The Newsroom
38:41 Share

Hi, it's Phoebe. We're heading back out on tour this fall, bringing our 10th anniversary show to even more cities. Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Madison, Northampton, and Atlanta, we're coming your way. Come and hear seven brand new stories told live on stage by me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr. We think it's the best live show we've ever done. Tickets are on sale now at thisiscriminal.com slash live. See you very soon.

Hey, I'm Sean Ely. For more than 70 years, people from all political backgrounds have been using the word Orwellian to mean whatever they want it to mean.

But what did George Orwell actually stand for? Orwell was not just an advocate for free speech, even though he was that. But he was an advocate for truth in speech. He's someone who argues that you should be able to say that two plus two equals four. We'll meet the real George Orwell, a man who was prescient and flawed, this week on The Gray Area. If you've ever read a news story about the mafia in Las Vegas, you were probably reading something Jeff Gehrman wrote.

Jeff Kierman grew up in Milwaukee and moved to Las Vegas around 1980. One of his early stories was about the death of an FBI witness testifying against organized crime members across the Midwest. In 1997, Jeff covered the murder of Herbert Blitzstein, a man who once worked for the Chicago mob in Las Vegas.

Jeff and reporter Kathy Scott broke the story that mobs in Buffalo and Los Angeles had put a hit on Blitstein to take over his racketeering business. Herbert Blitstein's death was one of the last mob hits in Las Vegas. For a while, Jeff Gehrman also covered the federal courts in Nevada. He worked out of a closet-sized office with other reporters. For several years, you know, we spent pretty much every day

weekday together at work. This is David Ferrara, one of Jeff's colleagues at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the newspaper where Jeff worked. Jeff Gehrman was a reporter for over 40 years. When he was a young reporter, Jeff ran into a high-ranking Chicago mobster named Tony Spolatro at a bar. He asked a waitress if he could send Tony Spolatro a drink, but she didn't.

The waitress came back and told him, you don't send Mr. Spolatro drinks. He buys you drinks first. Jeff was once asked if he was scared to report on the mafia. He said, no, it was something we just did. He had a reputation for not letting things drop. As a reporter, you know, the things that stand out to me are any time that I would be, say, in a courtroom during the day,

And I'd come back to that office. He'd be on the phone or on his computer searching for records on something, trying to get documents before they were sealed or calling sources to talk to them about stories he was working on or what stories he had done, trying to get more about the stories he had already reported on.

He was dedicated to journalism and holding public officials and people of power accountable for the things that they'd done. Around this time last year, on Labor Day weekend, Jeff Gehrman's colleague, David Ferrara, was looking at Twitter in the middle of the night, and he saw a tweet from his and Jeff's boss that read, "'There are no words for a loss like this.'"

and just kind of sat there reading the story, stunned, not really knowing what to do because it was like the middle of the night. Jeff Gehrman had been found dead. He was 69 years old. David read that Jeff had been found outside his home and had been stabbed several times. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police said they believed Jeff had been killed late Friday morning.

His body wasn't discovered until the next day when a neighbor saw him and called 911. The caller told 911 that Jeff was, quote, beyond resuscitation. My first thoughts were just disbelief. And then I started to wonder who could have done it and why. Jeff Gehrman had spent his life investigating corruption, fraud, and murder.

Now it was up to his colleagues to try to figure out why he had died. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. David Ferrara realized that he and Jeff knew a lot of people in common. He started to reach out to them. As I was calling sources, attorneys and people Jeff knew and people that Jeff had worked with in the past, I just kind of naturally started developing that into a story about Jeff and his life's work.

and about sort of what his reporting meant to Las Vegas and what sort of impact his reporting had and what kind of reporter he was. David wrote that Jeff's reputation helped his sources trust him. He was also protective. He promised anonymity and wouldn't even disclose that information to his editors. A defense lawyer Jeff had known for decades called him, quote, a fearless reporter.

A friend said, if he thought someone was wrong or wronging the little guy, it was part of his DNA to go after it, guns blazing. David's article on Jeff came out that Sunday. Was it odd to be, I mean, you covered crime before, and obviously that's what you do as a journalist, cover stories, cover crimes, but was it odd to be covering the story of someone you knew so well? It was not only odd to be...

covering somebody I knew pretty well. But it was also sort of the first time I had any experience with knowing somebody who had been murdered. I've covered dozens, hundreds probably, of murder cases in my career, but never knew anyone who had been killed by someone else.

So that was a whole new experience and feeling in and of itself. But I think that my experience in reporting and having covered these sort of things helped me keep focus. And in a strange way, having worked with Jeff also helped me focus on what we needed to do as a newspaper.

You know, it sounds cliche, but I didn't want to let him down. You know, I know that if this had happened to someone else at the newspaper, Jeff would have been the first one on this story and he would have done everything he could to find out through his reporting what had happened and why and to tell the story of who Jeff was. So that's kind of where my head was at at the time.

Jeff Gehrman had reported on a lot of dangerous situations. He was well-known around Las Vegas. Once, while he was investigating a court bailiff with mob connections, the man confronted Jeff at a party and punched him in the face. Later, at the hospital, the police officer investigating the assault turned out to be someone Jeff had also reported on. In 2003, Jeff reported on an FBI raid on a strip club called Jaguars.

The FBI was looking for evidence that the club owner had bribed four Clark County commissioners to delay permits for rival clubs. According to the federal indictment, they found that he wanted commissioners to vote against a proposed no-touch rule for strip clubs, and that he helped pay for election campaigns, offered to buy cars, and even paid for one commissioner's child to attend Olympic skiing school. The investigation was later dubbed Operation G-String.

Some of Jeff's colleagues wondered if his murder was related to his mob reporting. And because it was a stabbing, it seemed like something that had to be personal. That if it was just some sort of random thing, it might have been shot. And so, you know, I guess the next obvious step was, could it have been somebody that he had been reporting on that killed?

was angry with him. But Glenn Cook, Jeff's boss at the Review-Journal, told the Washington Post that that wouldn't make sense. He said, if someone were to put a hit on Jeff over a story he did, would you really stab someone to death in broad daylight on a Friday? Initially, police said they thought Jeff's murder was an isolated incident, and they didn't see any immediate connections to Jeff's work. They said there was no threat whatsoever.

David was also talking with his boss, Glenn Cook, about sending the paper's crime reporters to cover the investigation of their colleague's death.

and get the police side and go to Jeff's neighborhood, try to talk to neighbors to see if anyone had seen anything. Two of the Review Journal's crime reporters, Sabrina Schnur and Glenn Puitt, started interviewing Jeff's neighbors. It was Glenn Puitt's last week with the Review Journal. He was leaving to start a new job. He remembers that he and Jeff both covered the Ted Binion murder

And that Jeff had something new on the story every day. When he headed out to Jeff's neighborhood, he says he thought, I'm doing this for Jeff. A few hours later, the police announced they had a photo of someone they believed to be a suspect. And it was a man walking on a sidewalk wearing a straw hat, big round straw hat that had been kind of pulled down

and you could not see the person's face. And they were wearing this blaze orange, not a vest, like a construction vest, but an actual shirt with these reflective strips on it, dark jeans, gloves, which very unusual for early September in Las Vegas when the temperature's still in the hundreds, gray gym shoes, and carrying this dark jacket

satchel bag sort of thing, walking next to a dark sedan on a sidewalk, parked next to a sidewalk. Did anything stick out to you about the photo right away? Yes. One of the first things that stuck out to me was the height of the suspect, that even in this kind of big straw hat, the suspect was sitting

about the same height as the car, which looked like a sedan, so he couldn't have been that tall. I noticed he had this seemingly narrow stance, narrow gait. David started getting texts from other reporters who were friends of his and Jeff's. They'd all seen the photo and were trying to figure out if they recognized the man. Jeff's editor, Rhonda Prast, had put together a list of people Jeff had reported on over the years.

And there was one name that kept coming up. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Ritual. I love a morning ritual. We've spent a lot of time at Criminal talking about how everyone starts their days. The Sunday routine column in the New York Times is one of my favorite things on earth. If you're looking to add a multivitamin to your own routine, Ritual's Essential for Women multivitamin won't upset your stomach, so you can take it with or without food. And it doesn't smell or taste like a vitamin. It smells like mint.

I've been taking it every day, and it's a lot more pleasant than other vitamins I've tried over the years. Plus, you get nine key nutrients to support your brain, bones, and red blood cells. It's made with high-quality, traceable ingredients. Ritual's Essential for Women 18 Plus is a multivitamin you can actually trust. Get 25% off your first month at ritual.com slash criminal.

Start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off. In the United States, it's rare for a journalist to be killed. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that since 1992, fewer than 20 reporters have been killed in the country. Last year, an estimated 41 journalists worldwide were killed in retaliation for their work.

One of the deadliest attacks on reporters in the U.S. happened in 2018 when a man attacked the Capital Gazette newsroom in Maryland, killing five reporters. He had tried to sue the Gazette for defamation for reporting on his criminal harassment case. In 2007, a reporter named Chauncey Bailey was shot and killed in Oakland, California for his reporting on a local bakery chain's ties to fraud and murder. In the days after his death,

A group of three dozen local journalists created the Chauncey Bailey Project to finish his reporting and investigate his death. They eventually found that the bakery owner had put a hit out on him. Jeff Gehrman's colleagues continued to think that whoever killed him was doing this out of retaliation. And after they saw the photo, they focused on one name.

In May of 2022, Jeff had published a story about the Clark County public administrator, Robert Telles. Employees at the office told Jeff that Robert Telles had created a hostile environment, verbally abusing longtime employees and showing favoritism to others he had personally hired. One longtime staffer took a medical leave to deal with migraines from the stress. In Jeff's piece, he wrote...

Some staffers interviewed by the Review Journal cried while sharing details of their troubled work environment. The employees showed Jeff a video they had made secretly of Robert Tellis having a meeting in the back seat of an employee's car. Robert Tellis said that there was nothing inappropriate about his relationship with this employee. Jeff wrote two more articles about Robert Tellis. Shortly after, Robert Tellis wrote on Twitter...

Looking forward to Lawing Smearpiece No. 4 by Jeff Gehrman, Robert Tellis was also running for re-election that summer. On his campaign website, he had a section called Addressing the False Claims Against Me. He said he had looked into suing the Review-Journal for Jeff's reporting. On June 14th, Robert Tellis lost his primary. He was no longer a candidate for public administrator.

A few days later, he wrote on his campaign website that he thought Jeff Gehrman was still trying to drag him through the mud. I could see in that post he made on his campaign website that he was really frustrated and he didn't know what to do and that he didn't know how to stop these stories from coming out. Because, and that was kind of, it wasn't like Jeff was saying,

going after Tellis or anything. That was just how Jeff did his job. If there was something more on a story that he was covering, he was going to do everything he could to find out what it was. And he was never going to let up until he got it. And even after that, he might not let up. David and Review Journal editor, Kerry Gere, started looking at Robert Tellis' social media accounts.

comparing photos he had posted of himself to the police photos of the suspect. The way he stood in some of the photos on social media and the narrow gate of this suspect, to me, just looked very similar. He looked like he was a little bit shorter. And the things he had tweeted, the things he had written, a lot of this stuff started to start making sense. And, uh...

I just kind of went back and forth on my computer looking at these photos and then looking at photos that we had taken of Tellus for stories that we had done about him and comparing the height, the size. It looked pretty similar. And that day, I actually went out to...

Jeff's neighborhood and there was there was a bunch of construction going on road construction going on around Jeff's neighborhood and started to put these pieces together and as a reporter it's covered a lot of court

I just started thinking sort of like a detective or like a prosecutor who might try and put this story together to a jury or to a judge about what was going on. David thought that whoever had killed Jeff had likely driven around Jeff's neighborhood and noticed the construction. And so this would have been a Friday before a holiday. And...

He could have seen the construction and thought he wanted to blend in. So he puts this big sun hat on, puts this construction-looking type shirt on, and he could just walk around the neighborhood and make it look like he was somebody who was a worker just out there, either knocking off for lunch or something.

you know, leaving for the day early because it was holiday weekend and no one would really suspect anything. And he could be home within, you know, 15, 20 minutes or so pretty easily. And the neighborhood where Jeff lived seemed like it was pretty quiet. There weren't a lot of people out and about. So you sound, it seemed like you could get in and out pretty easily without anybody really noticing anything or much.

The next day, the Las Vegas police held a news conference. They announced they'd found a video of the suspect. We sent reporters, photographers, videographer to the news conference to cover it, obviously because this was our number one priority from the start. And we had a bunch of people in the newsroom. And all day long, this is all you're thinking about, all you're talking about, all you're

texting with people you know about. Word about the new video spread quickly. And we were sort of gathered around different computers watching the news conference on livestream. And they showed a screenshot of this maroon Yukon Denali. And within 20 minutes, a former reporter for the paper

sent me a screenshot from Facebook that showed, from Tellus' Facebook page, that showed his wife and kids standing next to the same vehicle. All that day, I'd been telling people that I thought it could be this guy. And a lot of people in the newsroom, maybe a little bit more level-headed than me, thought we need to keep all the, you know, everything...

All the possibilities, we can't just think, you know, can't just focus on one thing. But when we saw that image of the vehicle and his wife and kids standing next to the vehicle, and I think a lot of people were just kind of shocked that it was right there, out there in the open. They typed Robert Tellis' address into Google Maps.

On Street View, they could see a photo that had been taken just a few months earlier. The same car was in the driveway. As soon as we saw the Google Street View image, I sent it to one source and called him right away. And I said, did you get the text I just sent you? And he said, no. I said, I sent you a photo. And he said, hang on, let me check. And you kind of could tell that he looks down and he just says, holy shit.

We'll be right back. After the Review Journal reporters matched the maroon Denali with Robert Tellis' car, they shared what they'd found with the police. Reporters Caitlin Newberg and Brett Clarkson and photographer Ben Hager went to Robert Tellis' home. When they got there, they parked down the street. Brett Clarkson called David and said they could see Robert Tellis in the driveway, washing a maroon Yukon Denali. This is...

5.30, 6 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon in early September in Las Vegas. It was one of the hottest days of the year, one of the hottest times of the year. And he had a bottle of Windex and he was spraying down the windshield of one of his vehicles with the windshield wipers up, which makes no sense. And the reporter is telling me that he's standing here, he's looking around, he looks like maybe he's nervous or something. And we just...

Told them, you know, don't get too close. Just keep your distance. Keep an eye on it. Our photographer and reporters kind of stayed back and just observed. Ben Hager, the photographer, noticed several unmarked police vehicles parked on the street. And then reporter Caitlin Newberg got a phone call from her editor. The police wanted them to pull back. They moved to a new spot further away and stayed until midnight.

They came back at 6 the next morning. Brett Clarkson called David. He called me and said, the cops are here. They're setting up the police tape around the house. And that's when we started working on a story about the fact that police were serving a search warrant on the home of this elected official who Jeff had just reported on.

When the Review Journal published their story about the police searching Robert Tellis' home as part of their murder investigation, more and more reporters from other outlets started to show up at the house. For a few hours, the police took Robert Tellis for questioning. Then, that afternoon, he was escorted back home. Maybe an hour or two passes by again, and reporters are still outside the home, waiting for something to happen.

In the Review Journal newsroom, reporters were listening in on a police scanner. The police had put up tape to keep the media back from the house. But one of the newspaper photographers, Kevin Cannon, asked one of Robert Tellis' neighbors if he could watch from their yard, letting him get closer than anyone else. He said it was like being in a foxhole. He said he could hear everything, but kept his head down because he didn't want the police to see him.

And an officer arrived at the house, knocked on the door. No one answered. We had reporters who were listening to police scanners and kind of listening to this sort of exchange happening over the police radio waves. An officer said they're going to enter the house. The reporters heard that Robert Tellis had tried to injure himself and that paramedics were on the way. Tellis was brought out.

And they wheeled him out into an ambulance on a stretcher. And that's when police arrested him. Robert Tellis was charged with murder with the use of a deadly weapon. He entered a plea of not guilty. His trial was initially scheduled for April, but has been delayed a few times. He's representing himself. After the arrest, the Washington Post reached out to the staff at the Review-Journal to offer their condolences.

They also asked if there was anything they could do to help. The Review Journal told them that when Jeff died, he was in the middle of investigating a story about a Ponzi scheme that targeted Mormons. Washington Post reporter Lizzie Johnson took on the story. She flew to Las Vegas to read through Jeff's notes and do interviews. She said that when she arrived at the Review Journal's newsroom, it was clear the reporters were still in shock from Jeff's death.

Lizzie Johnson and Jeff Gehrman's story was co-published in the Washington Post and the Review Journal in February of this year. Jeff's boss, Glenn Cook, said it felt like closure. This year, Jeff Gehrman was posthumously awarded the Don Bowles Medal, an award for his career in investigative reporting. Don Bowles was killed for his reporting in 1976. Does it make you feel scared to be a reporter after seeing what happened to Jeff?

No, it doesn't make me feel scared because this sort of thing is so rare. And I think there's just, this is such a unique situation. But it does make me want to be more careful about just everything really. You know, be more aware of what's going on and more aware that you never know what other people could be thinking. I would say that I was more...

a little bit more nervous and more scared or more uneasy when I had no idea what had happened or why it had happened or who had done it or anything like that. Because Jeff and I had worked on a couple, you know, a few stories together. I mean, there could have been somebody who was angry at him for a story that we had worked on together at the time and they come after me. I mean, because like Jeff, he had covered mob figures, killers,

judges who've committed crimes and gone to prison for their own crimes, and people, you know, a lot more serious stuff. And I've covered a lot of that stuff too. I've covered a lot of bad people, and I've never felt like my life was in danger. In the days after Jeff's death, his desk filled up with flowers. Someone left a tiny football. Jeff had played in an office fantasy football league for years. Someone else left a framed copy of one of his stories.

During the police investigation into his death, police took Jeff's computer and phone. The Review Journal filed a motion to keep the police from looking through them. The paper wanted to protect Jeff's sources under his First Amendment right as a journalist. Jeff's boss at the Review Journal told the Washington Post, I have a hard time believing there's anybody in Nevada more deeply sourced than Jeff.

Other newspapers, including the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, signed on to an amicus brief in support. A judge is still making a decision on how much access to give the police to Jeff's devices. I think about Jeff every day and what happened to him. But the fact that I got to work alongside him and learn a little bit about being a journalist from him also helped.

almost everyone at the paper, we just wanted to do our best on this story for Jeff because that's what he would have done. And, you know, it's not just because he was a colleague, but it was because this was, is about, I don't know how to say this, but like, you know, just, he was just doing his job, you know?

I first met Jeff back in '99 when I came to the Review Journal and I was so happy when he joined the staff at the RJ so I could work alongside him. From the moment he got to the RJ, he was just a tenacious uncoverer of corruption. My memory of Jeff is basically he's kind of the quintessential Las Vegas journalist. Something that

Jeff would always say about a big story, he would call it wild and crazy. It's wild and crazy. And I just caught myself saying that yesterday and thinking about him. He would come into my office and talk to me and say, this one's going to be really good, or this is a big one. And the enthusiasm that he would have as he was getting closer and closer to publication, it was contagious. If Jeff got in the story, there was going to be

100 stories that he was going to write about it. And so that's what he was kind of known for, blanket coverage, always working hard and always trying to beat everybody else. He didn't want to be in the spotlight. He was forced into doing a picture for promotional purposes. He said that, I'll do it if Kevin takes the picture. And not that I'm the best photographer on staff, it's just that he's known me the longest, 25 years. And he...

I feel like his presence is still always there. And I mean, like,

A lot of people have his picture on their desk, a wall in the newsroom that's dedicated to him with his awards. His desk is still there. We obviously have to go on with our jobs, but, you know, I think he's always going to be part of that newsroom. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, Sam Kim, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. This episode was mixed by Veronica Simonetti. Fact-checking by Julia Harrison. Special thanks to Jeff Gehrman's colleagues, whose voices we heard at the end of the episode. Glenn Cook, Arthur Kane, and Kevin Cannon.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads and get a bonus episode each month. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus.

We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.