Tag: Claude Sitton

The IRS Plumber

It was after 10 on a Saturday night when my home phone rang.   I answered.  The caller identified himself as an IRS special agent from Atlanta;  he wanted to meet with me and talk.

He didn’t say what  he wanted to talk about and I didn’t ask.  I knew. He was in Raleigh to plug a leak.  He said he was staying at the Holiday Inn on Hillsborough Street in downtown Raleigh and I agreed to meet him there the following day, on Sunday morning at 10.

Gov Robert W. Scott
Gov Robert W. “Bob”Scott

He wanted to know the name of the anonymous source of a story I had written saying the IRS had recommended prosecution of 13 men associated with North Carolina Gov. Bob Scott’s election campaign.  No way would I ever tell him, but I agreed to meet because he might give me some information, inadvertently, of course.  He couldn’t ask questions without giving away information. I knew that, because I was in the question asking business myself.  I was an investigative reporter for The News & Observer.

After I hung up I got to thinking, did this guy really work for the IRS?  How did he get my home number? It wasn’t unlisted, but it wasn’t listed under “Pat,” the name I’ve always gone by, either.  Oh, I know, I know, he said he worked for the IRS and if he did, getting my phone number would have been child’s play, it’s right there on my tax return.

But I called The N&O anyway and asked the city editor, Gene Cherry, if anyone had called that evening looking for me, if he had given anyone my home telephone number.

“No, what’s up?” Gene asked.

I told him and he told me to sit tight while he called called Claude Sitton, The N&O’s executive editor.  A few minutes later Gene called back, gave me Claude’s number, and told me to call him.

I called Claude, told him what happened and he told me to forget about it — don’t meet with the IRS guy.  And then he said, “Be in my office at 9 o’clock Monday.”

I followed Claude’s instruction, I stood the guy up.

A few minutes before 9 on Monday, I walked by Claude’s third floor office on the way to my desk in the newsroom. His door was open and I could see he had company:  Bill Lassiter, an N&O attorney who worked on newsroom issues, and Frank Daniels Jr., the publisher. Nine o’clock came and went; I was not asked to join them.

Later I learned what happened.

Claude Sitton: Hexed
Claude Sitton, N&O executive editor

Sitton, who had covered the civil rights movement in the South for The New York Times and, after he became executive editor The N&O, had won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, had a fierce temper.  He was also protective of his reporters and this was just the sort thing that would set him off.

Claude had already gone to bed when the city editor called. After Claude and I talked he got dressed, called the paper and told them he was coming in, told them to have a reporter and a photographer waiting when he got there. And when he arrived, around 11 p.m. or little later, the three of them went to the Holiday Inn.

I don’t know how Claude got the guy’s room number, maybe he had given it to me and I gave it to Claude.  Anyway, Claude knocked on his door and when the agent opened the door Sitton stepped back out of the way and the photographer took the agent’s picture, standing in the doorway, wearing pajamas.

That’s when the shouting started, I was told. Maybe that agent also had a temper. Anyway, Claude told him that if he wanted to talk to one of his reporters, he had to come in the front door of The N&O and get permission.

I guess you know the rest.  He came to the paper that Monday morning but he was never going to get Sitton’s permission to question me about my source.  And that was that.

Coming Friday: My Face Is Still Red

Hexed!

NOTE: This is the three year anniversary of The Final Edition. And to celebrate, I’ve saved one of my favorite stories for today.

*  *  *

I was minding my own business when the City Editor of The News & Observer told me to go over to N.C. State University and interview a member of the faculty who claimed to be a witch.

You heard me right.

That’s one of things I liked best about newspapering — you just never knew what was going to happen next.

I was an investigative reporter, I rarely covered breaking news and almost never wrote a feature.  But when a story  involved someone who might be a little bit crazy I sometimes drew the short straw.

Witches, by Hans baldung, 1508
The Witches Sabbath, by Hans Baldung Grien, 1510.

The stringer who gave us the tip, an N.C. State student, also gave us a picture of this guy with two students from Meredith College, then an all-female college a mile or two from State, who said they were witches, too.

A witch, by the way, is usually a female but can be a male.  

I went to the fellow’s office and got right to the point: Are you a witch?  I asked.  He said he wouldn’t talk to me until I had done my homework, until I had read “The Exorcist,” a best seller in the early 1970’s.  The book jacket said something like, “Read this book with all of the lights on in your house — and all the lights on in your mind.”

It was scary, even with the lights on.

I stayed up half the night, finished, and went back to see him the next day.  But he wimped out, neither admitting nor denying that he was a witch. 

“The jury is still out,” he said.

He wouldn’t give me the names of the two Meredith College students in the photo with him, young women who had said they were witches too, according to our stringer.   So I drove over to Meredith and started showing the picture around.

“Do you know either of these students?” I asked.  It wasn’t long before I had a name and a few minutes later we were face to face, in the living room of her dorm.

“Are you a witch?” I asked her.

“Shssss, not so loud. I’m a white witch,” she said, a “good” witch. She said she didn’t want black witches to find out about her.

I interviewed a number of people, including a psychologist at Central Prison, a maximum security prison in Raleigh, who told me, yes indeed, some inmates claim that the devil made them do it.

And then I wrote the story, a light feature about witches, for the Sunday paper.

It was Friday, the story had been set in type and galley proofs had been pulled so the Sunday Editor could take a final look, when my phone rang. It was the faculty member at N.C State who wasn’t sure whether or not he was a witch.

He had learned that I had talked with one of the Meredith women and he was angry. He wanted me to kill the story.  He said he had told me not to try to talk to them and I had disobeyed.

I explained that I didn’t work for him. Moreover, he hadn’t give me the picture or identified either student. I had broken no confidences. If he wanted the story killed he was going to have to talk to Claude Sitton, The N&O’s executive editor, not that it would do him any good.

Would you like his telephone number? I asked.

Claude Sitton: Hexed
Claude Sitton, in his office.

Sitton, a  widely respected newspaperman who had covered the civil rights movement in the South for The New York Times earlier in his career, called me into his office later that same day. He wanted to talk about the witch story, which surprised me.

Normally he wouldn’t concern himself with a feature.  Editing stories like that was the responsibility of editors way on down the food chain. But I could see from notes he had written on the galley proof laying on his desk that he had a lot of questions.   The first two or three didn’t amount to much but then he asked:  “How many witches are there in North Carolina?”

Huh? Say again?

“I have no idea,” I said.

How could I know?  I  told him there was no Witches Association in North Carolina.  And, last time I checked, the U.S. Census Bureau didn’t count witches.

I ask him, “Do you know where I can find out how many witches there are in North Carolina?”  He didn’t.

But he said if I couldn’t answer that question the witch story was dead.

Claude did not seem to grasp that he had demanded the impossible. No one, no one in this world, could tell him how many witches there were in North Carolina.

“Well, OK, that’s it,” he said. “What’s next?” or words to that effect. And just that quickly the witch story I had spent several days reporting and writing was history, dead.

Now let me tell you the real story, and it didn’t get in the paper either: That N.C. State witch hexed Claude Sitton and made him kill my story.  No other explanation makes sense.

Coming Friday: Broken!