OUT OF THE SPOTLIGHT BUT ON THE MARK

Karen Dillon

'Coming to journalism late in life, after you've worked on an assembly line and had a kid, you have a different perspective.'  

The Kansas City Star since 1991

BEST-KNOWN INVESTIGATION: PeeWee Herman exposure arrest, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 1991.

FAVORITE INVESTIGATION: "To Protect and Collect," 1999 and continuing -- Missouri police bypassed state laws to divert drug forfeiture money from schools to their own departments; 2000 series found the same across the nation.

She's the classic Horatio Alger story of the newspaper world. Karen Dillon literally started on the ground floor, leaving her factory job as a typesetter at a tiny daily in Boone, Iowa, and working her way up through composing. Two decades, a pile of awards, and scores of wary cops later, she's emerging as the nation's leading reporter on laws regulating police seizure of money and assets from suspected drug dealers. Her reporting is shifting the course of the war on drugs.

"She's turned a battleship around on a dime, just through the sheer force of her will," says Mike McGraw, who has served as Dillon's partner in outrage. "She reminds me of a terrier on steroids," he jokes. "She's unbending, relentless -- she just doesn't give up."

Dillon has been trailing public officials since her days at the University of Missouri, where as a student reporter she caught the city parks director fabricating data to justify closing a city pool in a largely black district. Her research showed that attendance at the pool was roughly double what the parks director had reported, and the cost was half.

Her stint in Sarasota taught the police it was better to give her a straight answer than to dodge her. She reported that deputies were getting naked with prostitutes and then arresting them for prostitution. That was years before she caught the Kansas City police with a multimillion-dollar slush fund being used for everything from extravagant travel to secret settlements for unlawful police conduct.

Part of Dillon's success comes from learning the law -- sometimes better than those whose job it is to enforce it. In the forfeiture case, she used the Internet to access the forfeiture laws of all fifty states, building a database to compare them. She found that thirty-five states have a law that prohibits local police from the common practice of handing over cash seized in drug busts to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Typically, the DEA returns most of the money to the police department for its general fund. The system gives police a strong incentive to focus a disproportionate effort on drug enforcement, Dillon discovered.

In the five police agencies she examined, 95 percent of all search warrants were for drug cases -- "not for burglary, not for assaults, but for drug cases. Suddenly you realize that this is all the police are doing -- fighting the drug war."

Dillon, forty-nine, has her soft side, too, which emerges when she talks about Jennifer, the daughter she nursed through severe health problems while working her way through school and juggling her hectic career. The trials of her life outside journalism, McGraw believes, have only strengthened her resolve as an investigative reporter.

"Coming to journalism late in life, after you've already worked on an assembly line and had a kid, gives you a different perspective on being a journalist," McGraw says. "You're more tenacious; you don't want to just move on to the next thing."