John O'Brien covers
the operations of the federal agencies, prosecutors and courts
in northern New York. While examining TRACFED data about the district
in the spring of 1999, O'Brien noticed that the local office of
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) for the last
few years ranked at or near the bottom in the entire nation when
it came to the federal weapons cases. The obvious question was
why. But when O'Brien started asking questions he uncovered an
answer that was far from obvious: ATF enforcement had fallen apart
after a secret feud had developed between the agency and local
police several years before. The cause of this mysterious feud
was a number of discrepancies that local police had uncovered
when they tried to investigate a suspicious ATF shooting incident.
O'Brien's front-page articles -- deftly mixing the bizarre details
of the long festering feud, once secret government memos and the
agency's damaging performance statistics -- resulted in an insightful
front-page article on August 16, 1999.
