Professional journalists discussed how to produce a successful investigation on the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications’s Chicago Campus Thursday.
Pulitzer-winning journalist Michael Sallah, Pulitzer-nominated journalist Jason Leopold and David McCraw, deputy general counsel at The New York Times, spoke at the event. They discussed the “FinCEN Files,” a Pulitzer-nominated investigation that revealed the measures taken by big banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered to defy money laundering crackdowns, creating pressure on the U.S. law enforcement system.
The panel event was moderated by Debbie Cenziper, a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter and the director of investigative reporting at Medill. She opened the panel by asking Sallah and Leopold how the whistleblower first contacted them. Leopold explained the journey to the documents wasn’t easy.
“You don’t get a knock at the door — that doesn’t happen,” said Leopold, a senior investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News. “You have to cultivate your sources.”
Leopold had known Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, who worked in FinCEN, an intelligence unit to fight money laundering in the Department of the Treasury, for more than five years.
May Edwards told him that she tried to address the more than 2,000 suspicious activity reports filed by banks and other financial institutions with FinCEN, Leopold said.
“I happen to be a document person,” Leopold said. “So I asked her to back up her claim...
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