Today we’d like to introduce you to Greg Palast.
Greg, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
It didn’t start out promising. I grew up in Sun Valley, near the LA garbage dump. Went to Polytechnic High whose other illustrious graduates are Bruce Pardo (Covina Massacre, 9 dead) and my classmate Steve Paddock (the Vegas Shooter, 59 dead). How I got from a dead end at the dump to investigative reporter for Rolling Stone, The Guardian and BBC Television, international bestselling author and filmmaker, is a hell of a story. No one is more surprised at the ending than me.
My big break came when I heard that kids at Beverly Hills High could take UCLA classes in the afternoon – and I demanded in. Took some tests, but flunked the “Subject A” exam–I couldn’t write basic grammatical English. But they let me in. 30 years on, I’d be named Patron of the Philosophical Society of Trinity College, a post previous held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde–a post with the privilege of naming the rules of English.
Through hustle and a con too complex to repeat here, I snatched a degree in Economics from the University of Chicago working under Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman. He was brilliant – but selling the world on the frightening idea that greed is good. But I was working undercover even then for the Steelworkers and Electrical workers unions of Chicago.
Armed with special skills in math, deception, disguise and guile, I became an investigator of some of the nation’s biggest racketeering and fraud cases including the investigation of fraud in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez — which I conducted while living in Arctic Native villages — to unmasking massive fraud in the nuclear industry (a jury awarded $4.3 billion against the radioactive conmen.)
At age 43, I said, “Screw it, I’m going to be writer.” I faxed a true story of murder, billion-dollar thievery and racketeering to The Guardian in Britain. By the next morning, I was on a plane, hired as an investigative reporter for the world’s most prestigious newspaper. My first big sting: going undercover to get the dirt on the new Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Got him. And the front-page publicity nearly took him down.
Then, in November 2000, watching the Presidential race from London, I saw Black folk saying they could not vote. I decided there must be a computer program removing African-Americans from Florida voter rolls. And I got it: the secret computer files with the names of voters falsely accused of being “felons” who could not vote. And that was how Katherine Harris, Florida’s GOP Secretary of State snatched the Presidency for George W. Bush.
I wrote up the racial purge for the Guardian, and for BBC Television news, confronted Florida GOP officials–who literally ran away from me on camera and had me arrested. While hitting the top of the news and front pages in Britain and worldwide, it made it back to the USA through the internet — and Harpers Magazine.
That produced the hot material for book that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 7 months: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Three more bestsellers followed, a bestselling comic book and the film Bush Family Fortunes for BBC.
More investigations of racial vote theft continued while I hunted billionaires gone bad for BBC Television. My targets included a billionaire known as The Vulture–hunts that took from the Arctic, to deep into the Congo, up the Amazon River, Sarajevo, Bosnia, Kazakhstan, and darkest Washington.
And last year, I made it back home to LA, to Hollywood, to make the documentary movie, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of at the Stolen Election. Two million fans saw the first pre-election version which followed me on my investigation for Rolling Stone into the coming theft of the 2016 election. The post election version goes public in January.
It’s a documentary, but it uses cartoons by Keith “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” Tucker, and cameos by Rosario Dawson, Willie Nelson, ice-T and Richard Belzer of Law & Order…and a cast of real live politicians including Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies. It also includes a dream scene–or maybe a nightmare scene– where actress Shailene Woodley takes me back to Sun Valley, to where I began, to my homeless classmates camping along San Fernando road.
So I’m back to where I started — though not exactly: I’m looking down from the Hill and not up–dragged back by my chief investigatrix Leni Badpenny, my Swiss-British partner who dreamed of living in Hollywood while growing up in the remote Alps. A happy ending? Don’t know yet, the end’s not in sight.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The heartbreaker for me was that I had to leave my country to report about it. It was terrific working for the BBC and Guardian, but it remains nearly impossible to get real, old-fashioned gumshoe investigative reporting into US news, focused solely on the Twidiot-in-Chief. My story about how the Presidential race was rigged in Florida in 2000 was finally picked up this year by the New York Times — SEVENTEEN YEARS AFTER I FIRST REPORTED IT.
God bless outlets that are not money poisoned, like Pacifica radio’s LA station KPFK. And bless the LA writers who showed me how to do it: Art Kunkin of the LA Free Press, Charles Bukowski whom I met while a young fool at The Bridge in Venice. The advice he gave me was invaluable, unforgettable but unprintable here.
And in Britain, a fugitive from justice named Piers Morgan, as a favor to Tony Blair, nearly destroyed my career with a cheap honey trap.
Piers’ photographers (and her husband) burst into her hotel room–but I had a good explanation: she’d left me the key and told me to join her. Case closed. Piers on the lam to the US.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
I’m a fossil: one of the last of the American investigative reporters — the old-fashioned gum-shoe type who spends months – even years – getting the inside documents, the secret files, the illicit emails. Stealth, intense hard work and a sense that corruption is the way of the world –plus expert knowledge of finance and statistics–who does that anymore? Not in America, because no one will pay for it.
Real investigative reporting costs a fortune, takes time. And remember, I’m just the nose on camera. Behind me is a team of insanely brilliant investigators and filmmakers. Remember those gut-slamming shots of a Black teacher being beaten nearly to death by white neo-Nazi’s in Charlottesville? That was taken, at extreme danger to himself, by my co-producer Zach D. Roberts. There’s the brilliant Dave Ambrose who makes those brilliant “Dreamer” ads for the ACLU and music supplied by my high-school bud, composer Michael O’Neill. (No, not everyone became a mass murderer.) And our latest addition to the team, Tom Ortenberg, distributor who distributed that other film about investigative reporting, ‘Spotlight’ (Academy Award Best Picture).
And, of course, there’s the quadri-lingual investigator extraordinaire Leni Badpenny–whom you see in the film connecting the dots from Trump’s vote scammer to the Brothers Koch.
While Rolling Stone and other outlets throw in a few shekels, most of our loot is provided by donors to the Palast Investigative Fund, our not-for-profit foundation. In other words, we beg. So, if you see me at Hollywood and Vine with a sign, “We do investigative reporting for food,” be kind.
And so, what we’re most proud of it that WE DON’T DO IT FOR THE MONEY or glory or TV face time. We take on stories no one else will.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
The success of my work is that I will DO ANYTHING (LEGAL) to get the story. I hate lazy-ass American reporters who want the stories handed to them with all the details and proof and witnesses packaged neatly. That’s why 60 Minutes became so boring. You know damn well the reporters on the screen are just actors–they didn’t uncover the story.
Look, I reported in Rolling Stone, with solid documentary proof, that the GOP had knocked off 1.1 million Black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters off voters’ rolls before the 2016. But I couldn’t get that on the US airwaves unless I took hostages. I was not allowed to challenge the myth that American elections are the democratic envy of the world. It’s bullshit. If that means I’m locked out of MSDNC or the Fox hole or the Petroleum Broadcasting System, well, fuck’m.
The rest of the world will get my reports on their front pages — so you’ll have to read my books and watch my movie to get Palast. So it goes.
I’m also kicking around the idea of a TV series based on my investigations–reality TV but with real reality.
Pricing:
- $2.99 download or $8.99 DVD on Amazon and usual suspects. The new The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
- $14.99 or less on Amazon: The Book, the Best Democracy Money Can Buy, with chapters by Bobby Kennedy Jr. and a comic book by Ted Rall
- $50 tax-deductible donation for a signed copy of DVD or book at www.GregPalast.com
Contact Info:
- Website: www.GregPalast.com
- Email: contact@GregPalast.com
- Instagram: GregPalastInvestigates
- Facebook: GregPalastInvestigates
- Twitter: Greg_Palast
- Other: www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org
Image Credit:
Greg Palast
Zach D. Roberts
Richard Rowley
Daniel Meyers
Jordan Freeman
Keith Tucker
David Ambrose
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