Hot Type, for the week of October 4, 2002 -- continued But I've never spoken to anyone involved in the Mirage project who's lost a second of sleep to remorse, or who says good riddance to the kind of journalism it embodied. Inauthentic? On the contrary. They hail it as journalism verismo. Next Friday, October 11, at 5:30 the Chicago Headline Club is sponsoring and the Sun-Times hosting a panel discussion on the Mirage on what is more or less the bar's 25th anniversary (tickets are $10; call 773-604-1994 to reserve them). Ethical issues will be on the table, but the dominant note struck is likely to be celebratory. Smith will participate, along with Pam Zekman, the project's mastermind, who's now at Channel Two, and Bill Recktenwald, who at the time was an investigator for the Better Government Association. Recktenwald later joined the Tribune, worked there until he retired, and now teaches at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. "All we did," says Recktenwald, "was what any citizen should be able to do -- open a business. We didn't hang out a poster that said `Bribes are welcome here,' and we didn't offer money to people. But if people asked us, we gave them the money. If we'd been offering money we probably would have had a lot more people taking it, but they had to ask. When we tried to run a business we found out we couldn't run it honestly, so we documented it. And at the conclusion of our investigation, we reported everything to the state police." Besides Smith's writing, what really sold the Mirage series to Chicago, Recktenwald believes, was the name of the bar. "I thought of the name after consulting a dictionary," he says. "When you see something and you don't see what you're seeing, that's a mirage." It was a last-minute inspiration. A lot of the other names bandied about also celebrated the joint's pretense but were awful -- names like Sunny Times Tap, Golden Scoop, and La Tappe Lloyd. Recktenwald recalls another contender, the Scarlet Lady -- "because of Pam's bright red hair. But that sounded like the place a block south of us, which was a house of questionable behavior." Before Smith was done, that house found its way into the series. Recktenwald might have been alone in this, but it never occurred to him that the Mirage deserved a Pulitzer. Ethics had nothing to do with it; the petty corruption the Mirage was uncovering just didn't seem that important to him. "Nobody's life hinged on this," he says. As a BGA investigator he'd helped the Tribune win a couple of Pulitzers for undercover stories documenting vote fraud and corrupt ambulance services. "People were being abused," he says. "People were dying. Lives were at stake." The conventional expos separates its cast of characters into predators and victims. The small-bore urban venality that the Mirage chronicled washed over everyone. It turned out that victimized barkeeps had scams of their own: worldly-wise accountants, coin machine vendors, and liquor salesmen taught their techniques for cooking books and trimming taxes. Thanks to the Sun-Times, the Illinois Department of Revenue discovered the state was losing so many millions of dollars in taxes that it created something called "the Mirage audit unit." Could all of this have been revealed in a way more tolerable to Eugene Patterson? Maybe so. But perhaps Patterson failed to weigh against the subterfuge the fact that the Mirage was the rare investigative series the public actually followed. "I'd come in on the el," says Recktenwald, "and it was very funny to watch people. The night before, I'd be going over the galley proofs with Smith, so I knew where the funny parts were. I'd watch them read, and I'd see them laugh at the right place." As far as he's concerned, newspapers have unilaterally disarmed. "I'm sure there are a lot of bad guys who are chuckling over that. If the government had announced that newspapers could not do undercover investigative reporting, people would have gone into a tizzy." A fourth panelist at next week's Mirage conference will be Bernie Judge. The editor and publisher of the Daily Law Bulletin, in 1977 he was also the Tribune's city editor. Judge was invited to provide the voice of the opposition. (Fuller was also asked, but he'll be out of town.) The Sun-Times had been tempted to keep the Mirage open through the end of 1977 because Christmas seemed a promising season for graft, but the wheels were coming off: the Tribune and Daily News had both found out that the Sun-Times was running a bar, and they were looking for it. Judge assigned William Crawford, a top investigative reporter who'd worked with Zekman on paper stories, to scour the bars of the near north side for her. "I think it was the best assignment he ever got," says Judge. What if he'd found it? "I would have done something," says Judge, who isn't sure what. "I wouldn't have wrecked it. I wanted to steal a piece of it." By the end of 1977 Jim Hoge was editor of both the Sun-Times and the Daily News. Marshall Field had given him the Daily News in a last-ditch attempt to save the afternoon paper, which would close in March of 1978. Zay Smith remembers that Daily News reporters came to Hoge and told him they'd found out about the Mirage and written a story revealing the operation. "That put Jim in a very rough position," Smith remembers. "He just said, `I'm going to say one thing to you guys. Don't do anything irresponsible.' And the story did not run." Channel Two is where Zekman's spent the last 21 years. Life there hasn't been a bundle of laughs for anyone, and at one point several years ago she thought about going back to the Tribune. She talked to Fuller, and he made it clear that the Tribune was out of the undercover business. "He just didn't feel it was appropriate," says Zekman. "He said that if we're being deceptive, how can we then report on or accuse people of being deceptive?" Even if the Mirage was the baby thrown out with the bathwater, that's a tough question to answer. Says Zekman, "I'd do it again in a second." News Bites • When a couple of spectators jumped a Kansas City coach near the end of a White Sox game last month, sportswriters wondered if beer sales should be further curtailed at Comiskey Park. Enforcing the rules already in place might be the way to go. The Sox say the spigots must shut down at the beginning of the eighth inning in the stands and the middle of the eighth in the concourse. The last time I was out at Comiskey, the vendors were still coming around during the eighth inning and a fight broke out behind us in the ninth. These eruptions never seem to take place in the early innings, do they? • Last week, desperate for a metaphor to describe Roger Ebert's recent reporting from Toronto, I came up with Commodore Perry "writing a history of the War of 1812 in which he's too modest to mention himself." But the Tribune's Jon Anderson points out that the place to find the famous commodore is Japan. The Perry I had in mind was his less celebrated "older brother, Oliver Hazard Perry, the commanding officer on the American side." I regret the mistake, and that's the last time I look for a military hero of the northern theater of the War of 1812 who's a household name. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2002 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.