The Gambler: Down and out at the Raceway and everywhere else there’s Joker Poker,Jacks or Better, and an ATM (for all those who even for a minute felt they were gambling too much, or thought damn I could stay at this table forever… this one’s for you. Good Luck.

This is my old school writing, but some things never change and I knew this topic too well, too closely, so it’s worth revisiting.

Young un playing college dorm poker on-line; professional educator or medical technician who goes to AC once in a while but so so loves trying to win at those tables; the regular at that broken down harness track sliding card after card into the ATM because you can’t leave yet — you have to get your money back — it’s impossible to keep on losing on that machine, your luck has to change, it’ impossible to lose so many times in a row. The old folks saying over and over “it’s a night out, it’s just fun.”

I know, I watched you all many many years; many many times — I also got your ghost for a while. This is exactly what it feels like, what happens to you, who you become when you, some of you, play. I don’t boast too much and this isn’t even a boast really — I just know the head and the heart in the casino and at the betting parlour too well because I lived there for a long time; too comfortable and too curious.

So this, long and literary and the first paragraph filled with a little too much writerly showing off — this account about why and how we gamble when we gamble hard doesn’t get more definitive. Read it — if you’re a serious player or once were you’ll nod your head (guarantee: if this doesn’t happen, write me and I’ll write you a brand new essay on whatever you want, no charge).

So here you go,read about us as we really are or can be when you log on or slide that $20 into the machine and the thing lights up ready to play:
http://journalismworksproject.org/horseracing01.html

Caught between a war zone and a monastery; between the penitentiary yard and the Sound of Music

I’m a journalist and I once tweeted this:

“Wrote in my journ pad that every story that matters is worth living for+dying for beat my ass and I’ll just put it in the lede my shield law”

Now that sounds a bit like a loose cannon talking and I was actually told by a fellow journalist that an editor of mine once referred to me as a loose cannon. A magazine once profiled me and used the headline “The Risk Taker”   So just on the self reflection tip, I’m not really macho, I like show tunes and musicals, I’m pretty sensitive, I believe in all forms of welfare, charity, kindness, gentleness.  I hate bullies, wise-asses, sarcastic people, know it alls.  And I think listening to a person deeply is a really good quality.  My heroes are people like Dr. Oliver Sacks, my idea of demeanor to aspire to is Federal Judge Richard Howell of the Southern District Court in NY (Manhattan) in whose courtroom I covered a 3 week trial and stood for him eagerly and gladly when he entered and exited the room.  Also Andy Hardy’s judge father in those old films.  I can’t hit anybody in the face; I don’t like seeing people pranked or laugh when people slip and fall.  This train wreck business — that we’re supposed to be guilty pleasured into watching horrible displays on reality shows, that it’s compelling to watch people destroying themselves.  I can’t watch that, no desire to — I used to look away like crazy if a performer forgot his or her line in a play and I would be too embarrassed and hurt for them.

That said I’ve been wrestling and body punching, tackling, mixing it up, throwing people around, been thrown around on concrete, grass, barracks, jails — I love that contact.  Breaking up fights, I can’t not.  Cop chasing someone, I join in (true story, Southwest Yonkers, 1991 home of DMX and Mary J Blige, saw some guy running from the courthouse down the middle of a busy service road, two cops in pursuit, way behind, I started after him, we ran parallel for a while and then I grabbed him in the middle of the road, cars driving by, held him until the two cops arrived then threw him into their arms and they slammed him on the hood of a car (and I still got turned down for a NYPD press pass this year; c’mon DCPI).

I was also made a serial killer reporter for APB for two years and I covered a lot of crime, saw, heard, a lot of horrible things — but I can’t watch Nancy Grace or any of them, I don’t ever watch horror films.

I’m brave when I have to be because it’s easy — I become a different person, transported — if something is really wrong and bad and I’m in front of it, I get this righteous indignation spirit and I, I do anything, say anything, just confront it no matter how threatening or dangerous.  But give me some day to day — how to live, what people think of me, if I’m a good person, how to keep a job, talk the right way to the right people, job interviews, money issues, the possibility of boredom or shame, yeah that I’m not brave about — it’s scares me steadily, always.  Where do guys like me go when they want to live then, caught between a war zone and a monastery between the penitentiary yard and the Sound of Music.  I don’t — their is no home for that.  Journalism is the closest,  just watching and recording and telling other people’s lives and your life on the page — it’s what you have to do when you can’t live; you have to write.  It works.

vps hosting

Press Release for Winners of Fund for Investigative Journalism Grants

I received one and am grateful and will work hard to do right by them.  Thank you FIJ board.

And yo, I should add because everyone, I mean everyone is telling me it’s so… (the Romanian waitress at the diner says “Albanians are crazy people, they kill people, they’re the most hot-blooded country there is, I wouldn’t go there, it’s chaos, like a jungle”), I should add: yo,  don’t hurt me when I’m running around Albania asking stupid or rough questions.  I’m just a journalist — we’re not all jerks. Though I know a lot are.  They don’t give a damn about their subjects and they let their editors do whatever they want with their copy and they say “what do we give a damn we’re not social workers” and they stick microphone in front of the faces of the just convicted and those who just lost a loved one.  I was taught that way too — in journalism school by my professor whose name is Ka– nah, let it go. I don’t do that kind of shit, and yes it is shit when it’s done like that.

So crooks and cops, don’t look at me as the enemy – I’m just writing what goes on so people know and we and they and you are not in the dark as much.

PRESS RELEASE

FIJ Awards Grants to Investigative Journalists

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

WASHINGTON – (October 6, 2011) The Board of Directors of the Fund for Investigative Journalism has awarded $40,000 in grants for nine independent investigative projects in the United States and overseas.

The grants cover travel and other reporting expenses for investigative stories that otherwise would not be told. Significant support from the Park Foundation, the Gannett Foundation, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Green Park Foundation, and generous donations from individuals made these grants possible.

This year so far, FIJ has awarded $118,000 to journalists working on 32 investigative reporting projects.

Journalists awarded grants in the most recent round are:

Idris Olalekan Akinbajo, investigative journalist from Nigeria

Ken Englade, non-fiction author specializing in trial coverage

Elizabeth Grossman, environmental science reporter

Lorie Hearn, Investigative Newsource

Kevin Heldman, New York-based crime and justice reporter

Chris Kromm, publisher, Southern Exposure

Paige McClanahan and Felicity Thompson, Sierra Leone-based reporters

Rocco Rorandelli, photojournalist with TerraProject, based in Italy and Catherine Segal, Paris-based journalist

Susan Southard, Arizona-based author

The topics of grantees’ investigations are confidential until completed. In addition to critical funding, grantees receive editorial guidance from mentors through a partnership with Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Recently completed projects include:

• Trevor Aaronson’s report, “The Informants,” published by Mother Jones, on sting operations conducted by the FBI in the War on Terror. Aaronson describes how FBI operatives use the threat of deportation to recruit informants, then use their informants to lure alleged terrorists into schemes where the means, the method, and the opportunity to commit acts of terror are cooked up by the FBI.

• An investigation by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting into the misuse of federal stimulus funds in Florida schools. The nonprofit news center found that schools shored up their budgets, which were sagging due to the recession, rather than making school improvements as intended. Now that the recession is continuing to depress revenues from local taxing bodies, the schools will have to dig themselves out of even deeper financial holes and make drastic cuts.

• “Render Unto Rome,” a groundbreaking book by Jason Berry, who has investigated sexual abuse and now financial abuses within the Catholic Church over his long, distinguished career. Berry’s most recent book reveals how bishops use their power to close parishes and sell off property despite the wishes of parishioners — even in cases of parishes that were thriving financially. Church property is sold to bail out other parishes with expensive legal bills and court battles over allegations of sexual abuse. Berry was recently the subject of a profile in the Washington Post, which focused on the tension between his Catholic faith and his dogged reporting on the Church.

• An investigation for The Guardian of the use of child laborers to pick tobacco in Malawi. The children are paid extremely low wages and develop nicotine poisoning in the fields, inhaling fumes equivalent to smoking 30 cigarettes a day. Malawi’s economy is dependent on its tobacco production, with 70 percent of its exports coming from this industry. The country also has the highest incidence of child labor in southern Africa, with 90 percent of all underage children working on farms.

• The Chicago Reporter took an in-depth look at the minority contracting program in Illinois. It discovered that work that is supposed to be designated for companies owned by people with disabilities instead goes to sheltered workshops – which employ disabled people in supervised settings and pay less than minimum wage. They also found that the state isn’t meeting its own goals for minority contracts, and that for those minority contractors who get work, it doesn’t necessarily expand their business in any lasting way – the ultimate goal of this set-aside program.

The Fund for Investigative Journalism is an independent, non-profit organization that has supported hundreds of public service reporting projects since 1969, when it provided funding for Seymour Hersh to investigate and expose the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers in My Lai. His stories won the Pulitzer Prize.

Read more about FIJ-supported projects and instructions for grant applications at www.fij.org. The next deadline to submit proposals is Tuesday, November 1. Journalists with questions about the application process are encouraged to contact executive director Sandy Bergo by phone, 202-391-0206, or email, fundfij@gmail.com.

Going to Albania/the Balkans to report, seriously, on transnational organized crime; can I get a hand fellas

I spent over a year reporting and publishing on this topic. I applied for a grant (it was quite a package we were required to put together) and I just found out I received it.  It was from a very decent journalism foundation willing to support my trip and reporting.  I fly out of Newark airport on Nov. 9.

I’m happy as hell and grateful.  It’s an important story with a lot of national security implications.  It’s also a hard story to do.  To do right that is, not just some soft feature, get a few quotes, talk to a retired Interpol cat and some experts in the field.

I want to get the hell deep inside and tell the truth of their story, all of them, the cops and the robbers, the mothers, the gun slingers, the analysts, the guards, the beat up mob friend, the in charge shot caller, the hapless detective, the cop or prosecutor who works 14 hour days and is nailing this thing and no one really knows (I mean, damn, nobody ever knows about Albania here in the States) — no judgements — just a true story for posterity, history, so it will be documented, real.

Yeah, so a little help — you journos, sources, cops, feds, marshalls, friends from the old days, criminologists, bag men, young muscle, retired big shots — tell me what’s up.  I’ll do it right.  You know my e-mail kevinjayheldman[at]yahoo.com

I’ll give you my damn phone number if it’ll help — 347 – 351, the rest is easy to find.  Tell me if you have something real.  I know this unorthodox but I don’t work for the Times or the New Yorker (I would though, Dave and Susan/Sam/Punch whoever hires there; but I’m not good punching a clock to be honest).  I’m grass roots, renting cars, borrowing money, hitting up old friend skip tracers for database help, hustling on my own so…I’m asking.  No shame — it’s an important story — I’m going to do it anyway.  A little help though fella’s.

Thanks, Kevin Heldman (check my credentials, I’m a pretty good reporter; I try to do decent work).  It’s hard out here for an investigative journalist who likes to get a little literary and doesn’t want to be Dateline, wait till everything is over and then get the nice little story with a bow.

Grace Amid Chaos and Desperation: Medic Inside A NYC Hurricane Shelter

 

I spent 41 hours over three days working for the city during Hurricane Irene.  I wrote about it for Capital New York.

This is what it was like:

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2011/09/3212810/no-seinfeldian-glee-temporary-storm-shelter-john-jay

What it feels like to be heard and why journalism shouldn’t die

There is a man named Samuel Rubenfeld, he covers corruption for The Wall Street Journal.  This series I wrote on Albanian crime, I worked to the point of exhaustion on it, I probably embarrassed myself a number of times begging and haggling for information.  I thought it was important so I hawked it, hustled it, marketed it like a, like a bad merchant.  And this Samuel Rubenfeld, he took to Pro Publica’s new website and wrote this:
srubenfeld This series on the Albanian mob is truly one of the greatest things I’ve read all year http://bit.ly/p6mxbL via @capitalnewyork #muckreadsa day ago by Samuel Rubenfeld, Reporter, Corruption Currents, Wall Street Journal

That’s a damn nice thing of him to say. Not ego or publicity going on for me really, just that I got to do something good and that there are people out there, better people than me, who will read this, what I wrote and think that I did something worthwhile, correct, useful.  I can hold my head up for a little while, that means a lot. Because heads, they go down so quickly and easily when you’re a journalist (I remember when Pete Hamill was kissed by Abe Hirschfeld and Pete said so.  Does anyone else remember this, where my ### people at).

So thank you reporter Sam Rubenfeld,  good looking out, hopefully someday I can return the favor. May we both continue to have the opportunity to do good work.

The nice guy mob sidekick who just wanted to hang out with the fellas – kidnapped, interrogated, beaten, guns to his head, flipped and wired by the government, facing federal prison. He’s employee of the month every month, the guy just wants to go home. Some things are damn sad.

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2011/07/2801356/runaway-sidekick-how-little-tani-kocareli-escaped-new-york-albanian-