cost.

“The Russians don’t have a blank checkbook,” said Nagy, the former top U.S. diplomat for Africa. “They are playing a fairly weak hand extremely, extremely well.”

ProPublica will continue to report on the Wagner group and the power struggle between the U.S. and Russia as it plays out around the globe. We are especially interested in relationships between Western companies and Russian mercenaries.

If you know about these issues, please contact reporters Joaquin Sapien at joaquin.sapien@propublica.org or Joshua Kaplan at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org. We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

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Doris Burke and Lynn Dombek contributed research.

by Kiah Collier and Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

The fact that the gunman responsible for this week’s massacre in Uvalde, Texas, was able to buy two AR-15s days after his 18th birthday highlights how much easier it is for Americans to purchase rifles than handguns.

Under federal law, Americans buying handguns from licensed dealers must be at least 21, which would have precluded Salvador Ramos from buying that type of weapon. That trumps Texas law, which only requires buyers of any type of firearm to be 18 or older.

Following Tuesday’s massacre at Robb Elementary School, which killed 19 children and two adults, a growing number of lawmakers in Texas and beyond are calling for the minimum age to purchase assault rifles to be raised to 21 from 18. Doing so would require undoing nearly two centuries of more permissive regulations on so-called long guns.

“It’s something that could happen at either the state or federal level, but I don’t see movement on either front,” said Sandra Guerra Thompson, a criminal law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Only six states — Florida, Washington, Vermont, California, Illinois and Hawaii — have increased the minimum purchase age for long guns to 21, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The majority did so following the 2018 massacre in Parkland, Florida, where a then-19-year-old assailant killed 17 people at a high school.

Several states have since faced legal challenges.

The National Rifle Association sought to repeal the Florida law.

“The ban infringes the right of all 18-to-20-year-olds to purchase firearms for the exercise of their Second Amendment rights, even for self-defense in the home,” the NRA argued in a court filing, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “The ban does not just limit the right, it obliterates it.”

Government attorneys, however, argued that because “18-to-20-year-olds are uniquely likely to engage in impulsive, emotional, and risky behaviors that offer immediate or short-term rewards, drawing the line for legal purchase of firearms at 21 is a reasonable method of addressing the Legislature’s public safety concerns.”

A federal judge upheld the law last year; the NRA is appealing.

A U.S. Court of Appeals recently ruled that California’s version of the law was unconstitutional, though it did uphold a provision that requires adults under 21 to obtain a hunting license before buying a rifle or shotgun.

After the shooting in Uvalde this week, lawmakers in New York and Utah also called on their states to raise the age limit for long gun purchases to 21. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced federal legislation earlier this month — less than a week before the Uvalde shooting — that would raise the minimum age to purchase assault weapons to 21 from 18; the California Democrat said in a statement that it was in response to a shooting that killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket. That gunman also was 18 years old.

“It makes no sense that it’s illegal for someone under 21 to buy a handgun or even a beer, yet can legally buy an assault weapon,” she said.

Small rifles meant for children, including a miniature AR-15, for sale at a gun store in Austin. (Jordan Vonderhaar for The Texas Tribune)

Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said that increasing the age requirement at the federal level may be more effective because federal authorities can inspect and discipline licensed firearm sellers.

“State authorities often don’t have a system in place for enforcing the laws governing” licensed dealers, Nichols said.

In the hours after the shooting in Uvalde, there was some confusion about what types of firearms Ramos had used. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott initially said that Ramos had a handgun and possibly a rifle. That prompted some to speculate that Ramos had been able to get hold of the weapons more easily because of recent changes to the gun laws in Texas, including a bill passed last year that allows Texans to carry handguns without a permit or training. But those early reports turned out to be inaccurate.

After it became clear that the weapon used was a rifle, Texas Democrats questioned why Ramos was able to purchase one at the age of 18.

“Why do we accept a government that allows an 18 year old to buy an assault rifle, but not tobacco products?” state Rep. Nicole Collier, a Fort Worth Democrat who chairs the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, said in a statement. “The hypocrisy of government is deafening. We can develop gun policy that does not infringe upon one’s constitutional right, while preserving and protecting life; that’s called multitasking and we can do that.”

State Rep. Jarvis Johnson, a Houston Democrat, called on Abbott to convene a special session of the Legislature so lawmakers could “pass real gun reforms,” including raising the minimum age to purchase long guns.

“Enough is enough,” he said.

Such a move would reverse a decades-old Texas system that treats handguns differently from long guns, which have long been exempted from state rules on open carry.

The disparate rules date back to the post-Civil War era, when the state — counter to its modern-day reputation — adopted some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation.

“Despite its stereotype of being a state where cowboys promiscuously tote six-shooters, Texas is one of the few states that absolutely prohibits the bearing of pistols by private individuals,” wrote firearms attorney Stephen Halbrook in a 1989 Baylor Law Review article, six years before former Texas Gov. George W. Bush relaxed rules on handguns considerably.

Following spasms of violence that were then plaguing the young state in the 19th century, lawmakers “started specifically targeting weapons that they equated with crime,” said Texas historian Brennan Rivas, who is writing a book about the state’s early gun laws. “They equated bowie knives, daggers and pistols with interpersonal violence and crime.”

Muskets, rifles and shotguns, by comparison, were excluded because they were used for hunting or participating in a militia.

“They didn’t consider long guns to be deadly weapons,” Rivas said. “Those had valuable uses. Whereas these other weapons were kind of like a plague on polite society.”

Lawmakers of that time could not have envisioned that long guns would evolve from lumbering hunting rifles into AR-15s capable of firing dozens of rounds per minute, Rivas added.

But any tighter requirements appear unlikely to pass in Texas.

Just last year, following high-profile massacres in El Paso and in Midland and Odessa in 2019, lawmakers approved a variety of measures that loosened gun regulations. In addition to authorizing the carrying of handguns in public without a permit or training, the laws ban the governor from limiting gun sales during an emergency and allow gun owners to bring their weapons into hotel rooms.

During a Wednesday press conference at Uvalde High School, Abbott repeated a claim he and other Republican state leaders have often made, that mental health issues are to blame for the streak of mass shootings, not lax gun regulations. Officials conceded that they were not aware that the gunman had any criminal or mental health issues.

“The ability of an 18-year-old to buy a long gun has been in place in the state of Texas for more than 60 years,” Abbott said. “And why is it that for the majority of those 60 years we did not have school shootings? And why is it that we do now?”

by Anjeanette Damon

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Federal authorities are expanding an investigation into Chicago-based Northshore Clinical Labs following a ProPublica story that raised questions about its COVID-19 testing operations in Nevada, according to an email obtained by ProPublica.

In a May 17 email that referenced our reporting on Northshore, an investigator with the Inspector General’s Office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services indicated he planned to subpoena documents from Nevada health officials.

“Myself and other law enforcement agencies have had a case opened regarding Northshore Clinical Lab for quite some time,” wrote Special Agent Peter Theiler, who is based in Chicago. “After reading the ProPublica article on Northshore Clinical Lab regarding Nevada patients, we are interested in obtaining records related to testing for COVID-19 for Northshore Clinical Lab rapid test results and PCR test results for Nevada.”

The email did not name the other law enforcement agencies or provide further details on the OIG’s open investigation.

The state of Nevada had not received a subpoena as of Tuesday but will cooperate with one if it’s received, said Nevada Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Shannon Litz.

Meghin Delaney, a spokesperson for Gov. Steve Sisolak, said the state won’t need to be compelled to aid the investigation.

“We’re not going to need a subpoena to cooperate,” she said. “Clearly complying with this federal investigation is important on our end.”

Our investigation documented Northshore’s stunning false negative rate — 96% on the University of Nevada Reno campus — and raised questions about the company’s billing practices. We also found that the company, which is managed by three Chicago men with a history of fraud allegations, used political connections to fast-track its license inspection and to win agreements with local government agencies across the state to provide testing.

The company was able to expand its testing operations in Nevada despite concerns raised by local government scientists about its erroneous results.

Northshore representatives have repeatedly declined to comment.

In a statement released last week, Sisolak’s office said Northshore’s “negligence is despicable.”

“They took advantage of states and local municipalities at a time when millions of Americans were relying on their services,” Delaney said in the written statement. “In order to hold Northshore accountable for these fraudulent practices, the State of Nevada is assessing its legal options.”

Delaney also said Sisolak is making investments in the state’s public health infrastructure to increase testing capacity.

Sisolak, a Democrat running for a second term, is fending off attacks over his response to the pandemic from Republicans vying for the nomination to oppose him. Sisolak is friends with the father of two men Northshore contracted with to expand its business in Nevada.

“Sisolak’s friends made millions and we paid the price,” said Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, one of 10 GOP contenders in the primary for governor.

Sisolak’s office has said repeatedly that he had no discussions with Northshore’s Nevada representatives, Greg and Angelo Palivos, or their father, Peter. The Palivos brothers have said they weren’t aware of the Federal Trade Commission’s past fraud accusations against the leaders of Northshore. They also said Northshore owes them a substantial amount of money for their work in Nevada.

Sisolak also pushed back against criticism of Nevada’s role in allowing Northshore to continue operating for so long, claiming in a statement that the state “ordered them to stop their PCR testing operation, opened an investigation and worked to correct testing issues” on the day it was made aware of the problems.

Nevada’s own internal documents, however, indicate Northshore voluntarily stopped PCR testing days before the state’s regulatory agency learned of the issues. The documents contain no formal orders to stop PCR testing. The agency also waited four days to open the investigation because the complaint came in late on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.

The state also opted to allow Northshore to continue providing rapid antigen tests to the public outside of its license as the investigation progressed. Nevada officials said it is standard practice to allow a health care provider under investigation to continue operations as it works to correct deficiencies.

Northshore, citing a lack of demand, pulled out of the state before the investigation could be completed. Nevada regulators closed its license and notified the State Board of Nursing, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of their findings.

by Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

The Illinois attorney general’s office is investigating whether one of the state’s largest school districts, located in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, violated civil rights laws when police issued tickets to students accused of minor misbehavior.

Attorney General Kwame Raoul told the Township High School District 211 superintendent last week to provide records on students cited for municipal ordinance violations related to school-based conduct or truancy, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune. The office also requested data and records related to suspensions, expulsions, student transfers to alternative schools and calls to police regarding students since the start of the 2018-19 school year.

The nearly 12,000-student district operates five high schools and two alternative schools in Palatine, Hoffman Estates and Schaumburg.

The attorney general’s office decided to investigate District 211 after reading about racial disparities in ticketing across the state, which was documented by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica for the investigation “The Price Kids Pay.” As part of the investigation, reporters created and published a first-of-its-kind database of tickets issued at Illinois public schools over the last three school years, the reasons police ticketed students and, when available, the racial breakdown of students who received tickets.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

Amy Meek, chief of the Civil Rights Bureau in the Illinois attorney general’s office, said District 211 stood out in both the number of tickets issued and racial disparities in the ticketing. She said it is possible the office will examine other districts as well.

“This is an issue that we are quite concerned about,” Meek said.

The attorney general’s investigation also targets the village of Palatine and its police department, which has jurisdiction at three of the district’s schools and has officers, known as school police consultants, stationed in its buildings. The attorney general is seeking documents, including records on tickets, debts sent to collections and truancy fines issued to District 211 students, according to a letter sent to the village.

The civil rights investigation is the latest move by the state to address problems uncovered in “The Price Kids Pay,” a series of stories that, together with the database, have documented nearly 12,000 tickets issued in dozens of Illinois districts. Reporters found that school officials and police were working together to ticket students for misbehavior at school, resulting in fines that could cost hundreds of dollars per ticket.

Within hours of the publication of the first story last month, state schools Superintendent Carmen Ayala urged schools to stop asking police to ticket students, saying they had “abdicated their responsibility for student discipline to local law enforcement.” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he was exploring ways that he and lawmakers could “make sure that this doesn’t happen anywhere in the state of Illinois.”

Based on available records from two of the three police agencies that work in the district’s schools, reporters documented 541 tickets issued to students at District 211 schools during the past three school years, most of them for truancy, use or possession of tobacco or vaping devices, possession or use of small amounts of cannabis, or disorderly conduct.

Most of the ticket records involving District 211 students were obtained from the Palatine and Hoffman Estates police departments and did not include information on the race of the recipients. District 211 does not track the tickets that police issue to students, according to the district’s chief operating officer. But in response to a public records request for ticket records, the district did provide information on the race of students involved in 120 truancy incidents. These were labeled “truancy ticket issued.”

More than half of those 120 incidents involved Latino students, even though 26% of the district’s students are Latino. Black students represent less than 6% of enrollment but received 10% of the tickets.

Under a law that went into effect in 2019, the Illinois legislature banned schools from referring truant students to police so that they could be ticketed.

In a written statement, District 211 Superintendent Lisa Small said the district views student discipline as a way “to teach students citizenship in the school community, with an emphasis on equity and student success.”

Small said school officials involve the police when student conduct violates a local ordinance or state or federal law, when it poses a safety threat in the school, or when other interventions, such as parent conferences, aren’t effective.

“These responses are implemented regardless of the student’s race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background or other factors,” she wrote. “We continually review our practices to ensure we are acting fairly and equitably, responding appropriately and ensuring the results are in the best interest of all students.”

The Palatine village manager, village attorney and police chief did not respond to requests for comment.

Palatine is just one of three towns whose police departments have jurisdiction in District 211. Because the district does not keep records of when students get cited by police, obtaining a complete picture of ticketing practices in the district would require getting records from all three municipalities. Meek said the attorney general’s office may still also request information from the other two, Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates.

State civil rights inquiries examine whether there’s a “pattern and practice” of unequal treatment based on race or other characteristics, such as gender. Meek said school districts or municipalities can be in violation of civil rights laws when their policies and practices have a disparate impact on certain groups of people, even if it is not intentional.

In requesting records related to ticketing and other forms of discipline, the attorney general’s office asked for information on the students’ race and gender and on whether they have a disability. The office also sought information that would indicate the reasons for the tickets and the cost of the fines.

Palatine High School (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

In Palatine, records show, police issued 240 tickets from July 2018 to August 2020 to people under 18 at Palatine High School and William Fremd High School. About 170 of those tickets were for truancy. Most of the truancy tickets were written after the law banning schools from referring truant students to police for tickets went into effect.

Ticketing by police was far more common at Palatine High School, where nearly 48% of students are Latino, than at Fremd, where about 10% of students are Latino.

Excluding parking tickets, Palatine police issued more ordinance violation tickets at Palatine High School than anywhere else in the village during the time period examined, according to reporters’ analysis of police records. Nearly three times as many tickets were issued at the high school as at the next most common site for ticketing: Nellie’s Gastropub and Concert Hub, also known as Durty Nellie’s.

At Hoffman Estates’ two high schools, the Tribune-ProPublica investigation identified more than 300 tickets issued to juveniles during the past three school years for disorderly conduct, possession or use of tobacco, e-cigarettes or cannabis, or truancy. The fines totaled nearly $37,000, and about $13,000 was unpaid, records show. Some Illinois municipalities, including Hoffman Estates, send debt from unpaid student tickets to collections.

Schaumburg police would not indicate which of the tickets issued to young people went to students at Schaumburg High School.

One former student at Hoffman Estates High School recounted this week how she was ticketed for disorderly conduct at the school when she was 17 years old. She said she had put her hands out during a verbal confrontation after school. Police records show she was ticketed in March 2019 and fined $200.

The former student, who is multiracial, said she told school officials that the ticket was unfair and didn’t pay it, she said in an interview. Now a 20-year-old college student, she received a notice in January from a collections company that she owes $270.

The woman said she was glad that the attorney general is investigating District 211. “Hoffman has become more diverse in the past couple of years, and there is a difference in how they treat African American students, any kind of minority students. It is different treatment,” she said. “Something should have been done a long time ago because it has been going on for a while.”

Meek said publicly available data on suspensions and expulsions, as well as previous lawsuits against the district, played a role in the decision to launch a civil rights investigation. Meek also said the office is aware that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation in December into whether an individual student had been disciplined unfairly because of their race and disability status. That investigation is pending.

In addition, District 211 settled a federal civil rights lawsuit in 2019 that involved a Black student who had been ticketed at Palatine High School.

In that case, filed in 2016, a Palatine senior alleged that a police officer at the school used excessive force when he chased her down a hallway and pinned her to the ground. According to the lawsuit and a police report that became part of the case record, the girl had been running after her sister because the sister, also a student, spilled milk on her. The officer arrested both sisters and put them in cells at the police department. Police wrote each girl a ticket for violating a village ordinance prohibiting disorderly conduct.

The district, the police officer and school officials named in the lawsuit denied wrongdoing, but the district agreed to settle the case. District officials said they could not locate a record of how much the settlement was for.

The district and Palatine police have until June 30 to provide records sought by the attorney general. If the investigation reveals violations of civil rights law, the attorney general could negotiate with the district to change its practices, seek a court-monitored consent decree or file a lawsuit against the district.

Meek said the investigation could take a year to complete.

“We also encourage people to reach out to the Civil Rights Bureau if they have complaints or concerns about other districts they want to bring to our attention,” she added.

by Peter Elkind

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The prospect sounded terrifying. A nationwide rollout of new wireless technology was set for January, but the aviation industry was warning it would cause mass calamity: 5G signals over new C-band networks could interfere with aircraft safety equipment, causing jetliners to tumble from the sky or speed off the end of runways. Aviation experts warned of “catastrophic failures leading to multiple fatalities.”

To stave off potential disaster, the Federal Aviation Administration prepared drastic preventive measures that would cancel thousands of flights, stranding passengers from coast to coast and grounding cargo shipments. “The nation’s commerce will grind to a halt,” the airlines’ trade group predicted.

On Jan. 18, following nail-biting negotiations involving CEOs, a Cabinet secretary and White House aides, an eleventh-hour agreement averted these threats of aviation armageddon. Verizon and AT&T agreed not to turn on more than 600 5G transmission towers near the runways of 87 airports and to reduce the power of others.

Disaster was averted. But the fact that it was such a close call was shocking nonetheless. How did a long-planned technology upgrade result in a standoff that seemed to threaten public safety and one of the nation’s largest industries? The reasons are numerous, but it’s undeniable that the new 5G deployment represents an epic debacle by multiple federal agencies, the regulatory equivalent of a series of 300-pound football players awkwardly fumbling the ball as it bounces crazily into and out of their arms.

More than anything, a deep examination of the fiasco reveals profound failures in two federal agencies — the Federal Communications Commission and the FAA — that are supposed to serve the public. In the case of the FCC, the agency not only advocated for the interests of the telecommunications industry but adopted its worldview, scorning evidence of risk and making cooperation and compromise nearly impossible. In the case of the FAA, the agency inexplicably stayed silent and passively watched preparations for 5G proceed over a period of years even as the aviation industry sounded ever more dire warnings that the new networks could put air safety at risk.

That’s the alarming picture that emerges, in new detail, in interviews with 51 participants and observers in the 5G rollout, along with a review of thousands of pages of documents. The problems have spanned a Republican and Democratic administration. The process first ran off the rails under President Donald Trump. It then festered under the administration of President Joe Biden — which ProPublica’s reporting shows impeded the FAA when it finally decided to act — until a crisis forced an intervention.

For now, the truce between the FCC and telecom companies, on one side, and the FAA and aviation companies, on the other, is holding. The parties have mostly tempered their hostile rhetoric, sounded hopeful notes of “coexistence” and have begun to collaborate. The FAA is allowing the wireless companies to slowly turn on more 5G towers as planes mostly keep flying. (About a thousand regional jets, mostly used by JetBlue, American, Delta and United, are currently barred from landing in low-visibility conditions at many airports over fears of equipment interference.)

But the underlying issues are far from resolved. Aviation companies say they need much more time — perhaps two years or more — to upgrade or replace all the equipment vulnerable to 5G interference, according to Bob Fox, a United Airlines pilot now serving as national safety coordinator for the Air Line Pilots Association, a key player in the drama.

The telecom companies have no interest in such a lengthy time frame: Their agreement with the government is set to expire on July 5, and they have made no commitment to extending the restrictions on their towers past that date. The companies have been exhibiting a willingness to make short-term compromises, but they’re also showing hints of frustration that they can’t seem to bring the process to a resolution.

For its part, the FCC seems aggrieved. It overwhelmingly blames the aviation agency for the problems and simultaneously says it’s cooperating with the FAA — while continuing to insist that any claims that 5G will threaten airplanes are pure fantasy. The rhetoric of the FCC chief is almost identical to that of the industry she regulates. As recently as last month, Jessica Rosenworcel, the Biden-appointed FCC chair, dismissed aviation concerns as, in effect, a shakedown — a ploy to get telecom companies to fund a nationwide upgrade of airplane equipment. Referring to the air-safety devices that the aviation industry says could be compromised by 5G, she said in an interview with ProPublica, “Has anyone spec’d the cost of altimeter replacement?”

And a whole new telecom-aviation conflict could soon emerge. T-Mobile and other wireless companies are approved to roll out additional 5G service at the end of 2023, using a C-band frequency even closer to the one used by the airplane safety equipment. Like other participants in the process, T-Mobile says it’s committed to safety and to finding a reasonable solution. But if that rollout unfolds in a way that resembles the last one in the slightest way, a reasonable solution may be elusive.

There was a time, a century ago, when radio was the hottest new technology in the land. Stations sprouted up everywhere, and they routinely used the same frequencies. The result was electronic bedlam: Programming was regularly interrupted by rival stations, police-radio chatter and amateur enthusiasts. Congressional legislation lamented “the present chaos of jazz bands, sermons, crop reports, sporting services, concerts and whatnot running simultaneously on the same wave lengths.” In one celebrated case, a wealthy Illinois bank president obtained a court order against a local 18-year-old whose radio transmissions had kept him from listening to broadcasts of election-night results at his home.

Since its founding in 1934, the Federal Communications Commission has decided which companies would have rights to which parts of the airwaves — for television and countless other technologies. Here, an RCA engineer examines an array of ultrahigh-frequency TV antennas in 1952. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

There was a critical need for a neutral arbiter to make decisions about who could occupy which part of the airwaves. All this led to the creation of a federal agency to regulate radio, which ultimately morphed into the FCC in 1934. A big part of its mission, as the new agency told Congress, was to make “equitable distribution of the frequencies ... as congestion increases.”

The march of technology over the 88 years that followed can be understood as a series of battles for the airwaves. Virtually every important communications technology, from television and satellites to cellphones and GPS, has required bandwidth. The FCC was there to dole out frequencies and referee the conflicts. There were massive financial stakes in many of the decisions. They launched entire industries, while burying or transforming others.

As more and more technologies crowded into a finite set of frequencies, the opportunities for one technology to interfere with another only increased. In the mid-1990s, new digital phone technology unintentionally triggered a buzzing in some hearing aids, while interference from police radios sometimes prompted powered wheelchairs to randomly accelerate or brake, leading to serious injuries. In 2010, the shift to digital television required the replacement of wireless microphones used by actors in Broadway shows, referees at NFL games and pastors at Sunday church services.

By the time 5G approached, the FCC had long ago developed an acclaimed system of selling spectrum — reserved areas of the airwaves — for commercial use, which generated large sums of money for the federal government: public auctions. The agency’s first such auction was held in 1994. Over the years that followed, the FCC successfully used the process 110 times, raising more than $233 billion. The auctions’ sophisticated format helped win a Nobel Prize for two Stanford economists who designed them.

But the Trump administration didn’t initially seem inclined to leave 5G decisions to the FCC. The administration saw the fifth generation of cellular technology, with its faster speeds and automation efficiencies for industry, as its single biggest communications initiative.

Top Trump officials viewed the technology through the prism of competition with China. Many in the administration also expressed fears that Huawei Technologies, a dominant maker of 5G hardware, might be a conduit for Chinese government surveillance, posing a national-security threat. (Huawei has always denied such claims.) Trump lieutenants began employing a nationalist battle cry: America needed to “win the race to 5G” against China.

The Trump administration veered in multiple directions in pursuit of that goal. In January 2018, National Security Council officials circulated a plan to create a government-run 5G network. This idea was jettisoned almost as soon as it was proposed, amid criticism that this would constitute socialism.

President Donald Trump, with AT&T’s then-CEO, Randall Stephenson, in 2017, examining a model of how 5G will be deployed in cities. Trump was a cheerleader for 5G adoption but often cast the process as part of a race against China. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

Others in the Trump orbit proposed ideas as well. Attorney General William Barr at one point suggested that the U.S. government, in the interest of developing China-free 5G networks, buy controlling interests in Nokia and Ericsson, the European telecom equipment companies. Republican insiders such as consultant Karl Rove, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale promoted a partnership in which the Defense Department would lease unused spectrum to Rivada Networks, a company backed by GOP donor Peter Thiel. This approach was embraced by a Trump campaign spokesperson and then promptly repudiated by the White House. Trump himself declared that the administration’s 5G plan should be “private-sector driven and private-sector led.”

Eventually the White House moved on to other obsessions. The FCC, and its chairman, became the driving force in the race to 5G. The agency’s brash leader, 44 when he took the role in 2017, was Ajit Pai. He had been an FCC commissioner before being elevated by Trump. Pai’s agency was legendarily friendly to the companies it regulated, with commissioners and key staff routinely moving to and from lucrative posts in the industry. Pai himself had spent two years early in his career as an in-house lawyer at Verizon and later worked at a law firm that served telecom clients. Since stepping down at the end of the Trump administration, Pai has decamped to a private-equity firm whose portfolio includes telecom and broadband companies.

At the FCC, Pai joined the wireless companies in evangelizing for 5G. He would make it the central initiative of his tenure. A speedy rollout, Pai proclaimed, would “transform our economy, boost economic growth and improve our quality of life.” He regularly cited a report proclaiming that 5G could create up to 3 million new U.S. jobs and $500 billion in economic growth — without noting that those rosy figures came from a study commissioned by the wireless industry’s lobbying group.

Under Pai, the path to 5G initially continued to zigzag. After the White House abandoned the central plan, the FCC turned in a new direction, one that would put a few foreign satellite companies in charge of the process. At issue was the so-called C-band, a patch of wireless real estate viewed as the sweet spot for 5G. Wireless companies coveted C-band spectrum for its ability to transmit big chunks of data rapidly over long distances; it would maximize 5G speeds while minimizing the number of expensive cell towers and transmitters the companies needed.

That spectrum was owned by the federal government. But it was then being used with the government’s consent, free of charge, by four foreign satellite companies that relayed radio and TV signals around the globe. Sensing opportunity, the companies banded together and made an audacious proposal: They, the non-rent-paying users of the spectrum, would sell it to U.S. wireless companies and keep most of the expected tens of billions of dollars for themselves. (They agreed to make a voluntary contribution to the federal Treasury from the proceeds.) This “market-based solution,” the satellite companies claimed, would be the fastest way to get 5G networks up and running.

Pai seriously entertained this approach for a year. The plan eventually fizzled in the face of fierce opposition led by Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy, who expressed outrage that foreign satellite companies would reap most of the money from a sale of U.S. government spectrum.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, shown in 2017, was an evangelist for 5G. He regularly cited a report proclaiming that the technology could create up to 3 million jobs, without noting that those figures came from a study commissioned by the wireless industry’s lobbying group. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Stymied, the FCC swerved back to its traditional approach: a public spectrum auction, in this case for a big chunk of the C-band. The agency decided that the winning bidders would pay the satellite companies up to $14.7 billion for quickly vacating those frequencies and retooling on different frequencies. That, the agency hoped, would avoid costly, time-consuming lawsuits by the satellite companies.

A $14.7 billion payout was staggering, but it was an accepted FCC practice to arrange compensation for companies affected by its spectrum actions. The agency, however, would make no such provisions for another group warning of far graver consequences: the U.S. aviation industry.

The battle that would threaten to ground American aviation centered on an electronic device about the size of a toaster. Called a radio altimeter, it’s used to track an aircraft’s altitude during takeoff and landing.

Radio altimeters, which became standard gear in the early 1970s, work by bouncing an electronic signal off the ground, sending their readings instantly to the cockpit. This is important for low-visibility landings, at night or in bad weather. It matters at other times, too: Radio altimeters on many commercial jets feed their data into automated navigation and crash-avoidance systems, sometimes controlling the engines and braking systems. About 50,000 planes and helicopters in the U.S. carry radio altimeters.

Aviation industry anxiety about the peril of radio altimeter failure inevitably cites a Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 that crashed in 2009 while attempting a landing in Amsterdam. Nine passengers and crew members died. An investigation revealed that the disaster originated with a malfunctioning altimeter, whose faulty readings triggered the jet’s auto-throttle to cut power during the final landing approach.

The FCC’s plans to use the C-band for 5G rekindled these fears. The problem was that the upper part of the C-band is where radio altimeters operate, prompting concern that nearby 5G transmissions would cause them to spit out false readings or stop working. Because most altimeters had been built and installed decades earlier, when there was nothing noisy in their electronic neighborhood, they hadn’t been designed to screen out the likes of 5G.

Fights over the FCC’s efforts to cram ever more users into limited spectrum became unusually common, and heated, during the Pai regime, and it wasn’t just the aviation industry that protested. Other orders granting telecom companies various 5G frequencies prompted complaints that they would disrupt networks used for satellite communications, weather forecasting, agriculture, self-driving cars, global-positioning services and military weapons systems. One of the FCC actions, still being fought, drew opposition from 14 federal agencies and departments. Again and again, the FCC, backed by the Trump White House, brushed those pleas aside. “Agencies raising concerns about the impact of 5G were just sort of being mowed down by the FCC,” according to a former high-level Trump official involved in spectrum disputes.

Starting in 2018, more than a dozen aviation groups and companies told the FCC they worried that interference with radio altimeters could cause a deadly plane crash. They urged the agency to work with the FAA and delay an auction until it had identified and eliminated any risk. Aviation-industry officials also argued that the telecom companies, or the Treasury, should fund billions of dollars’ worth of altimeter upgrades to eliminate interference problems from the 5G C-band signals.

But the FCC didn’t think there was a problem to solve. The agency embraced the wireless industry’s view, which was to deny that the new 5G networks posed any risk to aviation safety.

“One of the things we built into the way spectrum auctions work is that various people need to be paid off,” said Blair Levin, who was FCC chief of staff when the agency first deployed its auctions. Levin said the 5G process was handled differently: “The airlines came and said, ‘We have this problem.’ Nobody asked: ‘What do you need to fix the problem? Do you need $2 billion? Do you need $4 billion? Do you need $6 billion?’ Ajit just said: ‘We don’t care; we don’t think your concerns are legitimate.’”

Pai defends that position. “The FCC’s career staff did a terrific job analyzing the facts,” he told ProPublica, “and had demonstrated to all the commissioners at the FCC that there was no credible case made for the possible interference with aviation altimeters… No legitimate objective engineering work would find a legitimate case for those arguments.” The FCC was the final word on spectrum allocation. End of discussion.

But that ignored a key fact: The FAA was the final word on airplane safety, and it was becoming more concerned about the risk to radio altimeters. And unlike other agencies, the FAA had sweeping authority to order dramatic steps to avoid any chance of a fatal accident.

The FAA had massive power — but it didn’t seem inclined to use it. For starters, like more than one agency under Trump, it suffered from instability at the top, with an interim leader for 18 months. And the FAA was on the defensive in the wake of two Boeing 737 MAX crashes that killed a total of 346 people and tarnished the agency’s reputation.

That meant that when Steve Dickson took over as chair in the summer of 2019, the FAA was distracted by the Boeing mess, according to an agency source. And in Dickson, the FAA seemed to have the temperamental opposite of the aggressive and ambitious Pai. Dickson, who was 61 when he took the agency helm, was a onetime Air Force fighter pilot who had recently retired from a three-decade career at Delta, first as a pilot and then as a company safety executive. (Along the way he also got a law degree.)

Perhaps because of his background in the military or perhaps just by dint of disposition, Dickson adhered strictly to the chain of command. Methodical, cautious and measured — a top deputy said he’s never heard him raise his voice — Dickson was loath to take steps outside official procedures, and those official procedures placed a lot of emphasis on filing papers. So that’s what Dickson and his agency did.

FAA Administrator Steve Dickson, shown testifying in 2021, spent a lot of his time dealing with the crisis over the Boeing 737 MAX. If Pai was aggressive and brash, Dickson tended to be rules-focused and methodical. (Joshua Roberts/Getty Images)

Dickson did not, for example, call Pai to hash out the 5G issue. He did not march to the White House to sound the alarm. He issued no press releases to bring attention to the looming problem. The agency’s only official expression of concern in 2019 was a two-page letter from an agency engineer to a Commerce Department panel charged with resolving government spectrum disputes. It urged the FCC to delay any C-band auction until a technical study the FAA had funded had arrived and “any interference mitigations have been considered.” (Dickson declined to comment for this article.)

The FAA’s passivity was particularly striking given the mounting concern in the aviation industry. A pair of reports by aviation research groups intensified those anxieties. The first was a preliminary lab study, conducted by a government-industry research cooperative at Texas A&M University. It found all seven radio altimeters it tested were susceptible to interference. It too urged further analysis. The report was submitted to the FCC in late 2019.

But the FCC didn’t wait. On Feb. 28, 2020, it voted to authorize the C-band sale, and it scheduled the auction for Dec. 8. The FCC’s 258-page report and order devoted just six paragraphs to aviation safety, much of it agreeing with a T-Mobile-sponsored report that dismissed aviation concerns. The FCC contended that its precautions, including leaving a patch of spectrum vacant between 5G transmissions and the altimeter frequency, would be sufficient.

The FCC order made clear whose problem this was to solve. “Well-designed equipment should not ordinarily receive any significant interference (let alone harmful interference) given these circumstances,” the order stated. “We expect the aviation industry to ... take appropriate action, if necessary, to ensure protection of such devices.”

The aviation companies didn’t see it that way. Their concerns escalated in October 2020 with the issuance of a 231-page report by the RTCA, a nonprofit aviation industry research organization originally known as the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics. It found that 5G posed “a major risk” to altimeters with “the potential for broad impacts to aviation operations in the United States, including the possibility of catastrophic failures leading to multiple fatalities.” It too urged the FCC, FAA and industries to work together to tackle the problem.

The opposite happened. The telecom and aviation industries embraced diametrically opposing views of reality. They assailed each other’s studies and methodologies. The wireless advocates declared that nearly 40 other countries had already deployed 5G on the C-band near airports, under conditions similar to those contemplated in the U.S., without incident. Aviation allies replied that power levels and other limits on 5G operations near overseas airports were meaningfully different. Each side accused the other of refusing to share technical data needed to assess the issue.

The two sides also viewed risk in radically different ways. From the aviation perspective, the wireless industry simply couldn’t fathom its hypercautious safety culture, which, given the horrific consequences of an accident, demands that any critical equipment be proven to pose a probability of failure of no more than one in a billion. “If there’s the possibility of a risk to the flying public,” the FAA’s “5G and Aviation Safety” website notes, “we are obligated to restrict the relevant flight activity until we can prove it is safe.”

Aviation companies were getting increasingly nervous. Yet the FAA continued to sit on its hands. Finally, with the 5G auction just a week away, in December 2020, the FAA took action of sorts: It drafted a letter.

What happened next involves a tiny government agency few people have heard of. Buried deep inside the U.S. Department of Commerce, it’s called the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. It advises the president on spectrum issues and mediates fights between federal agencies. Its job is to help resolve exactly the sort of conflict that was raging over 5G.

In the Trump administration, however, the NTIA was in disarray. A Government Accountability Office report would find that the agency lacked a “formalized” process for weighing in on spectrum issues. The last Senate-confirmed chief of the agency had abruptly quit in May 2019. By November 2020, it was on its third acting administrator, former Michigan State law professor Adam Candeub.

Candeub had a record as a conservative legal warrior. He’d represented a white supremacist in unsuccessfully suing Twitter for permanently barring him and his organization from its platform. He was also a fervent advocate for the FCC’s aggressive 5G agenda. Right before joining the Trump administration, Candeub published a column in Forbes titled “FCC Chair Ajit Pai Must Press Forward on 5G Auctions.” The article praised Pai for cutting “bureaucratic meddling.”

It was into these hands that the FAA and the Department of Transportation would deliver a four-page missive, dated Dec. 1, 2020, with a request that it be forwarded “expeditiously” to the FCC for public posting. Filing such a letter through the NTIA was the proper federal protocol. But the step hardly seemed to match the gravity of the problem.

Still, what the letter was asking for was remarkable: It urged the FCC to delay its C-band auction, which was just a week away at that point. Understanding “the safety and economic ramifications” of the 5G rollout required a “comprehensive risk assessment and an analysis of potential mitigation options,” the letter stated. Its tone may have been bureaucratic, but the letter contained a dramatic warning: If 5G deployment moved forward “without addressing these safety issues,” the FAA would consider imposing flight restrictions that “would reduce access to core airports in the U.S.”

This letter never made it onto the FCC’s public docket, where it would have amplified the need to resolve the dispute. Candeub never sent it.

Nearly a year afterward, when news of the letter first surfaced in media reports, and some people accused him of burying the letter to help the FCC’s agenda, Candeub, back at his old job at Michigan State, denied any political motivation. His agency’s experts, Candeub told reporters, had found “serious flaws” in the RTCA report and therefore dismissed its aviation-safety warnings.

In an interview with ProPublica, Candeub acknowledged discussing the FAA letter with Pai, who “wasn’t happy” about it. (Pai said he couldn’t recall whether or not he and Candeub had talked about the letter.) But Candeub said he’d made his decision based on a highly critical assessment of the RTCA report by Charles Cooper, head of NTIA’s spectrum management office and a career government employee. Candeub said Cooper thought the report had “serious errors.”

Emails between Candeub and Cooper, obtained by ProPublica, reveal a different narrative. In an email on Nov. 25, 2020, Cooper wrote to Candeub that, “as requested,” he and his staff had performed an initial assessment, and it indicated “agreement” with the RTCA’s approach.

“Ah ... so there is a there, there,” Candeub replied. “Do you recommend, therefore, that we work with DOT for a submission to the FCC?”

“I don’t think we have a choice!” Cooper emailed back.

Asked about the exchange, Candeub insisted that Cooper reversed his view after studying the matter for a few more days. “As we dug in further, the conclusion of Charles was that this did not rise to a level of concern, so the letter wasn’t sent. ... That was the final verdict I got from him.”

An NTIA spokesperson, in a statement, offered a different view: “There is no record of a staff recommendation against forwarding the letter from the FAA.” (Cooper declined to comment.) The statement also noted that NTIA staff “recommended that the RTCA study be validated and offered a path forward for better understanding the issues raised. Our work evaluating those issues is ongoing.”

On Dec. 8, the FCC commenced its auction for the C-band spectrum. The agency announced a few months later that the sale had raised a record $81.1 billion, roughly double what industry observers expected.

Verizon bought the biggest stake, for $45.5 billion, followed by AT&T, which paid $23.4 billion. Their costs for building out 5G infrastructure, marketing and paying satellite companies to speed their exit would add tens of billions more to their tab. It left the two companies, understandably, determined to exploit their investment. “We have a license from the U.S. government saying we can proceed,” explained one executive from a wireless company. “We’re not really looking for reasons why we can’t proceed.”

At that point, it appeared that the FCC had prevailed in the battle of federal agencies. Pai and Larry Kudlow, former director of Trump’s National Economic Council, would crow about how they had triumphed over Washington “swamp creatures” in a discussion on Kudlow’s Fox Business show months after both had left government. Pai insisted his agency had followed the science, and the two men denigrated concerns over aviation safety. “The FAA is bellyaching about 5G. The airlines are bellyaching about 5G. We ignored them,” Kudlow declared. “We actually fought the FAA. We won.”

As the 5G auction concluded in early 2021 and winter turned into spring, the FAA resembled the bureaucratic equivalent of a turtle that had first retracted into its shell, then been flipped onto its back. It seemed helpless. After its last-minute letter seeking to halt the spectrum auction was ignored, the agency had said nothing publicly about the issue for months.

The aviation industry was growing increasingly frantic at the FAA’s temporizing. In the summer of 2021, the agency told attendees at an industry forum that it was “still gathering information” on the radio altimeter problem. Aviation executives begged the agency to go public. “We wanted them to publicly state there is a huge problem, and it’s going to cause massive disruptions,” said John Shea, government affairs director for Helicopter Association International, a trade group. “We said: ‘You need to say this out loud! This can’t just be industry speculation.’”

Behind the scenes, though, reality was beginning to dawn at the FAA. Top officials, who had clung to the industry’s hope that somehow the FCC could be persuaded to postpone the C-band rollout for a year or two, had finally grasped that the launch was happening. The FAA simply couldn’t wait any longer if the agency wanted to follow its methodical processes and give airlines time to prepare.

Now the agency prepared to deploy its ultimate weapon: formal air-safety alerts that would pave the way for grounding commercial aircraft. By August 2021, the FAA was ready to proceed.

But a new impediment had arisen: the Biden administration. The White House was discouraging any public action, as was the FCC, which was now operating with a Democratic chair but was every bit as supportive of 5G and the telecom industry’s position on it as Pai had been. They assured the FAA that the agencies and industries could somehow still work out the problem quietly. (A senior FCC official denies the agency requested any delays.)

Repeatedly, the FAA deferred sending out its air warnings. Dickson privately told his staff that his agency was like Charlie Brown, with the White House and the FCC in the role of Lucy, who “keeps pulling the football out from under us.”

In October 2021, the FAA finally began preparing its first airworthiness bulletin, warning of “potential adverse effects on radio altimeters” — but not until its bureaucratic opponents had gotten a chance to vet the language. The bulletin received a line-by-line review from officials at the FCC and the White House’s National Economic Council, according to an FAA staffer involved in the matter. The White House “wanted to make the problem not seem as bad as it was,” the FAA official said. “And they wanted to make sure it was worded in such a way that wireless was not seen as the villain.” (The senior FCC official said his agency “routinely” provides “technical” input on bulletins. The FAA’s parent agency, the DOT, said it supported a “collaborative approach” to “minimize any disruptions to the traveling public” but that the FAA made the final call on the language of its bulletins. As the DOT put it, “​​Part of the process failure during the last administration was a result of auctioning the spectrum without the required collaboration between stakeholders and agencies to ensure the safety of the traveling public and minimize disruptions for them — despite consistent clear requests by DOT and FAA to do so. Conversely, this Administration wanted to ensure that government agencies with technical expertise were all at the table and collaborating.”)

Issued on Nov. 2, 2021, the bulletin alerted equipment manufacturers, aircraft companies and pilots to the potential for “both erroneous altimeter readings and loss of altimeter function.” This, the bulletin advised, could result in “the loss of function” of safety systems. It added that the FAA was assessing whether potential limits on flight operations were warranted.

That threat instantly transformed the standoff. “That kicked in some action,” a wireless-industry executive said. “That’s the first time they said to the airlines: ‘When these guys light up on Dec. 5, we’re going to ground your planes.’” The executive added: “All of a sudden, we needed to tackle a two-year problem in 30 days.”

Two days after the FAA’s airworthiness bulletin went out, Verizon and AT&T agreed to a one-month delay, pushing the 5G start date to Jan. 5, 2022. With threats of aviation shutdowns now officially in play, no one wanted to be blamed for ruining holiday travel.

Now the question became how broad and long-lasting any restrictions on the 5G rollout should be. The telecom companies, backed by the White House and FCC, wanted them to be limited and temporary. The FAA and aviation interests wanted something far more sweeping and permanent.

Haggling commenced in earnest. Verizon and AT&T had already offered to modestly cut power from some 5G transmitters near runways for six months. The aviation companies rejected that as “inadequate and far too narrow.” They proposed a broad swath around airports where towers would never be turned on as well as other limits. No way, countered the FCC. That would render the telecoms’ C-band spectrum “commercially unviable. ... Effectively it would cease to be 5G.” FCC officials felt that the telecom industry was being falsely cast as a villain.

But momentum had turned in favor of the aviation forces. The mere specter of fatal airplane disasters was a potent message. The wireless companies were getting hammered in the press, with news reports warning that 5G could cause planes to crash.

Negotiations intensified. In late December 2021, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg jumped in, talking with the CEOs of Verizon and AT&T. Buttigieg announced a truce on Jan. 3. The wireless companies agreed to another two-week delay and to establish temporary modest 5G-free buffer zones around 50 airports for six months. And they’d provide the FAA with full details about their tower sites.

But almost as fast as it was announced, the deal fell apart. Altimeter testing made clear that the planned buffer zones weren’t nearly big enough to resolve the FAA’s interference fears.

The once-somnolent agency was now firing a fusillade of safety notices, laying out the specifics of how each airport would be affected. Thousands of planes would need to be barred from landing in low-visibility conditions at airports where 5G was present. Some big long-haul jets wouldn’t be able to fly into airports with 5G at all. One FAA notice warned that C-band interference might prevent braking systems on some Boeing 787s from kicking in during landings, causing planes to speed off runways.

Buttigieg and the FAA’s Dickson went back to the CEOs of Verizon and AT&T and demanded yet more concessions. On Jan. 18, the companies capitulated, even as AT&T bitterly complained that the FAA and aviation industry had “not utilized the two years they’ve had to responsibly plan for this deployment.”

When Verizon and AT&T finally switched on their networks the next day, the expanded restrictions (a 3-mile buffer zone around 87 airports) left more than 600 of their 5G towers dark — about 10% of their planned first-day service.

The last-minute chaos spurred a flurry of flight cancellations. But the provisions, and continued testing of radio altimeters, allowed about 90% of planes to operate normally within days. A conspicuous exception was about a thousand Embraer regional jets, used by JetBlue, American, Delta and other airlines. Equipped with altimeters particularly susceptible to interference, they remain restricted from landing in poor-weather conditions in many cities with C-band towers.

The former adversaries finally began to collaborate. The FAA built a measure of trust with Verizon and AT&T by allowing them to turn on enough towers to showcase their 5G service at the Super Bowl on Feb. 13, even though the stadium was beneath a landing approach to Los Angeles International Airport. As the weeks passed, both sides made more accommodations, shrinking the size of the buffer zones while boosting the total number of “protected” airports to 114.

Most participants in the 5G process say comity and cooperation has increased among all parties. AT&T told ProPublica in a statement that it is “continuing to cooperate and collaborate with the FAA, FCC and other stakeholders to help facilitate the FAA’s technical assessments and clearance of aviation equipment. We are encouraged by the significant progress the FAA has made thus far, and we expect that progress will continue going forward.” Verizon also said it was “encouraged” by the “collaboration and pace” among the companies and agencies, adding, “We’re highly confident that the small and declining number of outstanding questions will be resolved sooner than later, without any meaningful impact to airline operations or the availability of 5G at airports.”

For all the expressions of optimism, the problems aren’t yet resolved and a deadline looms: Verizon and AT&T have made no commitment to extend their “voluntary” restrictions beyond July 5. And this may not be the last such battle, either: In December 2023, T-Mobile and other wireless companies will be free to fire up a new patch of C-band, even closer to the altimeter frequency. At that point, 5G will be operating near hundreds of additional airports.

In the face of this uncertainty, aviation companies are scrambling to develop the only promising short-term solution: filters designed to screen out electronic interference for the worst-performing radio altimeters. But many altimeters can’t be fitted with filters and inventing and deploying new altimeters for a 5G world will take years. Meanwhile, the industry is continuing to agitate for someone else to pay for it all.

In recent months, the center of activity in the 5G saga has been the FAA, which is now led by an interim chief. (Dickson announced his resignation in February, saying it was “time to go home”; he left in March.)

The FCC, more on the fringes at this stage of the process, has been talking about steps like improving its processes with the NTIA, while continuing to insist that claims of 5G risk are hooey. AT&T echoed that sentiment, saying “the physics has not changed,” in a second statement it sent to ProPublica, in late May. The company’s hope, in this statement, was beginning to sound like it was being uttered through gritted teeth. AT&T is still “working collaboratively with the FAA and the aviation industry,” it said, while noting that “we have made no additional commitments beyond July 5, but are in discussions with the FAA and aviation on a phased deployment approach that will provide the aviation industry with some additional time to complete equipment updates without stalling our C-Band deployment.”

At the FAA, it seemed like one step forward, one step back as the July 5 deadline approached. On May 4, the agency convened an in-person gathering of 40 invited “stakeholders” from the wireless and aviation industries — but no FCC officials — aimed at forging a path for continued peace. Agency officials reviewed the “rapid evolution” in easing the limits on the wireless companies around airports. And they pressed aviation officials to develop a firm timetable for retrofitting the entire U.S. commercial fleet with filters and new altimeters, in short, a day when 5G can finally be unfettered.

But barely more than two weeks later, on May 19, the follow-up meeting with the FAA sounded considerably less encouraging. One company that is preparing filters for altimeters pleaded for time, saying it needed until the end of 2023. That’s not good enough, the FAA’s acting chief responded. He told them it needs to happen by the end of this year.

Efforts to reach accommodation had increased, it seemed, but so had “heartburn,” as one FAA official put it. “The wireless companies have made it very clear they’re not going to agree to an open-ended situation,” he said. “They seem willing to go past July 5, as long as they know how far past. But they’re making clear their patience is not infinite.”

Do You Work for the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

Doris Burke contributed research.

Embedded illustrations by ProPublica. Source Images: The7Dew and Peng Song/Getty Images.

by Steve Mills

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

When guards first brought Daniel Taylor into a room at the Stateville Correctional Center outside Chicago, we were strangers. It was 2001. I was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He was an inmate serving a life sentence.

He had written to me earlier. His was one of the dozen or so letters I’d get from inmates each month — each in an envelope red-stamped with a note saying they were from an inmate at the Illinois Department of Corrections, as if to warn me about their contents. But his letter stood out. He had been convicted of a 1992 double murder, he wrote, but he had records that showed he was in a police station holding cell when the murders were committed.

Even in Chicago, which was fast becoming known for its miscarriages of justice, it was stunning.

Over more than a decade, I talked with Taylor scores of times on the telephone. I visited him in prison. And with Tribune reporters Maurice Possley and Ken Armstrong, I investigated his case as part of a series of stories on false confessions, then followed it until he was exonerated in June 2013.

That it took some two decades for Taylor to be exonerated and win his release spoke to many things, but none more so than the frailties of the criminal justice system and Taylor’s fierce persistence.

Taylor had a kindness and openness I liked immediately. He was candid about his troubled childhood growing up in foster homes and shelters, about leaving school and about life on the streets. Some three months before the murders, he joined the Vice Lords street gang, largely because his friends were in it. He had been arrested a handful of times for such minor offenses as mob action and theft.

Over the years, we got to know each other better. More than anything, I came to admire his tenacity in the face of a justice system that had repeatedly turned aside his innocence claims. His persistence was another indication to me that he might well be innocent, though it was the facts of the case that mattered the most.

This week, the Chicago City Council approved a $14.25 million wrongful-conviction settlement for Taylor in a vote that brought to an end a saga that had begun three decades earlier. His journey should have been so much shorter.

After all, Taylor, then 17, had what seemed the best imaginable alibi: When Jeffrey Lassiter and Sharon Haugabook were shot to death on Nov. 16, 1992, in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, Taylor was behind bars in a nearby police lockup. He had been arrested for fighting two hours before the murders and released more than an hour after the murders.

The Police Department’s own records, and officers working at the lockup, showed he was in their custody at the time of the shooting. But by the time police found those records, they already had built their case against him. Two other young men had been picked up and confessed to being lookouts; they implicated Taylor and others. All told, eight young Black men were charged with the murders.

Taylor confessed, too. He said he concluded it was futile to resist after detectives hit him with a flashlight and told him that he could leave if he told them what they wanted to hear. In the end, he gave a lengthy statement. In it, he said he and the others had killed Lassiter and Haugabook, four of them carrying out the crime, the other four acting as lookouts.

The other young men confessed, too, implicating one another in interlocking statements that, in the end, sent five of them to state prison; the cases against three of the eight fell apart at various stages. Some of the others said they were mistreated as well. Police have repeatedly denied wrongdoing in all these cases.

In Chicago, as elsewhere, confessions are potent pieces of evidence, and it is hard for people to understand how someone could admit to a crime they didn’t commit. But it happens with troubling regularity.

And once a confession is made, it is almost impossible to move law enforcement off that narrative. Police and prosecutors have proceeded with cases even when DNA evidence exonerates a defendant and points to another suspect. They have proceeded when a confession doesn’t match the physical evidence. And they have proceeded with other cases besides Taylor’s where a suspect was in jail when the crime occurred. There have been so many dubious confessions in Chicago — including the false confessions obtained through torture by former Cmdr. Jon Burge and his detectives, cases that have led to tens of millions of dollars in settlements — that criminal justice advocates have called the city the capital of false confessions.

Taylor’s case upends the idealistic notion that injustices, and particularly those that seem more obvious, will be quickly corrected. That when evidence emerges to undermine the theory of a case, there will be an aggressive and thorough reexamination of the facts to be sure the right people are taken to trial and sent to prison. That there will be an honest soul-searching to make people whole when they have been wronged rather than the legal brawl that so many have experienced.

When Taylor went to trial in 1995, prosecutors attacked his alibi. They said the records that showed him behind bars were unreliable, essentially arguing that their own documents and employees couldn’t be trusted. They offered witnesses who said they saw Taylor on the streets when he was supposedly in custody.

At 19, Taylor was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Two of the other men who had confessed were sentenced to life in prison as well, while another two were given 30-year terms.

As we investigated Taylor’s case at the Tribune, we found ample new evidence of his innocence — documents and witnesses who undermined the case against him. If Taylor’s case fell apart, all the cases would fall apart, since they depended on confessions that linked all the young men to the crime. Prompted by our investigation, prosecutors said that they conducted a reexamination of the case; they said they were confident Taylor was guilty. Taylor was upset. My reporting partners and I were not surprised.

Over the next decade or so, as Taylor languished in prison, Possley and I continued to report on the case, increasingly troubled that the system refused to right what seemed so clearly wrong. We uncovered additional evidence that pointed to his innocence. In 2003, one of the convicted men — the only one significantly older than the other seven — admitted he was involved in the slayings and the others weren’t. Other witnesses were found. More exculpatory documents were uncovered. No one else has ever been arrested for the murders; Taylor’s lawyers said there’s no indication they were ever reinvestigated.

And so it went. A slow accumulation of evidence suggested what seemed clear from the start: Daniel Taylor was innocent. At the same time, attorneys at the Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions took on the case, developing additional evidence over many years and making powerful arguments in court that a miscarriage of justice had been perpetrated.

Over time, the case gained traction. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 2011 that there was “strong proof that Taylor’s participation in the crime was physically impossible.” The Illinois attorney general’s office took an interest and turned over records that Taylor’s lawyers hadn’t seen.

Faced with spending his life in prison, Taylor educated himself and, like many inmates, studied his case. He learned to play chess and he lifted weights. He was doing what seemed impossible to me: making a virtue of necessity. But there were times he lost hope. He cried at night. At one point, he cut his wrist. His life seemed defined by an injustice. We talked every few weeks for years, but I was never sure our conversations offered much in the way of hope or solace. Too often, I had no news to offer him. Investigating wrongful conviction cases, some of them decades old, is slow, painstaking work. You can go months, even years without making any progress.

And then, in 2013, prosecutors agreed to dismiss Taylor’s conviction, saying that a review of documents and interviews with additional witnesses had persuaded them that it was not in the “interest of justice to proceed on this matter” — clinical language that failed to convey the legal battles the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had waged to keep Taylor behind bars.

After spending more than half of his life behind bars, his beard now turning gray, Taylor strode out of the Menard Correctional Center on a hot and sunny afternoon with $41 in his pocket. He walked into the embrace of his family. He walked into freedom. He got an apartment. He found a job at Northwestern University, in shipping and receiving. He became a father.

In 2014, a judge granted him a certificate of innocence. Later that year, he filed his lawsuit, alleging that police had arrested him though they knew he was not guilty. That set the stage for the legal fight that followed — years of depositions and motions that led finally to the settlement.

Now, nearly three decades after he was arrested, the city of Chicago will pay Taylor millions of dollars to make up for the years he lost in prison. A police spokesperson declined to comment. Jessica Felker, a deputy corporation counsel for the city, told the Finance Committee last week that settling the case was a “cost-effective measure to limit the city’s exposure.” Felker said that if the case went to trial, Taylor’s lawyers could ask for $21 million to $42 million in damages, plus an additional $4 million in fees.

When Taylor receives his settlement, the city will have paid roughly $40 million to Taylor and the three others who were also exonerated, a stunning amount for a case that seemed dubious from the outset. Police and prosecutors have never revealed publicly if any of the people who handled the investigation or prosecution were disciplined, and Taylor’s lawyers have not found any evidence that anyone has been held accountable. My guess is that no one ever will be.

“Rather than admitting there was a grievous injustice here, the city of Chicago chose to fight and drag this out. They chose to maintain the position that Daniel was guilty,” David Owens, a lawyer at the Chicago firm Loevy & Loevy and one of Taylor’s attorneys in his lawsuit, said in an interview. (The Loevy firm has represented ProPublica in open records lawsuits.)

At every stage, Owens said, Taylor faced opposition. Even after a jury awarded $13.4 million to one of Taylor’s co-defendants in 2017, and after the city of Chicago agreed to pay two others $5.25 million each, the city continued to fight Taylor’s lawsuit. It did so at a steep cost, too, paying outside attorneys more than $2 million in fees, according to Felker.

“They saw Daniel as a defendant,” Owens said, “rather than someone who was traumatized.”

I no longer have Taylor’s initial letter to me; I think I lost it when I moved from the Tribune to ProPublica five years ago. Until this week, I hadn’t talked to him for several years. He had attorneys he had grown close to, including the late Karen Daniel of Northwestern, and I didn’t want to intrude on his freedom. I didn’t want to remind him of his old life. He is charting a new one.

But, with his case now concluded, the time seemed right. We met on Monday at his lawyers’ office and embraced. He looks the same, though his small beard is now more white than gray. At 46, he is focused on his 7-year-old son. He and his girlfriend and son are now planning to move, to leave behind Illinois and the memories of his arrest, prosecution and imprisonment.

Taylor told me he is mostly at peace. He said he has let go of his anger that no one has been held accountable for his wrongful conviction. Instead, he chooses to be excited for the future, for the chance to live “a comfortable life” and to give his son “the opportunities I didn’t have.” His life has changed, but he knows the criminal justice system hasn’t.

“Mark my word,” he said, “I won’t be the last one to be proved innocent.”

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by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and Irena Hwang, ProPublica, photography by Kristyna Wentz-Graff, Oregon Public Broadcasting

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

CARSON, Wash. — The fish were on their way to be executed. One minute, they were swimming around a concrete pond. The next, they were being dumped onto a stainless steel table set on an incline. Hook-nosed and wide-eyed, they thrashed and thumped their way down the table toward an air-powered guillotine.

Hoses hanging from steel girders flushed blood through the grated metal floor. Hatchery workers in splattered chest waders gutted globs of bright orange eggs from the dead females and dropped them into buckets, then doused them first with a stream of sperm taken from the dead males and then with an iodine disinfectant.

Salmon at the Carson hatchery are moved toward a guillotine during the process of harvesting their sperm and eggs, which will be used to breed more than a million baby fish. Left to right: Fish are sorted by sex and tagged to track their DNA. Then the eggs are removed and fertilized with sperm.

The fertilized eggs were trucked around the corner to an incubation building where over 200 stacked plastic trays held more than a million salmon eggs. Once hatched, they would fatten and mature in rectangular concrete tanks sunk into the ground, safe from the perils of the wild, until it was time to make their journey to the ocean.

The Carson National Fish Hatchery was among the first hatcheries funded by Congress over 80 years ago to be part of the salvation of salmon, facilities created specifically to replace the vast numbers of wild salmon killed by the building of dozens of hydroelectric dams along the Northwest’s mightiest river, the Columbia. Tucked beside a river in the woods about 60 miles northeast of Portland, Carson has 50 tanks and ponds surrounded by chain-link fencing. They sit among wood-frame fish nursery buildings and a half-dozen cottages built for hatchery workers in the 1930s.

Today, there are hundreds of hatcheries in the Northwest run by federal, state and tribal governments, employing thousands and welcoming the community with visitor centers and gift shops. The fish they send to the Pacific Ocean have allowed restaurants and grocery seafood counters to offer “wild-caught” Chinook salmon even as the fish became endangered.

The hatcheries were supposed to stop the decline of salmon. They haven’t. The numbers of each of the six salmon species native to the Columbia basin have dropped to a fraction of what they once were, and 13 distinct populations are now considered threatened or endangered. Nearly 250 million young salmon, most of them from hatcheries, head to the ocean each year — roughly three times as many as before any dams were built. But the return rate today is less than one-fifth of what it was decades ago. Out of the million salmon eggs fertilized at Carson, only a few thousand will survive their journey to the ocean and return upriver as adults, where they can provide food and income for fishermen or give birth to a new generation.

Listen to the OPB Stories Listen to "The US has spent more than $2B on a plan to save salmon but the fish are vanishing anyway" on Spreaker. Listen to "As climate change threatens hatchery salmon, reforms and investments are sorely lacking" on Spreaker.

Federal officials have propped up aging hatcheries despite their known failures, pouring more than $2.2 billion over the past 20 years into keeping them going instead of investing in new hatcheries and habitat restorations that could sustain salmon for the long term. At the largest cluster of federally subsidized hatcheries on the Columbia, the government spends between $250 and $650 for every salmon that returns to the river. So few fish survive that the network of hatcheries responsible for 80% of all the salmon in the Columbia River is at risk of collapse, unable to keep producing fish at meaningful levels, an investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica has found.

These failures are all the more important because hatcheries represent the U.S. government’s best effort to fulfill a promise to the Northwest’s Indigenous people. The government and tribes signed treaties in the 1850s promising that the tribes’ access to salmon, and their way of life, would be preserved. Those treaties enshrined their right to fish in their “usual and accustomed places.” The pacts between sovereign nations did not stop the U.S. from moving forward with a massive decades-long construction project in the middle of the 20th century: the building of 18 dams that transformed a free-flowing river into a machine of irrigation, shipping and hydroelectric power.

The dams meet nearly 40% of today’s regional electricity needs. But they decimated wild salmon.

Otis Johnson processes freshly caught salmon at a roadside fish stand last August. Johnson, who grew up on the Warm Springs Reservation, said fishing reminds him of his mother’s tribal traditions and it “keeps me out of trouble. The fish keeps me in a good way and they take care of me. They're very sacred.”

Many species of salmon are at or near their lowest numbers on record. Native fishermen say their way of life has been stolen from them and from future generations. But the government didn’t invest in making hatcheries better equipped to grow more resilient and abundant stocks. Instead, officials ushered in endangered species restrictions. They knew that hatchery fish were genetically weaker than wild salmon, so they put limits on the number of hatchery fish that could be released into rivers, where they might spawn with wild fish and weaken the gene pool. These restrictions hampered the productivity of the hatcheries, squeezing tribal fishing even more.

In recent years, salmon survival has dropped to some of the worst rates on record. The numbers of returning adult salmon have been so low that dozens of hatcheries have struggled to collect enough fish for breeding, putting future fishing seasons in jeopardy.

Each passing year of poor returns worsens the outlook for salmon. While salmon runs fluctuate from year to year and this year’s returns have been higher than those of the past few years, human-caused climate change continues to warm the ocean and rivers, and the failure to improve salmon survival rates has left the region’s tribes facing a future without either wild or hatchery fish. Federal scientists project that salmon survival will decline by as much as 90% over the next 40 years.

Left to right: Salmon spawned at Carson National Fish Hatchery are tracked with DNA samples. The harvested eggs are given a tag identifying their mother and moved into trays for hatching.

The federal agencies responsible for more than 200 hatchery programs — including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council — have failed to implement recommendations from their own scientists about how to improve outcomes at the hatcheries they support.

Allyson Purcell is the director of West Coast hatcheries for NOAA, which oversees endangered salmon recovery, sets regulations for hatcheries and funds roughly a third of all Columbia River hatchery production. In an interview, she conceded that federal hatchery reform efforts have historically focused on saving wild salmon, but said that her agency is now researching ways to create more resilient hatchery fish.

“As soon as we have actionable science, we will implement changes,” Purcell said. She also acknowledged that hatcheries will need to change to sustain fish populations as the climate continues to change.

“We want to stay nimble,” she said. “In some cases you may want to change the goal of the hatchery. If you find that you need to rely on it to keep a population from going extinct, you’re going to operate that hatchery program differently.”

People like John Sirois, a former chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in northeast Washington, have been waiting a long time for changes. Nearly a decade ago, he cut the ribbon at the opening of the Chief Joseph Hatchery, 545 miles upriver from the mouth of the Columbia. That hatchery, one of 23 facilities overseen by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, opened in 2013.

But it is now struggling to return enough fish, and the upper Columbia’s spring Chinook population has fallen to one of its lowest levels on record. Last year the Colville Tribes, whose diet was once as much as 60% salmon, caught less than one fish for each of its 10,000 people.

“Despite all the efforts that we’ve done, the salmon run is looking pretty on the ropes.” Sirois said. “If it’s more difficult for hatcheries to produce salmon, it is the beginning of the end.”

John Sirois of the Colville Tribes looks over an area where salmon swam before the Chief Joseph Dam was built. Fish have been released here ceremonially, but the dam blocks them from reaching the ocean, where salmon finish maturing, so the fish released here cannot rebuild the river’s population. “A Finger in a Dike”

There are many reasons that Columbia River salmon die, whether they were born in the wild or in hatcheries. Millions don’t survive their trip down the river, which has become a gantlet of dams and slackwater reservoirs, hot and polluted waters, and invasive predators. Millions more die in the ocean or get snared by commercial fishing ships, ending up as grocery fillets or pet food before they can return upriver toward their spawning grounds.

Some die-off is natural. But the dismal survival rates of salmon bred on the Columbia today are neither natural nor sustainable.

Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica examined the yearly survival of eight Columbia River Basin hatchery populations of vulnerable salmon and steelhead trout, detected at a federal dam on their way out to sea as juveniles and on their way back upriver as adults. This dam-to-dam measure provides one of the only consistent indexes of how well salmon are surviving. But it’s a high-end estimate, because it only measures how well they’re surviving in the ocean. These numbers don’t account for the millions of juvenile fish that die migrating downriver before they’re counted at the dam or the many adults who pass the dam but die before reaching their destination upriver. Our analysis of the publicly available data provides a high-level and easily understandable snapshot of hatchery performance; previously, assessing the health of the hatchery system would have required combing through thousands of pages of government reports and academic research.

Even with this generous estimate, however, the survival rates of these hatchery fish have been well short of the established goals for rebuilding salmon populations, according to the Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica analysis.

Hatcheries Aren’t Rebuilding Salmon Populations in the Columbia Basin Note: Survival rates are for four vulnerable populations of Chinook salmon that were released from hatcheries between 2014 and 2018, the most recent years for which complete data is available. Source: Columbia Basin Research estimates, map data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors. (Irena Hwang/ProPublica)

According to our analysis, salmon populations released from 2014 to 2018, the most recent years for which complete data was available, had some of the worst survival rates on record. In that time period, none of the eight populations had average returns exceeding 4%, the threshold necessary for a population to recover, which was adopted by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and vetted by independent panels of experts. But even in the previous six years, when ocean conditions were favorable for salmon, only two achieved average returns above 4%.

That 4% goal was established for wild populations, but in a 2015 report to Congress, 17 scientists recommended that survival rates of hatchery fish would have to be high relative to wild fish “to effectively contribute to harvest and/or conservation.”

Note: Survival rates are for two threatened populations of steelhead trout that were released from hatcheries between 2014 and 2018, the most recent years for which complete data is available. Source: Columbia Basin Research estimates. (Illustration by Irena Hwang/ProPublica; source photo by John R. McMillan)

Most hatcheries, however, aren’t even aiming to meet the council’s recovery goals. Some aim to get less than half a percent of their fish back. But lately, they aren’t even getting that.

“It’s not self-sustaining. We don’t have the numbers,” said Aaron Penney, a member of the Nez Perce who spent more than 20 years managing his tribe’s hatchery on the Clearwater River in Idaho. Penney, now a biologist for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northern Idaho, says raising hatchery fish in worsening river and ocean habitat is like “putting a finger in a dike to stop a leak.”

Records obtained from NOAA show that over the past five years, dozens of hatchery programs have fallen short of their typical production levels, some by more than half. Some have tried to address that shortfall by capturing more wild fish to breed. Others used eggs that were shared by nearby hatcheries.

Note: Survival rates are for vulnerable populations of coho and sockeye salmon that were released from hatcheries between 2014 and 2018, the most recent years for which complete data is available. Source: Columbia Basin Research estimates. (Irena Hwang/ProPublica)

But major shortages across the Columbia basin in 2018 and 2019 left hatcheries scrambling to find enough egg-bearing female fish. Tribal hatcheries, which are located farther upriver where salmon face a longer, harder journey, bore the brunt. They’ve been planning for shortages to become commonplace as rivers and the Pacific Ocean get hotter.

In 2019, Idaho’s Nez Perce Tribe needed an influx of hundreds of fish from hatcheries 300 miles away in Washington to keep breeding salmon. Staff at the time called it a “dire emergency.”

In central Washington, the Yakama Nation’s share of eggs was so small that its hatchery on the Klickitat River was down to 30% of the number of fish it usually raises.

“It’s impacting the Indians a lot, man,” said Shane Patterson, a member of the Yakama Nation who fishes the Klickitat and works as a catch monitor for the tribe. “The seasons ain’t as long as they used to be, they’re smaller runs, everything.”

Between spring and fall, Patterson and his friend and fellow tribe member Chance Fiander spend evenings atop plywood scaffolds built into the rock face of the Klickitat River canyon, plunging dip nets 30 feet into the waters, awaiting the jolt of a salmon fighting its way upstream.

Shane Patterson of the Yakama Nation, right, uses a dip net to fish for salmon on the Klickitat River. He said a lot of people rely on fishing for income and to feed their families. “And it just ain’t like it used to be,” he said.

The Klickitat hatchery provides Patterson and Fiander fish to catch for their families and for the tribe’s longhouses, spiritual gathering centers that need salmon for weekly ceremonies, annual feasts, funerals and coming-of-age ceremonies known as name givings.

This April, there were so few spring Chinook salmon for the annual spring feast Patterson attended — held to honor the first foods of the new year — that it took donated bags of frozen salmon to feed everyone at the longhouse that day.

“That defeats the purpose. That ceremony was for that first food coming up the river,” Patterson said. “It’s just … kinda backwards.”

Power and Fish

From the very start, federal agencies had evidence of hatcheries’ failures. But they didn’t leave themselves any other solutions.

Within two decades of enshrining in treaties the right of Northwest tribes to fish for salmon as they always had, the United States government had let commercial fishing deplete salmon runs to the point that the nation’s fish commissioner was devising ways to produce more of them.

In 1872, Spencer Baird, the founder of the agency now known as NOAA Fisheries, built the West Coast’s first salmon hatchery in California and three years later recommended the same solution for the Columbia River’s problems with habitat loss and overfishing.

Baird Station, on Northern California’s McCloud River, was the first federal fish hatchery. Seen here in a photo from 1922, the station was named after NOAA Fisheries founder Spencer Baird, an early champion of hatcheries. (Freshwater and Marine Image Bank)

Baird told fishermen and cannery operators that artificial production would “maintain the present numbers indefinitely, and even … increase them.” Oregon fishing commissioners seized on the idea, declaring that salmon required less labor and care to raise than vegetables.

But the early hatchery efforts faded. By the 1920s, the first analysis of hatcheries at the time found “no evidence” to suggest hatcheries had effectively conserved salmon. Similar research reached the federal Department of Fisheries, a precursor to what is now NOAA Fisheries, in 1929. Amid the poor results and the Great Depression, state and federal fisheries agencies largely abandoned costly large-scale efforts to breed salmon.

Overfishing was the first blow to salmon populations. Dams were the biggest. Between 1933 and 1975, 18 dams were built on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Nearly half of all salmon habitat in the Columbia basin was completely blocked; the rest was drastically altered as humans turned a free-flowing river system into a series of reservoirs and built farms and communities.

The dams destroyed the river’s most important tribal fishing sites and pushed many populations of wild salmon nearly to the point of extinction or wiped them out entirely. But despite the hatcheries’ failures in the early days, the federal government turned to them after damming up the Columbia and the Snake. It was the best offer officials made to the tribes that depended on salmon.

Left: Native Americans fish for salmon from traditional platforms at Celilo Falls, Oregon, in 1941. The falls and traditional fishing grounds were flooded in 1957 by the opening of the floodgates of the newly completed Dalles Dam. Right: Grand Coulee dam construction, 1936. (Library of Congress)

The federal government laid out its position in a 1947 memo, signed by the secretary of the interior: “The overall benefits to the Pacific Northwest from a thorough-going development of the Snake and Columbia are such that the present salmon run must be sacrificed. Efforts should be directed toward ameliorating the impact of this development upon the injured interests and not toward a vain attempt to hold still the hands of the clock.”

Biologists for the Fish and Wildlife Service knew at the time there was no evidence to suggest hatcheries could make up for the impact. But four of those scientists, including the author of the 1920s research casting doubt on hatcheries, suggested hatcheries anyway; after seeing the government’s plans for dam construction, biologists knew that preserving existing salmon runs would be essentially impossible.

Hatcheries again failed to offset the damage. By the late 1970s, hatcheries were releasing three times more juvenile salmon than scientists estimate the wild fish ever produced themselves. But fish counts at federal dams showed that while tens of millions more juvenile salmon were heading downriver each year, the number of returning adult salmon kept dropping.

Part of the problem was how the fish were bred. Salmon have lasted millions of years, across multiple ice ages, because of the diversity in their populations. But in the hatcheries, that diversity started to disappear and fish developed traits that make it harder for them to survive in the wild.

Rob Jones, the former head of NOAA’s hatchery division, said the agencies running hatcheries have known this for as long as he can remember, which is why they have always depended on wild populations to bolster their stocks.

“Without infusing hatcheries, from time to time, with better-fit fish,” Jones said, “hatchery fish might taper off and not return anymore. Because their fitness is just so poor.”

In the early 1990s, several salmon populations landed on the endangered species list. Scientists and environmental advocates began to argue that hatchery fish posed a threat to wild salmon recovery.

“Fisheries scientists, by promoting hatchery technology and giving hatchery tours, have misled the public into thinking that hatcheries are necessary and can truly compensate for habitat loss,” Ray Hilborn, a prominent fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, wrote in a 1992 paper. “Hatchery programs that attempt to add additional fish to existing healthy wild stocks are ill advised and highly dangerous.”

By the end of the 1990s, a panel of scientists for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council concluded that hatcheries had failed in their objective to mitigate habitat damage and were harming wild populations by competing for food and spreading weaker genes. And, they noted, other scientific reviews had reached the same conclusion.

“Scientists and fish culturists should be concerned about the findings of three independent scientific panels that concluded hatcheries have generally failed to meet their objectives,” they wrote.

Congress created a task force to reform hatcheries in 2000, aiming to minimize competition between wild and hatchery fish and to keep weaker hatchery-fish genes out of the wild. Soon, hatcheries faced limits on which fish they could breed, how many wild fish they could capture, how many fish they could release, and how many of their fish were allowed to escape to spawn in the wild. Each hatchery program now requires a genetics management plan.

“There was a lot of work on genetics the past couple of decades, and that’s because that’s probably where our biggest concern was,” said Purcell, who succeeded Jones as head of NOAA hatcheries.

But as it focused on wild genetics, NOAA’s reforms largely ignored how hatcheries grow and release their fish. The agency did not require updates to outdated facilities, nor did it order changes to how hatchery fish were penned, fed or released.

Tribes had begun experimenting with new methods of breeding in their own hatcheries. At its hatchery in Cle Elum, Washington, the Yakama Nation painted concrete tanks to match streambeds, tried filling them with woody debris found in streams, and used underwater feeding tubes so fish didn’t get used to being fed at the surface by humans. They bred captured wild fish instead of hatchery stock and used a collection of earthen ponds to acclimate fish to the wild before they’re released. They documented some success at increasing abundance while minimizing the harm to wild genetics.

At the Melvin R. Sampson Coho Hatchery in Ellensburg, Washington, coho salmon from tribal collection points are used as breeding stock to maximize genetic diversity.

But endangered species regulations and environmental lawsuits alleged that releases of hatchery fish were threatening wild salmon and compromising their recovery. Tribes found that their only tool for putting fish back into rivers — and for exercising their treaty rights — was under threat.

The National Congress of American Indians in 2015 issued a resolution calling for the protection and maximization of hatchery production. In it, the tribes said that salmon production had been “reduced, restricted, and threatened” by endangered species protections, lack of funding and inaction by NOAA, adding that “a disproportionate burden of conservation” had been “placed on the tribal harvest and hatchery requirements.”

Purcell said NOAA has for many years been backlogged in reviewing hatcheries to make sure their breeding programs adequately protected wild fish. Those delays left hatcheries exposed to lawsuits from environmental groups that have blocked or reduced releases of hatchery fish. Purcell said the agency to date has reviewed about 75% of hatchery programs across Oregon, Washington, California and Idaho.

Purcell acknowledged concern for wild fish has led to some hatchery reductions, but said the agency has tried to avoid that when possible for the sake of tribes.

“NOAA Fisheries understands how important hatchery programs are to the tribes,” she said, “so we work hard to find solutions that work for all involved.”

“It’s Not Hopeless”

When salmon return each June to north-central Washington’s Icicle Creek, Sirois, the former chair of the Colville Tribes, drives with a rod and tackle box to the Leavenworth Fish Hatchery, where he sleeps in his car so he can be there when the sun comes up.

Sirois fishes at Icicle Creek at the Leavenworth Fish Hatchery, an area that the Wenatchi people had to fight to regain access to. “I’m standing on the shoulders of those ancestors, but with that, there’s a lot of responsibilities,” Sirois said. “You need to come fish and you need to be a part of this life, this walk, this way.” (Tony Schick/Oregon Public Broadcasting)

He’ll spend a weekend casting for salmon from Icicle Creek. During last June’s run, Sirois fished beside his cousin, with his young nephew perched atop a concrete bridge, watching from above. Across the water, his friend Jason Whalawitsa was fishing with his son atop scaffolds they had built.

The Wenatchi people, part of 12 bands making up the Colville Tribes, spent decades battling in court to reclaim their legal right to fish for salmon in Icicle Creek.

Now, they worry how long the supply of fish will last.

“Our warmer ocean waters don’t allow our fish to get here,” Whalawitsa said.

Salmon numbers have always fluctuated, but salmon biologists say the latest downturn is different: Climate change is making temperatures increasingly inhospitable to salmon, which need cold water. They’ve died by the hundreds of thousands in unusually hot rivers. And in warmer oceans, fish starve without adequate food.

A 2021 study led by NOAA ecologist Lisa Crozier found that warming ocean temperatures could cause salmon survival to decline by roughly 90% within the next 40 years.

“We can imagine all kinds of new situations that could occur. Unfortunately, most of them don’t seem to be favorable for salmon,” Crozier said.

The obstacles to saving salmon are myriad. Large swaths of the Columbia River Basin remain impaired by the effects of excessive heat and chemical pollution, and biologists say habitat restoration efforts are far behind what is needed to give salmon a real chance of rebounding. Advocates of removing the four dams on the lower Snake River to save salmon have gotten the attention of elected officials, but that would only benefit one subset of the basin’s salmon. It wouldn’t help the Wenatchi on the upper Columbia. And salmon there and elsewhere would still need a major boost in fitness to survive the ocean journey.

But Crozier’s study also recommended “desperately needed” actions to restore freshwater habitat, improve river flows and change hatchery practices to give salmon a better chance in the ocean.

“My biggest concern about publishing that paper was that people would say, ‘Oh, salmon are doomed. Let’s give up on them,’” Crozier said. “It’s not hopeless.”

Tanks filled with thousands of coho salmon at the Melvin R. Sampson Coho Hatchery, which aims to breed fish in a more sustainable way that maximizes genetic diversity.

Barry Berejikian, the top hatchery scientist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, agrees. He points to changes in fish tanks, water temperature and feeding schedules that can all increase hatchery fish’s survival odds. Facilities could also adjust how many fish are released and when: Longtime hatchery philosophy has been to flood the river with fish. But scientists have found that overloading the environment with too many fish can slow population growth, and that varying release times gives fish a better chance of survival.

As climate change damages the habitats of wild salmon, hatchery fish become all the more important.

“As we increasingly rely on them, we need to do them better,” Berejikian said of hatcheries. “Right now, the emphasis is not there.”

Officials at federal agencies governing hatcheries said they know salmon survival needs to improve, but demurred when asked about adopting the strategies Berejikian mentioned.

Most production at the 13 hatcheries run by the Fish and Wildlife Service is governed by legal agreements or settlements, giving the agency little flexibility, spokesperson Brent Lawrence said. He touted the agency’s success in keeping fish alive while they’re at the hatchery and said that fish survival in the wild is largely outside the agency’s control.

“We strive to release the healthiest salmon possible from our hatcheries to give the fish the best chance of survival,” Lawrence said.

Guy Norman, chair of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, acknowledged changes are needed at hatcheries to produce stronger fish. But the council’s latest program called for no such changes. Norman said the council would help facilitate research and improvements, but that it has a limited role in prescribing operations at the state and tribal hatcheries in its program. However, the council has ordered changes in the past, such as stipulating that all hatcheries funded through its program needed to follow recommendations for protecting wild salmon.

Purcell, the NOAA hatcheries official, said her agency is limited in what it can require of hatcheries if the changes aren’t directly impacting an endangered population. And, because most of the region’s hatchery facilities are between 40 and 100 years old, she said recommended improvements like more natural rearing conditions “are not an option without a major rebuild.”

According to documents obtained from NOAA, much of the Columbia River Basin’s hatchery tanks and rearing facilities are near the end of their lifespans, and the basin’s capacity for hatchery production has diminished as failing infrastructure has been decommissioned or put into limited operation.

“That creates a lot of limitations to what we can implement,” Purcell said.

Existing operations at Northwest hatcheries are already underfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars, and in some cases parts of their infrastructure have literally crumbled and killed thousands of fish in the process.

At the Lookingglass Hatchery in northeast Oregon, outdated concrete “fish ladders” meant to help salmon escape upstream to spawn are instead blocking them, but the hatchery doesn’t have the $3.4 million needed to fix the problem. Meanwhile, the Lyons Ferry Hatchery in southeast Washington lost 250,000 fish this year because of a crumbling rubber gasket. Last year, it spent more than $5 million on a burst pipe and a pump failure.

In all, records show staff at federally funded hatcheries have identified more than $320 million in repairs and equipment upgrades they can’t make unless the government provides funding.

Congress has kept hatchery funding essentially flat for more than a decade, leaving those needs unaddressed. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, sought to include $400 million for hatcheries as part of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. It would have been the single largest expenditure on hatcheries ever. That effort failed along with the bill. Cantwell did not respond to requests for comment.

Overhauling hatcheries to withstand climate change will cost hundreds of millions more. For instance, the Fish and Wildlife Service predicts that warming waters will lead to more disease and harm the growth of its fish, and that droughts could lead to water shortages on site. The agency has not yet requested additional funding to address what it calls “climate vulnerabilities” at Leavenworth or elsewhere.

More than a decade ago, Whalawitsa and his son Chris began fishing beside the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery, where the current system only supports about half the promised production levels.

Whalawitsa and Chris fish hook-and-line by day and with traditional dip nets all night, trying to fill orders for tribal elders, family members and sick neighbors to help sustain them through winters on the reservation.

“We’re doing the best we can to keep this alive,” Whalawitsa said. “All I can do is pray and hope that this gets better because I want to see my grandchildren fish this.”

When they first started, they’d easily fill five coolers in a single trip and end up racing back and forth to the reservation to make room for more.

Now, they say, they’re lucky to fill one.

About the Data: How We Analyzed Salmon and Steelhead Trout Survival

Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica obtained data from Columbia Basin Research at the University of Washington describing fish in several salmon and steelhead trout populations that were embedded with electronic tags. Tagged fish can be detected by special technology, often at dams, and tag data can provide a window into fish migration and survival. Our approach took a basin-wide view of the hatchery program to create a meaningful, accessible and representative picture of hatchery efforts to support vulnerable salmon and steelhead populations in the region.

We focused our analysis on eight fish populations, all of them Columbia River Basin stocks that are highly vulnerable and monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with the goal of restoring populations to healthy and harvestable levels. Focusing on fish populations that originated in the middle and upper Columbia and Snake rivers had two benefits: First, these were areas that were significantly impacted by the building of hydropower dams in the basin, and second, these were regions for which data was available. The upper Columbia River spring Chinook and Snake River sockeye populations are listed as endangered under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The Snake River fall Chinook, Snake River spring/summer Chinook, Snake River steelhead and upper Columbia River steelhead populations are listed as threatened. The Mid-Columbia Coho Restoration Program includes all coho released in the Wenatchee and Methow basins, and the population was considered by NOAA for designation as threatened or endangered, as were upper Columbia River summer/fall Chinook; though these populations ultimately were not listed, they are still monitored by Columbia Basin Research and NOAA. These eight monitored populations are supported by more than 30 artificial propagation programs along the Columbia River and its tributaries.

The University of Washington’s Columbia Basin Research center provides data about these eight populations at any one of three federal dams: Bonneville Dam, Lower Granite Dam and McNary Dam. The tags, called passive integrated transponders, help generate data including the number of tagged juveniles released each year on their outbound journey downriver and the number of fish from each release year that were later detected as adults returning upriver from the ocean. Comparing these two quantities taken at Bonneville Dam, the nearest dam to the ocean on the Columbia River, provides an estimate of how many fish survived the ocean.

We calculated survival rates across two time periods: 2008-2013 and 2014-2018. During the first period, coastal conditions and climate conditions in the Pacific Ocean were particularly favorable for salmon and steelhead trout. Conditions changed around 2014, the beginning of our most recent span of data. Though Chinook, coho, sockeye and steelhead trout all mature at different times and follow distinct migration patterns, the majority of adult fish from these species return to fresh water to spawn after four years in the ocean, which is why we ended our analysis with the 2018 population: Any juveniles released after that may not yet have had time to return as adults, so that was the most recent population for which data was reliable.

We compared survival rates to benchmarks established by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. In 2003, the council set a goal of 4%, on average, of all juvenile salmon who headed for the ocean would return to fresh water as adults, although it allowed for a range of between 2% and 6% annually. According to the council, these rates should be sufficient to ensure the recovery of the salmon species that are listed as endangered and to help reach the council’s goal of 5 million total salmon and steelhead returning to the Columbia and its tributaries each year. We used this approach for a couple key reasons. While individual hatcheries assess their programs using a variety of measures, we found that these assessments aren’t standardized and very few people are looking at the overall success of the hatchery system; the 4% benchmark allows us to look at the health of the system as a whole. We also listened to the advice of experts in looking at the data across multiple years because the results from any given year are too volatile to be meaningful.

In 2008-2013, only two of the eight populations we examined had average returns exceeding 4%: mid-Columbia coho and Snake River fall Chinook. In 2014-2018, none of the populations had average returns exceeding 4%. For the statistically minded, some further notes: To characterize the uncertainty in average survival rates for the two time periods, we ran bootstrapping experiments on the data using 1,000 trials within each time period to calculate 95th percentile confidence intervals around the bootstrap mean. The confidence intervals for three additional populations (Snake River spring/summer Chinook, upper Columbia River summer/fall Chinook and upper Columbia River steelhead) included the 4% recovery goal between 2008 and 2013. Between 2014 and 2018, the confidence interval for one population, the mid-Columbia coho, included the 4% minimum threshold.

It is important to note that fish biologists evaluate salmon and trout using a variety of performance indicators and metrics, with ocean survival being only one of them. Other metrics include the total number of juvenile fish released by hatcheries, the total number of adult fish returning to fresh water, the proportion of adult returns that started as hatchery juveniles, the state of local habitats, and even fish genetics. However, many of these measures are complex and difficult to compare across a variety of fish management practices, geographies and fish populations. By contrast, estimates of survival are readily available and offer a relatively holistic picture of how a population is doing. They also allow us to see the return on investment of the resources that have been allocated to hatcheries programs — a crucial measure given the limited amount of money available for this effort.

This estimate of ocean survival has some caveats. Only a portion of the salmon released each year are tagged. Furthermore, only a fraction of juvenile salmon survive the journey from release sites far upstream of Bonneville to the dam, and not all adult salmon that make it to Bonneville on the return trip will survive the full freshwater journey back through the hydropower system. That means the estimates drawn from these numbers are generous — the highest that they’ll be on the journey upriver. Nevertheless, these ratios of adult to juvenile tag detection can be considered an index that reflects the trends in populations that can be compared across species, migration patterns and release sites.

Help Us Understand Pacific Northwest Salmon and Treaty Rights

Maya Miller contributed reporting.

by Megan O’Matz

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Jay Stone grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago ward politics, the son of a longtime city alderman. But his own forays into politics left him distrustful of Chicago Democrats.

When he ran for alderman in 2003, he was crushed at the polls after party leaders sent city workers out to campaign against him. Even his own father didn’t endorse him.

Then when Stone sought the mayor’s office in 2010, he only mustered a few hundred of the 12,500 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. He filed a federal lawsuit over the requirement and lost.

His father, Bernard Stone, who held office for 38 years, once told the Chicago Tribune: “My son is very good at what he’s trained to do. And that’s not politics.”

Jay Stone’s training was in hypnotherapy, and he eventually walked away from Chicago politics, carving out a living using hypnosis to help people with anxiety, weight gain, nicotine addiction and other issues. Only in retirement, and after a move to Wisconsin, did he finally find his political niche.

In 2020, Stone played a crucial, if little-known, role in making Wisconsin a hotbed of conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the state’s 10 electoral votes from then-President Donald Trump. The outcry emanating from Wisconsin has cast Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a force of untoward political influence and helped create a backlash against using private grants, including large donations from Zuckerberg, to assist election officials across the country.

In Wisconsin, Stone has finally been embraced politically, by activists and politicians who, like him, didn’t approve of the so-called “Zuckerbucks” or of big-city Democratic mayors. They, too, are unhappy with the way the 2020 presidential election was run in Wisconsin and how it turned out. And they, too, show no inclination of giving up, even when their claims have been rejected and other Republicans have told them it’s time to move on.

“The best part of getting involved in politics in Wisconsin is the wonderful people I’ve been meeting,” Stone said in an interview. “They’re just a great group of men and women that I admire and respect.”

The questioning of the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 20,000-vote victory in Wisconsin continues thanks to Stone and others who have emerged to take on outsize roles after the election. Among them: a retired travel industry executive who has alleged voter fraud at nursing homes. Ten alternate GOP electors who signed documents to try to subvert the certification of Biden’s election. And some state legislators who are still looking for ways to hand the state to Trump, a year and a half after the election.

Stone hasn’t garnered much public attention, but records indicate that in the summer of 2020 he was the first person to complain to state authorities about grant money accepted by local election officials. The funds were earmarked for face masks, shields and other safety supplies, as well as hazard pay, larger voting facilities, vote-by-mail processing, drop boxes and educational outreach about absentee voting.

Stone, however, saw the election funding, which came from a Chicago nonprofit, as a way to sway the election for Biden by helping bring more Democratic-leaning voters to the polls in Wisconsin’s five largest cities.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission rejected Stone’s claim last year, on the grounds that he didn’t live in any of the cities he mentioned and that the complaint did not allege any violations that the commission had the authority to investigate. A separate complaint Stone filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which he objects to the Zuckerberg money, has not been resolved.

Nonetheless, the idea that the election was somehow rigged lives on.

Chief among the election deniers is Michael Gableman, who served on the state Supreme Court for a decade. A Trump ally, Gableman was named as special counsel by the GOP-controlled State Assembly to investigate the legitimacy of Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Not only did Gableman give Stone’s accusations a platform, he took them even further. In his review for the Assembly, Gableman labeled the grants a form of bribery.

Gableman expressed his admiration for Stone during a March interview on the “Tucker Carlson Today” show, which streams online.

It’s “a private citizen, a guy named Jay Stone, who really deserves a lot of credit,” Gableman said, referring to questions about the election grants.

“He saw all of this coming,” Gableman said. “And he’s not a lawyer. I don’t know what his particular training is — he’s trained in the medical field. He filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission back in August of 2020, well before the election. And he foresaw all of this, he foresaw the partisan nature of all of the Zuckerberg money and all of the Zuckerberg people coming in to influence the election.”

Gableman, who has not responded to requests for an interview, had hired Stone as a paid consultant for his review by the time he appeared on Carlson’s show.

But that’s not the only thing keeping Stone from a quiet retirement in Pleasant Prairie, not far from the Illinois border, where he grows his own fruits and vegetables and heats his home only with firewood. Once again, he’s got his eyes on political office. This time he’s running for the Wisconsin State Senate.

The Chicago Connection Items for sale at the H.O.T. Government meeting (Nathanial Schmidt, special to ProPublica)

In the summer of 2020, cities across the U.S. were canceling Fourth of July firework celebrations. Public health departments were scrambling to put contact tracing measures in place to track the spread of COVID-19. Movie theaters remained shuttered. Vaccines were still undergoing testing.

Against this backdrop, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit based in Chicago, decided to get involved. Its stated mission is to ensure that elections across the country are “more professional, inclusive and secure.”

The group approached the mayors of Wisconsin’s five largest cities — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha and Racine — and encouraged them to draw up a “Safe Voting Plan” outlining how they would spend more than $6 million in grant money to make it easier for people to vote while also limiting their exposure to the highly contagious coronavirus.

Wisconsin’s April elections, including the presidential primary, had been a near-disaster. The state’s Democratic governor and GOP-controlled legislature bickered over whether to postpone the balloting. Election offices were deluged with requests for absentee ballots. National Guard troops stepped in to replace poll workers too scared to volunteer. Polling places closed or relocated. Some voters waited in long lines for hours.

The Safe Voting Plan envisioned a smoother election that November. The goals were to keep voters safe and educate them about how to cast a ballot properly, whether in person or by mail. The plan also expressed the desire to ensure the right to vote “in our dense and diverse communities.”

Green Bay, for example, proposed using $15,000 to partner with “churches, educational institutions, and organizations serving African immigrants, LatinX residents, and African Americans” to help new voters obtain documents needed to get a valid state ID that they could show at the polls or to get an absentee ballot.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life awarded the $6.3 million to Wisconsin’s five largest cities in early July 2020. That’s when a friend of Stone’s sent him a link to a newspaper article about the grants.

“Within 10 minutes, I knew this was a scam, because they were targeting the Democratic strongholds in the state of Wisconsin,” said Stone.

Stone recognized that the organization’s address on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile was in the same building that had once housed Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, which he felt confirmed his instincts.

He took exception to the proposed outreach to communities that traditionally vote Democratic, saying such efforts are the responsibility of candidates and parties, not municipal election workers. On Aug. 28, 2020, he fired off a 27-page complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which included 167 exhibits.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life “exploited COVID-19” to help Democrats, Stone wrote. “All of CTCL’s $6.3 million expenditures will increase voter turnout in Wisconsin cities that are heavily Democratic and increase the likelihood that Democrat Joe Biden will win Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes.”

Less than a week later, CTCL made a major announcement: It had received a $250 million donation from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The couple later added an additional $100 million. CTCL’s previous funding had come from a variety of foundations.

Ultimately, CTCL awarded grants to more than 2,500 elections offices across 49 states, including rural parts of Wisconsin. The sums included $5,000 to small communities such as Ralls County, Missouri, and $10 million each for the city of Philadelphia and for Fulton County, Georgia, which encompasses most of Atlanta.

In an interview, Stone said he wouldn’t have objected if the grants had been awarded to each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties — with every county getting an equal amount per registered voter.

According to a ProPublica analysis, the biggest municipalities in Wisconsin received the most money and had higher per capita grants than smaller places like Waukesha, Brookfield and Fond Du Lac, which all had a history of voting for Trump. For instance, the per capita figure for Milwaukee was more than 10 times that of nearby Waukesha.

An analysis by Ballotpedia, a nonprofit focusing on elections, found that Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan — swing states that ended up in the Biden column — received some of the highest per capita grants from CTCL. However, it’s nearly impossible to discern what may have turned the tide in those states and whether turnout was affected by the grant money, a motivation to vote against Trump, or other factors.

CTCL was formed in 2014. One of its founders, Tiana Epps-Johnson, was named an Obama Foundation fellow in 2018, providing her with leadership training and other resources to help her in her work. She has described CTCL as nonpartisan, but Stone said the Obama Foundation connection suggests otherwise.

Epps-Johnson, who is CTCL’s executive director, did not respond to a voice message left on her direct line, but the group replied with a statement saying the grant money was available to all parts of the country. “Every eligible local election office that applied was awarded funds,” CTCL stated.

The center also defended its actions in a lawsuit the Trump campaign filed against the Wisconsin Elections Commission; the suit alleged, in part, that the state election commission had improperly supported the five cities’ plan to promote expanded mail-in voting.

In an amicus brief in that case, CTCL wrote: “Most of those funds were used to purchase personal protective equipment for voters and election workers, to recruit and train additional staff, to provide improved security, to establish in-person polling places, to process mail-in ballots, and to ensure emergency preparedness. CTCL’s program thus helped officials throughout the nation to run secure, lawful, and efficient elections for all Americans.”

A federal judge appointed by Trump found no merit in the former president’s case and dismissed it.

Zuckerberg also denies having hidden motives in funding nonprofits that targeted voting issues. His spokesperson Brian Baker said in an email to ProPublica that Zuckerberg and his wife stepped in when “our nation’s election infrastructure faced unprecedented challenges” and the federal government “failed to provide adequate funds.” The goal, Baker said, was to “ensure that residents could vote regardless of their party or preference.”

When Wisconsinites went to the polls in November 2020, there were far fewer issues with people having trouble casting a ballot or having to wait in long lines than there had been in the spring election.

Jay Stone’s Grievances “We have to fight for changes with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, because the way it is currently going we’re not going to have fair elections, and it’s going to be hard for us to elect honest candidates,” Jay Stone told the H.O.T. Government gathering. (Nathanial Schmidt, special to ProPublica)

Stone’s skepticism was deeply rooted. His own family and his political failures were shaped by Chicago politics, giving him a close-up view of the unseemly tactics of loyalists associated with Democratic rule under Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and then, to a lesser extent, his son Richard M. Daley.

Running for 32nd Ward alderman on Chicago’s North Side in 2003, Stone preached good government, transparency and election reform. He lost. Testimony in a 2006 federal corruption trial involving top Daley administration officials described how party bosses ordered city workers to campaign for Stone’s opponent, the sitting alderman.

“They wanted a puppet they could control,” Stone said.

After his election defeat, Stone filed a claim against the Daley administration as part of a class-action suit seeking compensation for damages related to political patronage. A federal monitor awarded him $75,000 based on Stone’s claims about city workers forced to campaign against him. His efforts taking on the Daley machine earned him a description as a “passionate independent” from a reporter for the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly.

Reflecting on the experience, Stone said that even his father was unwilling to endorse him for fear of political retribution. (Stone’s father died in 2014. Jay Stone said that despite their political differences, they remained close.)

Undeterred, in 2010 Stone made a bid for mayor, hoping to take on Richard M. Daley, but Daley announced he would not run for a record seventh term.

Stone didn’t obtain enough signatures to qualify for the ballot and sued the city’s Board of Election Commissioners, claiming the requirement was onerous and unconstitutional, designed to keep the machine in power. The courts disagreed, and the case failed.

Stone never won an election in Chicago, but he was able to build a professional life there as a hypnotherapist in private practice. Stone decided to enter the field after earning first an undergraduate philosophy degree and then an MBA. He received a doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy through remote learning from a now-shuttered California institute.

Hypnotherapists are not licensed in Illinois. But the treatment has gained acceptance. According to the National Institutes of Health, hypnosis has been shown to help people manage some painful conditions and deal with anxiety.

Stone sought to help clients visualize a better future, a goal he said he wanted to achieve in politics, too. In hypnosis, Stone said, some of his patients experienced flashbacks to past lives that helped them find peace and change their behavior for the better. He wrote a paper, posted on his website, on the potential to use DNA to prove the existence of past lives.

Science, he noted, always starts with a theory. “And then you have to be able to prove it,” he said.

His theories about elections tend to lump all Chicago Democrats together, so that Michelle and Barack Obama are considered just as capable of unsavory political tactics as the two Daleys who governed Chicago for decades.

Stone maintains that the Obamas have unduly influenced elections through a network of former White House staffers associated with nonprofits Stone believes are inappropriately registering and influencing voters. (He said he soured on Barack Obama long ago because he believed that Obama had failed to confront the Chicago Democratic machine as a U.S. senator.)

He is particularly opposed to the star-studded nonprofit When We All Vote, set up by Michelle Obama to register voters and help “close the race and age gap.” By the 2020 election, more than 500,000 people had started or completed their voter registration process through When We All Vote, according to the group.

“I believe Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote is the most powerful political organization or political machine in the country,” Stone said in a video he posted on Rumble, a video platform that’s popular among some conservatives. “When We All Vote is more powerful than the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee combined.”

When We All Vote told ProPublica in an email that it is nonpartisan and works with schools and educators to increase civic engagement and voter participation, saying its “initiatives comply with the letter and spirit of the law.”

Stone filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission against the former first lady, alleging criminal violations for offering financial prizes to schools that registered the most voters and for enticing people to early voting sites with food and music. The commission, in a 5-1 vote in April, dismissed the matter “due to a lack of reasonable suspicion” and fined him $500 for filing a “frivolous” complaint. (Stone on Friday appealed that decision in Kenosha County Circuit Court.)

Stone saw the supposed Obama network’s fingerprints on the 2020 election grants offered by the Center for Tech and Civic Life.

And while he measures his words more carefully than Gableman and others who see the 2020 Wisconsin election results as tainted, he clearly is in that camp.

“There was so much, I don’t want to say ‘fraud,’ but there was so much deviation from the election laws and the election norms, it raises serious questions,” he said of Trump’s loss in Wisconsin.

“I don’t think the election was fair and just.”

Allies in Wisconsin The H.O.T. Government meeting in Union Grove (Nathanial Schmidt, special to ProPublica)

The CTCL money has become a central theme in complaints about Biden’s victory in Wisconsin — and in the review by Gableman. Under pressure from Trump, GOP Assembly Speaker Robin

Vos appointed Gableman to review whether the election was administered fairly and lawfully.

Gableman has fallen short of proving fraud, but did use an interim report and an appearance before the legislative oversight committee on March 1 to highlight the Zuckerberg money and call for disbanding the Wisconsin Elections Commission. He said the legislature should look into decertifying the 2020 election results, but even Republican officials balked at that.

​​Republican Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke tweeted that “handing authority to partisan politicians to determine if election fraud exists would be the end of our republic as we know it.”

Jay Stone sat in the front row behind Gableman during the meeting, where Gableman released a report of his findings thus far. It spanned 136 pages, half of which dealt with the CTCL grants, which he characterized as “election bribery.”

Stone helped in the review but won’t talk about what exactly he did in the ongoing investigation, which was budgeted by Vos to cost taxpayers $676,000. “I’m on a confidentiality agreement,” Stone said.

Stone billed Gableman $3,250 for 128 hours of work between Feb. 16 and March 1, according to an invoice obtained by the nonprofit group American Oversight, which has sued to get access to Gableman’s records.

Asked about Gableman’s bribery terminology, Stone sighed. “It’s not a typical case where somebody gives a politician money for, let’s say, a zoning change,” he said. “So, it’s not your typical bribery case, but certainly it’s worth looking into.”

Lawsuits in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota about the CTCL grants have failed, as did Stone’s complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Just last week in Madison, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Ehlke called the election bribery allegation “ridiculous,” saying he saw no evidence that CTCL offered anything to change anyone’s vote. “I mean, what proof is there in the record anywhere of an inducement of bribery? That whole thing just falls away. There’s nothing in the record. Is there?”

Minnesota lawyer Erick G. Kaardal, who continues to challenge the grants, replied that he reads state law to mean: “We don’t want Wisconsin public officials taking money to get people to go to the polls.”

The county case is an appeal of the elections commission’s rejection of a similar complaint Kaardal filed there about the grants. Ehlke has yet to rule.

Gableman’s work, meanwhile, has been widely discredited, cast by politicians, including some Republicans, and legal analysts as unprofessional and amateurish. Wisconsin’s Democratic governor called the investigation a “colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.”

“This effort has spread disinformation about our election processes, it has attacked the integrity of our clerks, election administrators, and poll workers, and it has emboldened individuals to harass and demean dedicated public servants,” Gov. Tony Evers said in a prepared statement.

The issue of using private grants in administering elections, however, remains alive.

Zuckerberg will not be making future donations to election offices, his spokesperson told ProPublica earlier this month, calling it “a one-time donation given the unprecedented nature of the crisis.”

More than a dozen states, meanwhile, have banned or restricted the use of private funds for election offices. The Wisconsin legislature passed a bill in 2021 prohibiting counties or municipalities from applying for or accepting any private donations for elections, but left room for the Wisconsin Elections Commission to take outside grants so long as the money is distributed statewide on a per capita basis. Evers vetoed it.

In southeastern Wisconsin, however, the Walworth County Board of Supervisors passed its own ban last month, prohibiting the county from accepting donations or grants for election administration from individuals or nongovernmental entities.

Now that he’s left a mark as a political activist in Wisconsin, Stone is back on the campaign trail.

At an event hall near Kenosha this month, Stone addressed about 100 people gathered at a regular meeting of the H.O.T. Government group, a right-leaning Wisconsin grassroots organization that adopted an acronym for the words “honest, open and transparent.” (Stone is the group’s vice president.) A stuffed effigy of a torso with a white foam head hung from the rafters, wearing a shirt labeled “Corrupt Officials.”

Standing before a large American flag, he politely asked people to sign his nominating forms. Republican State Rep. Janel Brandtjen, who chairs the elections committee overseeing Gableman’s investigation and supports the effort to overturn Biden’s Wisconsin victory, jumped up from her seat to lead the crowd in a chant: “Jay Stone! Jay Stone!”

“Jay is the one who filed the complaint in the very beginning,” she told the audience. “Jay is a real hero in what he’s done for Wisconsin.”

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by Renee Dudley

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On Feb. 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, a prolific ransomware gang called Conti made a proclamation on its dark web site. It was an unusually political statement for a cybercrime organization: Conti pledged its “full support of Russian government” and said it would use “all possible resources to strike back at the critical infrastructures” of Russia’s opponents.

Perhaps sensing that such a public alliance with the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin could cause problems, Conti tempered its declaration later that day. “We do not ally with any government and we condemn the ongoing war,” it wrote in a follow-up statement that nonetheless vowed retaliation against the United States if it used cyberwarfare to target “any Russian-speaking region of the world.”

Conti was likely concerned about the specter of U.S. sanctions, which Washington applies to people or countries threatening America’s security, foreign policy or economy. But Conti’s attempt to resume its status as a stateless operation didn’t work out: Within days of Russia’s invasion, a researcher who would later tweet “Glory to Ukraine!” leaked 60,000 internal Conti messages on Twitter. The communications showed signs of connections between the gang and the FSB, a Russian intelligence agency, and included one suggesting a Conti boss “is in service of Pu.”

Yet even as Putin’s family and other Russian officials, oligarchs, banks and businesses have faced an unprecedented wave of U.S. sanctions designed to impose a crippling blow on the Russian economy, Conti was not hit with sanctions. Any time the U.S. Treasury Department sanctions such an operation, Americans are legally barred from paying it ransom.

The fact that Conti wasn’t put on a sanctions list may seem surprising given the widespread damage it wrought. Conti penetrated the computer systems of more than 1,000 victims around the world, locked their files and collected more than $150 million in ransoms to restore access. The group also stole victims’ data, published samples on a dark website and threatened to publish more unless it was paid.

But only a small handful of the legions of alleged ransomware criminals and groups attacking U.S. victims have been named on sanctions lists over the years by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers and enforces them.

Putting a ransomware group on a sanctions list isn’t as simple as it might seem, current and former Treasury officials said. Sanctions are only as good as the evidence behind them. OFAC mostly relies on information from intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as well as media reports and other sources. When it comes to ransomware, OFAC has typically used evidence from criminal indictments, such as that of the alleged mastermind behind the Russia-based Evil Corp cybercrime gang in 2019. But such law enforcement actions can take years.

“Attribution is very difficult,” Michael Lieberman, assistant director of OFAC’s enforcement division, acknowledged at a conference this year. (The Treasury Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.)

Ransomware groups are constantly changing their names, in part to evade sanctions and law enforcement. Indeed, on Thursday, a tech site called BleepingComputer reported that Conti itself has “officially shut down their operation.” The article, which cited information from a threat-prevention company called AdvIntel, laid out details about the status of Conti’s sites and servers but was unambiguous on a key point: “Conti’s gone, but the operation lives on.”

The evanescence of the Conti name underscores another reason it’s hard to sanction ransomware groups: Putting a group on a list of sanctioned entities without also naming the individuals behind it or releasing other identifying characteristics could cause hardship for bystanders. For example, a bank customer with the last name “Conti” might pop up as a sanctioned person, creating unintended legal exposure for that person and the bank, said Michael Parker, a former official in OFAC’s Enforcement Division. The government then would have to untangle these snarls.

By imposing sanctions, the federal government would hamstring victimized organizations, such as businesses and hospitals, that might suffer disclosure of trade secrets or other sensitive information, or might have to shut down if they couldn’t recover their locked files. If they could pay the ransom, the hacker would supply a key to unlock the files and pledge to delete stolen data.

But even without sanctions, victims are in a bind. Years before the invasion of Ukraine, OFAC imposed sanctions on the FSB, one of the successor agencies to the Soviet-era KGB. So even though Conti was not listed by name, its possible ties to the FSB or other listed Russian entities may have rendered it sanctioned anyway.

Between that and the bad optics of paying a group linked to Russia, most victims had not paid Conti’s ransom after the February proclamation, according to lawyers and negotiators who work with ransomware victims. They say the situation is confusing. “It certainly would be easier for us if the standard were to add particular ransomware groups to the OFAC list,” said Michael Waters, an attorney who frequently works with victims of ransomware. “Then we simply aren’t going to make payments to those groups. But it is much foggier than that.”

Some American victims continued to pay ransoms to Conti through a Canadian intermediary called Cypfer. CEO Daniel Tobok said Cypher paid Conti on behalf of about a dozen victims, more than a third of them American, after the war began. He said that some companies would have had to lay off employees or shut down entirely if they hadn’t paid Conti. Cypfer follows U.S. sanctions on groups listed by name, such as Evil Corp, Tobok said. “Either they’re on the sanctions list or they’re not,” he said of Conti. “I don't include morals here.”

The lack of clarity puts the onus on victims to discover if their attacker falls into a sanctioned category. Determining whether groups are operating out of North Korea or Iran, for example, or on behalf of the FSB is “very, very challenging because there’s obviously efforts to conceal that on the other side,” said Ryan Fayhee, a sanctions attorney who works with victims. The government makes it seem “as if this is a traditional commercial enterprise and you can just simply screen the criminal,” he added. “That’s not how it happens.”

The federal government has long discouraged the payment of ransom and in recent years has put the professionals who work with ransomware victims on notice. In October 2020 the Treasury Department issued an advisory saying that “companies that facilitate ransomware payments to cyber actors on behalf of victims” may “risk violating OFAC regulations.” A second advisory, in 2021, seemed to acknowledge that victims sometimes make payments that violate sanctions. In those cases, victims and their representatives may receive leniency if they quickly report the incident and payment to OFAC.

Since many victims in the past have been loath to report attacks to the FBI, fearing that the intrusion would become public or the FBI would instead investigate the company itself, the Treasury Department hoped the guidance would prompt more victims to work with law enforcement. That, in turn, could lead to more indictments and more sanctions.

That part of the strategy seems to be working: More victims are reporting incidents to law enforcement, according to Waters. Following the 2021 advisory, many insurers began requesting proof that policyholders making ransomware claims report the incidents to the FBI, he said. The insurers he works with heavily weigh decisions made by intermediaries such as negotiating firm Coveware. Following Conti’s proclamation about Russia, Coveware stopped making payments to the group, said its co-founder, Bill Siegel. Coveware continued to negotiate with Conti, allowing time for the victim to assess the situation, prepare a public relations strategy and make arrangements to notify people affected by the breach.

For its part, Conti laid low following the late February leak of its messages, then launched a final burst of intrusions in April, including a significant one against the Costa Rican government. But that attack, AdvIntel told BleepingComputer, seemed intended to provide cover while Conti protected its online infrastructure. Not unlike the Russian army in Ukraine, it seemed, Conti’s forces were making a tactical retreat in preparation for future attacks.

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Update, May 24, 2022: This article has been updated to include comments, made after this story was produced for publication, from the CEO of a company that continued to pay ransom to Conti after it proclaimed its sympathy to Russia.

Daniel Golden contributed reporting.

Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden are the authors of “The Ransomware Hunting Team,” which will be published in October by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

by Seth Freed Wessler

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In July of 2021, a professional architectural historian named Erin Edwards delivered what she expected would be the near-final draft of a report about a contested swath of sugar cane plantation land along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The painstaking survey, for her bosses at a consulting firm, was supposed to identify harms to historic sites so that developers can prevent or minimize them.

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Edwards’ report detailed how a proposed $400 million grain elevator, almost the height of the Statue of Liberty, would disrupt sites that are both sacred and dedicated to educating people about slavery and its aftermath. These included homes in the 750-person community of Wallace, an African American cemetery and the nearby Whitney Plantation Museum, which serves as a memorial to generations of people forced to work the fields against their will. The draft said vermin, loud noises and ground vibrations would likely invade the quiet space of the museum, which draws tens of thousands of visitors each year.

For many residents of Wallace and nearby communities in St. John the Baptist Parish, the site holds deeper meaning. They are the descendants of people who’d once been enslaved there.

An agricultural company called Greenfield had purchased the land for $40 million in 2021 and is seeking a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to build a massive industrial operation that would include 54 grain silos. A long conveyor would carry millions of tons of wheat, soy and other crops to the facility from ships docked on the river. Gulf South Research Corporation, where Edwards worked, was hired to help Greenfield comply with a section of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act that requires development projects funded or given a permit by federal agencies to document significant sites and come up with a plan to minimize harm. The law gives agencies like the Corps authority to deny permits if a proposed project cannot be reshaped to avoid harming sites with historic significance.

The draft report by Edwards and a co-author concluded that the grain elevator would have “an adverse effect on historic properties.” The authors said they had determined that the entire area should be listed as a historic district in the National Register of Historic Places, the federal government’s roster of sites deemed worthy of preservation.

The field where the agricultural company Greenfield plans on building a grain elevator. (Akasha Rabut, special to ProPublica)

Edwards had included a sentence that she believed was suggestive if not definitive about an underexamined aspect of the land: the possibility that it contained as-yet undiscovered graves. “Thus far, no enslaved cemeteries have been found for either Whitney or Evergreen Plantations,” another nearby and unusually intact plantation where the movie “Django Unchained” was filmed, “despite hundreds of enslaved people being kept there for over 155 years.”

Three months after Edwards handed in her report, in October 2021, Gulf South filed to the state a document with the same title as the one Edwards wrote but with some notable edits.

The determination of the historic district, the findings about the impact on Whitney and the community around it, and the lone sentence about unknown graves had all been removed. The report now concluded that “the project would not result in an adverse effect.”

The report submitted by Gulf South Research Corporation. (Screenshot highlighted by ProPublica)

The rewrite came after the contractor Greenfield hired to handle the permitting process pressured Gulf South, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. Gulf South was warned that if the firm didn’t take out Edwards’ key finding — that the entire area was a historic district — it would lose the contract.

“They are refusing to accept it,” Gulf South’s head of cultural resources, Mike Renacker, wrote about Edwards’ report in an email to an internal team. “They are willing to tear up the contract and fire us.” As written, the report “has the potential to not only cost us our contract and future work, but might end the overall project as well.”

Edwards was shocked. “It is unethical for a client to tell us what our findings are,” she replied in an email. “They came to us for our expertise, and they got a professional report that is factual.”

“Our reputation will be that we can be bought,” she added.

Renacker replied: “I’m not suggesting, nor would I ever suggest that we do something unethical. I’m not questioning your methods or even the recommendation. What I am doing is laying out the problem we are having and asking for help to find a solution.”

After Edwards’ bosses changed her report, she resigned from her job of seven years.

Gulf South wrote in response to questions from ProPublica that it “was not required by Greenfield or anyone else for that matter to make changes that GSRC does not support.” What Edwards submitted, the company said, was a draft, and it’s not uncommon for drafts to change after clients review them and offer new relevant information.

The company says it asked Edwards to provide additional evidence to support her conclusion that the area should be considered an historic district, but she “was unable to provide data needed to meet the referenced listing criteria.” Edwards, who has a master’s degree in preservation from Tulane, said that she was confident her report was comprehensive and that the state’s historic preservation office would have agreed, had that agency been sent the complete report.

Greenfield did not answer a number of detailed questions about the Gulf South surveys but said that it prioritizes the protection of historic sites, and that it would halt work in any area where construction discovers unknown cultural resources.

The contractor Greenfield hired to handle the permit process, Ramboll Group, declined to answer questions, stating that media requests should go to Greenfield and Gulf South.

Experts in the field of cultural resource management say that companies sometimes look away from findings or are asked to change them to make their developer bosses happy. The field is now dominated by for-profit firms like Gulf South that developers hire to comply with the federal law. As a result, these firms can operate not as preservation gatekeepers but as lock-pickers for private industry intent on development.

“There is little incentive for companies to find anything,” explained Tom King, who during the 80s was the director of the federal Office of Cultural Resource Preservation, under the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. “They’re not hired to find things. If they make construction impossible, they are not going to get more work.”

The community of Wallace, which is almost entirely Black, sits along a rare stretch of undeveloped riverbank south of Baton Rouge that’s not been transformed by polluting petrochemical plants and other heavy industry. Right off River Road, an 83-year-old woman named Clementine Grows sat on the porch of her small cottage, which was still covered in blue tarps after severe damage from Hurricane Ida last year. On this May morning, before the midday heat set in, she explained that she’d spent some of her childhood on the Whitney Plantation. From the dead-end road where she lives, Grows can see the plantation property, several hundred yards across a cane field.

Her grandparents had labored and lived on the Whitney, where wage workers were bound through credit to the plantation store, a whole century after the Civil War. They had cared for Grows, she said, after her mother was injured in a cane fire. She and her husband raised their children in Wallace. Grows worked as a cook at the local high school. Her husband worked at a grain elevator across the river. Her son, who was visiting Grows on that May morning, recalled coming home from school years ago and earning pocket change picking vegetables.

The cane field and Whitney Plantation seen from the end of Clementine Grows’ street. (Akasha Rabut, special to ProPublica)

Grows said she did not know exactly what the grain elevator would mean for her and her home. She’s heard some people in her community say that the project would make it difficult to remain in these houses. “A lot of people say it’s going to cause all sorts of problems.”

Three decades ago, another company had nearly begun building a plant on the same land. She’d prepared to leave. But the plans were scrapped. “If we had to move all of a sudden that would be something. I’ve been here. My daddy was living right there,” Grows said. “All these people on this little land are kinfolk.”

Edwards had listed Grows’ house among several in a small enclave in Wallace called Willow Grove that should be considered part of a larger rural historic district, “as it was built for and used by the descendants of freed plantation workers.” At the end of Grows’ dead-end road, beyond a cleared grassy plot and adjacent to the planned grain elevator, a cemetery with about 50 stones bears names of people who died here, including Grows’ mother, Lorenza Poche, born in 1910, and her husband, Melvin Grows, an Army veteran, as well as one of her sons, four siblings and a grandson.

Grows at Willow Grove Cemetery, where many of her relatives are buried. (Akasha Rabut, special to ProPublica)

Grows recalls that decades ago, families would ask to bury their deceased relatives in areas near existing graves. Her neighbors who managed the burials, all of whom Grows said have now passed away, would sometimes tell them that there were open spaces that were off-limits to new interments. “When someone would come to bury someone there, they would say, ‘You can’t bury them there because someone’s been buried there already.’ And they’d find another place to bury them.”

It was her understanding that people had been buried there without headstones.

There is no mention of these or any other possible unmarked burials in the report that Gulf South sent to the state.

Shortly after Gulf South changed Edwards’ report, University of New Orleans professor Ryan Gray sent a letter to the Corps detailing a list of ways that Gulf South’s methodology for locating unknown cemetery sites was “completely inadequate.”

Gray, who worked for eight years for a private cultural resource management firm in Louisiana before he got a doctorate in archaeology at the University of Chicago, concluded that the Willow Grove Cemetery likely extends beyond what is visible. The land around it, he wrote, is “almost positively the location” of “unmarked enslaved or nineteenth-century post-Emancipation burials.”

Greenfield did not respond to questions about potential burial sites, but on its website the company says it “has gone above and beyond what is required to ensure there are no ancestral burial grounds where the facility will be located.”

Cultural resource management firms have been criticized before for missing historic sites in their reports. Just up the river several years ago, a firm hired by a petrochemical company initially failed to document burial sites that activists and researchers uncovered by comparing aerial photos from the 1940s that might still have shown the contours of those plots with 19th-century maps that identified locations of cemeteries. After an outside archaeologist alerted the state to the likely existence of gravesites, the petrochemical company that owned the land agreed to cordon off at least one of those cemeteries.

In December 2020, Gulf South submitted a first report to the state historic preservation officer. After reviewing the work, the state asked the company to expand the radius of its study, to include all of the Whitney and Evergreen plantations and the communities nearby and to take into account other potential impacts. This is the work Edwards and another employee were assigned to.

Edwards said she raised the issue of unknown graves in the hopes it would spur the Division of Historic Preservation to demand that Greenfield conduct a more diligent search for unmarked burial sites, including near the Willow Grove Cemetery. (Edwards’ co-author has recently taken a job as a compliance officer with the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, overseeing cultural resource management reports. She declined to be interviewed because she is not authorized by the state to speak to the press.)

“If there might be burials,” Edwards said, “why not look harder?”

Grows walks to Willow Grove Cemetery. (Akasha Rabut, special to ProPublica)

Last year, the Whitney Plantation Museum, which decades ago was added to the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places, put up a new plaque on the museum premises. “It is a major threat to the slave-decsendant community in Wallace,” the plaque reads, referring to Greenfield’s plans. Visitors see the display before they reach a memorial to men who were executed after staging the German Coast uprising, the largest revolt of enslaved people before the Civil War.

“This grain elevator would take up hundreds of acres of the fields around you that once formed Whitney Plantation, potentially destroying unknown burial sites,” the plaque says. “It will contribute to the existing toxic burden with the grain dust pollution, and permanently change the landscape of West St. John Parish.”

A plaque put up last year at the Whitney Plantation Museum. (Courtesy of the Whitney Plantation Museum)

The grain elevator would be visible from parts of the plantation memorial site. And it would tower over a small restaurant on a verdant, tree-shaded plot off River Road.

Joy and Jo Banner, twin sisters in their mid-40s from Wallace, run the restaurant, which is on the same road as their family home. They also are the co-founders of the Descendants Project, a nonprofit dedicated to lifting the history of Black people in the region, and in particular ancestors of enslaved people in the river parish plantations.

After both sisters left Wallace for college and graduate school, and in Joy’s case to get a doctorate and then teach at a university in Texas, they returned to work in this small community. Like many residents, they trace their ancestry to people who were enslaved in these very plantations, including Whitney.

Sisters Joy, left, and Jo Banner run a restaurant on the same road as their family home. (Akasha Rabut, special to ProPublica)

The Banner sisters have dedicated much of their time to building the Descendants Project so that people like Grows might gain some power in decisions about how their communities change. For the last year, that has meant fighting Greenfield’s plans. Along with other advocates, they’ve alleged that the industrial facility will lead to the kind of harm that Edwards was independently documenting, entirely unbeknownst to them, because the report as she wrote it has never been released.

“If they build this, this community will not survive,” said Joy Banner, whose day job is communications director of the Whitney Plantation Museum.

The grain elevator would be constructed next to the pink building on the right, the Banners’ restaurant. (Akasha Rabut, special to ProPublica)

In May of 2021, the Banner sisters heard reverberating bangs originating several hundred feet from their home, on the land that Greenfield owned where the elevator would be. Builders were driving large metal beams, more than 20 of them, into the ground to determine feasibility for building, according to Greenfield. “If you didn’t know what was going on, you would think that there’s nothing you can do to stop it,” Jo Banner said, pointing into the field, just past their family home, where Greenfield placed a “No Trespassing Private Property” sign.

After the beams were pounded into the ground, lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represent the Descendants Project sent a letter to the Louisiana attorney general and the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, requesting that they force the activity to stop.

The letter cited work by a research firm called Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths’ College at the University of London, that had been investigating the location of historic cemeteries in Cancer Alley, the predominantly African American region between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that’s packed with dozens of petrochemical plants and refineries. Using historic maps and aerial photographs, they’ve identified geological anomalies that could indicate burial sites, including trees growing in otherwise-cultivated fields. In some cases, those anomalies took root because plows or planters had long steered clear of known or suspected locations of graves.

“If you are genuinely interested in finding antebellum or other historic sites, you want to find the earliest possible view of the land,” said Imani Jaqueline Brown, the researcher with Forensic Architecture who spent a year studying the geography, architecture and cartography of the region and constructed the maps of the anomalies in Wallace. Brown said two sites are particularly likely to be burial places, based on their relative location to plantation architecture.

Gulf South said that it “did review historic maps and aerial imagery and considered the potential for burial locations” and “found no evidence of potential burial locations within the footprint of potential ground disturbance resulting from the project.”

Forensic Architecture used historic maps and aerial images to identify possible burial sites near the proposed grain elevator. (Courtesy of Descendants Project)

The attorney general’s office replied to the letter from the Descendants Projects’ lawyers. “While some of the anomalies identified in your letter may represent unmarked burial sites,” it said, “so long as they are undisturbed we cannot take action under the existing laws.” Unless bones were dug up, in other words, under Louisiana’s cemetery laws, the state could not stop the work.

Another group of lawyers, also working with the Descendants Project, was trying to stop the federal permit, arguing in part that grain dust could leak into the air and create a respiratory irritant.

Greenfield disputes that the grain elevator would cause such problems, adding that “it will be one of the safest and cleanest facilities in North America. Greenfield is engineered to outperform all current and anticipated EPA standards.”

In November, the Descendants Project sued St. John the Baptist Parish to try to stop the project. Through their lawyers in that suit, the group presented evidence that the grain elevator land had been zoned for industrial use through fraud; a corrupt land deal three decades earlier landed the former parish president in federal prison. A judge in late April ruled that the case could proceed. Greenfield, which the court allowed to become a party to the case, said it would likely appeal. In court filings it has argued that the 30-year-old zoning decisions, whatever their origins, were approved by the St. John Parish Council.

Among the claims in the suit, the Descendants Project says that the sprawling operation could pose a risk to their own ancestors’ graves. The sisters aim to preserve the land to serve Black communities who have lived here for hundreds of years yet have been robbed of their claim to it by those who controlled it.

Jo and Joy Banner at the construction with a rendering of how the grain elevator will look behind their community. Protruding in the background are the stakes where construction is planned. (Akasha Rabut, special to ProPublica)

“These are Black spaces,” Joy Banner said, sitting on the lawn of her restaurant, about the geography of the plantations amid which she lives. “The trauma of not being able to talk freely about our own history is hurting our communities.”

Jo Banner added: “We have this district, we have an area that is really not found anywhere in the country. Communities like ours have been surviving all this time, since slavery and after slavery, so we’re fighting to protect this place.”

It is impossible to know how often important sites get covered up or downplayed in cultural resource management reports. These omissions typically come to light only because someone insists on revealing them.

After Edwards quit her job at Gulf South, she felt compelled to tell the state what had happened. On Oct. 22, 2021, she emailed the director of the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation, stating that the report she had drafted, and a set of accompanying forms, are “very different from the current version that should be coming to you soon.”

“The current version of the report was written by the project manager and the client, playing architectural historian, and they have made eligibility determinations and conclusions in the report that I absolutely do not agree with,” she wrote in an email ProPublica obtained. “Since my professional reputation in Louisiana is involved in this, I wanted to ask you to please be aware that my name, my degree, and SOI [Secretary of Interior] qualifications should not [be] associated with this revised report in any way.”

“That elevator was going to be harmful,” Edwards told ProPublica. “That is what I concluded.”

For communities with an interest in the land, removing those kinds of conclusions can foreclose access to a provision of federal law that promises communities a say in what happens when historic sites are at risk. For land that Black communities are deeply connected to but have never been allowed to control, like the land in Wallace, community consultation provides a rare opening, however narrow, to be heard.

“Consultation opens a crack to holding the laws to an ethical standard,” Gray, the University of New Orleans professor, said.

Historic preservation has given preference to the protection of grand things, places like slaveowners’ homes and courthouses and stately cemeteries, sites controlled by and for white men of significance and maintained with their wealth and by white-led institutions. Places whose significance is tied to how enslaved people and their descendants lived and died rarely have been recognized by protection laws. Only a tiny fraction of the 90,000 sites on the National Register of Historic Places are specifically associated with Black people.

Community input allows for “those preservation laws to be applied in a more equitable way,” Gray said, “to understand integrity differently.”

After Edwards sent her email to the director of the state Division of Historic Preservation, warning the agency that it was about to receive a gutted report about the Greenfield grain elevator, the director, Nicole Hobson-Morris, replied: “You have my respect for standing up for your professional reputation.” Edwards, who now works for a national environmental compliance firm, said she heard nothing more from the state. She thought that was the end of it.

But Hobson-Morris later raised flags about the project. On Jan. 20, 2022, in an email to the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, which oversees a separate state permitting process, she wrote that her office “has concerns regarding cumulative impacts the Greenfield project may present to historic and cultural resources in the area. We believe environmental and audible impacts over time may adversely affect historic resources in close proximity to the project.” She noted that when the Army Corps of Engineers reaches out to the state as part of its review, she will be communicating these concerns.

On April 12, the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, in its effort to halt the permits, filed comments and a set of attachments to the Corps. Among them was the email that Edwards had written to the state.

“The Corps must not allow Greenfield to develop the proposed Wallace site in light of the unreliability of the applicant’s report on the cultural, historical, and archaeological resources at and near the site,” the clinic wrote.

The Corps confirmed that it had received the email that Edwards wrote and had seen the revised report from Gulf South. The agency told ProPublica it disagreed with the report’s conclusion that the Greenfield development would inflict no negative impact. The Corps said it would enter a process to develop a plan to protect sites of historic significance.

Six days after submission, the Tulane clinic received notice from the Corps. The Descendants Project had been named a consulting party in the Greenfield permitting process. “It feels like a shift. We’ve been fighting against heavy industry, and for a voice about this land, for so long,” Joy Banner said. “We’ve been able to gather enough strength where they’re forced to listen to us, to take us into account.”

“We at the Corps are seeing adverse impacts,” said Ricky Boyett, the head of public affairs for the group in New Orleans. The Corps, he explained, will work with the National Park Service, since the Evergreen Plantation is an official national historic landmark, and with other stakeholders, including the Descendants Project, to develop an agreement about how the project might proceed and how to protect sites of historic significance.

“There’s discussion of cemeteries in the area,” Boyett added. “We need to do a little more research on those as well.”

The permit for the grain elevator, he said, is still under review.

ProPublica will continue to report on developers and cultural resource management firms that may have covered up or downplayed historic sites. We’re especially interested in information about spaces connected to marginalized communities.

If you know about this issue, please email reporter Seth Freed Wessler. We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

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