Mark T. Sullivan

Behind the Book

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, San Diego was the setting of a brutal newspaper war. The San Diego County edition of The Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union and the San Diego Tribune as well as several smaller dailies were all duking it out for circulation in one of the fastest growing cities in the country. It was pretty clear, however, that so many papers could not survive in one place. One or more of them was going to die.

In that pressure cooker atmosphere, a series of prostitute murders took place and the city formed a task force to try to catch the killer. Meanwhile, state investigators were looking into possible corruption within the San Diego police force. One prostitute, a young woman named Donna Gentile, testified against police officers before a grand jury. Very soon after, Gentile was found dead in the hills east of town. Gravel was shoved in her mouth, which was taken as a warning signal to other prostitutes not to talk. I was one of four reporters at the San Diego Tribune assigned to work these stories.

We spent weeks on the street at night tracking down prostitutes and others who had testified before the grand jury. We broke a series of high profile exclusives that rocked Southern California, including an interview with a prostitute who had been in hiding for more than a year. She told us she had overheard two officers, one of them a prominent lieutenant, discussing the contract killing of Donna Gentile.

At the same time, I was growing disillusioned with daily journalism. Increasingly I was growing frustrated at some of the hypocrisies I saw within the business of daily newspapering. Although as a group I found most of my fellow journalists to be honest, hilarious and hard working, I watched as a handful proved themselves guilty of some of the same kind of transgressions we so gleefully reported on the front page concerning judges, drug dealers, sports figures, celebrities and politicians.

I knew journalists who were alcoholics, drug addicts, extortionists, kleptomaniacs, tax evaders, wife beaters, adulterers, plagiarizers, bribe takers and on and on. But you weren't seeing stories about these people in the papers.

Hard News grew out my experiences reporting on police corruption and the Gentile case and my burning desire to pull back the curtain on the strange peccadilloes of modern journalists. I published that novel almost fourteen years ago and it's become something of a cult classic among reporters.

I still get e-mails from reporters at papers all over the country, journalists I've never met, who ask me how I could have possibly known so much about the weirdness that went on inside their own newsrooms.