Return of Muckraking

A contemporary form of journalism that owes a good deal to the muckrakers of the early 1900s seems to be making a comeback. It is called simply "investigative reporting," and it is more often sober than flamboyant. Its results come from months of patient digging into musty public records and dogged cross-checking rather than from dramatic secret informants. Three years ago, only one or two of the 36 newspapers represented at Columbia University's American Press Institute had investigative reporters. Last year, three-quarters of the same papers boasted at least one. "It's one of the hopes for this business," says Arthur Perfall, associate editor of the Long Island tabloid Newsday (circ. 427,000), a leader in the trend. Newsday has not one investigative reporter but a permanent team of four, sometimes raised to eleven for special projects. It is headed by Robert Greene, a 300-lb., 42-year-old veteran newspaperman who worked with Bobby Kennedy as a staff investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee in 1957.

Piquant Item. The Newsday team --sometimes called "Greene's Berets" --has up to now confined itself to local targets on Long Island, but last week it considerably enlarged its scope by taking on, though in a polite and peripheral way, the most distinguished target in the country: the President of the U.S. The team's disclosures about an unusually profitable sale of some Nixon-held stocks is but a small part of an encyclopedic--indeed, numbing --70,000-word, six-part report that deals exhaustively with the Florida real estate business. The principal characters in the series: Florida's former Democratic Senator George Smathers and his old Miami high school buddy, Charles G. ("Bebe") Rebozo, who is also Richard Nixon's best friend. Neither Rebozo nor Smathers is exactly virgin territory for prying reporters, but Newsday nonetheless managed to turn up some hitherto unknown details about them as well as a piquant item about the President. Examples:

> It had been previously reported that, when he became President, Richard Nixon sold his 185,891 shares in Fisher's Island Inc., a Florida land firm dominated by Rebozo, for $2 per share --twice what he had paid for it. What was not previously known, said Newsday, was that "other stockholders still were buying the shares at $1 each." It added that Nixon is the only "stockholder who is known to have realized a sizable profit," and quoted one of the other owners as saying, "He was President, and we thought we ought to give him a fair price."

> Because of the nuisance of having Secret Service men and security precautions to deal with constantly, Mr. and Mrs. Perry O'Neal in February of 1969 sold their Key Biscayne home in the five-house compound where Nixon established his Florida White House. In fact, it was the Secret Service that arranged the sale for $150,000 to a buyer who turned out to be Robert Abplanalp, a Bronxville, N.Y., millionaire and a friend of Nixon and Rebozo. Two days after the sale, said Newsday, the house was leased to the Government for use by the Secret Service at an annual rent of $18,000. With options, the lease runs for almost eight years realizing "a possible total of $142,500" for Abplanalp. Mrs. O'Neal told Newsday that the Government had never offered her and her husband any lease arrangement.

> With the assistance of then Senator Smathers, Rebozo, already wealthy, secured a loan from the Small Business Administration (founded to help struggling entrepreneurs), which had previously turned down his application. Later, in 1967, the SBA chose Rebozo to develop a Government-backed shopping center set up in Miami to help Cuban refugees go into business for themselves. Rebozo and a partner made $200,000.

> While a member of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, Smathers tried to persuade the Treasury Department to abandon a tax-reform proposal that would hurt stockholders of Florida's Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc. As it happened, Smathers secretly owned two Winn-Dixie stores, which he had obtained "for little or no cash." Subsequently, the Nixon Administration delayed putting the tax-reform measure into effect until 1969. The result: Winn-Dixie was the last major corporation to win the tax break before the deadline.

No Libel. The choice of subject matter for its recent series indicates that Newsday's investigative team may henceforth range much more widely. Its first effort, in 1967, was an expose of town government in Islip, N.Y.; and the reporters were soon delving into all sorts of scandal and shoddy practices that afflicted fast-growing Long Island. During its first 41 years, the team accumulated an enviable record: it won 17 awards, including a 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Its disclosures led directly to the indictment of 21 persons, the conviction of seven and the resignation of 30 public officials. Its articles have influenced the enactment of at least 20 state and local laws. Most impressive of all, perhaps, is the fact that Newsday has managed to accomplish all this without incurring a single libel suit.

For the Rebozo-Smathers series, Greene and his team worked for six months, of which 21 were spent in Florida. They conducted 400 interviews and examined 20,000 documents. "It was not glamorous work," says Greene. "Most of it was dismal slogging--sitting down, hand-copying every land transaction and analyzing it." Rebozo and Smathers declined to be interviewed, and the White House refused to answer questions. The team even had trouble getting access to public records; the Florida State Division of Banking, said Greene, agreed to provide them with bank records until it learned that the bank involved was Rebozo's. They were never able to find out how much Government money was spent on Nixon's Key Biscayne houses. Nonetheless, they produced a thorough report on the freewheeling world of Florida real estate that is not sensational but reveals 1,001 questionable little doings. "We're not looking for criminals," says Perfall, adding dryly, "we are trying to produce a detailed, factual account to tell people how their Government really works."

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