Abbie Hoffman: His last interview (I think)

One day I happened to come across a photo that really struck me as incongruous: Abbie Hoffman at his bar mitzvah.


It made me laugh, and then it got me thinking. Underneath all the personae that Hoffman wore throughout his attention-getting life - radical trickster, professional agitator, media manipulator, fugitive - there was a Jewish sensibility underneath.

Knowing that Hoffman was living not far away in Bucks County, I got Inside Magazine, the "quarterly of Jewish life and style" in Philadelphia, interested in the story.

Hoffman was happy to oblige. He said that his Jewishness was an important component of his identity and yet nobody ever asked him about it.

He looked sick and out of shape, but he talked up a storm and no matter how I argued to the contrary, he insisted that the Sixties generation had won. Though we were in the midst of the Reagan years, he insisted that the Sixties movements had changed the country for the good. He was full of optimism for the future, he said.

About a month later, the news broke that he'd killed himself.

He fooled me. I had no clue he was in any kind of desperation.

He probably fooled himself as well. His brother disclosed to me that Abbie had been bipolar. For every up, there was a down. For every public act of outrageousness, there was a period of private despair. I caught him in an up.

This was the last substantive interview the ever-talkative, media star-struck Hoffman ever gave. It may be the last interview, period. I'm not sure.

I'm glad I had the chance to talk to him, even though the story, rewritten quickly to take his death into account, now reads like a jumble.

I always admired Abbie Hoffman, even when I questioned his tactics. Or his tact.

I felt personally close to what happened in the Sixties, and I'm happy to know that Hoffman's last days weren't entirely bleak. He could still speak of hope.

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.

Animal rights, medical wrongs

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.

(click on image to enlarge)

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."