A detour for WSJ reporter leads to ‘Making Death Pay’
Mark Maremont
Mark Maremont and Leslie Scism of the Wall Street Journal had a terrific story this week with this lede: ”Terminal Illness? $2,000 in CASH, Immediately Available.”
That pitch comes from an ad in the Rhode Island Catholic, the official newspaper of the local diocese. Behind the ad was “a plan hatched by a prominent Rhode Island estate-planning lawyer, who believed he had discovered a way to use an investment product sold by insurance companies to make no-risk bets on the stock market. He recruited dozens of terminally ill people to, in effect, serve as paid fronts for purchases of the product, variable annuities. The lawyer and other investors put tens of millions of dollars into the policies, hoping to reap a profit when the recruits died,” they write.
How did Mark get on to the story? He was writing a completely different story about a California money manager accused of running a Ponzi scheme. The manager used some of the investors’ money to buy life insurance policies that were originally taken out by the elderly, and then sold to brokers.
“I started researching that market, and eventually heard about a separate, but unrelated, situation with annuity policies, which aren’t really insurance, but are a type of investment,” he says. “Although [the annuity story] was off the topic I was researching and looked fairly small in scope, I was so intrigued I kept digging.”
Today’s Tip: “Don’t be so focused on your original line of inquiry that you ignore side issues that may themselves be a better story,” Mark says.
For more on Mark, check out this profile of and podcast interview with the senior Journal editor, whose team won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. He also appears in this video of a panel discussion with other investigative business journalists, including Pulitzer winners Gary Cohn and Alexandra Berzon.
The Reynolds Center has two upcoming free workshops on investigative business journalism on a beat: May 7 in Portland, Ore., with Cohn and former Washington Post reporter Alec Klein, and June 9 in Las Vegas, right before the IRE Conference, with Klein. Another free workshop, March 10 in Indianapolis, will focus on investigating the business of college athletics. It features Pulitzer winner Buzz Bissinger and ESPN Digital Media VP Rob King.
