by ProPublica

Donald J. Trump is president, yet we're still trying to answer basic questions about his businesses. And it’s almost impossible to see the line between Trump the president and Trump the CEO. In the new podcast “Trump, Inc.,” WNYC Studios and ProPublica jointly investigate and report on the central mysteries of the Trump Organization, laying out what we know, what we don't and how you can help fill in the gaps.

Listen to the first episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

“Trump Inc.” is a production of WNYC Studios and ProPublica. Support our work by becoming a supporting member of WNYC or visiting donate.propublica.org.

by Joaquin Sapien

A few years ago, freelance journalist Linda Villarosa thought she was done covering HIV. She had accomplished plenty — front page stories for The New York Times, articles in Essence magazine. She started in the 1980s when there was little hope for those who had contracted the disease, but now, with the advent of antiretroviral drugs and the steady decline of AIDS deaths in the United States, the story started to feel, somehow, less urgent.

Then, she came across two studies. One from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that if current trends continued, one out of every two black gay men in America would have HIV. Another said Jackson, Mississippi, was essentially ground zero for the disease.

She realized she most certainly was not done writing about HIV.

On today’s episode of The Breakthrough, Villarosa describes how these studies inspired her to travel to Jackson. There, she witnessed how a disease nearly forgotten in parts of the country continues to aggressively spread among gay black men who lack access to the drugs and services that have saved lives elsewhere.

She met Cedric Sturdevant, the project coordinator for a small social services agency called My Brother’s Keeper, who delivers food and medication throughout the Mississippi Delta out of a beat-up Ford Expedition. He serves as a father figure, nurse and motivational coach to dozens of young, HIV-positive men. She met a 21-year-old man who had been taking the preventive drug known as PrEP, but slipped, became infected, and in five months, “looked like AIDS in Africa,” as Villarosa put it.

The story made her feel hurt, even angry, at herself and the institutions that neglected these men in crisis.

“I reported a lot on black women or HIV/AIDS in general — but black men were often the sources,” she said. “I was never talking to them about their own, you know, the epidemic in their own community.”

She has now, in “America’s Hidden H.I.V. Epidemic” for The New York Times Magazine.

Listen to how she made it happen on The Breakthrough, the podcast from ProPublica where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.

This will be the final episode of The Breakthrough. No doubt, ProPublica will return to the podcast format in some fashion. If you have ideas, we love hearing from you. Email us at [email protected].

You can listen to all of The Breakthrough’s episodes in our archive.

Thank you for listening and for all your support.

The music from this episode is from Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions and Lee Rosevere.

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud or Stitcher.

by Jessica Huseman

When we think of the harm that befalls soldiers during wartime, specific images come to mind. The fallout from scientific experiments — especially those carried out by our own government — isn’t one. But that was the reality of tens of thousands of military men in the 1940s, who were poisoned with mustard gas by the U.S. government to see how their bodies would react. It took decades to bring to light the vast scope of the experiments, and it couldn’t have been completed without the work of two NPR journalists.

For years, veterans were sworn to secrecy about the tests, prohibited from even discussing them with doctors. While this curtain was lifted in the 1990s, and Congress and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs promised medical care and services, many vets didn’t get it. NPR reporter Caitlin Dickerson and research librarian Barbara Van Woerkom found records for and called hundreds of vets who were used in these experiments, and their work paved the way for the men — who are now well into their 80s — to receive the care and recognition they needed.

Dickerson was new to the investigative desk when she began working with Van Woerkom, who’d been gnawing around the edges of the story for years. She said she understood right away the urgency of what Van Woerkom was sitting on. “There was also this element of time, because most of the men who were used in these tests had died, and those who were still around were in their 80s or 90s,” she said. “It felt sort of dire.”

Dickerson started calling them. Because the men were older, communication was sometimes difficult. But they finally started opening up. They told her about their skin flaking off, about chronic health problems they couldn’t fully report to their doctors. Many hadn’t even told their wives about the experiments.

“Some of them said, ‘I just can’t believe that the government did this to me. I trusted them. I trusted that they weren’t going to hurt me,’” said Van Woerkom.

The pair set off to see if they could prove, systematically, that the government failed to keep the promise to get these vets care. They dug through the VA’s medical benefits database and found a pattern: In denied claim after denied claim, the VA asked the vets for more proof that they were actually involved in the experiments — proof they didn’t have, because the tests were classified.

The journalists found more disturbing information. In testing to see how different races would react to the poison, the military used Japanese-American soldiers as stand-ins for enemy soldiers — something Dickerson said struck her. “Some of them were recruited out of internment camps,” she said, only to be used “as guinea pigs on the frontlines of a chemical war.”

The journalists asked the VA why it had contacted only 610 veterans in the 20 years since the tests were made public, and officials said they’d done the best they could. But in only two months of research, Dickerson and Van Woerkom had found double that number.

Their reporting brought about change. After the story aired, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., proposed a bill requiring the VA to reexamine all claims made by vets used in mustard gas experiments. It was signed into law last August.

Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at [email protected].

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

The music from this podcast is from Blue Dot Sessions, Lee Rosevere, Chris Zabriskie, Scott Holmes, Podington Bear.

by Jessica Huseman

This podcast was co-published with Poynter.

The rest of the world watched as Hurricanes Irma and Maria — both category 5 storms — slammed into the Virgin Islands, leaving devastation in their wake. Most of the news coverage came from journalists who flew in, and had the luxury of returning home. Reporters and editors with The Virgin Islands Daily News covered a disaster happening to them.

One editor lost his house. Another lost his car. A circulation employee died from injuries he sustained during Hurricane Maria. Still, The Virgin Islands Daily News pressed on. Reporters and editors slept in the St. Thomas newsroom, taking turns cleaning their clothes in a washer/dryer the owner brought in after the storm. They produced a paper almost every day, and broke a government curfew to venture outdoors and deliver the news by hand.

The Breakthrough is a podcast from ProPublica that explores how investigative journalists report their biggest stories from start to finish, and all the hurdles in between. Previous episodes have explored how VTDigger’s reporting led to the downfall of Vermont’s most powerful businessman, how a WNYC journalist triggered an internal investigation at the New York Police Department over cops making millions in shady side businesses, and how a New York Times reporter blew open the Russian doping scandal that marred the Olympics.

For The Virgin Islands Daily News, the reporting obstacles weren’t a stubborn source or a public records request that never came through. Instead, journalists had to navigate reporting without internet or phone service, and on an island under a 24-hour curfew. Gerry Yandel, the paper’s editor, talked to The Breakthrough about what it was like to cover a hurricane while it was happening and about the toll it took on his staff and his community.

Here are a few pieces of our conversation, but you can listen to the full chat here. Subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Jessica: Tell us what the hurricane was like — what it sounded like, and what it felt like.

Gerry: You couldn't see anything, you couldn't see anything. It was like being in a blizzard. You couldn't see five feet in front of your face, and you certainly couldn't go outside. Before it got anywhere near that [bad], I tried to go out the back door through the loading dock, and as soon as I cracked the door, the wind yanked it open, pulled me outside. I almost fell on my head, and I'm thinking, “Oh, that's how people die in hurricanes.” … It just kept building, it kept building. And there was, like, a roar that just kept going and increasing. And every now and then, you'd hear something rip off of something and go scattering across the parking lot. There were a couple of points during the middle of it when it was at its peak that I actually had (a) true fear that I was in a situation that was completely out of my control. And, at one point, I thought these power cables had come down, and they were slamming against the windows over on one side of the building, and that was the office where we had stashed all the food and the provisions, and I just had a vision of that shattering … I got everybody to take all the food into the middle of the room, and then, we were sitting around in the dark.

The newspaper’s staff had gathered at the office to ride out the hurricane — Gerry said it was far safer than their homes. And without phone service on the islands, living in the same place was the only way to stay in communication. The reporters picked their own rooms to sleep in, taking up available couches and sleeping on the floor. The owner and president of the paper, Archie Nahigian, bunked with them for solidarity, eating canned tuna right alongside them.

Because of power and internet outages, the island was down to a single source of news — a radio station operated by the government. Rumors, Gerry said, were flying. But with the internet down, their readers couldn’t log onto the site to get factual reporting. The road closures and the curfew also made delivering papers difficult. So, Gerry and Archie drove around to hand them out themselves. Here’s how he describes it:

Gerry: If we saw a store open, we’d stop and get out. Or if we saw crowds of people, we’d hand them out. They were surprised. “You printed a paper?” — that was the thing we would hear. And then, they would want one and then they’d say, “Can I have another one? Somebody else wants one.” It was really gratifying to me, too, because people were so thankful to get the paper and astonished that we were handing it out. Like, “Here’s your Daily News. Business as usual.”

Eventually, they were able to start updating their website. They waited until a store opened, and stocked up on Wi-Fi hotspots so they could reconnect. Gerry and his staff provided crucial information to their readers. They published a list of people whose family and friends were looking for them, and kept running tallies on which businesses were open. They also dispelled rumors and publicized the failure of the local government to help the most vulnerable citizens. In one case, a front-page story about a woman still living in a destroyed public housing building forced the government to move her.

Jessica: How has this experience changed the way that you think about the news or the paper that you run? And has it changed the way you think about the community that you serve?

Gerry: Yes, actually, it has. You know, a lot of people get into journalism to be idealistic and to change the world, and to fix the wrongs. But we have a function here to get the word out. … So, it just made me realize we have a bigger, deeper purpose here and there’s a reason we’re called The Fourth Estate.

The islands are still recovering from the storm, and The Virgin Islands Daily News will be there every step of the way. Gerry said its journalists have already begun digging into investigative pieces, and will continue to write features on the human impact of the storm. While he said this has been a transformative experience, he’s not eager to cover another storm any time soon.

“You know, that was always something that was on my bucket list as a newspaper guy. I wanted to cover a disaster,” he said. “And I have to say that I'm good now — I don't need to do anymore.”

Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at [email protected].

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

The music for this podcast is from Blue Dot Sessions and Scott Holmes.

by Jessica Huseman

The investigation started modestly enough — with documents anyone could have seen. Buried amid the public financial records of Universal Health Services, the largest psychiatric hospital chain in America, was a disclosure to its investors: It was under federal investigation.

BuzzFeed’s Rosalind Adams was curious. She embarked on her own investigation, to figure out, simply, why.

She built a spreadsheet of every person she could find online who was associated with the chain, from employees on LinkedIn to patients who had written reviews on Yelp. “I’m sure I called thousands of people,” she said. “This whole world opens up when you start making phone calls and asking questions.”

She talked to 18 executives who ran hospitals, cold-calling some and knocking on doors. She gained the trust of sources who slipped her security footage and insider documents.

After months of work, she found that multiple UHS hospitals had been accused of committing patients who didn’t need care in order to get their insurance payments, and for turning away patients who did need care, but could not pay.

Hospital CEOs told her they were instructed to use all insurance days available to them, even if a patient didn’t need to be hospitalized for that long.

Adams found that in one hospital, a 6-year-old boy who misbehaved at school was locked away for three days. In another, hospital employees were caught on video dangerously restraining a 9-year-old boy. “That’s how people die,” a nationally recognized restraint expert told BuzzFeed after seeing the footage.

UHS denied allegations that it held patients for purely financial gain, and said Adams’ work was based on “anecdotal accounts” and “personal perspectives.” The company said she drew “false conclusions” and ignored those who had positive experiences to weave a “false narrative.”

Regardless, her investigation produced results. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has demanded answers from UHS. One hospital lost its ability to care for foster kids and has been stripped of Medicaid funding. The FBI and the Department of Defense — which is scrutinizing billings to the military insurance plan, Tricare — launched investigations into the chain for keeping patients longer than necessary to boost profits.

Her investigation continues. Follow her on Twitter and on BuzzFeed.

Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at [email protected].

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

The music for this podcast is from Blue Dot Sessions.

by Joaquin Sapien

In the spring of 2016, a Russian government chemist named Grigory Rodchenkov sat across from Rebecca Ruiz of The New York Times and gave her the kind of scoop journalists dream of.

He told Ruiz and her colleague Michael Schwirtz how he helped orchestrate the covert distribution of steroids to dozens of the country’s top athletes. Russia went on to win 33 Olympic medals at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi — more than any other country. At least a third of the medal winners were linked to the elaborate doping scheme.

Rodchenkov told the reporters how he created what he called the “Duchess Cocktail,” a drink made of three anabolic steroids mixed with alcohol — vermouth for women, whiskey for men — at amounts tailored to meet the needs of each individual athlete. When it came time to test the athletes during the Olympics, Russian agents replaced tainted urine samples with clean ones in the dead of night through a hole in the wall of a testing laboratory.

Ruiz paraphrases the scientist’s nonchalant admission: “Yes, we stockpiled all of the top Olympians’ urine for months,” she remembers hearing. “And yes, we broke into these bottles, which are the gold standard … which are thought to be tamper proof. And this is how we won the most medals at Sochi by far. And we’re very proud of that.”

It was a climactic moment in a long, nerve-wracking reporting effort. In the end, more than 1,000 Russian athletes were implicated across 30 sports.

Rodchenkov is living in witness protection in the U.S. Last week, the Times reported that a Russian court issued an order for his arrest if he were ever to return to his home country.

Ruiz tells the whole story on today’s episode of The Breakthrough, the ProPublica podcast where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.

Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at [email protected].

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

The music for this podcast is from Podington Bear and Blue Dot Sessions.

by Joaquin Sapien

For five days, ProPublica reporter Megan Rose hunkered down in a very small, very hot conference room in Las Vegas, surrounded by boxes brimming with legal records. She took notes and scanned documents one page at a time. The grind of investigative reporting, personified.

But in those pages lay a big payoff: a story of murder, misadventure and injustice.

Rose had come searching for details about the remarkable case of Fred Steese, a drifter wrongfully convicted of killing a circus performer in 1992. It took nearly 20 years for Steese to get out of prison, even though prosecutors had evidence showing he wasn’t guilty, and that he was likely in another state when the murder happened.

In October 2012, a judge declared Steese innocent. But Steese wound up pleading guilty nonetheless through something called the Alford plea, an increasingly common, perplexing arrangement where a defendant maintains his innocence, but accepts the status of a convicted felon, and forfeits the right to sue.

Rose put it all together in “Kafka in Vegas,” which ran in the May 2017 issue of Vanity Fair.

“If you had been a TV writer, somebody — your producer, director — would be like, ‘This is too outlandish. You have to tone it down,’” Rose said, recalling the records from Steese’s original trial.

On today’s episode of The Breakthrough, she tells us all about it: how she first met Steese in the parking lot of a rundown Vegas apartment complex, how she persuaded veteran prosecutors to talk to her about a high-profile, highly sensitive case, and, of course, what it was like to be in that conference room.

“God, there was just so much,” Rose said. “It’s hard to express just how many pieces of paper that I was going through.”

Tune into The Breakthrough, the podcast from ProPublica where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.

Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at [email protected].

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

The music for this podcast is from Blue Dot Sessions and Dana Boulé.

by Joaquin Sapien

In the 1960s, New York began to clear out its scandal-ridden psychiatric hospitals. In their place, a new system emerged. Thousands of mentally ill New Yorkers moved into “adult homes,” large apartment complexes concentrated mostly in New York City and its surrounding suburbs. The homes were meant to provide a safer, more humane alternative to the hospitals; they were closer to where many of the patients lived, and promised modest psychiatric care and other services.

But decades later, that grand vision had devolved into something that looked more like a nightmare.

In 2001, New York Times metro reporter Cliff Levy spent a year investigating conditions of the homes. He found that more than 1,000 people died in a six-year period. Some threw themselves off of rooftops. Others succumbed to extreme heat, only to be found days later, decomposing in fetid rooms. He found that the homes were often staffed by unqualified workers paid a pittance to look after a population in desperate need.

Today, Cliff is a deputy managing editor at the Times. He has joined us on this episode of The Breakthrough to discuss the 2001 series, “Broken Homes.”

He describes how he developed his own novel way of obtaining records of deaths in the facilities, and how he tracked down former workers who detailed schemes invented by the home’s operators to maximize profits. He tells us how he made cold call after cold call to reach the relatives of dead residents.

“It’s exhausting, and it’s really depressing,” Levy said in describing the effort. “And you ask yourself, like, ‘Maybe I’m just wasting my time.’ But then, at some point, you reach someone.”

The stories helped prompt a class-action lawsuit, which led to a federal court order requiring New York state’s Department of Health to move as many as 4,000 mentally ill residents into their own apartments, where they can live more independently with individualized services.

ProPublica is now examining that transition and the effort to improve conditions at the homes. Thus far, the state’s progress has been slow and controversial:

Earlier this summer, we reported that the Department of Health is behind in its deadlines to move the residents. We learned that a federal judge has accused the state of trying to evade the regulations at the heart of his order by colluding with industry. We spent parts of several weeks at a home called Oceanview Manor in Coney Island, where residents wander around outside the facility drinking malt liquor, begging for change and eating from garbage cans, looking ill and unkempt. Workers seemed outmatched, and the home’s owners declined to be interviewed.

We are looking to continue our reporting on this subject.

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

If you have experience with or information about adult homes in New York, please email [email protected]. Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at [email protected].

Related Stories: For more coverage, read ProPublica’s previous reporting on the subject.

The music for this podcast is from Lee Rosevere, Blue Dot Sessions, Kai Engel and Afanassij Iwanowitsch.

by Jessica Huseman

We watched on election night as dejected Hillary Clinton supporters poured out of New York City’s Javits Center, but we didn’t see her campaign team wrestling with how and when to concede. And in the months leading up to that moment, we watched Clinton give long, disjointed speeches, but we didn’t see the internal campaign drama that went into writing them.

That’s all in “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” the groundbreaking book from Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes that creates an intimate portrait of a campaign positioned to lose, even though it was favored to win.

On The Breakthrough, Allen divulges his process for digging deep into what was, by all accounts, a secretive campaign. He shares his agreement with sources — all spoke on background, and none of their names were used. Hear how he and Parnes gained their trust, kept their confidences and reported out stories no one else was able to tell. He describes the moment they realized what their reporting all meant:

“Right before the election, our editor sent us a note and got us on the phone and he said, ‘You guys have a problem. Your book has all these warning signs, all this, sort of, foreboding … and she’s about to be elected president.’ He was like, ‘How do you reconcile that?’”

Allen and Parnes interviewed nearly 100 insiders. The authors returned to sources again and again, clarifying timelines and confirming facts without revealing who gave them the information. They turned up some scoops. The campaign was dysfunctional — tense from infighting over how resources were spent. The candidate herself couldn’t settle on a message for why she wanted to run, and argued with staff over whether she should apologize for her email server scandal. And even in the most pivotal days of her campaign, Clinton didn’t seem to understand the mood of the country.

“She’s partway through the primaries already and she’s saying, ‘I don’t understand what this populist uprising is,’” says Allen. He and Parnes were “dumbstruck” when sources first told them this, long before Election Day.

Hear about these surprises and more on The Breakthrough, the ProPublica podcast where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.

Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at [email protected].

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

The music for this podcast is from Blue Dot Sessions and Lee Rosevere.

by Jessica Huseman

Bill Stenger was a local hero. One of Vermont’s most important businessmen, he had created hundreds of jobs with mega-developments across the state. In 2011, the Vermont Chamber of Commerce named him “citizen of the year.” And, for years, a sign hung on the door of the City of Newport’s offices that read, “Thank You, Bill Stenger.”

But not all of Stenger’s businesses were what they seemed, a small nonprofit news organization revealed.

Anne Galloway is the founder and editor of VTDigger. When she launched the online outlet in 2009, she was its only employee. Today, she has 11 reporters and an annual budget of $1.3 million. Much of her newsroom’s success has stemmed from its dogged investigation into Stenger, his Miami-based business partner Ariel Quiros and their project, Jay Peak ski resort.

When the multimillion-dollar development was announced in 2012, it immediately smelled fishy to Galloway. It was to be built in a region known as the Northeast Kingdom — an impoverished area of the state near the Canadian border, mostly known for dairy and Christmas tree farms — and it promised 10,000 jobs.

“It just seemed too good to be true,” she said. “It seemed too big.”

She was right.

Galloway and her team dug deep, fought multiple legal battles over records and worked to gain the trust of investors losing confidence in the project. They chronicled complaints that this development was starting to feel like a scam, and reported on the cozy relationship Stenger had with state oversight authorities.

Four years and dozens of stories later, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced federal fraud charges against Stenger and Quiros in what they called a “massive eight-year fraudulent scheme.” It was a “Ponzi-like” operation, in which they collected millions of dollars from foreign investors, pocketed some and paid for past projects with the rest, according to the complaint. Newer projects were left incomplete, and investors were left bilked. Galloway and her team knew about almost all of this — they just couldn’t get anyone to go on the record.

With their investigative authority, SEC officials said they were able to determine Stenger and Quiros misused $200 million of the $350 million that had been invested. Quiros, they said, probably pocketed $50 million for himself. Stenger, who denied culpability, reached a settlement with federal regulators over the civil charges. Quiros’ case is still ongoing. Both remain under a federal criminal investigation.

Hear how it all began on The Breakthrough, the ProPublica podcast where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.

Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at [email protected].

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

The music for this podcast is from Blue Dot Sessions, Lee Rosevere and Scott Holmes.

by Joaquin Sapien

In the cellphone video, 33-year-old Lauren Bloomstein looks perfectly healthy, radiant even. She is in a hospital room, cradling her newborn baby as her eyes well — a portrait of the miracle of new motherhood.

Hours later, she is dead.

Bloomstein succumbed to preeclampsia, a treatable condition estimated to affect some 200,000 women a year in the U.S.

ProPublica reporter Nina Martin joined NPR’s Renee Montagne and ProPublica’s engagement team to put Bloomstein’s death into a larger context in the story, “The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth.” Through their reporting, the team explained how the U.S. health care system sometimes focuses so intently on babies that it ignores mothers, leading to hundreds of preventable deaths every year, from pregnancy to months after birth. They’re still collecting these women’s stories.

On today’s episode of the Breakthrough, Martin describes how she and the team produced the project. She tells us how they scoured Facebook and the crowdfunding website Go Fund Me to find cases of pregnant women and new mothers who perished; how they made dozens of cold calls on a subject that’s beyond sensitive; how the women’s relatives and friends often could not bear to revisit such tragedy.

Finally, she describes how Lauren’s husband, Larry Bloomstein, took the extraordinary step of inviting the reporters into his home, where he recounted his wife’s death with documents and details, and shared that devastating video.

“It was a really shattering moment,” Martin said.

Hear how it all came together on the Breakthrough, the ProPublica podcast where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.

Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at [email protected].

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

The music for this podcast is from Blue Dot Sessions and​ Jason Leonard.​