Forgive us Our Trespasses

 John McAleenan is a newshound of the old school. In 1967, while reporting for Gannett's Cocoa, Florida, Today newspaper, he swiped a press packet outlining plans for Disney World -- two days before a scheduled announcement -- and earned plaudits for scooping the hometown Orlando Sentinel. A dozen years later, as a columnist and feature writer for The Detroit News, McAleenan waltzed into the Chicago residence of the accused serial killer John Wayne Gacy. The police, who had not finished with their investigation, arrested McAleenan as he was heading out the door. But the News was so pleased with his doggedness that they had him bailed out within the hour and nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize for his Gacy coverage. When he returned to Chicago for a hearing that cleared him, he was put up in the tony Palmer House.

 On January 30, 1996, the sixty-two-year-old McAleenan was back writing features and columns at Florida Today (the renamed Cocoa Today, now based in Melbourne). The 80,000-circulation paper, a forerunner of Gannett's USA Today that was voted the chain's "Best Newspaper of the Year" in 1994, devotes much of its local coverage to crime and fires. And that morning McAleenan's editor asked him to work with Kathy Reakes, forty, the paper's police reporter, checking out the poor neighborhood where several people had been arrested days before in connection with an unusual murder.

 At the suspects' apartment, the reporters say, they found the back door open, with no police tape in sight, and the apartment itself trashed. They walked in. Having been told by neighbors that one of the murder suspects had operated a teenage crime ring out of the apartment, McAleenan was intrigued by a piece of paper that appeared to have telephone and pager numbers on it, and he put it in his pocket. "We could have sat down and copied it," he says. "It didn't occur to me." He scooped up several other pieces of paper and the pair left, excited with their find.

 After a celebratory lunch, McAleenan and Reakes returned to the office and worked the phones past deadline, drawing on the information they found in the apartment, as well as material from an informant. They pieced together a tale of sex and murder, burglary and insurance fraud, child abuse and bogus-check cashing, and a Dickensian den of young thieves. "It was a really great story," Reakes says. They realized more work would be needed the next day to tie up the loose ends before they could write. On the way out of the office, Reakes crowed about their foray into the apartment.

 The elation was short-lived. Late that night, McAleenan and Reakes got calls at home from executive editor Judy P. Christie, informing them that they were suspended immediately for "a significant breach of journalistic ethics" that might also be "a criminal act." Further, if they did not "notify the appropriate police agency that you went into the apartment" by 10 a.m. the next day, "we will notify the police." McAleenan and Reakes were advised by a lawyer they consulted not to contact the authorities, and did not. The next day, they were handed memos repeating the previous night's conversations and were summarily fired -- without being given an opportunity to explain themselves, they say.

Reakes says she was crushed by the dismissal, having worked her way up from clerk to reporter over nine years with the paper. "My shock over the whole matter was the way we were treated by the paper," she says, adding that her greatest regret was that the story she was fired for was never published. McAleenan, a colorful, long-haired surfer who has worked for Gannett papers for more than fifteen years, was unabashed. "We trespassed and we took something in the course of that trespass," he says, although "it didn't seem like I was violating anything" since the apartment was not a police crime scene. He calls the firing an "overzealous" reaction. Similar stunts had resulted in reporting coups that won him praise. "Maybe when I wasn't looking the rules changed a little bit, and nobody told me," he says.

 Maybe that's it. A veteran Florida Today reporter, Billy Cox, calls the firings "the most divisive event that I've seen in twenty years," adding, "Our managers won't back us up. . . . We don't know what the rules are." And Joe Saltzman, professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, sees the episode as "an extreme example of what is going on today in America. There's no question that the aggressive investigative reporter of the past is going to become extinct, because the people running newspapers are becoming more and more corporate. They're business people, not journalists. They're afraid of lawsuits, they're afraid of offending the public and their advertisers."

Melinda Meers, Florida Today's managing editor, declined to comment on "personnel issues" involving the reporters. "The newsroom is grieving over the loss of John and Kathy," she says. "Newsrooms are very tight places, and whenever anyone leaves we're sad about it." As for the reporters' offense, she acknowledges that the paper has "no specific written guidelines about entering people's houses," but says the assumption was that reporters would not trespass. (Ruling that the two reporters were entitled to unemployment compensation, the Florida Department of Labor and Employment Security declared in McAleenan's case that while he "exhibited poor judgment in an isolated instance, no information has been received that clearly substantiates misconduct.")

At the time of the firing, editors seized the documents they believed had been removed from the apartment -- McAleenan and Reakes say that in their haste the editors took the wrong papers -- and Gannett lawyers, concerned over jeopardy to suspects' rights, turned the documents over to a judge and asked that they be inspected in secret. That motion "doesn't make much sense" in light of the paper's newsgathering role, Meers acknowledges. And it was too much for Florida Today's court reporter, Maurice Tamman, who stood up and, "in the interest of all journalists," objected to his paper's motion. "It was a bizarre situation," he recalls. "I wanted that envelope opened in court." The judge referred the envelope to the grand jury, which found that the contents had no bearing on the criminal case.

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