Savoring a target-rich environment

Jan. 5, 2010:

Then there was the time I swiped a local city councilman’s trash. Another reporter and I were investigating him for all manner of crookedness (he was eventually convicted of felony corruption and banned for life from ever again holding public office in California) and thought the trash from his home might yield a few leads. So late one particularly crisp night, I drove down the alley behind his house, tossed a few trash bags from his garbage cans into the back of my truck and then headed home. I parked next to my apartment building’s dumpster, pulled latex gloves over my hands and dug right in.

There were lots of papers and old mail, but also gobs of cigarette butts and decaying food. I stood there, gingerly making my way through the two trash bags, thinking about how the whole thing was likely going to be far more disgusting than informative, when I heard a woman’s voice. I froze. Then I heard her again – but not so much a voice this time. It was muffled, without discernible words, but clearly a woman. I barely breathed as I strained my ears. Then it hit me: she was in the apartment just on the other side of dumpster, having sex with some guy while I was standing just a few yards away, elbow-deep in stinking, rotting garbage.

I’ve been a reporter for 14 years. I’ve done a lot of interesting things in the line of duty, and met some fascinating people. I even spent five years on the island of Maui (yes, that Maui) editing a small weekly newspaper. You’re probably right now doing what most people do after hearing that — furrowing your brow, flattening your lips into a frown, thinking Why the hell would someone trade Maui for Sacramento? Put simply, it’s because I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, which is what I’m doing right now.

I’m an investigative reporter for a non-profit think tank with a deceptively simple objective: expose waste and fraud in state government. For a reporter who’s already got a gut-level distrust of public officials (or anyone in any position of power, really), there can be no better job.

As you might have guessed, I enjoy the act of investigation, of digging through stacks of papers (even those stained with last night’s spaghetti) or outwitting obstinate media handlers to get a good story. There’s a certain romance to it, sure, but there’s also just a deep-set curiosity that runs through my bones: I want to know what the people in charge are doing.

Of course, last month was tough. Imagine going to work every day, doing interviews, gathering records, writing stories, but not having one word of it reach the public. It was like working in secret, which is anathema to the whole concept of journalism. I may run around playing hard-boiled detective, but at the end of the day I want as many people as possible to see what I discover.

But now we’re live, up and running and, well, staring down a long road ahead. “Oh, you’ll have no problem finding stories,” more than one person told me upon taking this job, and they were right. But that doesn’t mean this job is going to be easy.

“How on Earth do you reform government?” Steven Greenhut, my editor, asked shortly after reading my first story, “Just how many boxes did Arnold blow up?” “The government is so big and unwieldy, I can’t imagine how anyone can make any changes to it.”

This is something you should probably keep in the back of your head as you check out my work at CalWatchdog. The way I see my job, my purpose is to expose fraud and abuse and misspent money in our state government because, ultimately, we want to make sure that government works; that tax dollars are going to proper use and that programs work as promised.

I’d love to say that all the hard work we do at CalWatchdog will ultimately translate into some kind of reform, but that’s a bit much. It’s far more realistic just to say that what we do here will inform, agitate and even sometimes entertain. Which when you think about it, is a pretty good deal.

Call me at (916) 448-1926, x8. E-mail me at [email protected]. Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/apignataro.

-Anthony Pignataro