There are two things you should know about
New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff, who is covering all things California from the Los Angeles bureau in his latest high-profile writing gig. First, he is
really good, a fearless reporter and go-for-the-gut storyteller who in nine years, briefly under executive editor Howell Raines and now in the post-Raines, post-Jayson Blair era, has shot through a galaxy of assignments that most reporters don't experience in a lifetime. In a
Times career spanning more than 400 articles, he's navigated the streets of New York for five days as a blind person, detailed the emotional fallout of a Brooklyn fire station in the ash of September 11, embedded himself with Marines in Iraq, and worked for almost a month in a tacitly segregated pork slaughterhouse in North Carolina, a story in the
Times series "How Race Is Lived in America," which won a Pulitzer Prize.
"Charlie has a singular voice and extraordinary ability," says Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, where LeDuff was trained and remains a legend. "He's one of those guys who's always on the edge." In naked contrast to his Ivy League colleagues at the illustrious paper, LeDuff, who is part Native American, has tailored a persona as bibulous scribe of the working class, hanging out in bars and exercising his lush prose. That overwhelming talent has earned him a book deal for a selection of his reports from the streets called
Work and Other Sins: Life in New York City and Thereabouts, due out at the end of January.
The second thing to know is that LeDuff, who's in his mid-30s, has been harboring an increasingly loaded secret since his UC Berkeley days. Nine years ago, in a piece he'd freelanced for the Emeryville-based
East Bay Monthly, he had been caught plagiarizing another journalist's work.
Though LeDuff's article appeared the same year the
Times hired LeDuff in 1995, two weeks ago was apparently the first time the paper's higher-ups had ever heard anything about it. And it's unclear how much they know. Last week,
Times national desk editor Jim Roberts said he wouldn't discuss the matter. Meanwhile, former professors of LeDuff's at UC Berkeley also told us they'd never heard of the events.
But in truth, the plagiarism has been far from a secret. After it was discovered, LeDuff had to sign an apology that appeared in the
Monthly (circulation 75,000) conceding that passages of the story in question had "come" from another source. Several Bay Area journalists who watched LeDuff's climb to stardom knew the facts, as did the journalist LeDuff copied from, author Ted Conover, who writes on occasion for the
New York Times Magazine. But even during the finger-pointing after the Blair scandal—when LeDuff's name was floated for suspicion because he, like Blair, had been hired through the paper's minority internship program and he always seemed to get great quotes—the consensus among journalists who knew of the incident, including some at this magazine, was that LeDuff had put it behind him. "I sometimes wondered if he'd do it again," says Mickey Butts, the
Monthly's associate editor at the time. But, he says, "I chalked it up to youthful indiscretion."
LeDuff's offending feature in the
Monthly reported his experience riding the rails with hoboes and was adapted from the film he'd produced for his master's degree on the same subject. Yet, despite having substantial original reporting to work with—he'd jumped trains with hoboes with names like Gravelcar and Montana Blackie—when he composed the story's first paragraph, he appropriated much of it (and several other passages) directly from Ted Conover's 1984 book,
Rolling Nowhere: A Young Man's Adventures Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes. When Conover wrote him to complain, the letter was returned "addressee unknown." So Conover wrote the
Monthly's editor, who confronted LeDuff.
Tim Devaney, former editor of the
Monthly (and former consulting editor to this magazine), says that LeDuff was "very apologetic and honestly distraught about the whole episode." According to Devaney, LeDuff said he had copied passages from Conover's book into his notebook and inadvertently inserted them as the lead of his article. But "we never believed it was inadvertent," says Butts. Neither did Conover, who told us (via email), "I was angry about LeDuff's borrowing from my book, and then, once we spoke on the phone, about the way he minimized his responsibility for what he had done." (To compare passages from LeDuff's article to Conover's book,
click here.)
LeDuff also pleaded with Devaney not to tell anyone about Conover's letter. Devaney agreed, provided that LeDuff write Conover an apology and acknowledge the borrowed passages. In June 1995, the
Monthly printed a brief erratum, signed by LeDuff. (
Click here for a copy of the erratum.) Remarkably, J-school professors did not see it, although the
Monthly was stacked up in cafés and bookstores around the campus. Nor, we have to assume, did anyone at the
Times. No doubt if they had known the details, LeDuff would never have been hired; he might even have been kicked out of school. (The UC J-school recently expelled a student caught plagiarizing, according to Schell.)
