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Leen dusts off old notes for remembrance of cocaine cowboy

By Mark Obbie

Search the Washington Post's site for bylined articles by Jeff Leen, and you'll come up empty. He has a desk job -- but a critically important one in the paper's devotion to public-affairs journalism -- as the assistant managing editor in charge of investigative reporting. Today Leen penned a brief piece for the Post's investigations blog on a figure from his own reporting past. When he heard that Max Mermelstein had died, Leen wrote about Mermelstein's notoriety as one of the leading smugglers of South Florida's "cocaine cowboys" heyday. Mermelstein then became the Valachi-like turncoat of the Medellin cartel, testifying in key cases against his Colombian coconspirators. Leen and his co-author Guy Gugliotta (now a freelance science writer) documented all this in the Miami Herald, and then in their book Kings of Cocaine, which I avidly devoured as a fellow drug-beat reporter of that era. So I was pleased to see the old reporter haul out his old notes and put them to good use -- proving something that major newspapers these days seem to have a hard time remembering, or affording: the value of experience.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on September 16, 2008 (boomark / email).