The best long reads from 2019
Interior designers caught up in cocaine cartels. Deep-cover CIA operatives with lives that read like Forest Gump.
Reporters at USA TODAY spent the past 12 months digging deep on stories from across the country. They uncovered heart-wrenching narratives of fraud and abuse, of changing cities and unruly corporations.
As 2019 ends, we’re reflecting on some of the work that inspired us and led to winding tales we couldn’t put down. Here are a few of our favorite investigations and long reads of the year.
The designers and the don
The bullet-riddled corpse, lying face-up on a street in Medellin in March 1996, was that of a large man with a bovine head and scraggly beard.
Don Chepe was dead.
Real name José Santacruz Londoño, he was one of the four chiefs of the Cali Cartel, the multibillion-dollar cocaine syndicate that fueled an American epidemic of addiction. A task force of New York-based cops had pursued him since the late-1970s, earning them the nickname “Chepe Chasers.”
They had him on the ropes, then he had the nerve to die. In the months to follow, a wild legal proposition formed – a Hail Mary to put Santacruz on trial despite being deceased. It was perhaps the boldest, most ostentatious and fabulous back door in the history of federal drug prosecutions.
They would indict the cocaine kingpin's interior designers.
The City, Season 2: Reno
Reno, Nevada, is famous for vice, with a gritty downtown full of aging casinos and legal brothels on the outskirts of town. Why is this notoriously permissive city suddenly cracking down on strip clubs?
That question kicks off the second season of The City – USA TODAY’s investigative podcast about how power works in American cities.
The answers lead host Robin Amer and reporter and Reno native Anjeanette Damon to embattled strip club owners such as Kamy Keshmiri, a once-celebrated discus thrower and native son, who says the city he loves has turned on him. And to city boosters who have decided that their gaudy, downtown strip clubs have got to go as tech companies such as Tesla move in.
And to women such as Stephanie, a single mom who supports her two young daughters dancing, who are caught in the middle of a proxy battle for the gentrifying city’s future.
Read the full story, and listen to the new season.
Tarnished brass: The cop who claimed to be dying for decades
In 1995, Leonard Forte was due to face charges that he repeatedly raped and molested his daughter's 12-year-old friend.
Instead, he started dying.
Forte, then a 54-year-old former detective, told the court his heart had failed and he was on a transplant list. He said his doctors had given him a grim diagnosis: Without a new heart, he’d be dead within a year.
A prosecutor agreed to delay the case until Forte was healthy enough to stand trial – unless his terminal condition made prosecuting him a moot point.
Forte never received a heart transplant. But he also didn’t die.
Instead, he has been living as a retiree in Florida, collecting boats, taking vacations and successfully fending off his trial by professing for more than two decades that he’s on the verge of death.
Trump, Ukraine and the power of conspiracy theories
Days after a whistleblower's complaint became public, USA TODAY's Kim Hjelmgaard traveled to Ukraine to learn more about a detail in a phone call July 25 between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Did former Vice President Joe Biden pressure Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation to protect his son Hunter, who had been involved with an energy company there?
Over the course of about a week in Ukraine, the message from two dozen government officials and anti-corruption investigators became clear: The allegations against the Bidens are entirely lacking in evidence.
But they persist, and not only because Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani keep repeating them.
"It doesn't matter who in Ukraine tells you what – a lawyer, a politician, media, someone in business. They are either lying to you or at the very least trying to confuse you," said Oleksandr Techynskyi, a Ukrainian filmmaker who chronicled the uprising that led to the ouster of the Ukrainian president in 2014.
Techynskyi said Trump's allegations resemble what Ukrainians have been dealing with for years, and what Americans may have to get used to: official misinformation.
1619: The long road home
"Who do you pray to, the God that let it happen, or the God that let me return?"
Wanda Tucker's soul-searching statement in Angola, mourning an identity robbed from her by the transatlantic slave trade, opens our exploration of the roots of American slavery in 1619: Searching for Answers. She and her family believe they descend from Antony and Isabella, two of the "20 and odd" Angolans brought to the shores of English North America in 1619. But like millions of black people whose ancestors were taken from Africa, chattel slavery left her with a history that can never fully be known.
When Wanda traveled 7,000 miles to Angola, a country no one she knew had ever visited, she did so on the faith of her connection to William Tucker, the first named African born in what would become the USA. She was also doing it for the millions of African Americans who don’t have the name of an African ancestor to claim.
Trapped and trafficked: One town’s dark secret
Michael Mearan, a onetime city councilman of Portsmouth, Ohio, has been a fixture of the small but troubled town along the Ohio River since the 1970s.
According to a federal wiretap affidavit, Mearan is also a prolific sex trafficker.
Cincinnati Enquirer reporters picked up where the DEA affidavit ended, spending a year visiting Portsmouth to investigate the allegations. The effort included interviews with more than 65 individuals and a review of hundreds of documents.
Among those interviewed were 10 women who said Mearan, as their defense attorney, promised lenient sentences from judges he knew and parole officers who would ignore probation requirements – as long as the women were willing to have sex for money.
JFK files: The spy who knew Castro
Fifty-six years after President John F. Kennedy's murder, unsealed government files detail dangerous intrigues running beneath the crime of the century. These deceptions centered on Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and one CIA spy – a real-life James Bond named Ross Crozier.
Under outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower, Crozier pretended to befriend Cuban rebels Castro and Che Guevara using The New York Times as cover. Once John F. Kennedy was in the White House and Castro cemented his rule as communist dictator, Crozier marshaled a group of exiles against the regime.
The wily Castro survived a CIA-led invasion and stoked a near nuclear confrontation with the United States over Soviet missiles on the island. Cold War setbacks and alcohol sent Crozier’s career into a tailspin, just as a strange character with dubious allegiances tried and failed to join the exile group – Lee Harvey Oswald. Three months later, under arrest and suspected of killing JFK, Oswald was murdered himself.
'I do what I want, I’m security!'
Philip Mayo cost himself a law enforcement career the day he helped shatter a prison inmate’s face and beat him until his back was broken.
But the fired Maryland corrections officer wasn’t out of uniform for long.
Within months, G4S, the largest private security company in the world, gave him a job 20 minutes up the road guarding an office building and its workers.
Co-workers said he raised more red flags almost immediately. They claimed he stalked a woman around the building, that he adjusted security cameras to watch women enter a locker room, that he groped a co-worker’s breast.
Mayo’s supervisor warned his bosses: Fire this guy before someone gets hurt. They ignored him.
A police report details what happened next. One night on the graveyard shift, Mayo watched a cleaning lady push her cart down a darkened hallway. He waited until they were alone.
Then he pinned her from behind, slammed her head against the wall and ripped at her clothes. “Please don’t do this,” she begged.
The priest next door
John Dagwell said he’s earned the right to live in peace as he tries to put his past behind him.
The former Roman Catholic brother pleaded guilty in 1988 to molesting a student when he taught at a parochial school. His religious order, the Xaverian Brothers, transferred him to a new area, where he soon faced new abuse accusations that were never reported to police.
Despite his past, Dagwell was never required to register as a sex offender. He moved on to a new life in a new community, a place where children fill the pool during school vacations and where his history remained a secret from neighbors. He began teaching again.
Dagwell is one of more than 1,200 former priests, Catholic brothers and Catholic school officials identified in a USA TODAY Network investigation who were accused of sexual abuse but were able to move on with little or no oversight or accountability.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The best long reads from 2019 from USA TODAY
