IRE Honors Stories on Political Gifts, Homicides

Times staff writers have won two Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) awards for stories tracing funding from Asian sources to the coffers of the Democratic National Committee and for an examination of the way homicides are investigated and prosecuted in Los Angeles County, it was announced Thursday.

One team of Times reporters exposed numerous large contributions to the Democratic National Committee from sources in Tokyo, Beijing, Bangkok, Seoul and Taipei, some of them illegal. The story precipitated the return of more than $1 million and highlighted the issue of the influence of overseas interests in the U.S. election process.

The reporters who worked on the story were: Alan C. Miller, Glenn F. Bunting, Rich Connell, David Willman, Sara Fritz, Richard T. Cooper, K. Connie Kang, Jim Mann, David Rosenzweig, Teresa Watanabe, Maura Dolan and Jonathan Peterson.

The other team of Times reporters winning the IRE award studied every willful homicide in Los Angeles County during a five-year period--nearly 10,000 killings in all. Their seven-part series, called “And Justice for Some,” found that overwhelmed police and prosecutors obtained convictions in only one in three killings and that the likelihood that a particular killing would be solved or successfully prosecuted could be predicted by the victim’s race and social class.

Reporting the story were staff writers Fredric N. Tulsky, Ted Rohrlich, Rich Connell, Victor Merina, John Johnson and Dan Weikel. Other major contributors to the series were Times staffers Richard O’Reilly, Patrick Downs and Tim Reiterman.