The S on My Chest Stands for Sun
The story began, like all newspaper stories, with a question.
First, however, I apologized for asking it.
‘‘President Dixon, I’m sorry but I have a sensitive question to ask you,’’ I said in February 2006.
‘‘What is it?’’ said Sheila Dixon, then-president of Baltimore’s City Council and now its mayor.
‘‘Does your sister work for one of the Comcast subcontractors?’’
Her anger emerged immediately as she stared her Dixon daggers – known to anyone who has covered her – straight into me. She had just presided over an hour-long grilling of Comcast about why the cable company wasn’t using more minority subcontractors in Baltimore, including one that employed her sister.
Who told you that, she demanded. The tip had come from a council member, but I could not tell her that. Who told you, she snapped again.
‘‘So, it’s true?’’ I asked.
‘‘Yes,’’ she said. But she refused to identify the company, called Utech, and claimed (falsely) that she had disclosed her sister’s employment in city ethics forms.
‘‘You figure it out,’’ she replied. She stormed off, opened a door to her office, then turned around and said, ‘‘Not that I’m trying to hide anything.’’
A month later, after about six more Utech stories, another tip led me to another question: Why had Dixon’s office been paying her former campaign chairman $100,000 annually without a contract for five years? The chairman, Dale Clark, had serviced the council’s computers, with Utech as a subcontractor. And Clark’s firm, Ultimate Network,
continued to get paid even after the city had hired a large corporation to provide the service.
A day after that story, the Maryland state prosecutor subpoenaed reams of records about Utech and Ultimate Network from the city, a probe that resulted in the heads of both firms pleading guilty to tax charges. Prosecutors indicted Dixon in January 2009 on theft charges stemming from unrelated activities that they uncovered during the nearly three-year probe, making her Baltimore’s first mayor to stand trial for a felony. (In December, a jury convicted Dixon of a misdemeanor charge of embezzling gift cards but acquitted her of felony theft.)
The Sun. Light For All.
Glaring hot light for Sheila Dixon.
And for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich. Gov. Martin O’Malley. School board chairman Brian Morris. City, state and county bureaucrats. State delegates and senators. Shady developers, bankers and landlords. Thugs, cops, lawyers. Few escaped the watchful eye of watchdog reporters at The Sun.
Enterprise reporting by beat reporters has long been one of the hallmarks at The Baltimore Sun. When I was hired as a City Hall reporter in 2003, I was honored by the chance to join that tradition at one of the nation’s best newspapers.
The Sun first emerged on my radar as a great paper while I was a junior at the University of Delaware. We were assigned to read David Simon’s book, Homicide: A Year on The Killing Streets. And when the former Sun reporter gave a talk at the school, I made sure I attended.
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