Freedom

Ed Ryder was almost 20 years into a life sentence for murder, when I wrote a detailed investigative story about the weakness of the evidence in his conviction and the unlikeliness of his guilt. It helped get him freed from prison - the most gratifying event of my career.

I kept close track of Ryder after his release, and wrote about his first year's ups and downs for the Inquirer's Sunday magazine. The story won that year's top prize for profiles from the Sunday Magazine Editors' Association.

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Ryder is free. And celebrating.

A long struggle gets a happy denouement.

Ryder wins over the pardons board

The Ed Ryder case took a huge turn when the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons agreed that the evidence of innocence was too strong to ignore. After almost 20 years in prison, Ryder would soon be free. 
It was the most emotional event I was ever part of as a reporter. 

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Ed Ryder: The case for innocence

This is the first of many articles I wrote about the case of Ed Ryder, a man from North Philadelphia who had been in state prison nearly 20 years on a life sentence, convicted of murder on very shaky grounds. Everyone says that inmates will always tell you they are innocent, but I found out that this is not exactly true. They'll tell you that a lawyer botched their case or give you some convoluted story. Ryder was the first inmate I met who actually said, simply, he was innocent. And when I asked other longtime inmates about him, I found out that it was common knowledge he was innocent. After 18 years, a time when most lifers have come to terms with their imprisonment, he was still burning with anger about what had happened to him. Yet his temperament was sweet. He loved joking around and playing music; he was a good trumpeter. He was the most un-hardened criminal you could meet.

All of this led me to look into his case, and to link up with Jim McCloskey, a crusader for the wrongly convicted who had been examining the weaknesses in Ryder's prosecution point by point.

In Philadelphia it was very hard to get the prosecutor's office to admit to error and to get the courts to overturn a verdict. This story was not the first to be written about Ryder - I followed a trail of good reporters who had questioned the verdict over the years - but this was the first in a series that actually led to his freedom.

Helping to get some justice for Ryder was the most gratifying thing I was able to do as a reporter.

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Scandal's end: Prison

Here was the denouement to the Matthews and Wright story. Two years after we broke the story and explained the scam, court evidence confirmed our reporting as it sent the Wall Street firm's principal protagonist to prison.






BOND-FRAUD SCANDAL'S LATEST CHAPTER: PRISON

By Howard Goodman
Inquirer Staff Writer


To Moshe Lichtman, a developer who tried in 1986 to bring a major trash
resource-recovery plant to the ailing city of Chester , the attitude of
Matthews & Wright Inc.'s municipal- bond chief Arthur Abba Goldberg
was best expressed when Goldberg jokingly described a bond issue the
firm had underwritten in Guam as "selling bonds to the cannibals. "

"Lichtman thought this to be ironic," reads a recently released FBI
report, "because Goldberg had food dripping out of his mouth when he
said it. "

Exploitation, racism and gluttony - the themes surge through the
evidence amassed by prosecutors in the Goldberg case, which came to its
probable end on Monday with the one-time Wall Street wunderkind
sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $400,000 in
fines and restitution.

The sentence, by U.S. District Judge Jesse W. Curtis Jr. in Los
Angeles, came two months after Goldberg pleaded guilty to three counts
of mail fraud for playing the key role in a bond -fraud scandal that
rocked the financial industry when it came to light in 1987.

With a breathtaking appetite, the evidence shows, Goldberg lured some
of America's poorest communities into the municipal- bond business to
make huge sums of money for his firm, never caring whether the trash
plants or housing projects that the bonds were supposed to finance were
ever actually built.

Swindle in the South Pacific

Here's what the golden age of investigative reporting was like at the Philadelphia Inquirer: To pursue the Matthews and Wright municipal bond story, the paper sent me to Guam, Saipan and Palau. I traveled that far to collect color, background and documents on the firm's actions before it turned its attention to Pennsylvania.
A lot of miles and expense, and the paper was content to run only a fraction of what I found.

Amazing.

Inquirer gets indictments!

Well, that's how William Randolph Hearst might have headlined it.

Before the year was out, we saw our reporting validated with these indictments.

Eventually, these charges would be matched by others involving East St. Louis bonds. Goldberg would be sentenced to 18 months in jail and the disgraced firm Matthews & Wright was fined $1 million and ordered to pay $7 million into a community fund for the impoverished Mississippi River city.

A billion here, a billion there; Uncovering a huge bond scandal

By following the threads of a suspicious municipal bond issue in the dirt-poor city of Chester, Pa., I discovered something amazing: A fraud that stretched all across America and into the Pacific territories, as a group of Wall Street wheeler-dealers used an income-tax loophole and phony promises to poverty-stricken communities to make themselves rich.With the Inquirer allowing me to investigate the story at length, and teaming me with business-reporter partner Barbara Demick and genius investigations editor Jonathan Neumann, we wrote a series of stories that led to big results: the Wall Street firm's demise and its principal officer's indictment and jail term. The federal investigator on the case told us he used this story as "his roadmap" to show other investigators what to dig for.Amazingly, we had this story to ourselves for months, our only competition being the industry newspaper, The Bond Buyer. In the day of Boesky and Milken, the Wall Street Journal didn't touch this huge scandal until indictments were at hand.

The Inquirer nominated these stories for the Pulitzer. We didn't win (another Inquirer investigation did), but Editor Gene Roberts told me this series was his favorite of the paper's entries that year -- and that remark is an honor I continue to treasure.

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A trash deal for Chester, Pa., that smells

Assigned to cover the Delaware County suburbs, I immediately was intrigued by the poorest town in the area, Chester - and the incongruous news that this impoverished had somehow issued $335 million in municipal bonds. I understood nothing about finance. But even given the usual incomprehensibility of these things, this marriage of a poor, majority-black city and Wall Street just made no sense to me.

I soon learned that a city attorney had received a $335,000 commission for doing, he admitted, very little work. That was a Page 1 story.

My editors kept encouraging me to keep digging. I soon came up with this Page 1'er.

And then much more.

Medicaid fraud doesn't stop these docs

Many Medicaid Violators Continue To Practice Medicine
By Edward Colimore and Howard Goodman, Inquirer Staff Writers



Dr. Arnold Lincow and his clinic did hundreds of thousands of dollars in business with Medicaid patients in Philadelphia - and then state officials said they wouldn't pay him any more.

He broke Medicaid regulations, they said, by performing 145 unnecessary treatments on welfare clients.

But that didn't stop Lincow from billing for thousands more dollars, the attorney general's office said. After Lincow got word of his expulsion, the state said, he submitted 961 more invoices to Medicaid by fraudulently using the names of other physicians - including one doctor who was in his last, dying month, hospitalized with a heart attack.

Lincow was indicted in 1982. The following year, he pleaded guilty to 10 counts of Medicaid fraud, and was placed on probation and fined. In 1985, his license was suspended - for 90 days.

Today, Dr. Lincow is again practicing in Philadelphia, and the federal government is still seeking $418,402 from him in fines and restitution.

He is not the only Pennsylvania doctor who continues to practice on an unwitting public despite being convicted of crimes against Medicaid. An examination of records reveals that there are scores of such doctors.

And there are scores of others who continue to practice despite being barred from Medicaid because their medical practices and techniques have violated state regulations.

The state Department of Public Welfare is dropping such doctors in record numbers from Medicaid, the mammoth state and federal health-care program for the poor. Tighter regulations and stepped-up enforcement have created a dramatic increase in doctors cited for Medicaid abuses.

Overall, according to state records and interviews with medical investigators, doctors, through improper billing, stole about $13 million from Pennsylvania taxpayers last year alone.

But only rarely do the state's licensing boards, which are supposed to protect the public from violations of medical and ethical standards, follow up by significantly limiting those doctors' right to practice.