by Bryan Gruley
“Whoa,” I said.
“I’m such a pig,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth.
“I’m not sure you’ll be able to do that at the New York Times. ”
She grabbed the next beer. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” she said. “Listen. ‘Sound Off: How do you keep your kids from belching at the dinner table?’”
“Not bad,” I said. “But how about…” I looked around the room. “‘Sound Off: Should the county outlaw buzzing fluorescent lamps?’”
“Yes! And ‘Sound Off: Why does every darn door around here have those little bells?’ And ‘Is there one eligible man around here who doesn’t live in a trailer and start every morning with a tomato-juice-and-beer?’”
We laughed again and drank. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe Tillie can out-stupid us any day.”
Joanie propped her boot heels against the edge of her desk. “Do you really think I could make it at the New York Times?” she said.
She has the chops, I thought, and she’s smart and usually solemn enough to fit in with those East Coast pinheads. But the evening’s flash of silliness made me wonder if she might be better off in Cleveland or Chicago. I’d never send her to Detroit.
“Honestly,” I said, “you really can’t expect to be a reporter of that caliber unless you can and will use profanity with remorseless abandon. Try this: ‘motherfucker.’ Go ahead. Say it.”
She stared at me blankly.
“OK. You might be able to handle New York,” I said. “Though you might need a little more experience than the Pilot. ”
“No, duh. Did you ever have a chance to work there?”
“The New York Times? Yeah, right, and the Pilot outbid them for my services. No, Joanie, in case you hadn’t noticed, my career has taken a slightly different direction. I’m thinking my next job will be covering volleyball for the Needle. ” The Needle was the paper at Pine County High School.
“Don’t sell yourself short. I know about those truck stories you wrote.”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m up here in shitsville rewriting Kiwanis Club announcements.”
“All right, all right. I got rid of Trenton. Now give it up.”
She’d probably read about my departure from the Detroit Times in the Columbia Journalism Review, which had run a short item saying I’d resigned amid an unspecified controversy over my truck stories. “Carpenter declined to comment,” the story said, “as did executives at the Detroit Times and Superior Motors, citing the possibility of litigation.” Rumors had bounced around the Times newsroom, but no one knew the truth. According to my severance agreement, I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. But who would know if I told Joanie?
“They want my source,” I said.
“Your what?”
“They want the name of someone who helped me on those stories. They want me to give up an anonymous source.”
“Who wants?”
“Superior Motors.”
She let her feet fall to the floor and leaned forward. She looked at me hard, as if she’d never seen me before. “Gus, what in hell are you talking about?”
Hell? I thought. Joanie had said hell. I told her everything.
I had gone to Detroit when I was twenty-two years old, carrying with me the vain and preposterous goal of winning a Pulitzer Prize. And not because I thought it might help my career or fatten my wallet. What I wanted was to take whatever fancy certificate they gave you for winning a Pulitzer back to Starvation Lake and hang it on the jangling damn door at Audrey’s, where Coach and Elvis Bontrager and everyone else could see it. Then they’d know who I was.
I almost pulled it off.
I spent most of 1996 writing about Superior Motors’ XP-model pickup trucks. The trucks were big sellers that made big profits. But they had a problem. Their fuel tanks sat between the chassis and the outer shell of the truck like eggs in a vise. In crashes, the tanks ruptured and gasoline ignited, causing explosions and fires. Hundreds of people had been severely burned. Some had died. Superior had kept it quiet by buying the silence of victims and survivors with out-of-court cash settlements. Almost no one noticed until I started writing about it. Eventually, the TV newsmagazines started airing pieces, the national papers followed, the government started investigating. It was the kind of story you waited your whole career for. And it kept getting better.
One family, the Hanovers of Valparaiso, Indiana, refused to take Superior’s hush money. Justin Hanover had been a seventeen-year-old basketball player with a decent jump shot who wore baggy jeans that hung to his butt crack and a fake diamond stud in his left ear. He played chess and liked Nick Lowe records and had a girlfriend named Jennifer, one of four Jennifers he’d dated in high school. One night on his way home after dropping Jennifer off, he was broadsided by a drunk driver in a Honda Accord. Justin’s 1991 XP pickup truck exploded beneath him. Eyewitnesses heard him screaming inside the flaming cab but couldn’t get near enough to help him.
In the courtroom, the Hanover family’s attorneys cited some of my stories as evidence that Superior executives and lawyers knew the trucks were dangerous but did nothing to fix them. My reporting showed that Superior had buried an internal study that portrayed the trucks as unsafe, that the company had attempted to hire a government investigator working on the case, that one highly placed executive was demoted after arguing that Superior should admit the trucks were unsafe. The jury found this behavior repugnant and awarded the Hanovers $3 million in compensatory damages-equal to Superior’s latest settlement offer-and an additional $351 million in punitive damages, or $1 million for every known truck fatality due to fire. The jury’s forewoman said jurors wanted to punish Superior for “a willful neglect bordering on the amoral.”
A good deal of my reporting depended on a longtime source I had inside the company. As a mid-to-high-level marketing executive, he had access to a great deal of valuable information, such as the next models Superior would be building, where it was closing or expanding plants, which bosses were hot or not. He’d call me with tips, feed me internal memos, confirm stuff I’d uncovered elsewhere. On occasion he leaked information that wasn’t flattering to Superior. I asked him once why he did this, and he said, “If I don’t dish some dirt, then the fluff has no credibility, does it?” Which was true. I didn’t worry about his motives because I believed, foolishly, that motivations had little or no bearing on whether something was factual. It was either a fact or it wasn’t, regardless of who happened to whisper it to you. And he had never fudged his facts or otherwise steered me wrong.
It would’ve been hard to pick him out of a roomful of Superior executives. Like most, he was white, trim, lightly tanned, with a charcoal suit, starched white shirt, dull red tie, every salt-and-pepper hair in place. He wore a smile as routinely as most guys wear a T-shirt. After we got to know each other a little, he told me to forget his real name and refer to him as “V.” That way, he said, I was unlikely to unmask him even if I did slip and mention him around anyone from Superior.
One day in May of 1996, V left a message to meet him that evening at Fran amp; Jerry’s, a pub on Detroit’s northwest side. When I arrived, the front door was propped open to let the sun in. Stevie Wonder was singing through a tinny radio behind the bar. V waited in a varnished wood booth in the back. He had removed his tie. A thin stack of papers rested facedown in front of him. We ordered a Pabst and a Michelob.
“So what’s up?” I said.
“You’re busting our balls, my friend,” V said. He meant the pickup truck stories. By then I had written just two or three.
“Pretty interesting stuff,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “A kid in flames, a big, bad company, all the ingredients.”
I didn’t respond, but I was thinking, yes, all the ingredients. The waitress brought our beers. V asked for a glass. Then he removed reading glasses from his shirt pocket and placed them on his nose. He turned his papers faceup and scanned the first page, then the s
econd.
“You might find this interesting, too.” His eyes flicked up at me over the spectacles. “Off the record, for now?”
“Sure.”
“And the fact that I’m giving it to you is totally off the record.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
At first, I couldn’t tell what the pages were. The Superior letterhead marked them as clearly from inside the company, but they didn’t look to be a memorandum. More like a script. Each page was filled with entries, some lengthy, some as short as a few words. One said: “Mark, it’s Laurie, give me a shout back.” Each was labeled with numerals that appeared to denote a date and time. The entries made frequent references to the XP trucks.
“This isn’t Friedman, is it?” I asked V.
“That would be Mark Friedman, yes,” V said. Friedman was Superior’s general counsel.
“So Laurie would be, uh, Lauren Watson?”
“Wilson.”
“Right.” An assistant general counsel. “So this other guy’s got to be, what’s his name? Reichs.” Howie Reichs was Superior’s top safety executive.
I kept flipping through the pages. “I don’t get it,” I said. “It’s like they’re not in the same room. I can tell from these things”-I turned a page toward V and indicated the time-and-date notations-“that they’re not even talking at the same time. Some of these are like an hour or so apart.”
“Very good.”
“It’s not e-mail?”
“Close.” The waitress set a tulip glass down. V picked it up and tilted it as he poured so that the beer barely had a head on it. “Not quite so modern.”
“Voice mail?”
He nodded.
“Transcripts of voice mails?”
“Did you notice what they’re talking about?”
“Yeah, your pickup trucks.”
“You’re selling yourself short, my friend.”
I took a minute to reread the first few pages more slowly. “Oh,” I said. “Holy shit.”
The people on the pages were talking about me and my stories and some questions I had asked. “Look at this,” I said. “They’re plotting how to bullshit me. Friedman says, ‘I think we can provide Mr. Carpenter an answer that will make him think we’ve actually given him one.’”
“Stop the presses,” V said sarcastically.
“Goddamn voice mail. Where did you get this?”
“Not going there.”
OK, I thought, you’ll tell me eventually. “Can I keep these?”
V hesitated. I thought maybe I’d sounded a little too eager. The music faded. I heard traffic hissing past outside.
“You cannot quote from them,” he said.
“What? Come on.”
“No.”
“Then what good are they?”
“You don’t need to quote. You can read the lawyers’ minds.”
“But what good is it to read their minds about stuff that’s”-I looked at one of the date notations-“two weeks old? That doesn’t-”
“There’s more.”
“Like from when?”
“Like, for instance,” he said, taking a dainty sip of his Michelob, “you called about that government study.”
I had called that very morning about federal regulators preparing a new study of deaths in the trucks. “Jesus,” I said.
A briefcase sat next to V. He snapped it open and drew out a manila envelope stuffed with paper. “Here,” he said, handing me the envelope. “No quoting. Read, understand, use them to figure out what’s going on. Better to fish where you know the fish are, am I right?”
I couldn’t disagree. “Is this it?”
“Until tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I tried not to show my excitement. “How are you getting these?”
“You don’t need to know. Use them productively. Or don’t.”
“Then why? Why are you doing this?”
V shrugged. “It’s the right thing to do? You’d never buy that. Let’s just say the truck people have it coming.”
At Superior, there were car people, like V, and there were truck people. The car people had grown considerably less glamorous-and got less and less of the company’s money-as pickups and sport-utilities had caught the public’s fancy. But was it enough to turn V against his own company? Maybe. Or maybe I didn’t care.
It worked like this: I’d open a line of questioning with Superior about some aspect of the trucks. Every Thursday after six, I’d walk to the bus station on Michigan Avenue, where I had rented a locker. I’d put a key in locker number 927, and remove three or four unmarked manila envelopes bulging with transcripts. I’d hustle them home and read what Superior lawyers and safety engineers and the occasional executive had said to one another about my questions. Then I knew exactly what to ask in my next round. I took care to word my queries generally enough so that the flacks wouldn’t make connections I didn’t want them to make. It wasn’t quite like I was sitting on the nineteenth floor at Superior headquarters, but it was close.
The voice-mail transcripts helped me write some of my biggest stories, several of which found their way into the Hanover trial. When the verdict came down, Detroit Times editors started preparing to nominate my stories for a Pulitzer. None of the editors knew about the voice mails. Because I’d never quoted from them, I didn’t feel the need to tell anyone about them. I told myself that this further assured that my source’s anonymity would be protected. And why should it matter anyway, I thought, so long as the stories were right?
One Thursday in late November, I opened locker 927 and saw no envelopes. Damn, I thought. I’d assumed that V eventually would decide that the truck guys had had enough bad press and my gravy train would end. But way in the back of the locker I saw a single sheet of paper. I had to get up on my toes to pull it out. The paper looked to be a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. The Superior letterhead was smeared black. A column of barely readable surnames, each matched with a six-digit number, ran down the page. I recognized the names of Superior lawyers and flacks. “No way,” I said. The numbers had to be their voice-mail pass codes.
An old man sitting against the lockers turned to me as if I’d spoken to him. He was eating a Hostess Sno Ball wrapped in a wrinkled napkin. Pink flakes of coconut stuck to the front of his sweatshirt.
“What am I going to do with this?” I said.
“Up to you,” he said.
Of course I had no idea why V had just given me the codes. I tried to reach him, without success. I thought maybe he’d gone on vacation. At the time I was working on a story that was supposed to wrap the entire year of truck news into one long, dramatic narrative. The bosses had ordered it up as the capper of our Pulitzer entry. I already had plenty of strong material for the story, but I wanted something really fresh and juicy.
I thought the voice-mail transcripts were probably stolen goods, although I didn’t know for sure because V never broached the subject and I never asked. Reporters aren’t supposed to accept materials they know to be stolen. Of course we take stuff all the time that we suspect has been procured through illegal or at least questionable means. It isn’t quite like buying a car stereo from a fence, but when we suspect the stuff we’re getting is hot, we justify taking it by telling ourselves that we aren’t the thieves and the public is being served.
The rationalizations weren’t so easy, though, when it came to the voice-mail pass codes. I hadn’t stolen the codes, of course. And I didn’t even know for certain that V had stolen them. But if I used them to listen to voice mails, and if listening to voice mails was theft, then, perhaps, I would be a thief. But would that be worse than knowingly allowing people to burn to death?
I didn’t think about it too hard. I used the codes twice. After midnight. From a phone booth outside the bus station. A few didn’t work; their owners had probably changed them. Others did work. The editors cleared space for my last great story to run on the front page on the last Sunday of the year.
Three days bef
ore, I attended an annual holiday get-together hosted by Superior. About twenty reporters, half a dozen flacks, and a few execs gathered at a restaurant in downtown Detroit for too many drinks, a dried-out dinner, and some phony laughs. Over the years I’d come to loathe the dinner, but I always worried that if I didn’t go, my competitors might beat me to a story. I was waiting at the bar when I overheard two midlevel execs talking about a “purge.” I hoped I’d misunderstood. At dinner I dropped a casual question. There had indeed been a round of early retirement buyouts the company hadn’t publicized. Certain execs-V’s name came up-had declined the buyout, but their bosses had leaned on them to resign.
I excused myself from the table and went to the men’s room and locked myself in a stall. I hoped no one had seen my face go pale or the cold sweat bead up on my forehead. V had been gone from Superior for nearly eight months. He’d left weeks before he started giving me the transcripts. Now I knew, without having to ask anyone, that every single thing V had supplied me with was stolen, that he’d had an ax to grind and a reason-a bad one-to use me. So the motivations trumped the facts, after all. There was nothing I could do about the stories that had already been published. But as I sat there staring at the muddy shoeprints on the floor, I contemplated the bitter knowledge that there was time to spike my last great story-and along with it, my chance at a Pulitzer.
I was shivering at a pay phone when I finally reached V at home just after 1:00 a.m.
“You got fired and you don’t tell me?” I said.
“You woke me up.” V yawned. “I didn’t get fired. I took a buyout.”
“I needed to know.”
“Why? You wouldn’t have taken the transcripts then? You would’ve just told me to keep them?”
My temper was rising. “If I’d known you stole them and was trying to screw the company, goddamn right I would’ve told you to keep them.” I said it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.
“So just forget it then,” V said. “You didn’t know they were stolen-and I’m not saying they were-but you didn’t know, so you’re fine. You can plead ignorance. Just take my last little gift and throw it away.”