Confounded by Conflict
Benjamin was riding high back then. He’d made his name as a populist crusading for property tax reform. Did Biesen champion him? “Yeah, sure,” says a former Times reporter who, like almost everyone else from the Times I talked to, didn’t want to be named. “The whole paper did. It wasn’t just Robin. It was this whole crusade for tax reform, and the broader theme of fighting the machine, the political establishment. Robin wasn’t operating in some kind of vacuum. She was getting encouragement from the editors.”
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I’m told that four years ago some Times reporters asked their bosses if some kind of relationship existed between Benjamin and Biesen and were told no. Two years ago the disciplinary commission of the Indiana Supreme Court held hearings to decide whether Benjamin–who’d been accused of having a buddy sign in for him at legal education seminars he was required to attend–should lose his law license. (He did lose it, and he lost his license to practice in Illinois five months later.) Biesen’s name turned up on a list of possible witnesses on Benjamin’s behalf, and that’s when a curious Times reporter at the hearing found out she’d spent some time on his payroll.
“We all went nuts,” says another Times reporter. “She’d shouted the praises of this guy who was obviously a crook. The reporter who covered that hearing went to senior management and raised the issue. There was an in-house investigation, and a lot of us assumed she’d be out the door.”
On July 18 Walsh broke the story of Benjamin and Biesen. It now appeared, he wrote, that the “journalistic enthusiasm” for the “self-described leader of a ‘dream team’” had been more than “simple swooning over the man of the moment.” A reporter who’d written “some of the most generously worded articles…was being paid by Benjamin to work on personal injury cases.” Records indicated that Biesen had been paid several hundred dollars by Benjamin in April, May, and June of 1999, Walsh reported, and during that time she’d written a dozen stories quoting him. Because Benjamin’s private records were so hard to come by, Walsh couldn’t be sure whether Biesen had worked for him longer than that.
The next morning a letter to readers from Monopoli and Nangle occupied half a page of the Times. When I called Nangle he deferred to Monopoli; Monopoli–citing concern for Biesen’s privacy–deferred to their letter. “It represents what the Times can say about the issue,” he told me. “Any other details that might come to mind are addressed in the four corners of that letter. If one reads with care our letter to the readers, that represents the maximum the Times is able to say.”
The highest honor a Hoosier can receive from the state is the Sagamore of the Wabash award, which is given by the governor as he sees fit. Last October 23, Governor Frank O’Bannon showed up at the Times’s Munster headquarters for a meeting. To Nangle’s surprise, his wife and kids and a big cake also made an appearance, and O’Bannon added to the excitement by bringing along several Democratic candidates for office. The governor pronounced Nangle a Sagamore of the Wabash.
