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Thomas Peele

Goodreads author profile

url

http://www.goodreads.com/ThomasPeele

born

April 21, 1961 in New York City, The United States

gender

male

website

http://www.Thomaspeele.com

twitter username

thomas_peele

genre

Nonfiction

member since

October 2011

About this author

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My journalism career began at a weekly newspaper in Bridgehampton, New York in 1983, an endeavor so small, the printing press was powered by a Ford Pinto engine mounted on blocks. From that humble beginning, I’ve worked for seven daily newspapers, starting in Newsday’s sports department, and had scores of stories in others and in magazines and journals. Today, I’m an investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group, publishers of The Contra Costa Times, The San Jose Mercury News, The Oakland Tribune and other papers surrounding San Francisco, where I specialize in data collection and analysis. I’m also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, co-teaching a class on public-records reporting. I’ve...more My journalism career began at a weekly newspaper in Bridgehampton, New York in 1983, an endeavor so small, the printing press was powered by a Ford Pinto engine mounted on blocks. From that humble beginning, I’ve worked for seven daily newspapers, starting in Newsday’s sports department, and had scores of stories in others and in magazines and journals. Today, I’m an investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group, publishers of The Contra Costa Times, The San Jose Mercury News, The Oakland Tribune and other papers surrounding San Francisco, where I specialize in data collection and analysis. I’m also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, co-teaching a class on public-records reporting. I’ve won more than 50 journalism awards, for long-term investigations of government corruption, the environment, casino gambling and murders to a story in the first person voice of a Christmas tree waiting to be bought on Christmas Eve. I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Long Island University and a master’s in creative writing from the University of San Francisco.
I moved to Northern California in 2000 after six and a half years covering Atlantic City, N.J., for the Atlantic City Press. I’d also worked for The Ocean County Observer and, briefly, The Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, a state where I had started my post-Newsday career after deciding I didn’t want to write sports. I wanted to learn how to dig. (I also wanted to hang out with Bruce Springsteen). What better place, then, than the Garden State? My first assignment was covering a sleepy town, Manchester, home to tens of thousands of senior citizens clustered in retirement developments. As uneventful as the place seemed, it wasn’t. I soon found its government was deeply corrupt, the leaders siphoning away millions to spend on prostitutes and gambling in Atlantic City. (The Manchester scandal is recounted in my award winning essay, “Oligarchies I Have Known,” published in Controlled Burn.)
Manchester, as I wanted, taught me to dig, to use documents, to be relentlessly aggressive. Thirteen people were convicted of corruption and theft; most served prison time. A few years later, after brief stints in Delaware and upstate New York, I moved to Atlantic City. It was the time of the so-called “second wave” of casino development and of a deep social upheaval. In other words, it was a hell of a time to be a reporter in that gambling city, one where Donald Trump considered himself king. (Trump once began a phone interview with me by saying, “You fucking twerp…”) From my City Hall beat I wrote a seemingly endless run of surreal stories – from a city councilman who was an electrician who decided to steal electricity by secretly tapping power lines and burned his house down with bad wiring, to the endless get-rich-quick schemes of grifters and con men disguised as everything from radio talk-show hosts to school superintendents to casino executives.
In 2000, I joined the Contra Costa Times as an investigative reporter, writing about nursing home abuses, corruption, Indian gaming, anti-war protests, pollution and politics. I also carved out a niche reporting about freedom-of-information issues and pursuing lawsuits against governments blocking the public’s right to know. In 2005, we sued Oakland to force it to disclose the salaries of government workers. The California Supreme Court eventually ruled unanimously for disclosure; it’s been called the most significant open-government victory in the state in a generation.
My work life changed radically after the 2007 murder of a man I’d never met. Chauncey Bailey, the editor of a weekly newspaper in Oakland, was working on a small article about a business and supposed religious institution called Your Black Muslim Bakery and the cult behind it. “We gotta take him out before he write that story,” is how its leader ordered the assassinatio(less)

6 posts
Thomas Peele's Blog

Gearing up for the Newseum

I am getting excited over my upcoming east coast trips around Killing the Messenger. The Newseum in DC on 6/3 is especially interesting because I haven’t been there for years. In fact, it was still in Arlington at the time long before it moved to Washington proper. It now has permanent exhibit to murdered journalists Don Bolles and Chauncey Bailey. Several of us on the Bailey Project helped gat... read more »

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Published on May 27, 2012 14:51 • 1 view

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combine editions
Books by Thomas Peele

Average rating: 4.12 · 41 ratings · 12 reviews · 3 distinct works

	Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist 4.13 avg rating — 38 ratings — published 2012 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Queer Popular Culture: Literature, Media, Film, and Television 4.00 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2007 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Queer Popular Culture: Literature, Media, Film and Television 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2011	My rating:

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Thomas is Currently Reading

Thomas Peele gave

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The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

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May 13, 2012 09:09am

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Thomas Peele added: The Experts' Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do by Samantha Ettus	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:28pm
Thomas Peele added: Rising Dog by Vincent Kohler	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:27pm
Thomas Peele added: The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever by John Feinstein	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:26pm
Thomas Peele added: Crazy Bosses: Crazy Bosses by Stanley Bing	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:25pm
Thomas Peele added: The Moon Pulled Up an Acre of Bass: A Flyrodder's Odyssey by Peter Kaminsky	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:25pm
Thomas Peele added: Mad as Hell: How Sports Got Away from the Fans--And How We Get It Back by Mike Lupica	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:24pm
Thomas Peele added: The Top of the Hill by Irwin Shaw	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:24pm
Thomas Peele added: A Rage for Justice by John Jacobs	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:24pm
Thomas Peele added: Full Swing: Hits, Runs and Errors in a Writer's Life by Ira Berkow	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:23pm
Thomas Peele added: Extra Credits by Mike Lupica	My rating:
May 27, 2012 07:22pm