Robert W. Greene, a reporter and editor at Newsday who led investigative teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes and brought together reporters from across the country to uncover corruption in Arizona after a journalist there was murdered, died Thursday in Smithtown, N.Y. He was 78.
The cause was heart failure, his wife, Kathleen, said.
The Pulitzers notwithstanding, Mr. Greene regarded what became known as the Arizona Project as the greatest achievement of his 37-year career at Newsday, Long Island’s dominant newspaper.
The project began after Don Bolles, a reporter for The Arizona Republic who had been investigating ties between organized crime and politicians, was killed by a car bomb on June 13, 1976. Mr. Bolles had been a founding member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a national organization that Mr. Greene had helped start.
Mr. Greene assembled a team from that organization, and they spent six months in Phoenix putting together a 23-part series that expanded the investigation that Mr. Bolles had begun; it ran in newspapers around the country.
At the time, according to the organization’s Web site, Mr. Greene said the project would make people “think twice” about killing journalists. “We are buying life insurance on our own reporters,” he said then.
I particularly liked this part of the story. :)
Mr. Greene thought no expense should be spared in investigative journalism. As Anthony Marro, a former editor of Newsday, wrote in a 2002 Columbia Journalism Review profile of Mr. Greene: “The result was close to four decades of lobster dinners and two-inch-thick steaks, double Tanqueray martinis, and endless bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He once stopped a reporter new to the team from ordering a Salisbury steak in a restaurant, saying: ‘When you eat with the team, you don’t eat chopped meat.’ ”