exclusively reported that a federal judge donated tens of thousands of dollars to New Orleans’ Roman Catholic archdiocese and consistently ruled in favor of the church amid a contentious bankruptcy involving nearly 500 clergy sex abuse victims, an apparent conflict that led to calls for him to recuse himself.Read more.
applied data work and old-fashioned reporting to reveal how officials allow successive waves of young children to be harmed by lead, by leaving lead pipes in the ground when they already have pipes dug up for water main work.Read more.
told the story of a stumbling start to a historic wildfire mitigation effort intended to avoid a repeat of the climate-driven conflagrations that destroyed Western communities in recent years.Read more.
After a monthslong analysis, the AP revealed that at least 10% of $4 trillion in federal COVID-19 relief money was stolen or misspent.
The story was sparked by a simple question in January from Acting Global Investigations Editor Alison Kodjak: How much relief money was stolen? Richard Lardner, of the global investigations team, teamed up with climate reporter Jennifer McDermott and data team reporter Aaron Kessler to get an answer. They conducted scores of interviews, read dozens of government indictments and reports and tracked down experts.
In the end, they determined scam artists potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding, and another $123 billion was wasted or misspent — a combined loss of 10% of the relief aid the U.S. government has so far disbursed. Senior video producer Jeannie Ohm and motion graphics designer Eva Malek created an animated video explainer, narrated by Kessler, that succinctly laid out how easy it was for fraudsters to make off with so much money. Multimedia editor Kevin Vineys created a series of compelling graphics that helped break down government spending and potential theft.
For spending months investigating and documenting how much of the federal government’s $4.2 trillion in COVID-19 relief was looted or misspent, Lardner, McDermott, Kessler, Vineys and Malek earn Best of the Week — First Winners.
's persistent public records work, coupled with strong expertise and collaboration across the newsroom helped land exclusive reporting detailing Jeffrey Epstein’s final days before he took his life while incarcerated at a federal jail in New York.Read more.
was the first to report on lawsuits filed against Texas by women who sought abortions because their babies would survive, or their health was endangered.Read more.
were the only journalists invited to a private ceremony and blessing for a campground in Grand Canyon National Park that was renamed to Havasupai Gardens, nearly a century after the federal government forcibly removed the last Havasupai tribal member from the site.Read more.
in Washington reported exclusively on the results of a first-of its-kind federal investigation of hospitals that refused to provide an emergency abortion to a woman whose premature labor put her life at risk.Read more.
witnessed and documented a high seas faceoff on April 23 between Chinese and Philippine coast guards.Read more.
Josh Goodman and Jim Mustian reported exclusively that a federal watchdog is investigating whether the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration under chief Anne Milgram improperly used millions of dollars in no-bid contracts to flout normal governing hiring procedures to hire past associates at a very high cost.
The two followed up on a previous scoop about the arrest of former DEA agent Jose Irizarry, who confessed to laundering money for Colombian drug cartels and skimming millions of dollars from asset seizures and informants.
After an external review of the DEA’s foreign operations was slammed for underplaying its scandals, Latin America reporter Goodman and investigative reporter Mustian began asking questions.
What they found was that a Washington law firm that was hired as part of a no-bid contract did the review, and that its author was the former right-hand man to one of Milgram’s closest friends, former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. That led to more reporting, more questions and more sources talking about how the DEA used other no-bid contracts to hire Milgram’s past associates.
For expert source reporting that holds accountable the DEA and its highest-ranking official, Goodman and Mustian win Best of the Week — First Winner.
"The drug war is a game,” José Irizarry told two AP reporters during his final moments of freedom. “It was a very fun game that we were playing.”
Irizarry’s decision to spend some of his last few hours before beginning a 12-year federal prison sentence with two AP reporters in early 2022 was a moment years in the making that yielded a bombshell bacchanal of a story -- itself months in the making.
Four years ago, just before starting at The Associated Press, New York-based investigative reporter Jim Mustian received a tip about a DEA investigation into one of the agency’s own agents in Colombia. That spiraled into a string of AP scoops by Mustian and Miami-based Latin America correspondent Joshua Goodman on DEA corruption in Latin America, including an exclusive on the arrest of that agent. Irizarry had been accused of conspiring with Colombian drug cartels to divert millions from DEA money laundering stings in what prosecutors called one of the worst betrayals in DEA history.
For a deeply reported and compelling investigation, telling the tale of a former war-on-drugs warrior who crossed multiple boundaries, Mustian and Goodman earn AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner honors.
scored huge play with print, online and video customers with a deeply reported, all-formats examination of the crash of the U.S. West Coast’s legal marijuana industry in the absence of federal legalization. Read more.
got unique access in the U.S. to hours of interviews with one of the few high-level elite Russian security officers around President Vladimir Putin to defect.Read more.
exclusively reported about the background of the special prosecutor appointed to lead the case of five white officers charged in the deadly 2019 arrest of Black motorist Ronald Greene.
Read more.
led AP’s efforts to get the fastest and most comprehensive coverage of a federal judge’s hearing questioning the legality of access to medical abortions.Read more.
broke news about a new Pentagon study that found high cancer rates not only among pilots, but also among ground crew who take care of military aircraft.Read more.
obtained an on-the-record interview and a big scoop on the first-ever federal regulation of toxic PFAS chemicals, commonly known as “forever chemicals.”Read more.
in Anchorage spotted a small item on the website of a radio station that serves a remote part of Alaska that described how a Federal Emergency Management Agency contractor had badly botched the translation of brochures into Alaska Native languages.Read more.
scored a rare sit down, on-camera interview with International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva that broke news: She urged China to rethink its zero-COVID policy and said the U.S. Federal Reserve has to keep raising rates for the good of the global economy.
Read more.
When photographer Jae C. Hong returned to Los Angeles after a year in Japan, he was struck by how the number of homeless people had vastly multiplied. It was immediately before the pandemic -- and Hong, like so many reporters in the AP, spent much of the next year chronicling the impact of coronavirus.
Earlier this year, he was able to get back to the project he’d yearned to pursue and started chronicling homeless Angelenos between other assignments. One night, he encountered two police officers standing over a dead body -- and his project, spotlighting the lives, and sometimes the deaths, of fentanyl addicts, began to take shape.
Hong spent about six months documenting the humanitarian disaster. What he produced were gut-wrenching photos that gave a rare, intensely personal and brutally honest look into the tragedy unfolding on the streets of LA, an unconscionable scene often overlooked. AP writer Brian Melley, using Hong's reporting and experiences, crafted a story of equally vivid imagery that portrayed the raw human suffering with sensitivity to complete the package. The package was widely used and kept readers’ attention. The engagement score on AP News was a perfect 100 and Facebook featured it on its news feed.
For focusing on a problem that is too often unseen and producing a raw, compelling visual package, this week’s first Best of the Week is awarded to Los Angeles photojournalist Jae C. Hong.
