This is the third in a week-long series of columns written to coincide with national Newspaper Week. The columns highlight examples of high-impact reporting by our journalists and take you behind the scenes with reporters in a Q&A format.
This year, we pursued a couple of special projects that involved international collaborations. Our reporters dug into the issue of how wealthy foreign investors pour money into U.S. real estate purchases, including in South Carolina, in a climate of weak transparency laws.
Senior Projects Reporter Tony Bartelme played a key role in this work, along with Glenn Smith, deputy managing editor for investigations and public service reporting.
In February, they anchored a project that we called Power and Polo. It revealed how a top Nigerian political figure moved nearly $1 million into the purchase of a sprawling horse farm in Aiken. Nigerian prosecutors have since accused him of “criminal diversion” of more than $2 billion from the government. For the story, we partnered with two nonprofit public interest organizations, one based in Paris and the other in Amsterdam, as well as the Aiken Standard.
And last month, we published a story built from a collaboration between The Post and Courier, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and an independent Russian news site called iStories. We shared research, but each outlet pursued and wrote its own story. The Post and Courier story explored how Russian bankers who have been sanctioned by the federal government and saw their U.S. assets frozen, sank millions of dollars into South Carolina resort properties.
I asked Tony to tell the backstory of how these projects developed. Here’s what he had to say:
What led you to the stories?
Stories like Power and Polo and The Russians Next Door are often like links in a chain, with earlier stories forming the first links.
In this case, the first of the stories really was rooted in our Uncovered project (where we have partnered with local South Carolina newsrooms that needed The Post and Courier’s help on investigative projects). We’ve done some heavy-hitting stuff with those local newsrooms, everything from crooked sheriffs to a cushy taxpayer-funded hunting lodge.
An international anti-corruption journalism outfit noticed our work, asked us to work with them on a more global project, and we were off to the races, or in the case of Power and Polo, off to Aiken’s polo fields.
How did you dig into the reporting and where did it take you?
Starting projects like these is like getting a big pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces. You start with that photo on the cover of the puzzle box, and then you hunt for clues to fit them together. We often begin with documents, because they likely will form the backbone of an investigative piece. Documents don’t lie, so whenever I find a revealing document, I feel a sigh of relief — we’re getting closer to finishing that puzzle. But it’s a lot of work. In Power and Polo, I stopped keeping track of how many pages of documents we sifted through after 5,000.
Documents are great, but you also need human sources. They’re often your best guides. We spent a lot of time in Aiken talking to experts in polo. We spent a lot of time talking to experts around the world about Nigeria, alleged money laundering and horse culture. We obtained court documents from two continents. We scoured police reports in Los Angeles about a multimillion-dollar heist.
The result was Power and Polo, which was one of the stranger stories I’ve worked on in a while. It detailed how one of the most powerful public officials in Nigeria, literally the guy who ran the government mint, came to Aiken and bought a million-dollar horse farm, ostensibly because of his love of polo. From there, we took readers deep into Aiken’s horse culture, Nigeria’s horse culture and massive corruption schemes. The story has a lot of twists and turns, and I really ought to let it speak for itself.
As for the Russians Next Door, it was a bit simpler than Power and Polo. Both were based on public documents, but instead of Nigeria, this one had a Russian twist. It revealed for the first time how sanctioned Russian bankers bought properties in Palmetto Bluff, a luxury resort near Bluffton, while highlighting potential gaps in the government’s push to deter Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Very different stories, for sure, but underlying both is an important theme: The United States has one of the least transparent real estate markets in the world. This creates a wide-open door for wealthy foreign investors to park mind-boggling amounts of money and, if corruption was involved, to launder it.
What kind of impact did the story have?
The stories had a global impact. Power and Polo generated big readership both here and in West Africa. Transparency experts and NGOs highlighted our findings on their organization’s platforms.
But sometimes impact is less tangible, like when a reader thanks us for giving them a little better understanding of an issue. To me that’s the most important impact a journalist can make.
Finally, what drove you to journalism? And how do you see your mission as a journalist?
The truth is, about 40 years ago, I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to be a journalist. I just didn’t know what else to do!
But the more stories I did early in my career, the more I realized that what we do makes a difference, that people behave better when someone is holding them to account, and that we all make better decisions when we have the facts. I kind of hate jigsaw puzzles — so tedious! But I love putting together real-life puzzles about things that matter.