Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them. Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
Speaker 1: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 1: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 1: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 2: Jeff Garman, a veteran in Las Vegas Review Journal investigative reporter,
Speaker 2: was no stranger to controversy or the danger of his work.
Speaker 2: For more than four decades, he wrote stories relentlessly confronting
Speaker 2: the mob, corrupt politicians, and greedy bureaucrats. As a result,
Speaker 2: he was often threatened enough that he and his friend
Speaker 2: and fellow investigative reporter Arthur Kine, sometimes joked about reporting
Speaker 2: on these threats if they were ever acted upon. Then,
Speaker 2: in the spring of twenty twenty two, German received a
Speaker 2: tip about abuses at a little known county office. His
Speaker 2: subsequent investigation on earthed a scandalous, sexually incriminating video of
Speaker 2: a rising politician. The resulting stories in the Review Journal
Speaker 2: ended the man's political aspirations. Less than six months later,
Speaker 2: on September three, Garman's lifeless body was discovered outside his
Speaker 2: home with multiple stab wounds. His dedicated newsroom colleagues, including Kane,
Speaker 2: vowed to find the killer. In doing so, they expose
Speaker 2: the true depths of corruption and malice in Sin City. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: the police struggled to identify a suspect until they released
Speaker 2: a photo of the suspects vehicle to the media. That
Speaker 2: tip led them to none other than the small time politician,
Speaker 2: who was subsequently arrested and now faces life in prison
Speaker 2: pending the outcome of his trial in August twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: In the Last Story, Caine delivers an intense narrative of courage, betrayal,
Speaker 2: and the unrelenting quest for justice. The book that we're
Speaker 2: featuring this evening is The Last Story, The Murder of
Speaker 2: an Investigative Journalist in Las Vegas, with my special guest,
Speaker 2: investigative journalist and author Arthur Kin. Welcome the program, and
Speaker 2: thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 3: Arthur Kin, Thanks for having me on the program.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, and congratulations on your new book,
Speaker 2: The Last Story.
Speaker 3: I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Now, just to open, you and Jeff Garman work together
Speaker 2: as journalists, and you and Jeff used to talk about
Speaker 2: a promise to each other in jest, tell us before
Speaker 2: we start about that promise.
Speaker 3: It was kind of the newsroom gallows humor. You know.
Speaker 3: One time I'd had a story that was a pretty
Speaker 3: good story that ended up getting constable here and dieted,
Speaker 3: and he came up to my desk and said, hey,
Speaker 3: you better watch your back. That guy is going to
Speaker 3: come and get you. And I said, hey, you better
Speaker 3: write about it if it happens, right. And so every
Speaker 3: time one of us would have a hard hitting investigation
Speaker 3: that got results, the other one would kind of do
Speaker 3: that as a compliment without getting too mushy and as
Speaker 3: a kind of, you know, a kind of a joke
Speaker 3: or gallows humor. So about a week before I met
Speaker 3: him at the paper, we had met to talk about
Speaker 3: a story he had just done, a story that had
Speaker 3: resulted in someone losing their reelection, and so I kind
Speaker 3: of we kind of went through that whole monologue or
Speaker 3: exchange together.
Speaker 2: Now, give us your background and when you arrived in
Speaker 2: Las Vegas, and then also what you learned in writing
Speaker 2: this book, but also just learning about your colleague Jeff Garman.
Speaker 3: So I started at the RJ. At the end of
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen and was a reporter with Jeff. He was
Speaker 3: the first person on an investigative team, and I was
Speaker 3: the second person. He had been an internal candidate. I
Speaker 3: was hired from the outside. Basically worked pretty closely for
Speaker 3: about six or seven years, did a lot of investigations together.
Speaker 3: I think we taught each other a lot. He was
Speaker 3: kind of old school guy and who he liked. He
Speaker 3: work phoned and sources, and I'm kind of public records
Speaker 3: and data guy, and so we kind of complimented each
Speaker 3: other in our reporting. So it's pretty much we're working
Speaker 3: with him on store and by myself, and he would
Speaker 3: work on stories by himself too, but we collaborate in
Speaker 3: four or five big investigations that got some pretty decent results.
Speaker 2: You talk about the history of the Las Vegas Review Journal,
Speaker 2: and right away there was had many owners over the years,
Speaker 2: but there is an owner that raises quite a bit
Speaker 2: of controversy. Can you explain that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So in twenty fifteen, the paper was purchased by
Speaker 3: the wealthiest person in Nevada and one of the wealthiest
Speaker 3: people in the world, Sheldon Attilson, who owned The Venetian
Speaker 3: at the time. And the Palazzo, two of the biggest
Speaker 3: casinos on the strip. He was one of the biggest
Speaker 3: Republican donors. Him and his wife had contributed a lot
Speaker 3: of money to Republicans. The controversy kind of began because
Speaker 3: there was an attempt from him to kind of hide
Speaker 3: his ownership of the paper, and the reporters that the
Speaker 3: paper ended up uncovering it and reporting who bought the paper.
Speaker 3: It wasn't the best start for them, But since then
Speaker 3: they've been pretty good about investing money into the paper
Speaker 3: and it's become a pretty I think their resources have
Speaker 3: definitely improved the product and the paper and definitely allow
Speaker 3: us to have a big investigative team, which some papers
Speaker 3: are getting rid of.
Speaker 2: You talk about Jeff Garman and his tenure as a
Speaker 2: journalist in Las Vegas for almost forty years before his death.
Speaker 2: But he didn't start at the Review Journal, the Las
Speaker 2: Vegas Review Journal. He started at the Las Vegas Sun.
Speaker 2: So tell us about his career just briefly, the kinds
Speaker 2: of cases that he was very interested in and the
Speaker 2: kinds of stories that he did end up breaking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he graduated from Marquette with a masters degree and
Speaker 3: came right to Vegas. Worked at the Sun for a
Speaker 3: couple of I think three decades. What's a columnist an
Speaker 3: investigative reporter there a courts reporter, did some politics cover
Speaker 3: and stuff like that, and you know, broke some pretty
Speaker 3: big stories about the mob, broke stories about corruption in government.
Speaker 3: I had some hustles, got punched one time by a
Speaker 3: guy who was collecting who was a court bailiff, but
Speaker 3: he was also collecting money for the sheriff campaign and
Speaker 3: also for a bookie. And Jeff was writing about him
Speaker 3: and the guy and they guess they confronted each other
Speaker 3: at a bar and the guy ended up punching Jeff,
Speaker 3: but Jeff kept writing about him after that. He wasn't
Speaker 3: towed by that, and so he spent quite a bit
Speaker 3: of time at the Sun, and then he was laid
Speaker 3: off even though he was a very prominent journalist. And
Speaker 3: then he came to the RJ in twenty ten as
Speaker 3: a courts reporter and then was promoted to investigations right
Speaker 3: about the time that right before the time I joined
Speaker 3: it in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: You right about the unique situation in Las Vegas, given
Speaker 2: its CD backgroundund of mob organized crime history in Las Vegas,
Speaker 2: the building of Las Vegas itself, but then also the
Speaker 2: influence of organized crime currently at the time that Jeff
Speaker 2: was reporting for the Review Journal and the Sun about
Speaker 2: its influence on politicians and all kinds of elected officials
Speaker 2: in the Las Vegas area.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I think that was. You know, Jeff was
Speaker 3: about fifteen twenty years older than me, so in the eighties,
Speaker 3: I was in elementary school or junior high when he
Speaker 3: was doing all this reporting. But what really struck me
Speaker 3: in my research was how much the mob, and if
Speaker 3: not the mob, people with severe major criminal backgrounds, people
Speaker 3: who had been accused of killing people, people who've been
Speaker 3: accused of of all kinds of crimes were basically part
Speaker 3: of the establishment here. You would have someone like many
Speaker 3: Union who had been suspected in five murders in Texas
Speaker 3: and fled because the sheriff who was protecting him was
Speaker 3: voted at office, fled to Vegas to escape prosecution, having
Speaker 3: regular lunches with a federal judge who was here, right,
Speaker 3: and so it was it was really the corruption was
Speaker 3: just kind of part. You know, they were the elite.
Speaker 3: The people who were were we would think of as
Speaker 3: criminals now, were the elite and everybody kowtowed to them,
Speaker 3: from the governor on down to the DA and all
Speaker 3: these other people, And so it was a very interesting situation.
Speaker 3: I can't imagine something like that in that time. I mean,
Speaker 3: obviously you probably had stuff like that in Chicago in
Speaker 3: the twenties and thirties, things like that, but in America,
Speaker 3: you just it was a pretty unique situation, a very
Speaker 3: very eye opening for me, who didn't really I mean,
Speaker 3: I knew there was a mob history, but I didn't
Speaker 3: realize how influential and how much they were in society
Speaker 3: in Vegas until I started reporting this book.
Speaker 2: You talked about the binion and also that Jeff Garman
Speaker 2: reported on mob cases like the Ted Binyon case. But
Speaker 2: you also explained that, of course American journalists don't have
Speaker 2: the same fear factor that you write about the journalists
Speaker 2: in Russia and Mexico, and the threats, the imminent death
Speaker 2: threats that those journalists face is very very rare, and
Speaker 2: deaths of journalists, murders of journalists is very very rare
Speaker 2: in America. But that also that Jeff had established himself
Speaker 2: as a respected journalist that could criticize mob figures and
Speaker 2: still be considered doing justice job.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, the thing about it is that, obviously,
Speaker 3: if you look at and I did an analysis of
Speaker 3: the Committee to Protect Journalists Data, you look at certain countries,
Speaker 3: there are dozens or hundreds of journalists killed every year
Speaker 3: for what they're writing. Here, you've got a dozen or
Speaker 3: so killed, and almost all of them were by you know,
Speaker 3: gangsters or criminals, or five of them were killed in
Speaker 3: a mass shooting, which is just now part of the
Speaker 3: fabric of society now, and it was a disgruntled reader,
Speaker 3: you know, who walked into a newspaper. Fortunately, and I
Speaker 3: hope we keep it that way or even reduce it.
Speaker 3: But it's very rare for a journalists to fear physical retribution.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of otherwise retribution where people are trying
Speaker 3: to get you fired or de platformed or something like that,
Speaker 3: but as far as hearing for your life, it's pretty rare.
Speaker 3: And so for something, you know, for journalists to be
Speaker 3: murdered in America is still a huge story. I mean,
Speaker 3: we were flooded with requests from every paper and every
Speaker 3: TV station after Jeff's death in the country and probably
Speaker 3: some international stuff. So it's definitely a unique story to hear,
Speaker 3: and we hope to keep it very unique.
Speaker 2: Now, Jeff was dealing with some stories right up to
Speaker 2: his death, and you and Jeff had worked on a
Speaker 2: story just recently before his death. So tell us what
Speaker 2: you were working on and the last story that you
Speaker 2: worked on with Jeff.
Speaker 3: The last story we worked on together was it was
Speaker 3: a couple of years before. We started, right around the
Speaker 3: time of the pandemic, so it took a little while
Speaker 3: longer because there's all this pandemic stuff that we were doing,
Speaker 3: but separately, but we did a story about the former
Speaker 3: Clark County corner who was we had found was you know,
Speaker 3: it looked like he was using his vacation time but
Speaker 3: then not logging and so they was able to cash
Speaker 3: it out. He was traveling around the country giving speeches
Speaker 3: about the October one mass shooting, which I think everybody's
Speaker 3: familiar with the Mandalay Bay shooting, right, and he was
Speaker 3: taking paid speeches when he wasn't taking were supposed to
Speaker 3: take vacation time if they were paid. But during that
Speaker 3: whole time, his whole office ended up being I guess
Speaker 3: a nest of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct. But there
Speaker 3: wasn't anyone really, it looked like from our reporting that
Speaker 3: there wasn't someone mining the store, and so we had
Speaker 3: done three or four big stories about that right around
Speaker 3: the time we started, right around the time of COVID,
Speaker 3: and it was probably about a year before his death
Speaker 3: is when we did those stories. But we had met
Speaker 3: to talk about another story we'd worked on together, as
Speaker 3: was about a councilwoman named Michelle Fiori that he had
Speaker 3: been covering a lot. That's that's the reason we met
Speaker 3: right before his death, was to talk about whether we
Speaker 3: wanted to work on some other stuff he had found
Speaker 3: about her. That's the first time I'd seen him since
Speaker 3: COVID started in person, and we had some zooms and
Speaker 3: we had lots of calls, but that was the first
Speaker 3: time we got together in a person in person for
Speaker 3: a couple of years.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about now. Labor Day twenty twenty two and
Speaker 2: executive editor Glenn Cook gets a call from police Sheriff
Speaker 2: Joe Lombardo. Now, what's the call about. What do you
Speaker 2: have to say?
Speaker 3: Still, Yeah, it was a Saturday, right before Labor Day,
Speaker 3: long weekend. He gets a call from Lombardo, and Lombardo says,
Speaker 3: I'm calling about Jeff Garman. Do you know what I'm
Speaker 3: calling about? And Glenn was helping his son with some homework.
Speaker 3: Assumed it was about a story because police and the
Speaker 3: RJ have a pretty contentious relationship, and so he assumed
Speaker 3: it was something Jeff was working on. But it was
Speaker 3: strange because Jeff was really good about keeping all of
Speaker 3: his editors updated, and so he couldn't remember a hard
Speaker 3: hitting story about Lombardo the police department, and at the time,
Speaker 3: Lombardo was running for governor, which he ended up successfully
Speaker 3: coming governor, and so he was kind of racking his
Speaker 3: brain and then the sheriff flirts out Jeff's dead. And
Speaker 3: of course, you know, Jeff was sixty nine years old.
Speaker 3: He'd had some health problems. So the first thing your
Speaker 3: mind comes to is, oh, my god, he had some
Speaker 3: sort of a medical issue and and he is, you know,
Speaker 3: collapsed or something like that. And so the sheriff was
Speaker 3: really kind of coy about the whole situation and didn't
Speaker 3: really say much. They said, wow, he's at the corner.
Speaker 3: We're trying to find out what happened. He was really
Speaker 3: scratched up things like that, and so so that was
Speaker 3: the Saturday, and then and then later on there was
Speaker 3: a press conference about a murder in Jeff's neighborhood, and
Speaker 3: one of the editors looked and said, oh my god,
Speaker 3: that that that murder is a block away from where
Speaker 3: Jeff's body was found in front of his house. And
Speaker 3: so at that point we realized that it wasn't someone
Speaker 3: scratched up. It was basically a homicide that took a
Speaker 3: whole different you know, obviously tone for people, and it
Speaker 3: was a much much, much more you know story. The
Speaker 3: story was much bigger. Now I've been a murder instead
Speaker 3: of instead of a fatality based on health for some
Speaker 3: other reason, it was it was a homicide, and so
Speaker 3: everybody kind of jumped on that story right away and
Speaker 3: tried to figure out what happened.
Speaker 2: You're right that the police have a hearing or a
Speaker 2: briefing and not much information is released, but in subsequent
Speaker 2: days there is a fair amount of information, especially given
Speaker 2: about now the coroner has decided that this is a homicide.
Speaker 2: So tell us what you and the other people at
Speaker 2: the newspaper learn about Jeff Garriman's murder.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, it was it didn't take a corner
Speaker 3: to find out us. He was stabbed seven times in
Speaker 3: the neck and chest, so there was no doubt that
Speaker 3: it was a homicide, and we actually knew about it.
Speaker 3: We call know, the leadership called sheriff back and he
Speaker 3: confirmed after, you know, after we knew about the press
Speaker 3: conference that Jeff was who they suspect a murder. So
Speaker 3: but it was a who done it at that point,
Speaker 3: because you know, Jeff had upset a lot of people.
Speaker 3: It also police were acting like, well, this could be
Speaker 3: a personal thing where he has some sort of a
Speaker 3: personal relationship with this person, because they always jumped to
Speaker 3: that instantly, is if someone is killed there did they have.
Speaker 3: Is that a girlfriend boyfriend situation or is this a
Speaker 3: jilted husband or something? You know, it was really kind
Speaker 3: of a who done it? Obviously, we knew some of
Speaker 3: the stories he was working on, and we one of
Speaker 3: the editors gave the police a list of the stories
Speaker 3: he had been working on. But I I personally was
Speaker 3: hearing from my sources that this was probably something like
Speaker 3: either a robbery gone wrong or or some sort of
Speaker 3: a personal thing and not really related to his work.
Speaker 3: And then they released a video of a guy a
Speaker 3: big hat that looks like a landscaper or a construction worker.
Speaker 3: There's a there's a lot of roadwork going on right
Speaker 3: next to right north of Jeff's house, so he fits
Speaker 3: in with all the people who are walking around there
Speaker 3: with that in a big sun and hat. You know,
Speaker 3: it's it's hot, it's one hundred plus degrees. They have
Speaker 3: to protect themselves from the sun. So the first thing
Speaker 3: we get is a video of this guy walking around
Speaker 3: the neighborhood. They say is a suspect, but they don't
Speaker 3: know who he is. They can't see his face. It
Speaker 3: was kind of who done it and people were obviously
Speaker 3: we were obviously interested in who it was, and everybody
Speaker 3: was interested. It was the biggest story of town. But
Speaker 3: we didn't really really have anything but theories at that
Speaker 3: point that at one point they so police are pretty
Speaker 3: tight lipped about cases where they know what's going on,
Speaker 3: but this his cases a who done it for them?
Speaker 3: So they every day they'd had a press conference and
Speaker 3: they would release some more information, and then at one
Speaker 3: point they released a maroon older Denali type of SUV
Speaker 3: truck that was driving in the neighborhood and they said
Speaker 3: was driven by the suspect. They got They got a
Speaker 3: tax from someone in the county who said, hey, the
Speaker 3: public administrator who Jeff had written about has access to
Speaker 3: just such a truck. And about the same time, one
Speaker 3: of our assistant city editors had gotten a text from
Speaker 3: a source saying, hey, look at this, there's a truck
Speaker 3: just like that in front of the public administra this
Speaker 3: guy named Robert Tais in front of the public administrator's house.
Speaker 3: And then at that point it really got it really
Speaker 3: got interesting and just crazy because if the public administrator
Speaker 3: was a suspect and Jeff murdered, that was probably the
Speaker 3: first time in seventy years that a journalist was allegedly
Speaker 3: killed by a public government elected official. That's when the
Speaker 3: story really ramped up and we kind of just hit
Speaker 3: the ground running.
Speaker 2: You immediately thought it was sounded sort of insane for
Speaker 2: somebody to do something like that over an article that
Speaker 2: had already already been published. You thought, maybe for a
Speaker 2: pending article that would be runeous, but in this case
Speaker 2: it was the article had already been published. Now, getting
Speaker 2: to investigate this Robert TEIs, you go back and the
Speaker 2: newspaper goes back to the cases that he was working on.
Speaker 2: They obviously was one of them was Robert Tais. But
Speaker 2: you go back to all of the confrontation, the tapes,
Speaker 2: all the footage that they have, and look at his
Speaker 2: behavior and his reaction to Jeff Jerman's articles in the paper.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean he so Basically what happened is Jeff
Speaker 3: had written a couple of stories about this guy being inappropriate,
Speaker 3: kind of a bad boss thing, you know, verbally abusive
Speaker 3: towards people, moving people for no reason, just being a
Speaker 3: bully at work. And on top of that, his employees
Speaker 3: and his office had caught him on video in the
Speaker 3: backseat of suv with one of his subordinates, but both
Speaker 3: of whom were married. And so after that story ran,
Speaker 3: there was a primary where he lost his primary and
Speaker 3: was going to be out of office by the end
Speaker 3: of the year. After that, he had sent some texts,
Speaker 3: some tweets out basically making fun of Jeff. It didn't
Speaker 3: it wasn't threatening in that I'm going to come get him.
Speaker 3: It was kind of going, doesn't Jeff have anything better
Speaker 3: to do? Jeff looking through my garbage, which he obviously wasn't,
Speaker 3: but he was joking. And when he finds the sushi
Speaker 3: containers and the pizza container. He's going to say, I'm
Speaker 3: part of the Kuza and part of the mob, and
Speaker 3: so it was just him kind of blowing off steam,
Speaker 3: which happens a lot in stories that you know are true.
Speaker 3: And we find somebody who who has public foibles and
Speaker 3: they don't like that was exposed. But nothing there would
Speaker 3: have indicated any kind of a threat or else we
Speaker 3: would have taken precautions, and so it was definitely surprising
Speaker 3: for everyone to think that was a suspect. And you know,
Speaker 3: a few days later he ends up getting arrested for
Speaker 3: the murder.
Speaker 2: You wrote about the photos that they have and that
Speaker 2: the police release, and you said, a big floppy hat
Speaker 2: to protect against one hundred and ten degrees that these
Speaker 2: guys were working in. But he didn't have construction boots,
Speaker 2: and he had designer jeans, and he had runners, they
Speaker 2: had sneakers. So when they did get a search warrant
Speaker 2: for his house, what did they find.
Speaker 3: Well, they found the hat had been cut up, but
Speaker 3: in stashed in the garage, they found one of the
Speaker 3: sneakers cut up and one of them, I assume probably
Speaker 3: being ready to cut up. They found a bag that
Speaker 3: looked a lot like what the suspect was wearing they found,
Speaker 3: so basically what it looked like is that he had
Speaker 3: They never found a knife that was used in the homicide,
Speaker 3: but they basically for some reason. If he is convicted
Speaker 3: of this, and he hasn't gone to trial, so we
Speaker 3: don't know that he is a personal who did this,
Speaker 3: but if he's convicted for this, there's a real question
Speaker 3: of why he got rid of the knife but kept
Speaker 3: the shoes with blood on him and the hat that
Speaker 3: was you know, had the same little vent holes that
Speaker 3: they see on the video and all this other stuff.
Speaker 3: So there's some real questions about why he just didn't
Speaker 3: dispose them in the same way he disposed of the knife,
Speaker 3: because no one who knows where the knife is very interesting.
Speaker 2: We haven't mentioned that the footage that he was caught
Speaker 2: on which didn't recognize his face, couldn't really show his face,
Speaker 2: but it was interesting that he left the premises he
Speaker 2: was parked across the street. He left, but then came back,
Speaker 2: and it looked like just a check to make sure
Speaker 2: that Garriman was actually dead.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that whoever, Yeah, if it was him or
Speaker 3: whoever did it, there's definitely surveillance video from the neighbor
Speaker 3: across the street of him leaving and then a few
Speaker 3: seconds later driving back. So he parked the car outside
Speaker 3: of Jeff's call the sack or the suv outside of
Speaker 3: Jeff's Cali sack. He goes behind Jeff's gate, jumps out
Speaker 3: as Jeff is is coming around. We're not sure why.
Speaker 3: Maybe he'd made some noise or something Jeff was going
Speaker 3: to investigate. Jumps out from behind the gate to Jeff's backyard.
Speaker 3: The stabbing happens in the kind of the side yard
Speaker 3: in front of the gate. Jeff collapses behind a bush
Speaker 3: on the side of his house and he walks off quietly, quickly,
Speaker 3: and then if you let seconds later, the scuv drives.
Speaker 3: He drives the SUV back into the call to sack,
Speaker 3: parks it in front of Jeff's driveway and run and
Speaker 3: walks over quickly, looks looks like he's making sure that
Speaker 3: there's Jeff's dead and there's not a witness, and then
Speaker 3: he drives away.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very interesting. And also you talk about this
Speaker 2: incriminating damning evidence found at his home, but there was
Speaker 2: also they take a DNA sample from underneath Jeff's gernails.
Speaker 3: And that's what it was an interesting thing. I talked
Speaker 3: about it a little bit. But usually in a situation
Speaker 3: like this, if you've got that kind of evidence, you've
Speaker 3: got a car that was in the area, you've got
Speaker 3: you know, you've got pretty good idea of a person
Speaker 3: who had some sort of motive, they would arrest him.
Speaker 3: But the DA in this case, maybe because he's a
Speaker 3: public official, I don't know, maybe he's a lawyer. I
Speaker 3: don't know why, but the DA refused to allow police
Speaker 3: to arrest him until they got the DNA evidence back
Speaker 3: from under the skin under Jeff's fingernail, until it matched
Speaker 3: has according to police did. That was when they were
Speaker 3: able to go arrest him. And by that time, he'd
Speaker 3: holed up in his house, had slashed his wrists in
Speaker 3: the bathtub, was trying to kill himself. They actually sent
Speaker 3: in a drone to make sure there was no danger
Speaker 3: to the the police officers who were going to knock
Speaker 3: down the door, and then they eventually got him to
Speaker 3: come out, put him in an ambulance for his wounds.
Speaker 3: He's been in the Our County Detention Center ever since.
Speaker 2: But Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: Now one of the things that you do, and I
Speaker 2: guess police obviously would do as well. But for this book,
Speaker 2: you go into Taos's background to try to explain this
Speaker 2: kind of unexplainable behavior.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, here's the thing that the office is
Speaker 3: so minor and so unknown. Basically, the office is a
Speaker 3: dozen people that he runs, and he takes over the
Speaker 3: probate or the office public Administrator takes over probate cases
Speaker 3: of people who don't have family members to deal with
Speaker 3: their state after they die. And so it's a pretty
Speaker 3: obscure county office. I'm not sure why they have elected
Speaker 3: official as as supposed to appoint an official on it.
Speaker 3: But the office sobscure that he didn't really when he
Speaker 3: was running for office, nobody wrote about it, nobody did
Speaker 3: into it. He actually ended up getting arrested for domestic
Speaker 3: assault against his wife while he was in office, and
Speaker 3: no one even picked up on that because it was
Speaker 3: in city court instead of district court, because it was
Speaker 3: a minor offense at that point. She wasn't severely injured
Speaker 3: or anything like that, and nobody covers city court because
Speaker 3: it's DUIs and domestics and there's a lot of those
Speaker 3: in Vegas and so but instantly we started the investigative team.
Speaker 3: So basically the Metro team started following the homicide and
Speaker 3: the court cases and all that, and the investigative team
Speaker 3: started digging into who is this guy really? And one
Speaker 3: of my colleagues did a long profile that found that
Speaker 3: he had had all kinds of abusive and inappropriate behavior
Speaker 3: throughout the years, starting at university a law at the
Speaker 3: UNLV law school, he was got drunk and made some
Speaker 3: inappropriate advances at a party and then made some threats
Speaker 3: afterwards about suing people and things like that. When he
Speaker 3: opened up his own private practice after passing the bar,
Speaker 3: there was really an appropriate conduct with some of the employees,
Speaker 3: and then when he got into office it looked like
Speaker 3: that type of conduct continued. It was a pattern that
Speaker 3: we only uncovered afterwards because before that it was just
Speaker 3: such a small office that no one was really covering.
Speaker 2: One of the issues that comes up and as a
Speaker 2: primary part of this book is the challenge for the
Speaker 2: Review Journal to preserve the confidential sources that they believe
Speaker 2: should be on Jeff's phone, which is confiscated by the
Speaker 2: police and their investigation there was also the issue of
Speaker 2: four computers at work, or two computers at work, four
Speaker 2: computers at Jeff's home. So tell us just a little
Speaker 2: bit about this battle that begins for his devices electronic devices.
Speaker 3: Right, and that that's kind of a very important precedental
Speaker 3: case that we've spent since just that fighting and may
Speaker 3: continue even further on, because there's a lot of back
Speaker 3: and forth. So basically, they find Jeff's body, there's a
Speaker 3: there's a his iPhone, which at the paper we're reimbursed,
Speaker 3: we're given a certain amount every month, but we have
Speaker 3: our own phone. We do get computers from the paper,
Speaker 3: but his was in the it getting repaired, so his
Speaker 3: work computer wasn't there. But they find the phone in
Speaker 3: his pocket. They find poor computers in a hard drive
Speaker 3: in his house that were all his personal computers that
Speaker 3: he used for work. And so at that point we
Speaker 3: know his phone is chocked full of forty years of
Speaker 3: contacts and confidential sources, many of whom probably work in
Speaker 3: the DA's office and the police who want may want
Speaker 3: to see those people and may want to know who's
Speaker 3: talking to Jeff. Additionally, his computers have probably have drafts
Speaker 3: of stories, documents he received tips, emails, that kind of
Speaker 3: stuff from confidential sources. Police say, okay, they initially look
Speaker 3: at the phone just to see if there was a
Speaker 3: text saying hey, I'm coming to get you, or a
Speaker 3: meeting or something that would give him a suspect. And
Speaker 3: after that we find out that these devices exist, we
Speaker 3: instantly go to court and get a restraining order to
Speaker 3: prevent the police from from looking at the devices until
Speaker 3: we can get a ruling on whether there's confidential sources,
Speaker 3: which we know there are because Jeff worked sources like
Speaker 3: nobody in this town, and he knew people for forty years,
Speaker 3: so there were a lot of people talking to him.
Speaker 3: And so this ends up being a huge fight. The
Speaker 3: prosecutor and police contend that we have no right to
Speaker 3: intervene in the case. We have no standing because a
Speaker 3: the devices weren't the devices were not the newspaper's devices,
Speaker 3: they were just the personal devices. So if anybody can
Speaker 3: intervene to be his family, which who did not intervene
Speaker 3: to protect his sources? And we argued that because we
Speaker 3: have a very strong shield law in Nevada, that the
Speaker 3: shield law protects the reporter after his death and allows
Speaker 3: the agency or the news organization that he worked for
Speaker 3: to exert that privilege when he couldn't do it. The
Speaker 3: shield law would be pretty worthless, is if you could
Speaker 3: kill a reporter and then get all his sources. In
Speaker 3: November of last year, we won historic ruling. Basically the
Speaker 3: Supreme Court nanaiostly ruled that yes, the shield law extends
Speaker 3: after a reporter's death. Yes the news organization can exert
Speaker 3: that privilege on their behalf, and yes the police can't
Speaker 3: search those devices without somebody else taking out anything that
Speaker 3: could be privileged journalistic materials. Fight was very expensive. I
Speaker 3: don't have an exact figure, and I know in court
Speaker 3: they talked about a million plus on our side. The
Speaker 3: you know, they spent a lot of time on the
Speaker 3: on the prosecutors and the police side, and hire their
Speaker 3: counsel and their legal teams. So at that point, once
Speaker 3: we win the police department, which has been nothing but
Speaker 3: obstructionist and fighting for every little thing, because we had
Speaker 3: initially said, look, let us take out all the confidential sources.
Speaker 3: We can appoint a judge and a former prosecutor to
Speaker 3: look at this stuff and find anything that might be
Speaker 3: relevant to the case. Because obviously the prosecutors arguing that
Speaker 3: the defendant has a right to discovery in those devices
Speaker 3: in case there's someone else who could be a suspect,
Speaker 3: and they wanted nothing to do with it. So the
Speaker 3: second we win, they call us up and say, Okay,
Speaker 3: why don't you guys look through the instead of hiring
Speaker 3: these outside people do why don't you guys look through
Speaker 3: the devices, tell us what's privileged and then go from there.
Speaker 3: And so we've had these devices, but we're still fighting
Speaker 3: on how on how much is privilege and what's privilege
Speaker 3: and how much they're going to ask for and stuff
Speaker 3: like that. So it's been a long legal battle.
Speaker 2: You talk about the long legal battle despite you right,
Speaker 2: despite all of these you know, the damning evidence, the
Speaker 2: DNA and all of the other evidence, including the photo
Speaker 2: of the vehicle. And what is this person's defense? What
Speaker 2: is he claiming? Is his defense?
Speaker 3: Okay, well, he spoke to me from jail video link,
Speaker 3: and his contention is there was a company called there
Speaker 3: was a company, a real estate company that was doing
Speaker 3: things that he felt were inappropriate in probate cases. And
Speaker 3: state law allows anybody who's not a felon in over
Speaker 3: eighteen to take over a probate case if there's no family,
Speaker 3: even if they have no connection to the family, And
Speaker 3: so he felt that there was a real estate company
Speaker 3: that was inappropriate taking people's houses, and when he was
Speaker 3: in office, he was fighting to try to get them
Speaker 3: to stop and try to get them investigated. His contention
Speaker 3: is that they framed him for Jeff's murder because they
Speaker 3: wanted him out of office. He was being a nuisance
Speaker 3: to their business, so they framed him for Jeff's murder.
Speaker 3: And when I asked him, well, how did the DNA
Speaker 3: get there, He's like, I don't know, We're still investigating
Speaker 3: that kind of thing. But that's his contention, and that
Speaker 3: that is probably going to be his defense from what
Speaker 3: we could tell so far that he's after I talked
Speaker 3: to him, he ended up talking about this in open court.
Speaker 3: I expect if the trial goes to August in August,
Speaker 3: that he will be maintaining that he was set up
Speaker 3: by this real estate company, which of course denies any
Speaker 3: involvement in the case.
Speaker 2: It's very interesting when you talk about Alicia Goodwin, her
Speaker 2: version of events when she was with the with his firm,
Speaker 2: and the conversation she had, her religious background, she claims
Speaker 2: changed their relationship irrevocably from that point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Alicia is one of the people who was
Speaker 3: filing complaints against Rob Tais in his office, and he
Speaker 3: said that, and she had claimed she was actually the
Speaker 3: only one who actually filed two formal complaints. Everybody else
Speaker 3: was just kind of complaining behind the scenes. And she
Speaker 3: maintained that they had a pretty good relationship until he
Speaker 3: found out that she was the Mormon, and then he
Speaker 3: started talking about the Mormon mafia running the Nevada and
Speaker 3: all this other stuff, and so that she felt that
Speaker 3: he reassigned her and basically demoted her and took away
Speaker 3: out of her job functions. And so she was one
Speaker 3: of the people who started following him and got the
Speaker 3: video of him and the other employee in the back
Speaker 3: seat of her the employees suv at outlet mall not
Speaker 3: far from the office. Video that is kind of hard
Speaker 3: to explain why you're what kind of professional thing you
Speaker 3: could be doing in the backseat of a car. And
Speaker 3: so she had gotten they'd followed him half a dozen,
Speaker 3: maybe nine ten times and gotten different video that they
Speaker 3: gave to Jeff And so that was kind of the
Speaker 3: beginning of the story. And I suspect from Jeff's point
Speaker 3: of view, I think the video is probably the most
Speaker 3: damning part of the story because a lot of it
Speaker 3: was kind of he said, she said, he claimed, they
Speaker 3: claimed that he did these things. He said, No, they're
Speaker 3: just bad employees. I'm not one hundred percent sure Jeff
Speaker 3: would have gone forward with the story without the video,
Speaker 3: but clearly having a subordinate, having an appropriate relationship with
Speaker 3: a subordinate, you know, is not is not appropriate. It's
Speaker 3: against county rules. And so I think that pushed it
Speaker 3: over to a story for Jeff. So, yeah, Alicia was
Speaker 3: a key actor in getting Jeff to work on the story.
Speaker 3: And actually her father had been a source of Jeff's
Speaker 3: for years and years because he used to be a
Speaker 3: Metro detective, and so her father actually reached out to
Speaker 3: Jeff when other media didn't want to do the story,
Speaker 3: and that's how they kind of connected with the people
Speaker 3: who were complaining about Rob Tayas in the Public Administration office.
Speaker 2: Now, what is the local the Las Vegas and the
Speaker 2: national and international reaction once they find that a journalist
Speaker 2: has been killed by this taus and the reasons for
Speaker 2: the murder itself? How big a story is this and
Speaker 2: how does the review Journal handle it all?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, just to be fair, he's accused but not convicted,
Speaker 3: so we don't know if he killed them until he
Speaker 3: gets convicted. Each he's an innocent person. But obviously the
Speaker 3: reaction was huge. We were I was because I was,
Speaker 3: you know, working closely with Jeff. They asked me to
Speaker 3: take a lot of the media stuff. So I was
Speaker 3: on CNN, I was on Fox, I was on various shows, podcasts,
Speaker 3: other people. People talked to big papers, New York Times,
Speaker 3: La Times, A lot of papers sent correspondence here. CBS
Speaker 3: ended up sending people for a week, did a long thing,
Speaker 3: and then forty hours more recently did a whole hour
Speaker 3: on it. It was a big story nationally internationally because,
Speaker 3: like I said earlier, unless it's the last time we
Speaker 3: could find a government official killing a reporter because of
Speaker 3: his story. Was in the forties in Texas where sheriffs
Speaker 3: were a sheriff for our assistant sheriff killed a radio
Speaker 3: reporter who was investigating some of his properties for prostitution.
Speaker 3: So we're talking about close to sixty or seventy years.
Speaker 3: All the other journalists who were killed, and there were
Speaker 3: more than a dozen were either killed in the mass
Speaker 3: shooting I mentioned, or were killed by a gang member
Speaker 3: or a mobster or something like that. So it's extremely
Speaker 3: extremely unusual for a government elected official to go this,
Speaker 3: and you're talking about a guy who has a law degree.
Speaker 3: He did lose the reelection, possibly most likely because of
Speaker 3: Jeff's stories, But if he ended up killing Jeff, it's
Speaker 3: completely surprising because it wasn't like this story got him indicted.
Speaker 3: It wasn't like the story, you know, would prohibit him
Speaker 3: from going back to legal practice and going on with
Speaker 3: his life. His wife is stuck behind behind him, despite
Speaker 3: the video of him in the car with this woman,
Speaker 3: so it didn't even break up his family, and so
Speaker 3: surprising if he is the person and the police and
Speaker 3: prosecutors say did it. If he is the one, it's
Speaker 3: really kind of a head scratcher because why would you
Speaker 3: go to that extent for the damage has already been done.
Speaker 3: You've lost your you've lost your reelection. There's nothing anybody
Speaker 3: can do about that. Killing Jeff doesn't get you back,
Speaker 3: and it just puts you in more trouble.
Speaker 2: If he did it, let's just just as an opportunity
Speaker 2: to hear these messages. Yeah, it doesn't make a lot
Speaker 2: of sen And you write about in the book your
Speaker 2: conversation with Taos and you challenge some of the things
Speaker 2: he says. Can you it's a pretty dramatic scene. Can
Speaker 2: you can you recreate that for us somewhat?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Sure. You know, I sit down with him. It's
Speaker 3: in a loud room because there's other people talking to
Speaker 3: their friends and family who've been arrested over over video links.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to put my recorder to my ear and
Speaker 3: still ask questions, and so I want to you know,
Speaker 3: I went there assuming he didn'tn't want to talk about
Speaker 3: the case. I wanted to learn a little bit more
Speaker 3: about him. And then he said, no, I don't want
Speaker 3: to talk to you about my personal history because I
Speaker 3: might want to work on a book with someone, right.
Speaker 3: I said, okay, And I said, well, what are we
Speaker 3: doing here then? Because he has to prove the interview.
Speaker 3: You can't just show up and force him to do
Speaker 3: an interview. So I had to lie to police to
Speaker 3: do it. He goes, well, let's talk about the case.
Speaker 3: And first he wanted to relitigate whether or not he
Speaker 3: was a bad boss and whether or not Jeff's stories
Speaker 3: were fair and accurate, right, And then I started, I said, well,
Speaker 3: do you want to talk about the murder case? And
Speaker 3: he says, yeah, I mean, I'm innocent. I've never I
Speaker 3: would never do anything like that. I'm I'm a good person.
Speaker 3: You know, I've made mistakes in my past. I know,
Speaker 3: choked my wife, but I was drinking and I was
Speaker 3: an alcoholic, so I stopped drinking after that. And I
Speaker 3: had meant making mistakes in you know, other parts of
Speaker 3: my life, but who hasn't. But I would never kill anybody.
Speaker 3: And that's when he comes out and said and I said,
Speaker 3: well who does. And we had heard some inklings that
Speaker 3: he was going to blame this, this real estate company,
Speaker 3: and I said, well who did it? And he starts
Speaker 3: talking about the real estate company and that he set
Speaker 3: him up. And I said, look, Rob, who's going to
Speaker 3: believe that. I mean, it's very unlikely, not only that
Speaker 3: they would kill someone, but it's very unlikely that if
Speaker 3: they wanted to kill some get rid of you, they
Speaker 3: would just kill you instead of the person who was
Speaker 3: basically responsible for taking you out of office. And then
Speaker 3: he says, well, if they killed me, then the investigation
Speaker 3: would a snowball on them, and here they were able
Speaker 3: to look make me look like I'm crazy and took
Speaker 3: me out. And I said, but you know, you were
Speaker 3: already kind of out. They only had to wait three
Speaker 3: months before your time in office is done. And then
Speaker 3: I said, well, what happened with you?
Speaker 2: Know?
Speaker 3: Where were you? He's like, oh, I was at home alone,
Speaker 3: because the cell phone was at home, and because he
Speaker 3: left it at home because cell phones can be tracked.
Speaker 3: Right if he ends up being convicted of the killer,
Speaker 3: He's smart enough to leave a cell phone at home
Speaker 3: so it wouldn't be tracked to the site. He said,
Speaker 3: I was just at home alone. How did they get
Speaker 3: your DNA? Well, I don't know, but you know, and
Speaker 3: I said, you know, the figure looks kind of like you,
Speaker 3: and he goes, yeah, well, that person could have just
Speaker 3: planted the DNA after the stabbing, and so he could
Speaker 3: never really explain how they got DNA from him the plant,
Speaker 3: even which would be a really difficult thing for some
Speaker 3: random person to get somebody else's the DNA, especially skin scraping.
Speaker 3: It's one thing to get him, you know, follow him
Speaker 3: to Starbucks and grab their their coffee cup after they
Speaker 3: throw it away, but that's not what they according to police,
Speaker 3: what they found. So yeah, it was an interesting I
Speaker 3: found it very interesting because he was saying stuff that
Speaker 3: was very hard to believe, but he was very earnest
Speaker 3: about it and didn't appear to be out of his mind.
Speaker 3: He just had this this story that I think a
Speaker 3: lot of people have heard it were pretty incredulous about it.
Speaker 3: So it was I'm surprised he talked to me. He's
Speaker 3: been talking to a lot of reporters. Was kind of
Speaker 3: surprised that he would lay that all out there before
Speaker 3: the trial, because, you know, gives a prosecutors and police
Speaker 3: an idea of where he's going to go.
Speaker 2: He also say it's unusual for a person like him
Speaker 2: in his situation to also speak to other media, but
Speaker 2: he had also granted interviews to other media. If I'm
Speaker 2: not correct, he also granted an interview to an RJ
Speaker 2: reporter Newburgh. I'm not correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Caitlin has talked to him several times and she is. Yeah,
Speaker 3: He's talked to her repeat about the case because she's
Speaker 3: the one kind of thing on the ground. She's a
Speaker 3: courts reporter. She's a really good reporter, hard working, really
Speaker 3: dedicated and she's been following this case from the day
Speaker 3: he was arrested, and he ended up talking to a
Speaker 3: TV station, so she decided to try and sure enough,
Speaker 3: he was okay. I'm not sure if he turned down
Speaker 3: any of his requests. I went to final I went
Speaker 3: an additional step to ask for his visitor logs for
Speaker 3: the book, just to see who who was visiting him,
Speaker 3: and there was a number of reporters he ended up
Speaker 3: talking to forty eight hours on camera when they did
Speaker 3: the big piece, the hour long piece on the RJ's
Speaker 3: reaction in RJ's work after the after Jeff's murders. So
Speaker 3: he has been very unusual for suspect to do this.
Speaker 3: A lot of it probably extends the fact that most
Speaker 3: of the time he's represented himself, and he's gone through
Speaker 3: several attorneys, but he's continuing to talk even though he
Speaker 3: has a pretty high profile defense attorney who's pretty credible.
Speaker 3: You know, most defense attorneys tell you not to talk, right,
Speaker 3: don't talk to police, definitely, don't talk to the media.
Speaker 3: But he's ignoring that and and wants to be have
Speaker 3: his voice heard in it, and so we obviously are
Speaker 3: more than happy to allow him to put his side out.
Speaker 2: There was the Review Journal involved at all in the
Speaker 2: investigation of his claim that he was indigened despite owning properties.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I did that story. So basically the way
Speaker 3: the law works is you get a public defender only
Speaker 3: if you're completely indigen You have no resources, you have
Speaker 3: no income, you have nothing in the bank account. So
Speaker 3: I had gotten a tip after he had signed that
Speaker 3: paper claiming that he had written on the paper that
Speaker 3: he had some rental properties, but there was no other
Speaker 3: information about it, and there was no sense of whether
Speaker 3: they were worth anything. So I had gotten a tip
Speaker 3: that some of these rental properties are in Hot Springs,
Speaker 3: and so I was able to track them down, but
Speaker 3: basically it was an l blind LLC, so I couldn't
Speaker 3: find anything. What I did is I called up the
Speaker 3: tax collector's office in Hot Springs and said, Hey, are
Speaker 3: any of the you guys ever sent tax bills to
Speaker 3: Rob Tayas's address in Las Vegas? I had I knew
Speaker 3: his address, and they said, yeah, here it is, and
Speaker 3: on those tax bills were the properties right, So it
Speaker 3: was clear that they were his. In fact, the day
Speaker 3: after my story ran with a police source that I
Speaker 3: have fairly high up called me up and it's like,
Speaker 3: how the heck did you get that? We were been
Speaker 3: looking for those properties for weeks? And so, yeah, he
Speaker 3: had several properties worth quite a bit of money. He
Speaker 3: ended up selling him recently to pay for this attorney.
Speaker 3: He had some money in the bank, his wife was
Speaker 3: still making money. So we questioned. We wrote a story
Speaker 3: questioning why taxpayers were paying for his legal defense, and
Speaker 3: a few days later he ended up dropping his public defender.
Speaker 3: I don't know, I don't I doubt it's because of
Speaker 3: our story. He's been going through attorneys. I think he
Speaker 3: went through four or five different attorneys. But when he
Speaker 3: wanted a public defender again, the judge finally did the
Speaker 3: right thing and held it indiagency hearing and said that
Speaker 3: he couldn't have it because he does have resources. He
Speaker 3: has property, he has a house, he has he has
Speaker 3: family who has money. And so he ended up having
Speaker 3: to pay for his own attorney and went through a
Speaker 3: few more and now has a new attorney that he
Speaker 3: got recently.
Speaker 2: Who is the new attorney that he.
Speaker 3: Has, Draskovic. He's a pretty high profile criminal defense attorney,
Speaker 3: has done a lot of cases and has had some
Speaker 3: pretty good success of getting people mistrials and things like that.
Speaker 3: He has quite a bit of credibility. Some of the
Speaker 3: other attorneys he hired were good attorneys, but didn't have
Speaker 3: the experience in a high profile murder cases that the
Speaker 3: attorney has now. But the issue is how much how
Speaker 3: much of the attorney's advice is Rob Tays really listening
Speaker 3: to if he's still agreeing to talk to reporters. So
Speaker 3: obviously the attorney has atorne a client privilege. He can't
Speaker 3: talk to us about his interactions there. But it seems
Speaker 3: like Rob is very is very in control, in charge.
Speaker 3: He is a lawyer. He never did any he didn't
Speaker 3: do any serious criminal work. He was a probate lawyer.
Speaker 3: I think he did a dui or something. But he's
Speaker 3: definitely knows what he wants. He believes, or at least
Speaker 3: he says it repeatedly that he believes he's going to
Speaker 3: walk out of there after the trial. He wanted the
Speaker 3: trial to happen in March because he thought that he
Speaker 3: was going to quit it and why spend any more
Speaker 3: time at the Clark County Detention Center sitting there with
Speaker 3: no bail. It's going to be an interesting case, and
Speaker 3: that it would be interesting to see what his attorney
Speaker 3: does and what he what kind of defense he puts up.
Speaker 2: It's interesting in representing himself he is doing. I think
Speaker 2: in his mind that he is also representing himself as
Speaker 2: an attorney might in a high profile case like this,
Speaker 2: trying to somehow affect the jury pool with his interviews
Speaker 2: that he does.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's possible, or he wants he doesn't want. You know,
Speaker 3: the problem with not speaking to the media is then
Speaker 3: you have no comment and your side is never out.
Speaker 3: So I think he's hoping to get the side of
Speaker 3: his side out into the media. Maybe some juries will
Speaker 3: hear it, maybe they won't. It also kind of locks
Speaker 3: them into a story because I knew full well when
Speaker 3: I was talking to him that the police were recording
Speaker 3: this conversation on video link. And I'm sure as an
Speaker 3: attorney he's He's not stupid, he knows that's happening. So
Speaker 3: now he has at least his legal strategy out there,
Speaker 3: and prosecutors can look for ways to thwart it well
Speaker 3: before the case comes to the trial. I don't know
Speaker 3: for a fact, but I suspect that some of his
Speaker 3: issues with changing attorneys where they were telling him, look, Rob,
Speaker 3: the case is pretty overwhelming. You should try to we
Speaker 3: should try to get you a police so you don't
Speaker 3: spend the rest of your life in prison. And he
Speaker 3: doesn't want to do it. He's maintaining his innocence and
Speaker 3: he has a right to a trial. The question of
Speaker 3: the matter is how effective is his defense going to
Speaker 3: be with what he has put out there? And you know,
Speaker 3: juries aren't predictable. You know, we just we just had
Speaker 3: oj Dye and we all remember what happened in that case.
Speaker 3: I think most people thought he was going to be
Speaker 3: convicted and he was absolved of the murder. So you
Speaker 3: never know. I mean, maybe he has a story that
Speaker 3: will appeal to the jury. We'll have to see when
Speaker 3: it actually goes to trial, because it doesn't look like
Speaker 3: it doesn't look like he's going to take a plead
Speaker 3: of any sort.
Speaker 2: When is the trial scheduled for? Do you know?
Speaker 3: It's scheduled now for first Monday in August, the fifth
Speaker 3: of August. But it was supposed to happen in March.
Speaker 3: And the reason it didn't happen in March is because
Speaker 3: we were still the RJ was still reviewing Jeff's devices
Speaker 3: for what could and couldn't be privileged as far as
Speaker 3: sources and journalistic materials, and so initially he wanted to
Speaker 3: go forward without that, but then the prosecutors wanted the stuff,
Speaker 3: and then I think his conturney convinced him to delay
Speaker 3: it until August. So as soon as we have an
Speaker 3: agreement with police and prosecutors on what we turn over
Speaker 3: and we don't turn over, a bunch of us are
Speaker 3: going to be there's a dozen of us who have
Speaker 3: been authorized by the court to look at the devices,
Speaker 3: find out where the sources and the religion material is
Speaker 3: that police and prosecutors can't look at.
Speaker 2: Oh, very interesting. What we haven't mentioned though in this
Speaker 2: and just to sort of wrap up this story, is
Speaker 2: the injuries that Jeff Garriman endured right in his front
Speaker 2: yard of his home and wasn't found by the neighbor
Speaker 2: till the next day covered in blood, but right away
Speaker 2: his crodit artery was slashed and he was stabbed in
Speaker 2: the neck three times, but then three times in the
Speaker 2: torso as well. So this was, as you write, a
Speaker 2: brutal and gruesome murder in revenge for an article written
Speaker 2: in a newspaper, and you explained throughout this book the
Speaker 2: dangerous characters that Jeff Garriman dared to write about mob figures.
Speaker 2: Even one mob figure said I will kill you after
Speaker 2: writing an article. So he was a fearless with great integrity,
Speaker 2: this journalist. And you do write about his enduring legend,
Speaker 2: what his reputation was as a journalist after the news
Speaker 2: of his murder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, obviously big thing for us is when
Speaker 3: we got the autopsy report, we wanted to know if
Speaker 3: he suffered. Did he lay there for twelve hours twenty
Speaker 3: four hours before he died, just immobilized. Fortunately, all the
Speaker 3: experts thought he was pretty he probably was dead before
Speaker 3: he fell because those injuries were so severe. He was
Speaker 3: able to scratch the suspect allegedly according to police, and
Speaker 3: get DNA. His life legacy, he's definitely I call him
Speaker 3: the quintessential Las Vegas journalists. He's been there for he'd
Speaker 3: been there for forty years. His killing, he was inducted
Speaker 3: in the Hall of Fame by the never Ada Press Association.
Speaker 3: And he you know, he basically the he tracked Vegas.
Speaker 3: He was he was a huge almost like a historian.
Speaker 3: His stories tracked Vegas through late seventies to the current time,
Speaker 3: which was one of the most interesting times in Vegas
Speaker 3: because that's when the mob was was pushed out and
Speaker 3: when the corporations kind of took over the casinos. He
Speaker 3: definitely is will be missed, and he definitely has a
Speaker 3: a place in the history of this town that he's
Speaker 3: created through his hard work and is digging in his
Speaker 3: his tenacity.
Speaker 2: Tell us about when you talk about his legacy murder
Speaker 2: in Sin City, and also the podcast Mobbed.
Speaker 3: Up Right, So he had always wanted to write a
Speaker 3: book in the he there was a guy Binion. Benny
Speaker 3: Binyon was the guy I talked about earlier who had
Speaker 3: created a Binion's Horseshoe and been a big, big, big
Speaker 3: casino owner downtown, very checkered history. His son was running
Speaker 3: the casino because after a while Benny's history allowed didn't
Speaker 3: allow him to have a license. But his son had
Speaker 3: some similar problem or had not similar problems. He had
Speaker 3: different problems. He had a drug addiction, He was divorced,
Speaker 3: ended up moving in with a woman who had a
Speaker 3: boyfriend of her own, and then he was found dead.
Speaker 3: They initially thought it was a drug overdose, but then
Speaker 3: police and prosecutors decided that the woman and her boyfriend
Speaker 3: had killed him for the money because the boyfriend was
Speaker 3: caught digging up a bunch of silver and chips, casino
Speaker 3: chips and other valuables in the desert outside of Perump,
Speaker 3: which is about sixty miles away, And so Jeff covered
Speaker 3: the case. He was a courts reporter for the Sun
Speaker 3: and ended up writing a book called Murder in Sin
Speaker 3: City about this case and ended up being a really
Speaker 3: high profile case. There was actually a few books written
Speaker 3: about it, but his was made into a made for
Speaker 3: TV movie with some pretty well known actress and actresses.
Speaker 3: More recently in We Have, We Have, We Have. This
Speaker 3: is our third season. We have a season called We
Speaker 3: Have a Podcast. The RJ producers a podcast called mobbed Up,
Speaker 3: pretty popular podcast Wired. Wired magazine called it one of
Speaker 3: the best crime podcasts and it gets a lot of listeners.
Speaker 3: And basically every season is one other, one section of
Speaker 3: what the Mob's history is in Las Vegas. And Jeff
Speaker 3: did season two reluctantly at first, but we all think
Speaker 3: he did a really good job. In fact, he wanted
Speaker 3: to have had a Press Association award after his death
Speaker 3: for season two of mobbed up as the best podcast.
Speaker 3: He talked about his experiences covering the Mob and the
Speaker 3: purchase of the Aladdin. There was a big fight between
Speaker 3: Johnny Carson and Wayne Newton bob who would purchase the property,
Speaker 3: and so that was his season of and there's a
Speaker 3: lot of recollections. He talked a little bit about that
Speaker 3: punch by the by the who is working for the
Speaker 3: for the loan Shark and it was I remember that
Speaker 3: as being a very emotional Press Association Awards because we
Speaker 3: were there. I had won substancial number of awards, but
Speaker 3: the big thing was him being inducted in the Hall
Speaker 3: of Fame and him getting award for the podcast that
Speaker 3: he didn't want to do but ended up really loving
Speaker 3: and getting a lot of publicity for and a lot
Speaker 3: of accolades for. And it was really well done. It's
Speaker 3: worth listening to. You can hear Jeff Voyce still.
Speaker 2: Absolutely you considered Jeff a respected colleague. And this book
Speaker 2: tell us what the purpose of this book is. We
Speaker 2: talked about at the very beginning the promise you made
Speaker 2: to Jeff if anything were to happen, But tell us
Speaker 2: about the promise of this book for you.
Speaker 3: So that that meeting that we had before. About a
Speaker 3: week before his death, I talked to him. He go, hey,
Speaker 3: that Rob Tayos guy, he's pretty upsets tweeting about you,
Speaker 3: and he took him out of office. You better watch
Speaker 3: your back, which is kind of our kind of you know,
Speaker 3: our kind of little gallows joke. And he goes, well,
Speaker 3: you're better write about it if anything happens, and I'm like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: of course not in assuming nothing happened. We did this
Speaker 3: a dozen times. Right after he was killed. I decided
Speaker 3: that even though that promise was in jest, that I
Speaker 3: would keep that promise. It was important A to keep
Speaker 3: the promise, B and more importantly to tell Jeff's story
Speaker 3: as a cautionary tale about what can happen when government
Speaker 3: corruption and government malfeasance is exposed and if police are
Speaker 3: are and prosecuted are right. Person who got exposed didn't
Speaker 3: like it, and so we definitely want I definitely wanted
Speaker 3: to show his life, his career, and what happened to
Speaker 3: him so people would understand it. And that's kind of
Speaker 3: what the Last story is all about. Jeff's last story.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I want to thank you so much for coming
Speaker 2: on and talking about your book, The Last Story The
Speaker 2: Murder of an Investigative Journalist in Las Vegas. So could
Speaker 2: you tell us where they might find out more information
Speaker 2: about this book and the publisher? Could you tell us that?
Speaker 3: So The Last Stories On will be published August thirtieth.
Speaker 3: It's already on Amazon for pre order, both kindle and
Speaker 3: the hardcover and a paperback too, and I think there's
Speaker 3: gonna be an audiobook coming out. You can see my
Speaker 3: page on Wild Blue Press where the book. You can
Speaker 3: also link to the book, and you can follow me
Speaker 3: and Twitter at Arthur m Kin and is my middle initial,
Speaker 3: like Mary. Arthur m Kin is my Twitter handle, And obviously,
Speaker 3: even though I rarely write for the R jam Moore
Speaker 3: because I'm an editor, you can see my work my
Speaker 3: bio there and the work of my reporters on the
Speaker 3: investigative team.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Arthur Kine The Last Story, The
Speaker 2: Murder of an Investigative Journalist in Las Vegas. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much for this interview. And you have a great evening,
Speaker 2: good night, good too.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you.