A Hoax Most Cruel. Exploiting the human tendency to blindly obey authority, a voyeur-by-proxy armed only with a telephone conned dozens of fast food managers across the country into strip searching and humiliating their employees. And how McDonald’s knew about it and did nothing.

Ordeal by Intern. In an ordeal basically unquestioned for a century, medical interns work up to120 hours a week as the shock troops in the nation’s teaching hospitals. Forget about the image of the eternally chipper young doctor. Interns are unrelentingly fatigued, nowhere more so that at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. (Chicago Tribune Magazine, 1978).

Hunt for a Serial Killer. Detectives knew a serial killer was on the loose. To increase their chance of catching him, they kept that chilling fact a secret from the public – even after a man was falsely charged with the crimes.

Triple Murder. Thirty-eight years ago engineer David Becker, then 25, testified that he had never had sex with a woman, that he once tried to have sex with the family cat, and that he had touched niece’s vagina when she was about 6 months old and he was a teenager. But when Becker was charged with her rape and murder – and with killing both his parents – the jury never heard that evidence. Two dozen years later, when Becker changed his gender and his name, to Kathleen Anne, she wrote on a transgender website that she had “known all my life that I have been just not quite right.”

Nursing Home Cover-Up. The nursing home was supposed to give retired Judge Dan Schneider a daily dose of antibiotics for 28 days. He didn’t get a single dose. Then he died and the home didn’t tell his widow why.

The Wrong Man. Kerry Porter was a small time thief; Juan Sanders would kill a man without blinking. But using discredited eyewitness identification techniques, police put Porter behind bars for 14 years, until the newspaper helped get exonerate him.

The Charity Thief. Kentucky’s leading estate-planning lawyer, whose roster of clients included the publisher of The Courier-Journal and the editor of the Los Angeles Times, gave away $1.6 million from a dead client’s estate pretending he was being generous with his own money. After the newspaper exposed his scheme, he was convicted of felony theft and disbarred.

Scouting Scandal. After Louisville police were accused with sexually abusing Scouts in the police-run Explorer Scout program, The Courier-Journal found that over the past 40 years, at least 137 girls and 26 boys have been allegedly raped, sodomized, kissed or otherwise abused in 28 states by at least 129 police officers, firefighters, sheriff’s deputies, state police and other advisers. The youngest was a fifth-grader.

The Imperial President. Using secret payments from a university foundation he managed, James Ramsey paid himself as much as $2.8 million a year to run the University of Louisville – more than the president of Duke. And if one of his minions criticized him, he paid them to leave in exchange for their silence. He was eventually ousted after The Courier-Journal helped expose his shenanigans.

Marijuana Profiling. It’s widely known that blacks and whites smoke pot in about the same proportions. But Louisville police cited African Americans for possession at six times the rate of whites.

Compassionate Parole. Kentucky is one of 33 states that allow terminally ill prisons to be released on medical parole, so they can die at home with their families. But even though the state could save millions of dollars a year, it refuses to let even the most harmless dying inmate out, fearing the political ramifications of releasing the next “Willie Horton.”

Traffic Stop from Hell. Tae-Ahn Lea was homecoming king of his high school and had just graduated with several scholarships. He’d never been in trouble and had a good job as a car salesman. But Lea is black, and when he borrowed his mom’s car to go get a Slushie, he was pulled over for allegedly making a wide turn, pulled from the vehicle and searched and handcuffed while a police K9 rooted through it. No drugs were found. The stop outraged blacks and white and triggered immediate reforms.

Data Doesn’t Lie. A database investigation shows the police search black drivers at three times the rate of whites – even though whites were far more likely to be found with contraband.

Pardon Me. How a lame-duck governor granted pardons and commutation to more than 500 offenders, including family members of his campaign contributors, for crimes that include rape, murder and child sexual abuse. (Winner, the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting, 2020)

No Escape. How 27 people – 24 of them children – died in a fiery church bus crash -- not because of the impact drunk driver who rammed into the bus but because it didn’t have enough exits. A reconstruction of the worst drunk driving crash in American history. (Cover entry, the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting)

The Last Formation. How 248 soldiers returning from a peacekeeping mission in the Middle East died when their chartered aircraft crashed on takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland. And how the Pentagon hired fly-by-night carrier Arrow Air without checking on its dismal safety record and repair history. (Winner of the George Polk Award for National Reporting)

Kentuckians at the Court. The eight most important Supreme Court cases from Kentucky and how they helped define civil rights, criminal law and the Constitution. (Winner of the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award)

Drunk. When a judge in Northern Kentucky begged for a lawyer to step forward to defend Gregory Wilson in his capital murder case, the court finally found a volunteer – in a tavern. He had no office, no law books and no experience trying a murder case, and his client was sentenced to death. (Winner, Anthony Lewis Media Award)

Louisville Athletics Inc. The University of Louisville raked in a$1.5 million sponsorship deal from adidas, its uniform and shoe supplier. But head basketball coach Rick Pitino got 98 percent of the money. And how Louisville athletics loses money and must be subsidized by the university. (Associated Press Sports Editors award for investigative reporting, second place.)

By Here, Suffer Here. How a notorious buy-here, pay-here auto dealer sold poor people outrageously price junkers, some of which broke down as buyers were leaving the lots. After the newspaper disclosed its practices, the state sued the franchise and J.D. Byrider’s parent company put it out of business. (Winner, the Green Eyeshade award for business investigative reporting. Winner, the Society of Business Editors and Writers award, best project.)

Pizza Man. Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter’s rise and fall.

Tobacco Hardliner. Even among the “Carcinogenic 7,” as Doonesbury dubbed the tobacco CEOs who swore before Congress that nicotine wasn’t addictive, Brown & Williamson chief executive Tommy Sandefur was a hardliner. When a boy with asthma testified he couldn’t go to bowling parties with his friends because of the smoke, Sandefur told him, essentially, tough uck kid – “smokers have a right to be around people smoke.”

An Unlikely Comeback. With a golden resume and dashing good looks, Lacey Smith seemed to have an unbridled future in Kentucky politics. He was charming. He was handsome. He had an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a law degree from Harvard. He was the youngest person ever elected to the state Senate. But then he was indicted for bribery and narrowly escaped a conviction at trial. After disappearing from Kentucky from years, Smith tried to make the most unlikely of comebacks – running for Congress in Western Kentucky’s 1st District.

Ventilator Man. Growing up on his father’s farm in rural Kentucky, W. Bruce Lundford’s main goal was to get off it. He did, and then some. He built one of the nation’s fastest growing companies, Vencor, a $400 million and growing chain of hospitals for patients tethered to to ventilators. And he’s not finished. He wants to win the Kentucky Derby and get himself elected the state’s next governor.

Gov. Chutzpah? Bruce Lunsford ran his high-flying company into the ground, costing thousands of people their jobs and investors hundreds of millions of dollars. But rising from the ashes, now he is running for governor. Lunsford, who used to travel in his corporate jet, now rambles across the state campaigning in a ramshackle motor home. “I’ve come along way,” he says, “a long way down.”

Senator Slime. To his critics, state Rep. Dan Seum is an opportunist who is against everything and for nothing. A Courier-Journal editorial denounced him as an unprincipled charlatan while columnist David Hawpe said his name, depending on your politics, rhymes with “sublime or slime.” He helped defeat a bill to ban sales of soft drinks in schools, saying that should be a local matter. But then he sponsored a bill that would bar local governments from enacting smoking bans. “I’m not inconsistent,” he said. “I am consistently Dan Seum.”

Riddle on the Run. She loved gardening. She loved her dog. And librarian and teacher Carrie Minnie Daulton seemed to love her husband, a $46,800 a year state bureaucrat. But then she did something so shocking, said her lawyer, “that if I had false teeth, they would have fallen on the floor.” She helped a convicted killer escape from prison and joined him on the lam.

Fifty Years. Kentucky's longest-serving inmate is a developmentally disabled and mentally ill man who has been imprisoned for 50 years — and who experts say never should have been prosecuted. He’s been behind bars since he was 18 and Harry S. Truman was president — longer than all but five other inmates in the United States.

Portrait of a Killer. Ricky Kelly bragged in a secretly recorded prison conversation that he has killed 10 men. He said his philosophy is to instill fear, and that he takes his cue from Caesar. "You implement fear in people, you can control them," Ricky Kelly said on a prison wire. A profile of a man police call the most dangerous in Louisville.

Robin Hood. Retired Metro narcotics detectives say Louisville’s top heroin dealer Reggie Rice was like a modern-day Robin Hood. He bought shoes and book bags for teenagers and paid for them to go to college. They in turn tipped him off about raids by police.. He was caught red handed with 50 pounds of cocaine but beat the charge. Rice’s luck finally ran out last week. He died after losing a fight with cancer. An obituary for a drug dealer.

Thanksgiving, 1915. Tuberculosis and influenza were ravaging the city, and one in 10 babies died before their first birthday. The city had just enacted one of the nation’s most draconian segregation laws, barring blacks from moving onto any street that was mostly white. And a masked mob in Henderson pulled a black man from jail and hang him from a willow tree. But as the city celebrated the holiday 100 years ago, its residents – at least the white ones – were pleased with their lot.

On Assignment. A young reporter realized the power of the press when he showed up in court to fight a ticket. “What the hell are you doing here?” the judges asked as the reporter approached the bench, the last defendant in the court room. Told the reporter was in court on a citation, the judge said: “Dammit, Wolfson, I thought you were monitoring how I’ve been handling DUIs. And I’ve been giving them twice my usual sentence!” A brief autobiography.

Courier Journal: For 150 years. The Courier-Journal, has fought for justice, against discrimination and strip mining, and to save the Red River Gorge. It also has been wrong sometimes and occasionally hypocritical. And since Gannett bought it from the Binghams, it’s been decimated. An unvarnished history of the CJ on its 150th birthday.

CJ legends. One of its former city editors broke his own story -- that he had AIDS. One of its reporters famously couldn’t type -- it turns out he was an undercover CIA agent. And other legends of The Courier-Journal.

Tupperware Queen. Friends exploit friends – and their friends’ friends to make big bucks selling plastic.

Outreach to Rednecks. In what the Kentucky Baptist Convention called an “outreach to rednecks,” it incredibly gave out guns in church to boost attendance.

Swiss Lawyer a Security Risk? A state bar panel refused to let a Swiss-educated lawyer sit for the bar exam, saying he posed a security risk because of his mandatory service in the Swiss army, a position a former bar president described as “ludicrous.”

Ark Encounter. The evangelic group that touts its 500-foot long replica of Noah’s Ark has sued its insurance carrier for, of all things, refusing to cove rain damage.

Concealed Carry. Incredibly, Kentucky alloqa blind people to get permits to carry concealed weapons.

Pitino Scandal. No. 1. University of Louisville’s Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino allegedly raped a woman at a restaurant, then paid her to have an abortion.

Gay Marriage. In Eastern Kentucky’s impoverished Magoffin County, known for voter fraud and as the birthplace of pornographer Larry Flynt, gay marriage is heresy.

Fake War Crimes. A Louisville lawyer of Balkan descent claimed he’d been invited to prosecute a Serbian war criminal at the Hague. It turned out he made the whole thing up – down to the name of the defendant, prompting a spokesman for the new Republic of Serbia to say, “We had enough real war criminals without having to make them up.”

Lawyer Vanishes. An Eastern Kentucky lawyer with deep roots in his home town told his secretary to clear his calendar for June 24, 2013 because he was “going fishing.” He disappeared and never came back.

Bad Boy of the Bar. When lawyer Richard Shapero learned that the U.S. Supreme Court would hear his pitch to let lawyers send letters soliciting clients, his own attorney joked that he had one mortal fear: That Shapero would saunter into the nation's highest court dressed in one of his "So you got caught?" t-shirts.

Acquittal Machine. His suits are baggy. His hair is thinning and out of place. And he shuffles around the courthouse schlepping an ancient scuffed attache case stuffed with documents and his lunch. But Rob Eggert tries and wins more cases than any criminal defense lawyer in Kentucky.

The Prosecutor Who Never Loses. He has avenged the deaths of those who were stabbed, shot, starved and shaken, poisoned, electrocuted, axed and bludgeoned. The youngest was 6 months old; the oldest 89. Joe Gutmann remembers all their names.

Big Foot. Struggling to seat a jury, Judge Edward H. Johnstone offered an unusual deal to a farmer who insisted he needed to be excused to cut his tobacco. "If I come help you cut tobacco on Saturday, will you sit on my jury today?" asked Johnstone. The farmer served on the jury and Johnstone reported for duty on the farm. Now, after 30 years on the bench, Johnstone, known as “Big Foot,” is hanging up his robe.

“Mr. Clean.” Barry Bingham Jr., who led The Courier- Journal and Louisville Times to national acclaim and three Pulitzer Prizes before seeing his family’s media empire collapse in the 1980s, died yesterday at his Glenview home. He was 72 and suffered respiratory failure, his family said. Editor and publisher of the newspapers from 1971 to 1986, Bingham was known for an uncompromising insistence on ethics in journalism. Yet Bingham’s refusal to compromise with his own sisters triggered the sale of his family’s media holdings, including the two newspapers his family had owned since 1918.

Feared and Revered. David A. Jones Sr., a Golden Gloves boxer who grew up in a tough West End neighborhood, borrowed $1,000 to help found what became the nation’s largest nursing home chain, then transformed it into the world’s largest hospital company and finally a health insurance colossus worth $37 billion, had died.

Progressive Republican? Senior U.S. District John G. Heyburn II, a Republican who carved a fiercely independent and progressive record in 30 years on the bench, striking down a law that forbade gay marriage and upholding a school assignment plan based on race, has died. Recommended for the bench by his former law partner, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Heyburn did anything but walk in his footsteps.

The Maverick. Fiery former Courier Journal reporter and columnist John Filiatreau, who exposed the deplorable conditions in Kentucky’s prisons – and once got himself arrested for loitering so he could spend five days reporting from behind bars in the descript county jail, has died. He fought justice and his own demons that included alcoholism and crippling depression.

John Prine. The whimsical singer-songwriter who grew up in a suburban Chicago mill town but always had one foot planted in Kentucky — and whose songs about loneliness, passion and regret could be both profoundly sad and uplifting — has died. 

My World Photos, Volume 1

My World Photos, Volume 2

My World Photos, Volume 3