Category: Newspapering

A Stupid Mistake

The guy I was interviewing was telling one fib after another and I just got tired of it — that’s my excuse.

Getting lied to usually didn’t bother me, it just meant I was getting warm.  I was an investigative reporter for more than 35 years  and I heard people say plenty of things that were not true.   If you turn the heat up a lot of people will try to protect themselves any way they can — they’ll lie to your face.

Anyway, this guy had gone overboard.  He was taking me for a complete idiot and it finally got to me.   So when he told me he had never been an officer in a corporation I was asking about, and I was sitting there holding a document proving he had been an officer, I couldn’t take it anymore. I handed the paper across the desk to him and I said, “That was a lie you could have kept from telling.”

His lawyer immediately began jumping up and down, figuratively speaking, saying I had called his client a “liar,” which in a way I had.   The lawyer terminated the interview and there was nothing to do but get in my car and drive back to Raleigh.

What I had done was stupid, giving in to my temper. I had handed the lawyer an excuse to cut off series of extremely uncomfortable questions. So stupid.

Claude Sitton
Claude Sitton

It was a three-hour drive back to Raleigh, plenty enough time for him to get in touch with Claude Sitton, the executive editor of The News & Observer, and complain about me.

I parked my car, got on the elevator and rode up to the third floor, to the newsroom.  When the elevator door opened Sitton happened to be standing right there, as if he had been waiting on me, holding a mug of coffee.

I looked at him and he looked at me and then he asked me: “Well, was he lying?”  I said he was.

And that’s all that was said about that.

Coming Monday: The Secret

My One Star Hotel

The first time I stayed overnight in New York City  I was on assignment, reporting on cigarette smuggling for The News & Observer. The Mafia was buying truckloads of cigarettes in North Carolina, where the state tax was only two cents a pack, and then smuggling them into New York City and other high tax jurisdictions up North and selling them under the table.

I had never ridden a subway and I didn’t know that it was a lot easier to get around in Manhattan than it was in Raleigh.  So I decided to stay at a hotel within walking distance of my first appointment — that would solve one problem. 

The hotel I picked, on 42nd Street near Times Square, was in a rough neighborhood.  You know how I knew?  The cops didn’t go out walking by themselves — and they were carrying guns.  They patrolled 42nd Street in pairs.

My hotel, it turned out, was a one-star, if that.

They turned over chairs in the lobby at night to get rid of the free-loaders.  Stuff they had for sale, magazines, candy bars, razors,  was inside a fenced off area, padlocked at night.  And there were four locks on the door of my room.  

Makes you wonder, don’t it, why it was necessary to have four locks.

One morning, as I was leaving the hotel, walking down the front steps to the street, a young woman who did not look like the girl next door and an older man were coming up the steps.  She was leading him, maybe “tugging” him is more like it.

As they passed I heard her say, “Oh, come on. You’ll like it.”

Coming Monday: An Unfair Advantage