Kurt Eichenwald
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Kurt Eichenwald (born June 28, 1961) was a writer and investigative reporter at The New York Times newspaper until October 2006, when he resigned to become an investigative reporter with Condé Nast's forthcoming business magazine launch, Portfolio. Eichenwald had been employed by the Times since 1986 and primarily covered Wall Street and corporate topics such as insider trading, accounting scandals, and takeovers. He graduated from St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas and Swarthmore College, where he was a founder of the a cappella octet Sixteen Feet.
In 1984 and 1985, Eichenwald was a writer-researcher for CBS News in the Election and Survey Unit. He joined The Times in 1985 as a news clerk for Hedrick Smith, who was chief Washington correspondent. When Mr. Smith began writing his book The Power Game, Eichenwald became his research assistant, leaving in 1986 to become associate editor at The National Journal in Washington. Eichenwald returned to The Times later in 1986 and was a news clerk for the national desk in New York before becoming a financial reporter in 1988.
He began reporting for the Times' business section in 1988, covering Wall Street, corporate takeovers and the insider trading scandals. In 1992, he began writing the "Market Place" column and covering the unfolding scandals at Prudential Securities. In February 1995, Eichenwald began covering a range of investigative projects for the business section.
Eichenwald was a 1996 winner of the George Polk Award for his articles about deficiencies in the American system of dialysis care. In 1998, he won a Polk Award again for a series of articles about allegations of corruption at the nation's largest private hospital chain, the Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation. That same year, he was selected for The Times's prestigious Senior Writer program. In 2000, he was finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about how business interests were influencing the system for medical clinical trials. He again was a Pultizer finalist, along with a team of other Times reporters, in 2003, for his coverage of the corporate scandals at Enron, WorldCom and other companies.
His first book, Serpent on the Rock (Harper Collins, 1995), is about the Prudential Securities scandal. Eichenwald's second book, The Informant: A True Story (Random House, 2000), is about the Archer Daniels Midland price-fixing case and was a finalist for a J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award. It is currently in development as a major motion picture directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Matt Damon. His most recent book, The Conspiracy of Fools (Boadway, 2005), is about the Enron scandal. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the New York Public Library Bernstein Award.
In May 2005, while doing research for an article about online financial fraud, Eichenwald stumbled upon a picture of Justin Berry, a 19-year old from Bakersfield, California, who, since age 13, had been running his own internet pornography business. Justin had made hundreds of thousands of dollars by stripping, showering, and performing sex acts in front of a webcam at the behest of his customers. Eichenwald contacted Berry, posing as a potential customer, and got the boy to agree to meet him in person in June, at which point he revealed that he was a reporter for The Times. At that point, Eichenwald learned that Justin was malnourished, mentally unstable, and addicted to cocaine. After convincing Justin to quit drugs and shut down his webcam operation, Justin agreed to turn over all his records to the Justice Department, which has since opened an investigation in an attempt to catch some 1,500 adults who watched Justin and other children on the internet. After nearly six months of work, the resulting article was published on December 19, 2005, in The New York Times and has already garnered a substantial amount of attention and praise.
For this effort, in 2006, Eichenwald won the Payne Award, the highest honor in journalism for professional ethics. The judges cited Eichenwald's efforts to assist Berry "in escaping the pornography trade and rehabilitating himself as well as facilitating Berry’s participation in prosecuting the adults in the porn ring." This was accomplished, the judges said, while "preserving the editorial integrity of an important story." For the story, he also won the Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for best enterprise reporting and was selected as a finalist for the prestigious Michael Kelly Award "for fearless expression and pursuit of truth in journalism."
