Doo-Wop will never die (if these guys have anything to say about it)

A story I loved researching and writing -- finding the traces of Philadelphia's old doo-wop culture:

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.

Live Aid readies for take-off

It was the biggest music extravaganza the world had yet seen, and I got to cover it.

ON A PLANE BACK: REVELRY TOOK A JET TO UNUSUAL HEIGHTS

By Howard Goodman
Inquirer Staff Writer

Delta Flight 392 - fairly hijacked by exultant and exhausted Villanova fans -flew from Lexington, Ky., to Philadelphia yesterday on something stronger than jet fuel.

Dozens of revelers, wearing Wildcat caps and T-shirts, clutching souvenir posters and programs, chanted Villanova fight songs and cheers as the plane taxied toward takeoff. The hum in the cabin was a blue charge that started the night before at wild Rupp Arena, a victory vibe that carried the jet much higher than 30,000 feet.

"I've been wearing this for three days," said Chick Hamlin, a Media high school teacher, tipping the brim of a blue-and-white painter's cap with the prophetic words: "Rollie and His Wildcats Are #1. "

"Exciting, exciting - there's no other way to describe it. " He was surrounded by passengers ordering the last drinks of a hallucinatory four-day weekend. They were all becoming aware that as the party was fading, a lasting piece of sports lore was growing.

And they had been there.

There weren't many superlatives left but "great."


"Great," said a smiling Irv Wisniewski, a former University of Delaware basketball coach to whom Final Four tournaments are old hat. This one, though, was special - a 66-64 victory over a Georgetown team that only perfection could beat.

"They build up the Super Bowl, and most of those are anticlimactic," he said. "This one was just what it was meant to be. It was meant to be a climax and it was.

"As the game was ending, I noticed, people weren't leaving. They were still coming in. And the way they stood and cheered the players when they got their awards - I loved the way the people appreciated them. "

Adam Lamb, a Penn freshman in a Wildcat baseball cap and face paint, also paid tribute to the Villanovans: "My dad and his friends go to the finals every year, and they said that this year there was the most cheering of any one. "

Georgetown student Nancy Sarkis, taking the flight all the way home to Boston, felt conspicuous wearing her "Hoya Power" pin. "Maybe I should cover it," she said.

Sad as losing was, she confessed: "I think it's kind of neat that Villanova won. They were the underdog, and they worked hard, and it was no fluke. I think Villanova definitely played a super game. They hit everything! We won so often. It seemed so impossible we could lose. "

CBS announcer Dick Stockton, ordering a Bloody Mary in first class, already had the game in perspective. He was among a group of television crew people who made a stop in Cincinnati for connecting flights. They were distinguishable by their natty sweaters and sport coats in network blue, and by their tennis rackets.

"I thought it was like the '75 World Series," said Stockton. The Cincinnati Reds beat the Boston Red Sox in that storied series, winning a seventh game that felt like a laughing afterthought after six thrilling games that were a model of see-sawing valor.

"As time goes on," Stockton said, "people will regard this championship as maybe the standout against which all the others will be measured. I think it will truly be seen as a classic, not this year or next year, maybe. I think it will stand the test of time."

Wild Horses!

As a national correspondent, I went out to Marlboro Man country for this story on a federal program to manage wild horse herds.  It was wonderful out there.  The photos in this fine spread were by the great Fred Blocher.

You can click on the images to enlarge.

The Farm

I'd known for years about The Farm, the band of San Francisco hippies who traveled cross-country by converted school bus until deciding to settle in rural Tennessee.  I was thrilled to get the chance to visit them and see how well they had kept to their ideals. They represented a strain of American communalism that is now, alas, all but dead.

(click on images to enlarge)

The Memphis Blues, again

One of the most enjoyable reporting trips I ever took -- to Memphis, Tenn., to write about the revival of Beale Street.

What sounds!

The Jedi homicide

Our courts reporter covered this trial, but the circumstances were so bizarre and the details so rich that the metropolitan editor, Bob Samsot, assigned me to write a reconstruction of the case after the verdict was in. Early on, I got the cooperation of the killer's father, which gave me great access to the son's bedroom and drawings, windows into his disturbed mind. The dead boy's parents also opened up to me, eager to show what a talented young man he had been. And the investigating detectives opened up their thick case file.

What made the story eerier was my realization, about halfway through the reporting, that I actually had met the murder victim a year earlier when covering the opening of one of the Star Wars movies in suburban Kansas City. I went out to write about the rabid young fans who waited days in line for the first screening, and the most rabid fan out there was this immature looking guy in a Beatles haircut and an old Army jacket bedecked with sci-fi movie trinkets. Ralph Cochran.

We didn't have a Sunday magazine at the Kansas City Times, but the paper would sometimes run long stories on Saturdays in a full-page format. That's how this story appeared. I'll never forget eating a late breakfast in a restaurant that Saturday morning and all around me, people were opening their paper and getting absorbed in the story. It was one of the most exciting moments I've had as a writer.

I was further honored when the story was reprinted in the book, Best Newspaper Writing of 1985.

(Click on image to enlarge it. Right-click on "Open Link in New Window" for best view) 

K.C.'s lost "Black Rialto"

Count Basie's death occasioned this look at the storied neighborhood of 18th and Vine, once one of the jazz centers of America, but in the 1980s a desolate stretch of empty lots and old brick buildings housing a handful of stubborn businesses.  Nowadays, I've read, 18th and Vine has been revived as a thriving tourist and entertainment center, with a hall of fame for KC jazz players and Negro League baseball. I'd like to think that articles like this one helped keep the memory alive.

(click to enlarge images)