Jeff German was a dogged investigative reporter of the old school, excited by nothing so much as the whiff of corruption or official malfeasance and following it wherever it led. For four decades he chronicled the racketeers, mobsters, loan sharks, hard-luck grifters and big-time crooks of Las Vegas, the notoriously seamy desert city he called home.
When, to the shock of just about everyone in Sin City and beyond, German was found stabbed to death outside his house earlier this month, it was a sobering reminder of the risks that such work entails – and the threat that many journalists face in a country whose last president notoriously dubbed the media “the enemy of the people”.
Still, German’s colleagues at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the city’s main paper, knew there was only one appropriate way to channel their grief and honor his memory: by doing what he would have done and investigating the hell out of his murder.
Within days, German’s fellow investigative reporters had tracked down vital information leading to the arrest of a relatively obscure county official whom German had accused, in a series of articles published in May and June, of bullying his staff and conducting an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. The official, Robert Telles, is now behind bars and has been denied bail as the investigation continues.
Last week, the reporters revealed that Telles, a lawyer on the periphery of Democratic party politics who sold himself as a civic reformer, had been arrested in 2020 on a domestic violence charge and received a suspended sentence for resisting the police officers who came to arrest him. The paper also published the emergency call placed by Telles’s wife at the time, in which she complained that he had had too much to drink and was “going crazy”.
These, the reporters say, are likely to be just the first of many revelations – some arising from public records requests made by German while he was still alive and others the result of shoe-leather work by his colleagues since his death.
“There’s a lot more that’s going to come out,” German’s former boss, the investigations editor, Rhonda Prast, said. “We’re working 16 hours a day, and still working through the grief of losing Jeff. It’s overwhelming.”
‘You don’t always know who you’re talking to’
At least at first glance, Telles was not someone to make an experienced reporter like German think he had to watch his back. Telles’s title was Clark county public administrator, and his job was to handle the estates of county residents who died without leaving a will. As another prominent Las Vegas investigative reporter, John L Smith, put it: “You probably don’t even know the office exists unless you die without a will – and then of course you don’t know it either, because you’re dead.”
As evidenced by German’s stories, Telles was unpopular enough in the office for some of his staffers to file confidential complaints about his behavior, which they later shared with German along with text messages, emails and surreptitiously shot video footage. Weeks after the first story appeared, Telles lost a bid to serve a second four-year term as public administrator in a primary that pitted him against his top deputy. While he accepted his defeat graciously at first, he later sent out a string of tweets hostile to German (since removed) accusing the reporter of spreading lies and smears.
Still, this was hardly Watergate-level malfeasance. Nor was Telles’s aggrieved reaction on par with threats that German and other reporters have faced in the past from Vegas mobsters and street thugs. In a town where mafiosi were once known to drill holes in the heads of their enemies and dump bodies in hastily dug holes in the desert, reporters have had their share of guns or knives pulled on them or – as in one notorious case – had their car torched as a warning. German himself was once punched in the face by a court official suspected of ties to organized crime.
“The sad irony,” Smith said, “was that this was a run-of-the-mill inquiry into office politics. The lesson for all of us is that you don’t always know who you’re talking to. You don’t necessarily know what else is going on in their lives.”
As soon as German’s body was discovered in his suburban cul-de-sac, the day after he was killed, police began collecting surveillance footage from neighbors’ houses and local businesses and put out a picture of a man in a straw hat and reflective orange jacket. They also issued a photograph of a GMC Yukon Denali they thought might be connected to the case.
The police were certainly interested in investigating the subjects of German’s recent stories, but they did not rule out the possibility that this could also have been a random attack. Over at the Review-Journal, meanwhile, investigative reporters were already taking an interest in Telles and searched Google Maps for photographs of his suburban home a few miles away from German’s. A GMC Yukon Denali was parked in the driveway.
When a reporting team was sent out to Telles’s house, they found him washing the car. Within 24 hours, the police had obtained a warrant to tow the car and search Telles’s house. Soon after that, Telles returned home from the office wearing a white hazmat suit, barricaded himself in the house, and was eventually removed on a stretcher with bandages around his arms where officials said he had cut himself. The police later reported that they had recovered pieces of a straw hat from the house and had matched Telles’s DNA to traces of human tissue found beneath German’s fingernails.
Baiting the media – a Trump-era sport
As news spread that a public official was suspected of murdering a reporter writing stories about him, press freedom organizations from coast to coast sounded the alarm. What could this mean, they asked, in a country where journalists have historically enjoyed considerable leeway but where, increasingly, the political climate is turning against them, police do not always respect press passes, and even a politician who body-slammed a Guardian reporter in Montana and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault did not have any difficulty being elected governor of his state three years later.
Almost as soon as the news of German’s murder broke, the Nevada Press Association expressed alarm that the possibility that a public official under investigation could be responsible. “That would be a dagger directed at the heart of a free press and a blow to our democracy,” it said. Similar statements from national press freedom organizations followed in quick succession.
It is still relatively rare for journalists to be killed on the job in the United States – just 16 in the last 30 years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. But many media watchdogs believe it may be becoming less rare. In Virginia in 2015, a local TV reporter and her cameraman were shot live on air by a former colleague. Three years later, a gunman upset at the way his criminal proceedings had been reported murdered five people in the newsroom of the Maryland Capital Gazette.
Ever since he first ran for president in 2015, Donald Trump has made a sport out of baiting the media, accusing reporters of telling lies about him and encouraging his supporters to boo – or worse – at the press at his rallies. Of Greg Gianforte, the Montana politician who body-slammed Ben Jacobs of the Guardian, he said: “He’s my guy.”
What makes German’s killing particularly devastating is that reporters like him – tenacious, hard-working, interested in looking under every rock to hold officials accountable – are becoming an ever rarer breed as cash-strapped news organizations cut back on local coverage and balk at the cost of running in-depth investigations.
Prast, his editor at the Review-Journal, said it was deeply painful to look at his empty desk and carry on the work without him. “Jeff was an amazing reporter and a good-hearted person,” she said. “He was gruff on the outside, but he was fair and balanced and very modest. He sat right next to me. I miss him greatly.”
