Celebrating a Decade of Reveal — The Show That Helped Investigative Radio Go Mainstream

Reveal is an investigative radio show and podcast produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting in the United States. It is heard by more than one million people each week across more than 500 public radio stations. The stated mission is to “hold the powerful accountable by reporting about everything from racial and social injustices to threats to public safety and democracy.” This is the transcript of a podcast produced by the team to celebrate 10 years in the business, and is republished with permission. You can listen to the original here. 

The first pilot episode of Reveal exposed how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing opioids to veterans and contributing to an overdose crisis. Journalist Aaron Glantz explained how he received — surprisingly quickly — a decade’s worth of opioid prescription data from the federal government.

“Sometimes, you have to sue to get the records,” he said. “I have to think that there were some people over there in DC who were as concerned as we were about this.”

After that first show was made, host Al Letson didn’t know what to expect. “We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” he said.

Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Congress held hearings during a government lockdown, and there’s been a sea change in the way veterans are prescribed painkillers. And today, the show is on more than 500 stations.

This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.

Al Letson: I am Al Letson. Today we’re going back to a simpler time. In 2013, I got a call from a friend and a mentor who asked me if I’d be interested in hosting a pilot for a new show centered on investigative journalism, and that was the start of what would become…

From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.

It’s been 10 years since Reveal became a public radio show and podcast. In that time, we’ve talked to thousands of people all around the world bringing you stories that inspire, that enrage, that enlighten to try to give you and me a better understanding of the world we live in. Today, I am proud to say this is our 10th-anniversary special. It’s a celebration of the staff, the people we’ve talked to, and the stories that have made the show what it is, and you, our listeners.

Listener: Hey, this is Lauren from Norristown, PA. I just want to say that your reporting is essential to communities everywhere and allows for the truth to be discovered, and I just want to say thank you for all that you do and happy 10 years and here’s to many more.

When I first came to the Center for Investigative Reporting, I wasn’t sure if it was a good fit. I had just finished hosting my own show that was all about talking to everyday people and I told anyone who’d listen I wasn’t Tom Brokaw or Edward R. Murrow. I didn’t even see myself as a journalist. I was a storyteller who worked with journalists, but the folks at CIR said they wanted to try a new approach and have the host of Reveal be a stand-in for the audience. They said they would surround me with journalists, including former executive director of CIR, Robert “Rosey” Rosenthal. Rosey, thanks for coming on.

Robert Rosenthal: Thank you, Al. It’s always great to be with you.

Al Letson: Rosey’s too modest to say it, but I will. He’s legendary. He’s been a part of some of the biggest news stories for decades, including the Pentagon Papers, which shifted the trajectory of the Vietnam War. He’s also been a part of some of the most prestigious newsrooms like The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Robert Rosenthal: Yes. I left the Times in 1974. I had a very good career as a reporter at the Boston Globe. I covered presidential campaigns and did investigative reporting, but I came to the Inquirer in 1980. I was a foreign correspondent, which I loved, in Africa, in the Middle East, and eventually became the editor of the Inquirer, and was fired.

Al Letson: Rosey was forced out after clashing with corporate executives. Newspapers were struggling at the time and the media landscape was in disarray, so when he became the executive director of CIR, he and his team knew they had to do something different and they had an idea. They wanted to take investigative reporting onto the airwaves.

Robert Rosenthal: You told the print story, but you also created radio for it. It was a very creative take-a-risk environment. It all grew out a really great reporting.

Al Letson: The first step was to gather some amazing producers and reporters to make pilots of the show, with me as the host. We didn’t really know what we were doing. We were just feeling around in the dark, but we knew our reporter, Aaron Glantz, had a big story.

Aaron Glantz: And it was specifically a story about how the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is the largest integrated hospital system in America with nine million patients, people were coming home from war with PTSD, with traumatic brain injuries, with back injuries, depression, whatever it was, and the government was just giving them painkillers. And so what I wanted to do was substantiate that that was true and find out exactly where it was happening and to what extent it was happening. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the VA for all their prescription records and a week-and-a-half later I had a decade of opioid prescription records from the VA.

Al Letson: I’ve never heard of that happening.

Aaron Glantz: No. Usually you end up with a months-long fight or sometimes even years-long fight. Sometimes you have to sue to get the records, right, and I have to think that there were some people over there in DC who were as concerned as we were about this. So what we end up getting is these huge spreadsheets of 10 years of prescriptions for oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, and morphine, and it became very clear almost immediately that there had been a huge 270% increase in the number of opioids prescribed by the VA since 9/11 and that their patients were dying at twice the rate of the national average from overdose.

Al Letson: So we sent Aaron to rural New Hampshire with a microphone to meet Tim Fazio, a Marine Corps veteran who fought in the Iraq war.

Aaron Glantz: His parents had told us to go talk to him. He was deep in the addiction but trying to get clean and I ended up sleeping on the floor of his apartment — in the living room — and in the middle of the night a buddy of his came over. Both him and his buddy were trying to stay clean, and so they just stayed up together making eggs in the middle of the night, and I can remember standing there with my microphone taping the frying of the eggs.

It’s three in the morning in Newport, New Hampshire. Tim Fazio is cooking eggs over easy… He’s dressed in shorts in an undershirt. The Marine Corps veteran says he prefers the nights where there are no loud noises to trigger post-traumatic stress disorder, which he developed after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Tim Fazio: I thought the painkillers were okay because the doctors were prescribing it to me, so it was okay.

Aaron Glantz: Fazio’s medical record shows he started getting opiates from the VA in 2008, two years after he left the Corps. Since then, the agency has provided him with nearly 4,000 oxycodone pills and more than a dozen bottles of Tramadol, another opioid painkiller. He told me he was never in acute physical pain, but he took the pills to blot out the guilt and shame of surviving when so many of his fellow Marines died in combat.  

Tim Fazio: If the doctors are giving this to me, I’m going to take it. You know? (Beep) Makes you feel good, I’m going to take 15 of them. You know what I mean?

Al Letson: Fazio was hooked. When the pills didn’t get him high, he started on heroin. He overdosed again and again. The VA determined that he was an addict and yet continued to dole out more oxycodone…

Aaron Glantz: That story was the first major story about the overdose crisis as related to veterans. It had been something that people were talking about for a long time behind closed doors, just kind of in whispers, and we threw it out in the open.

Al Letson: And we wanted more reporters to do the same. So we shared all that prescription data we got from the government and we trained local journalists how to use it so they could report on veterans being affected in their own communities. This crisis was nationwide. Our story made waves and lawmakers were paying attention.

Aaron Glantz: So Congress started talking — they actually held a hearing in the middle of a government shutdown — on this issue, and there’s been a real sea change in the number of prescriptions that are made of these dangerous painkillers. And although we’re in the midst of a fentanyl epidemic, as we all know, the government is no longer party to that epidemic. Instead, it’s part of wrestling with that.

Al Letson: That story went on to win a Peabody Award and it was just the pilot episode, but when we were first putting it out there, we weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it. We thought maybe 10? 150 stations ran the program. We were excited but also terrified because stations now wanted a weekly show and that was a tall order. A weekly investigative show is a beast, and we needed someone who could help us figure it out. Enter my friend and former executive producer of Reveal, Kevin Sullivan.

Kevin Sullivan: So I was brought onto the show after you guys did the pilots, and part of the reason I wanted to do the show was because I listened to the pilots and I was really just blown away. I hadn’t heard anything like it before.

Al Letson: Just to be really honest, I did the pilots for Reveal because I needed a paycheck and when they started talking about turning it into a weekly show, I thought, I’m going to stay around and keep getting these paychecks, but there’s no way this thing is going to go weekly.

Kevin Sullivan: Yeah. And to be honest, I had my doubts. And everyone said, there is no way you can do a weekly investigative radio show for public radio. There just aren’t the resources. There aren’t enough stories. You’re never going to make it work.

Al Letson: But clearly we did. We assembled a strong team and made some great audio….

Kevin Sullivan: I mean, man, people don’t know how many stories we have done.

Speaker 1: He told me get on the ground, and I asked him what I’m getting on the ground for?

Kevin Sullivan: The show’s been around for 10 years now…

Speaker 2: Any good company will say, let’s investigate this. Who else is affected? What else is going on? That didn’t happen here.

Kevin Sullivan: … and sometimes up to three stories a show.

Speaker 3: They’re saying to us, if you don’t let us out of here, we’re going to put this prison on the news.

Al Letson: We were beginning to figure out what the show was, but we still hadn’t broken through.

Kevin Sullivan: The real turning point for me, when it comes to Reveal, was the day after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

Speaker 4: Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States.

Speaker 5: President-elect Donald Trump.

Speaker 6: Donald J. Trump, a real estate magnate and reality star with zero government or military experience will soon be our 45th president. How did he pull this off?

Al Letson: I think it’s fair to say that most news media didn’t see Donald Trump’s first election win coming, including Reveal. We were prepping to interview one of his supporters based on what the polls were saying — that he would lose.

Kevin Sullivan: We had an interview set up with Richard Spencer, you know, this white supremacist who saw President Trump coming in as the future for him and the people who thought the way he did, and we had set this interview up because we wanted to find out, ‘oh, what are you going to do now that Trump loses?’ But of course we were all wrong.

Al Letson: At the time, Richard Spencer was one of the leaders of the alt right, a racist movement that was planting roots across the country. Spencer was masquerading his hatred behind a political think tank. He’d been making the rounds and for the most part, journalists weren’t calling him out. When I interviewed him, I told him I thought his shtick was just the same old thing. The only difference between him and the Klan was that he wore a suit. It’s all racism and white supremacy.

Richard Spencer: Well, I don’t think it is the same old thing that you’ve heard before. I think you just said that it’s not, that you’re actually intrigued by it. Look, I’m not going to comment about some hypothetical Klansman or whomever…

Al Letson: There’s no such thing as a hypothetical Klansman because the people that I’m talking about exist. They have gone out. They have burned crosses on people’s lawns. They have lynched people. They’ve done horrible, horrible things. They are the first American terrorists. So it’s not hypothetical. I’m not comparing you to this thing that I’m just dreaming up. I’m comparing you to history and I’m not intrigued by your ideas. I’m saying to you that your ideas sound just like them except you wear a nice suit and you can speak to me directly and I respect that about you…

Kevin Sullivan: That show, I feel like, that interview really put us on the map because it showed the combination of, first of all, just the humanity that you and the rest of the staff bring to all of our stories, but it was based on reporting. It was based on knowing everything we could find out about this guy and not letting him get away with anything in the moment.

Al Letson: When I came to Reveal, I still didn’t really call myself a journalist because I don’t know, I think I had such a high standard for what a journalist should be, but in the time that I was working at Reveal, I feel like you kind of taught me what the job of journalism was, and I think all of it kind of came to a head when we did the Richard Spencer interview, and I felt like it was really important for me to step into that title, to hold it, and to hold people accountable.

Kevin Sullivan: When I was hired, they said, you know, Al doesn’t have background as a journalist, but he’s going to be a stand in for the listener. That’s his role. He’s a stand in for the listener. I said, okay. I was like, there’s no way I’m going for that.

Al Letson: [Laughs]

Kevin Sullivan: There’s no way I’m going for that.

Richard Spencer: The ideal of a white ethno-state, and it is an ideal, is something that I think we should think about in the sense of what could come after America. It’s kind of like a grand goal.  

Al Letson: Richard, respectfully, man. So are you saying that America has to end in order for your ethno-state to happen? Because if you are trying to have a white ethno-state, what you’re basically saying is that you have to forcibly remove people, because I got to tell you I’m African American and I’m not leaving. 

That interview was a paradigm shift for me and the show, and over time we would go from 150 stations to over 500 across the country, in big cities and hundreds of small towns.

Listener: My name is Elena Claver in Niwot, Colorado. I absolutely love and depend on Reveal for its unflinching courage in tackling important stories. It’s too hard to pick one favorite program, but one was Al’s interview with a racist white supremacist, and I was completely blown away, not only at Al’s sheer bravery, but also the way he maintained his composure and calm in the face of such brutal ignorance and even malevolence.

And people weren’t just listening on the radio. Our podcast was reaching people all over the world.

Listener: Hi, Reveal. I’m Carlos Lopez from Mexico City. First of all, happy 10th anniversary. For me, the podcast is an invaluable source of interesting topics and deeply well told stories about what we experience as a society. I hope you continue telling such relevant and impactful stories for many more years to come.

Coming up, the people we get the privilege to interview and the real-world impact of a good story.

Kandy Latson: Yeah. We brainwash them because their brain is dirty.

Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is a special 10th anniversary episode of Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today we’re taking a look back and celebrating some of our most memorable stories, the staff who helped make them, and you, too, our listeners, because well we wouldn’t be here without you.

Listener: Your stories have deepened my understanding of the human experience and the real America, and has made me feel more connected to this world. Thank you so much Al and the Reveal team.

Al Letson: The Reveal team started out as a small but mighty group. Once we got the show on the air and started picking up stations fast, we began to refine our sound to really focus on what the show was about. To put it simply, accountability. We don’t want to just tell stories about something bad that happened or is happening, we want to hold institutions and people accountable.

Katharine Mieszkowski: The first story I did for Reveal was literally just about rich people behaving badly.

Al Letson: My friend and former colleague, Katharine Mieszkowski, spent years working on a wide range of investigations at Reveal.

Katharine Mieszkowski: So it was this drought story. I don’t know if you remember this one?

Al Letson: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. It was the Fresh Prince of what did we call it?

Katharine Mieszkowski: The Wet Prince of Bel Air.

Al Letson: There you go.

Katharine Mieszkowski: Who is the Wet Prince of Bel Air?

Al Letson: Climate coverage is in the DNA of what we do, and this was one of our first shows on the issue from way back in 2015.

Katharine Mieszkowski: California was in this terrible drought and everyone was going to pull together and conserve, and when you went to a restaurant they wouldn’t give you a glass of water because it was like, you need to ask for it. We looked at like, “Well, what about the people who just aren’t conserving and are just using as much water as they feel like?” And so we set out to find out who those people were. I got to run around with a celebrity tour guide in these fancy neighborhoods trying to peek behind hedges and gates and stuff.

Tour guide: Yeah, I think Bel Air has the biggest hedges.

Katharine Mieszkowski: Usually Steve takes tourists to Bel Air and Beverly Hills to gawk at the luxury, what you can see of it from the street that is, like David Beckham’s driveway and a little corner of Tom Cruise’s house, a house is probably the wrong word. These are estates, mansions, temples to opulence. Some of them are 30,000 square feet. From the street, it’s pretty hard to see much since many are cloistered behind towering gates and hedges… 

Tour guide: We just passed Madonna’s old house and that was on the market for $25 million.

Katharine Mieszkowski: Today we are not here trolling for celebrities, but for extreme water wasters.

Al Letson: To find these people who are wasting precious water, Katharine and her reporting partner, Lance Williams, spent months trying to get access to utility records.

Katharine Mieszkowski: Not a single agency would cough up the names and how much water they were using.

Lance Williams: The law allows them to conceal or keep secret utility records, but says they can make them public if that’s in the public interest. Nobody thought it was in the public interest.

Al Letson: But Katharine and Lance didn’t give up. They kept making public records requests and finally found at least one Wet Prince of Bel Air.

Katharine Mieszkowski: We found this house that used 11.8 million gallons of water in one year, which is like 90 families. It’s an estate.

Katharine Mieszkowski: This property is the size of a park and as green as one. It’s also the former TV home to the Beverly Hillbillies, and it’s actually in Bel Air, not Beverly Hills… And this is all the same property?  

Tour guide: Yeah.

Katharine Mieszkowski: Wow. That just goes on and on. The gardener’s looking at us with suspicion.

Tour guide: Yes.

Katharine Mieszkowski: They’re shutting the gates.

Lance Williams: Close the gate. Yeah.

Katharine Mieszkowski: Yeah. They’re like, “Get away. You’re not wanted here.”

Basically, the thrust of the story was, the rich people are doing whatever they want while we’re all letting our lawns die, kind of thing. So, it really fueled this sort of populist outrage.

Al Letson: That outrage motivated the California state legislature to do something. Lawmakers actually changed the law and capped how much water people can use, and if you use more than that, well you’re going to get outed.

Katharine Mieszkowski: Your name is going to end up in the public record. You can end up paying fines and then everyone’s going to know who you are.

Al Letson: Changing laws and having an impact is really difficult to do. And one thing is crucial. You have to have the sources, brave people whose lives are at the center of the stories we tell, people who are willing to come forward and go on the record with our reporters, even when they’re in really vulnerable situations and sometimes putting themselves at risk to share their stories. That’s especially true of our investigation into labor abuses in one of the poorest areas of the Dominican Republic. It’s where we met a teenager named Lulu Pierre.

Lulu Pierre: Today is Sunday. I haven’t had anything to eat since Friday. I can’t do this work, so I resolved not to do it and see what God is going to do with me. I have to go home.

Al Letson: Lulu was taken from his family and sent to work in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. It’s where a journalist named Sandy Tolan first found him three decades ago.

Sandy Tolan: I still carry the memory of him. A child standing barefoot under a punishing sun in a place called Batey 8, all stick limbs and sunken eyes. He was 14. It was 1991.

Lulu Pierre: Lulu… Lulu Pierre.

Sandy Tolan: With my cassette recorder rolling, Lulu told us he’d been kidnapped at a market on the Haitian border in broad daylight.

Lulu Pierre: [Short clip].

Sandy Tolan: For decades, I’d think about Lulu Pierre and wonder if he ever got back to his mother. So, when I returned to the island three decades later, I tried to find him. Working with reporter Euclides Cordero Nuel, I looked in the Dominican bateys [settlements built around a sugar mill], went to the Haitian border, and to Lulu’s hometown in Haiti. We heard he’d made it home, but we never found him.

Al Letson: The story didn’t end there, because what Sandy and Euclides did find was that all these decades later, the cane cutters were still being paid a pittance and living in bateys, work camps without running water, electricity, or even proper health care.

Michael Montgomery: There were still huge problems in the Dominican sugar industry.

Al Letson: That’s Reveal senior reporter Michael Montgomery, who helped produce the story in 2021.

Michael Montgomery: We had evidence of forced labor, and this really matters, because at the time this was sugar coming to the United States and into supply chains of brands we all know Domino, Florida Crystals, Hershey… This is something we consume every day, and yet we didn’t know how it’s connected to the lives of these cane cutters. So, we felt that this was a perfect investigation for Reveal to connect one part of the world to another.

Al Letson: Michael, the voices of the cane cutters are so moving. What happened after our story came out?

Michael Montgomery: A lot has happened, and I want to make it clear that there’s been a lot of work by NGOs and by anti-trafficking groups on this topic. There’s been a lot of reports. Our story comes out together with some of these NGO reports. There is immediately a group of lawmakers calling on the Biden administration to take action. US Customs opens an investigation, and a year later, citing evidence of forced labor, they issue an order banning the import of sugar from the Dominican Republic that’s produced by this company, the Central Romana Corporation. After that, Homeland Security opened a criminal investigation. So, our story has had quite a lot of impact.

Al Letson: That import ban on Central Romana sugar is still in place, though the company has denied allegations of forced labor.

Our stories come about in lots of different ways. Sometimes reporters get lucky and just stumble into a good story. Other times they cover an issue for years, become experts in a topic, build up their sources, and then bam, they discover something huge, something so big and so complicated, it’s impossible to explain in an hour. In 2020, we found one of those stories and it would ultimately become Reveal’s first serial, American Rehab. It was produced and reported by a team of journalists, including my former colleague, Laura Starecheski. My dear friend, Laura Starecheski, how are you?

Laura Starecheski: I’m pretty good. I’m better now that we’re together.

Al Letson: … and Ike Sriskandarajah, my mellow, my brother.

Ike Sriskandarajah: Oh, my God. Al Letson, everybody.

Al Letson: Dude, it’s been too long.

Ike Sriskandarajah: Oh, it feels good.

Al Letson: American Rehab came out of years of covering the drug rehab industry. The opioid crisis was surging and reporters, Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, had uncovered all kinds of crazy stuff in drug treatment programs. But nothing compared to this one story that Sho kept hearing.

Laura Starecheski: She was telling me this wild story that had to do with a cult and Ronald Reagan and the NFL and the Salvation Army. And at the core of all of it was this phenomenon where people were going to what they thought was an addiction treatment program and in some cases being forced to go by court order and in fact being made to work but not getting paid.

Al Letson: So, the work is the treatment. And she found one story here and she found one story there, and she’s starting to get these tips that were pouring in and wanted to map how widespread this phenomenon was.

Laura Starecheski: Where were these workers that no one wanted us to talk to and no one wanted us to find? And we ended up — after trying everything else — to just tail a van full of people going to work from the addiction treatment center, from Cenikor, and see where it went.

Al Letson: Cenikor is the name of the drug treatment program at the center of this investigation. People were going for help and then were forced to work for no pay or pennies on the dollar. They were shuttled to job sites in these unmarked vans.

Laura Starecheski: Every morning before 6 a.m, unmarked white passenger vans full of rehab participants pull out of the Cenikor parking lot. The vans go to job sites all over Baton Rouge. We’re going to follow a van, see where it goes, and try to talk to the people inside. So, we wait. Ten minutes go by.

Is there another entrance and exit?

Sho: I don’t think so.

Laura Starecheski: 20. There’s a van. One of the big white passenger vans pulls out of the Cenikor parking lot. It has no Cenikor logo on the side, no markings of any kind. It just says “Vehicle #20” on the back, and we can’t see inside. We start following it.Why are there two cars all of a sudden in between us and the van?

We’re immediately paranoid that they know our plan and are trying to stop it.

And that became a whole episode of the series, which was really fun. And of course there were silly moments of us just trying to keep up with the van. We’re not professional drivers.

Are they getting off at the next exit?

Sho: I can’t see.

Laura Starecheski: Oh, jerks.

And we lose the van.

Are they still in the right lane?

Sho: I don’t know. All we can do is try to see if they’re still on here. Because if they got off, then we’re kind of screwed.

Laura Starecheski: This is the point where Sho jams the gas pedal to the floor and passes a whole line of cars.

My God, you’re amazing. Yes. Wow.

Al Letson: American Rehab had everything from a car chase to unforgettable people.

Kandy Latson: Yeah, we brainwash them because they brain is dirty.

Al Letson: That clip is my all-time favorite sound bite. It’s just so good. You get lucky once in a while, like once in a lifetime to meet somebody like Kandy Latson.

Kandy Latson: Kandy with a K, K-A-N-D-Y, not no fucking C.

Al Letson: And who just is an incredible storyteller, has lived this wild life and was at the beginning of something, the origin story of the popularization of this form of rehab, and he could really sell it.

So this form of work-based rehab started at a place called Synanon. It’s where Kandy got sober long ago before drug rehabs as we know them even existed. Kandy was 83 when we spoke, living in Santa Monica in an apartment that’s not far from where Synanon was founded. Synanon helped Kandy get off drugs. The Korean War is how he got on them.

Kandy Latson: When we landed at Incheon off the boat, and we would run it, because the Koreans was up on top of the hill shooting 50-caliber machine guns with tracer bullets and tracer bullets light up and then tracers was hitting the sand and lighting up so as you ran, they could get a flasher where you was.

Al Letson: Kandy was born in Raccoon Bend, Texas, a small town with not a lot going on. So when he was just 15 years old, he lied about his age and joined the US Army. Not long after that, he was on that beach at Incheon outside of Seoul, dodging tracer bullets.

Kandy Latson: Then I looked at my left and it was a boy from Georgia named Country who shot crooked dice, but he told good jokes. So, he’d tell you a good joke and they’d be laughing, but he’d be cheating you out your fucking money. And I saw a bullet hit Country right in the middle of his head, his forehead, and the blood skidded in the air. So, I didn’t want to get shot in my face.

Al Letson: It wasn’t only the Korean People’s Army that was trying to kill Kandy. Now by his account, his newly integrated platoon wanted him dead, too. Kandy says a group of white soldiers with Confederate tattoos abandoned him behind enemy lines. He was stuck alone in enemy territory. Scared, he looked into a tree where he thought the North Koreans were hiding and he begged them to shoot him anywhere but his face. Ten hours later, he found the tire tracks in the mud from Army Jeeps and he followed them all the way back to his camp.

Kandy Latson: So look, when I had gotten back from the field, Sergeant Willie, who was in World War II said, “Young Blood, where you been?” I told him. He said, “Here,” he said, “take this. This will calm you down,” because I was shaking, and it was a cigarette and it was twisted at the end, and I lit it and smoked it. And it was China White heroin, like pure opium. And that’s how I started using drugs. I had never had a drug in my life before.

Al Letson: Kandy spent years addicted to heroin. He eventually kicked the habit and he credited Synanon with saving his life. This is part of what makes this story so complicated. Some of these rehab centers profit off the unpaid labor of people in the throes of addiction. And also sometimes the treatment works.

Laura, when you guys were working on this, I feel like you had to walk a tightrope between compassion and asking hard questions about the most difficult times in people’s lives.

Laura Starecheski: I’ve worked in a lot of newsrooms, and the Reveal newsroom felt to me like a real sense of mission at the heart of it. I guess I just don’t think that there are many places that have all of those ingredients mixed together, the caring, compassion, and also this hard-bitten mission of uncovering things that people in power really do not want uncovered.

Al Letson: Reveal’s reporting on rehab centers had a big impact. Many employers canceled contracts with Cenikor, the rehab at the center of our story, and at least one of their programs that use unpaid labor closed down. We reached out to Cenikor to see if they’ve changed their labor practices more broadly since our series first aired, but they never got back to us. In a different drug rehab program, a federal judge ruled that 172 participants were owed more than $1.1 million in back wages.

After a short break, an investigation that goes all the way back to slavery.

Nadia Hamdan: Do you feel like descendants of the formerly enslaved who have worked land on these plantations are warranted some kind of payment or reparations for the time they spent enslaved?

Jenks Mikell: No

Nadia Hamdan: No?

Jenks Mikell: No

Al Letson: That’s up next on Reveal. From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is a special 10th anniversary episode of Reveal.

Listener: Congratulations on your 10th year anniversary and I’m wishing you a hundred more.

I’m Al Letson, and today we’re taking a look back and not just our favorite stories, but yours too.

Listener: My name is Punta Deleste Bozeman. My favorite episode was the story related to the Mississippi young Black athlete that was killed supposedly by suicide. As I was listening to the story, I could literally put myself there while all the events were occurring, and that’s excellent storytelling on Reveal’s part.

Al Letson: Punta, thank you so much for that message and for shouting out Mississippi Goddam The Ballad of Billey Joe. I first heard about Billey Joe Johnson’s death way before I came to Reveal. I was in Mississippi working on a story about an oil spill in the Gulf. I met some Black folks from a small rural town called Lucedale, and they kept telling me about Billey Joe Johnson, a high school football star with a bright future whose life was cut short. Once I heard what they had to say, I couldn’t let it go, but I didn’t have the resources to investigate, so I held onto that story for almost a decade until I came to Reveal and could finally dive into Billey Joe Johnson’s death.

In December of 2008, a month after Obama was elected, a white cop pulled Billey Joe over. Authorities say Billey Joe handed the officer his driver’s license. The officer then went back to his cruiser to run a check. He said while he was looking down reading the license, he heard the gunshot. He looked up and Billey Joe was lying on the ground, blood pooling from his head, a shotgun on top of his body. Initially, police said Billey Joe died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The official story left so many questions unanswered trying to get to the bottom of what happened was personal to me because when I met Billey Joe’s family, I could feel their pain and their rage at a system that wouldn’t listen to them. I understood that in my gut. I grew up in a little town in the South and watched injustice all around me. Black people’s issues were minimized or completely erased. I understood why the Johnsons and the Black community felt unheard. They thought Billey Joe was murdered and felt like no one had seriously looked into it, and that’s what I wanted to do, to give Billey Joe’s case the investigation he deserved.

Jonathan Jones: It really set the tone for how we were going to tell the story.

Al Letson: That’s Reveal’s Jonathan Jones, he was my reporting partner on this story.

Jonathan Jones: Yes, we were going to go deep and forensically look at what had happened to Billey Joe Johnson, but it wasn’t like it happened in isolation, how we perceive things, how we understand things happen in the context of everything else that goes on in America.

Al Letson: With this series, I wanted to draw a line from Billey Joe’s death to the larger story of this country, dying as a young Black man in the Deep South in police custody carries the weight of history. So while we spent most of our time in Lucedale, Mississippi, Billey Joe’s hometown, we also drove to Montgomery, Alabama, home to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a place that’s dedicated to the victims of lynching. It was such a delicate line to walk because we in no way wanted to suggest to the audience that Billey Joe Johnson was lynched, we didn’t know. At the same time the sins of the past were the lens through which his parents saw Billey Joe’s death. To understand his family, you had to understand his history.

I could have spent hours just walking the pavilion, but there’s a structure in the main exhibit that has its own gravity. I followed the paved pathway that leads to it. There are no walls, just a roof and what looks like columns. When you get closer, you see the columns are suspended from the roof to the wood deck floor. The monoliths are rust-colored metal rectangles, engraved on each are state, county and the names of people.

Speaker 9: Clay County, Mississippi, William Gates.

Al Letson: People who’ve been lynched.

Speaker 9: John Williamson, Milt Calvert.

Al Letson: I knew I was going to see a lot of names, but –

Speaker 9: Cleveland McBee.

Al Letson: … when you look out across the structure, you realize how big it is.

Speaker 9: Winston County, Mississippi.

Al Letson: It’s breathtaking.

Speaker 9: Eli Bryant. Lewis Hodge.

Al Letson: I couldn’t count the columns. It’s that many.

Speaker 9: Daniel McDonald. William Carter.

Al Letson: I don’t think this story will ever leave me. It’s always on the edges of my mind. When you go that deep into who Billey Joe was as a young man, the lost his family feels and how it’s all entwined with the history of the Deep South, it’s heavy and something that neither Jonathan nor I could easily let go.

The US National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Image: Wikipedia, Soniakapadia, Creative Commons

Jonathan Jones: After we did that series, various people have reached out about suspicious deaths, and I’ve looked into some of them, and some of them you look at and you see that there’s hundreds of pages of police investigation files. They talked to 44 people. They followed every lead that the family gave them. None of the sort of rigorous investigations occurred at any point for the Johnson family, and so it’s not as if everybody has the same experience from the local law enforcement, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, they all failed this family and in some ways then they failed America and that really sits with me and it makes me very angry.

Al Letson: Examining race in America is something that’s important to us at Reveal. This nation has failed to deal with its history of racism. It’s messy and hard to look at and doesn’t serve some people’s narrative about the country. That’s always been the case, but right now we’re at a flashpoint with the speed of misinformation and the obscuring of the past has increased exponentially. Books about race are being banned from school libraries and some states have made it nearly impossible to teach Black history in public schools, that’s why it’s even more important to tell those stories.

Listener: Hi, Reveal. My name is Susie. I absolutely love your program. And your podcasts, I have learned so much from them. Thanks for having an awesome show.

Just recently, during Black History Month, we revisited our three-part series called 40 Acres and a Lie, a historical investigation into a government program that could have changed the trajectory of Black Americans coming out of slavery. Today we refer to the program as 40 Acres and a Mule, and we think of it as a promise that was never kept, but our investigation found that Black Americans were actually given land only to have it taken away. Our reporting took us to Edisto Island, South Carolina to have hard conversations. The kind that leave you thinking long after the mics go off.

Nadia Hamdan: Do you feel like descendants of the formerly enslaved who have worked land on these plantations on Edisto Island are warranted some kind of payment or reparations for the time they spent enslaved?

Jenks Mikell: No

Nadia Hamdan: No?

Jenks Mikell: No

Nadia Hamdan: Why is that?

Jenks Mikell: Anybody in this country who wants to do better has the opportunity to do it. There are many, many, many Black folks around this country that have been very, very successful. Now, you explain to me why.

40 Acres and a Lie was a collaboration between Mother Jones, Reveal, and the Center for Public Integrity. The investigation explored a government program that gave formerly enslaved people land after the Civil War, only to take nearly all of it back a year and a half later. Image: Screenshot, Mother Jones

Al Letson: That’s Jenks Mikell speaking with Reveal producer Nadia Hamdan. Jenks lives on a sprawling, beautiful former plantation that was passed down to him from his great-great-grandfather, a wealthy slave owner from South Carolina. It’s part of his generational wealth, but as we learned, for a brief moment, some of that land was given to formerly enslaved people. We also know the federal government actually gave them land titles. We found names of more than 1,200 Black Americans who were given land titles across the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. There, Black folks were trying to build their own communities when it was taken away and given back to the former enslavers like Jenks’ great-great-grandfather.

Nadia Hamdan: I mean, I guess I’m trying to understand how –

Jenks Mikell: It’s all up to them.

Nadia Hamdan: … hundreds of –

Jenks Mikell: We keep giving away stuff, that’s all we’re going to be able to do is give away because people don’t want to work because they don’t have to work because all we’re doing is giving them freebies. Nobody ever gave me anything other than this, and I had to sweat bullets to keep it.

Nadia Hamdan: I respect that, I just, there’s no denying that hard work has gone into your life, but I think even you just said, “I haven’t been given anything, but I was given this.” And so is it not fair to at least acknowledge that there has been some privilege in having a hold of this land?

Jenks Mikell: Did they not have land?

Nadia Hamdan: They meaning Black people?

Jenks Mikell: Yeah, they had it.

Nadia Hamdan: And then it was taken away.

Al Letson: The series 40 Acres and a Lie was a partnership with the Center for Public Integrity and Mother Jones, and it recently won a prestigious duPont-Columbia Journalism award. Nadia spent two years on this project as the lead producer going through hour upon hour of tape. Working at Reveal for a decade now, I have heard some really great stories and heard a lot of great tape that ends up on the cutting room floor. Sometimes your good stuff, it doesn’t fit what you’re trying to do or you’re alone and you just have to figure it out and I feel like the cuts that you guys had to make, oh, some cuts were brutal. The cut that did not make it that I think about all the time-

Nadia Hamdan: It’s the same one I think about, I’m sure.

Al Letson: Yeah, the bricks, right?

Nadia Hamdan: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Al Letson: The bricks.

Nadia Hamdan: The McLeod Plantation, which is in Charleston, South Carolina, it’s a plantation unlike many other plantations. You walk and take a tour of the plantation from the perspective of the enslaved, and so we met a woman named Toby Smith who’s a historian, and Toby was our tour guide. She stopped us at a wall, it was just a brick wall.

Toby Smith: And they had to turn these bricks over because you can’t put wet bricks in the kiln and sometimes the bricks would be too heavy, and they would squeeze too tightly, and it would leave finger marks like these, these are some of our children.

Nadia Hamdan: There were small fingerprints in the brick and she shared with us that they had found out that those were the fingerprints of small children. Sorry, I’ve never talked about this before and it’s making me emotional because small children, small enslaved Black children were also the ones who had to hold the brick and form the brick with their own hands.

Toby Smith: Children were used in every single horrific way possible, bought, sold, raped, abused, beaten, lynched, and hung. Everything that happened to adults happened to children, and we have to reconcile ourselves to that.

Al Letson: That’s the hard part, reconciling the past with the present. While none of us were alive then, we still have to deal with what’s left, just like the fingerprints in the bricks.

As we were finishing this series, our partner, Public Integrity, went through some serious turmoil. The nonprofit news organization laid off most of its staff. Reporters and editors who originally brought us the 40 Acres story lost their jobs.

Nadia Hamdan: It was incredibly difficult to watch these reporters you’ve been working on this story so deeply with go through that. This is kind of the sad reality of the industry we’re in right now. It’s really fragile right now.

Al Letson: Journalism is being challenged in ways we haven’t seen before. About 8,000 people have been laid off from news jobs in the past two years alone. With President Donald Trump back in the White House, major news networks and public media are both under attack with lawsuits and threats to pull broadcasters licenses and calls to end funding for NPR and PBS, but we’re still here and we aren’t going anywhere. Someone has to be the voice of the little guy, to speak truth to power, to meet people where they are and take you with us.

Speaker 10: The town of Alamogordo comes out of the desert kind of all of a sudden.

Speaker 11: Where am I right now?

Speaker 12: On one side…

Speaker 11: It is the Blue Moon Hookah Lounge in Dearborn Heights.

Speaker 13: You pull into a parking lot at Barton Springs, a natural swimming hole.

Speaker 14: We’re so deep in the mountains, there’s no GPS signal. You feel like you’re driving into the clouds.

Al Letson: Talking to my former and current colleagues and hearing old shows, it really reinforces what Reveal means to me. A good friend of mine, a former editor of Reveal, sums it up perfectly. He used to say, “Investigative journalism is really a hopeful enterprise. Yes, we uncover bad things, but we do it with the hope that the knowledge will create change.” And he was right. Our investigations have and will continue to make change because that’s what we do. Our job is to shine a light and declare that facts are facts and the truth is true. We’re going to keep revealing as long as you keep listening.