Daily News wins Pulitzer Prize

"Tainted Justice," a yearlong series by the Philadelphia Daily News that exposed the questionable tactics of a police narcotics squad, won the Pulitzer Prize on Monday for investigative reporting.

Judges at the Columbia University School of Journalism praised reporters Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman for their "resourceful reporting," which resulted in an FBI probe and the review of hundreds of criminal cases.

The project began Feb. 9, 2009, with a story about drug informant Ventura Martinez, who claimed that he and Jeffrey Cujdik, a narcotics officer, lied about evidence in at least two dozen cases to gain illegal entry into homes and make arrests.

Subsequent stories reported that members of the Narcotics Field Unit had frequently raided small "mom-and-pop" shops - many owned by immigrants - and those store owners said officers stole cash and merchandise. In other raids at homes, the paper reported, female residents said officers sometimes fondled and groped them.

Laker, 52, and Ruderman, 40, labored on the project for half a year, knocking on doors in the city's toughest neighborhoods and poring over thousands of the Narcotics Field Unit's suspicious search warrants and arrest records.

The stories led to the suspension of four officers and forced the review of dozens of drug arrests made by the unit.

John McNesby, head of Lodge 5 of the Fraternal Order of Police, said he believed that the police officers named in the series, several of whom were removed from active duty, would be exonerated.

The FOP threatened a lawsuit against the paper, and Laker was slapped and chased by a woman she tried to interview, "but they never gave up," Daily News editor Michael Days shouted out to his gleeful staff minutes after the announcement flashed over the newswires.

News that the tabloid had won the nation's most coveted journalism award sent shouts of joy through the newsroom, followed by the popping of champagne corks.

Their "old-fashioned journalism," Days said, had "brought so much honor to this city, this company, this paper."

It was the first Pulitzer Prize for the Daily News since its cartoonist, Signe Wilkinson, won in 1992. Then-editorial page editor Rich Aregood won for his editorials in 1985.

The Inquirer's cartoonist, Tony Auth, was a Pulitzer finalist this year. Both papers are owned by Philadelphia Media Holdings L.L.C.

"I'm just so proud," company president Brian P. Tierney said from Orlando, where he was attending a meeting of the Newspaper Association of America.

He said the stories "gave a voice to people who have no voice." The prize "nails down forever the question of the paper's place in this city," Tierney said.

The Daily News shared the investigative-reporting category award with Sheri Fink of ProPublica, in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine, for a story that described the "urgent life-and-death decisions made by one hospital's exhausted doctors when they were cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina," according to the Pulitzer committee.

The Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier won this year's Public Service Medal for "illuminating the murky mismanagement of natural-gas royalties owed to thousands of land owners in southwest Virginia, spurring remedial action by state lawmakers," according to the judges.

In New Jersey, the Asbury Park Press was a finalist in the public-service category for its "exhaustive examination of how an archaic property-tax system harms New Jersey's economy and ordinary families."

And the staff of the Newark Star-Ledger was a finalist in the breaking-news category for its sweeping coverage of 44 arrests of local officials, several religious leaders, and others on corruption charges.

See the Daily News series at http://go.philly.com/justice

Links to other winning works at www.pulitzer.org/ EndText