Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal: Web gambling

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR LIVED ON BORROWED CASH AND TIME

My partner, Gordon Dempsey, and I stood in silent shock. Sure we'd seen dead bodies before. But this was different. This was the man at the center of a series of our investigative reports. This was the top prosecutor in Hillsborough County, slumped beneath a Tampa expressway. There was a gun in his lap, blood on his shirt and a bullet in his head.

My mind was racing. What to do? Who to call? Once we phoned 911 and the television station, we sat and waited for td inevitable debriefings.

I gathered my thot and recalled how it all began. Panicked prosecutor

Four months earlier in March 2000, a contact in the state attorney's office told me Hillsborough County State Attorney Harry Lee Coe routinely locked his office door, then played the dogs on his county computer all day long. We learned about the Web site he visited, his password and his user ID.

Coe also was said to have bounced checks at local dog tracks,maxed out several credit cards and dodged bill collectors daily.

The hunt was on.

The Web site checked out, but we stopped dead in our tracks when our lawyers advised us that employing the password and user ID was illegal.

So we asked the state attorney's office about how they policed the use of the Internet by employees. We discovered not only did they not monitor Internet use, but didn't even have the software available to check what sites were being visited.

Such checkups were deemed unnecessary by the state attorney's office. "We have an office full of professionals," contended Bill Reynolds, the chief of technology for the state attorney's office.

But because Florida's Public Records Law allows the inspection of computer records, we asked for Coe's. That's when we got a panicked call from a source inside the state attorney's office, saying that Coe and two aides were behind closed doors, deleting his computer records.

That sparked a series of meetings with our station's news director, Dan Bradley, our executive producer, Kathryn Bonfield, and our attorneys to discuss options, including:

* Filing a lawsuit. Unfortunately, we knew it might be weeks before we got a hearing, and by that time the records might be lost forever.

* Running a story. We didn't have much to go on, however.

* Contacting law enforcement. There were sure to be questions about the media becoming an arm of the law.

* Sitting and waiting, and watching the story possibly go cold and die.

After great debate, Bradley suggested that as citizens of the community, we had a responsibility to notify law enforcement of a possible crime. We called the agency charged with investigating public officials, Florida's Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE).

Borrowed time, money

While the FDLE took the limited information we had, we watched our investigation stall. No one in Coe's office would go on the record, and the state attorney's office gave us records showing that Coe had visited only two Web sites in the last four years. Reynolds denied any records had been deleted.

But just when our investigation seemed to hit a brick wall, we learned that Coe borrowed thousands from people who worked for him. And even though it was revealed on his financial disclosure form with Florida's secretary of state in Tallahassee, it didn't show up in his personnel file in Tampa that also required financial disclosure of such loans.

That's when sources in Coe's office told us about other undisclosed loans.

Still, Coe stuck to the argument that he considered these loans as being from friends - not employees. In an interview, he claimed he had not compromised his position because he had nothing to do with these employees' job performance evaluations, and had paid back all the money he owed. He denied borrowing money from anyone else. Our check of records, however, showed that employees who loaned Coe money clearly had their evaluations done by him.

Coe further denied destroying computer records, claiming that not only did he not know how to use a computer, but he had no use for one in the first place. He kept up his denials even when we showed him the information we had such as his password, his user ID, and the greyhound racing Web site he visited.

Our first story aired July 10, 2000, and outlined how Coe borrowed thousands of dollars from people who worked at his pleasure, his growing debt and criticisms from other state attorneys about such loans.

As other media outlets began picking up the story, we learned the issue was under review by Gov. Jeb Bush, who directed the FDLE to investigate the loans and the handling of public records by the state attorney's office.

That night we told our viewers that we had reported our concerns about Coe's failure to follow the state's public records law to authorities.

Death threats

After firing one of his longtime friends who loaned him money, Coe disappeared.

On July 14, as the rest of the media waited at the courthouse for Coe, my partner and I drove to his apartment complex, and watched as some of Coe's closest friends and aides searched the area for him. He was obviously missing.

We waited a couple of hours, circling the complex several times. It was on the final drive that I noticed a man sitting beneath the expressway. As we drove closer, my partner noted that whoever it was had blood on his shirt.

It was Coe, and he was dead.

The backlash from the public was intense. The hundreds of e-mails and phone calls to us included death threats.

Security at the station was heightened, and the sheriff's office put my house under a special watch.

In the weeks to come, in the midst of FDLE investigation, we filed another public records request for Coe's computer records. This time the state attorney's office coughed up records showing Coe visited Internet gambling sites.

We aired a report revealing Coe's office withheld information and broke the law.

The next day, Reynolds, the spokesperson for the state attorney's office, resigned.

In the following days, we reported Coe visited greyhound racing Web sites more than 800 times; bounced $30,000 in checks at local dog tracks; took money from his re-election campaign to pay off debt; borrowed money from other employees that he failed to disclose; ordered the destruction of public records; maxed out more than 20 credit cards; and was about a half-million dollars in debt.

What we all learned was that this was not the action of a responsible public official. But it was the profile of a compulsive gambler.

Coe had tried to hide his secret. And it was that secret, says the Florida Council on Compulsive Gamblers, which probably helped Harry Lee Coe pull the trigger.

BY STEVE AN&EWS of WFLA-TV, Tampa

Steve Andrews has been an investigative reporter for WFLA-TV in Tampa, Fla., for 16 years. He was an IRE Award winner in 1990.