Educational Program: Learn Secret Tips to Becoming a Good Investigative Journalist
During a recent educational program, foreign correspondents had the opportunity to hear valuable tips to help them grow as investigative journalists.
On hand to share his insights was Gary Weiss, who has been uncovering Wall Street wrongdoing for nearly two decades. His latest book, Retail Gangster, was published by Hachette Books in August 2022 and was met with critical acclaim.
A native of New York City, Weiss attended public schools and the Bronx High School of Science, and graduated from City College and the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. After working as a reporter for The Hartford Courant and news services in Washington, D.C., Gary joined the staff of Barron's in 1984. He moved to Business Week in 1986, and worked there as a writer and investigative reporter through 2004. He was a contributing editor at Condé Nast’s Portfolio until its closing in 2009.
Before we dive into Weiss’ insights, the reader will need some basic background on Crazy Eddie, which was the name of a consumer electronics chain that had locations across the Northeastern United States. Almost from the beginning, the chain—run by Eddie Antar—engaged in fraudulent practices. Antar, who died in 2016, became famous for a series of commercials depicting a “crazy” character played by a radio disc jockey named Jerry Carroll.
The company appeared successful on the surface but quickly collapsed when stockholders seized control of it only to find that $45 million in merchandise was missing. The company later filed for bankruptcy. As it turned out, prosecutors had been building a case against Antar, whom, they said, was guilty of manipulating stocks. Antar and two of his brothers were later accused of skimming cash and inflating the company’s value. He fled to Israel only to later be extradited to the United States, where he pleaded guilty to one charge of racketeering conspiracy and served time in prison.
Weiss delves into the investigative process and how that informed Retail Gangster.
This educational program was held on Tuesday, February 14 and was moderated by journalist Momoe Ban Braveman, a business journalist and senior correspondent for Nikkei, Japan’s largest business newspaper. She is a member of the board of AFPC-USA.
The AFPC-USA is solely responsible for the content of this educational program. Below, readers will find a summary of some of the most important takeaways from the presentation.
ON WHAT MOTIVATED HIM TO WRITE THE BOOK
Weiss recalls he followed the Crazy Eddie story when it blew up in the 1980s but did not report on it himself. However, as the years went on, his interest piqued when he came into contact with Sam Anar, Eddie Anar’s cousin, who acted as a whistleblower to Eddie Anar and his family’s misdeeds. Weiss started interviewing him in 2000 and slowly developed the book over a more than 20-year period.
Weiss realized no one had ever written a book about this saga though he did find out that a true-crime author sat in on Eddie Anar’s trial with the aim of eventually writing a book but never actually did so.
ON HIS RESEARCH PROCESS
Weiss says Retail Gangster is “the most difficult” book he’s ever written given the complexity of all the fraud that was committed. He scoured public records and had difficulty finding a transcript for a trial that was more than three decades ago since “it's not on file anywhere.” He later spoke with a prosecutor who shared an electronic copy of the trial transcript with him which was supplemented by extensive public records concerning the “numerous lawsuits” which were filed against Crazy Eddie and there were federal court decisions on these cases.
While conducting research on the history of Syrian immigrants—Weiss used ancestry.com to access “wonderful naturalization records” and “very good census records,” he learned about a family scandal involving Eddie Anar’s father’s first marriage to an Arab woman. He learned Eddie Anar had a half-brother who was a Vietnam war veteran, so he was able to “substantiate” the records he found.
Weiss says he didn’t “dramatize” any of his book because “there was so much material that was in the public record” including “pretrial depositions” and “divorce litigation between Eddie Anar and his first wife.”
Weiss says social media “is really not helpful at all” and wasn’t over the course of writing his book and that his research process wasn’t really any different than what he would have done before the advent of social media networks. He says his online research “was helped by the fact that there are online databases of newspapers” which he did have to pay to access.
ON THE FINANCIAL FRAUD ITSELF
Weiss’ research served as a reminder, as Braveman pointed out, that people on Wall Street don’t “learn much from past history when it comes to financial fraud and illegal activities.” To that end, Weiss says “fraud never looks like fraud until it's too late” and refers to the case of the disgraced entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
ON WHAT HE LEARNED FROM WRITING THIS BOOK AS AN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
Weiss said that he learned a lot about “human nature” while writing his book.
“The book is telling the story through people,” he says, “so by telling the story through people, even people who were dead, even people who wouldn't talk to me, I was able, through the public record, through their own words, usually [able to] get a sense as to what motivated people to commit frauds when they themselves were not the beneficiaries.”
Weiss characterizes the story he relays in his book as one about “family” and “betrayal.” He chuckles when he says that Eddie Anar even “betrayed Israel” when he “lied to get access” and “had one of his aliases become an Israeli citizen,” violating Israeli law “in a big way.”
ON WHAT FASCINATES HIM ABOUT BEING A JOURNALIST COVERING WALL STREET FINANCIAL CRIME
“Investigative journalism is just the same as ordinary journalism, except that it probes things a little deeper and sometimes deals with things that are a little bit unpleasant sometimes to obtain,” says Weiss, who says investigative journalism “has to dig sort of deeper and gets into the dirt a little more than other kinds of journalism” though he considers investigative journalism and “ordinary journalism” two sides of the same coin.
ON THE RECIPE OF BECOMING A GREAT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
The “main thing” you need in investigative journalism is “someone who will pay you to do it,” says Weiss, who adds “that’s harder and harder to obtain.” Someone “needs to hire you” and “stand behind you if things get hot.”
Investigative journalism “is a team effort,” he goes on to say, noting that, in regard to personal traits, “you have to be willing to dig beneath the surface,” “be willing to go through a lot of documents”—which, he says, “are much better than interviews” because people may tell you things but “memories fade”—and have a good sense that “you’re not being played,” noting that he has in the past been “manipulated” by some of his own sources.
Also important: When warranted, the person who hires you “should have a good, good lawyer.”
