UNDERCOVER VIDEO CATCHES
CHARITY WORKERS TAKING GOODS

VOLUME 19, NUMBER 23       JUNE 7, 1999

Undercover video captured eight office workers hauling off boxes and boxes of donated goods --- apparently for their personal use.

Feed the Children provides aid to hungry children and relief to victims of disasters, such as the outbreak of tornadoes that devastated portions of Oklahoma recently.
In fact, a number of television stations worked with Feed the Children just a few weeks ago to help their viewers send supplies to victims of the violent storms.

"It shows all of us that we need to be on alert. No matter how well-intended an organization is, we must keep our checks and balances in place," says WTVF News Director Mike Cutler.

"News departments are re-discovering investigations,
and I am pleased this station made the commitment to
spend many, many hours to make this
investigation complete."
--- Mike Cutler
News Director, WTVF-TV

WTVF does not have an I-Team per se. Their investigative reporter/producer works with anyone on the staff, providing support where needed, particularly on the Internet and data base searches.
"All of our reporters are encouraged to do investigative work," he says.

It's not just canned goods and used clothing.
"This warehouse handles the entire eastern end of the country, as well as shipping goods overseas," she explains.
"In addition to donations from the public of canned goods and clothing, they get donations from all kinds of businesses," she says.

Basically, anything you can find in a WalMart is in the warehouse. From cosmetics and jewelry to small electronics, there are many items donated.
"It is often brand new merchandise, sometimes with the tags still on, but things the stores can't sell. A grocery store distribution warehouse brings fresh produce all the time," she adds.
"When Garth Brooks finished his world tour, he donated a lot of the tour merchandise --- including bomber jackets, sweatshirts and T-shirts. Feed the Children has a lot of big corporate sponsors and celebrity sponsors," she says

Because the administrative staff parked in the front of the building, the newspeople could easily observe the activities.
"They would cart out box after box. Sometimes they had so much stuff, they needed dollies. These were large boxes that were filled. They would drag the boxes out, and they would make multiple trips. We couldn't believe how much stuff they carted out!" she says

Only a handful of people in the newsroom knew about the investigation, so Cutler pressed the news management team into service as undercover photographers, using home video equipment. The news director, managing editor, executive producer, special projects producer and a talk show producer all helped out with surveillance and shooting video.
"Fortunately, the advent of the camcorder has made it easy for anyone to pick up a camera, so several of the managers have gone out so we have someone available to monitor the situation," Cutler explains.
"You do what you have to do to make an investigation like this thorough," he says. After they had taped for days and watched employees removing merchandise, they had to find out where the merchandise was going. What if it was being given to another charity? "We wanted to make sure we had evidence of donations from the Feed the Children warehouse actually taken to individuals' homes," says Cutler.
"Just because someone removed donated goods didn't mean someone was doing something bad. We needed to have that part of the story," he says.

One day a woman and a child, neither of whom were employees, removed boxes of new clothing.
"They were removing giant boxes and boxes of clothing. The van was so full that when they loaded the last box in, it tumbled out and all the clothing spilled out in front of the camera," she says.

When the news crew followed them home, it turned out the woman lived two doors away from the woman who was second in command at the warehouse. Aft er more checking, WTVF discovered it was the employee's mother and 9-year-old son!
"We got video of them loading boxes into their garage, pulling clothing out and holding it up and modeling it," says Kraus. She says they have video of the entire administrative staff --- about eight people --- removing donated goods.
"Once we had seen the vast quantity of donations walking out of that warehouse, we felt an obligation to alert the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation," Cutler explains.

In the middle of May, law enforcement agents began their own investigation. "We were ready to run the story, and we wanted to confront the executive director as he was walking into the house with boxloads of stuff," she says. However, the TBI officials wanted some time to work on their investigation. The WTVF managers agreed to sit on the story a little longer.

When the TBI moved in, and began searching the houses of some of the employees, the station had to run with what they had spent months working on, or risk being scooped because of the breaking news.
It happened suddenly on a Monday.
Although WTVF had a promo that had been prepared in advance, they were unable to run it over the weekend to build the audience. Once the story broke, WTVF ran the hard news of the investigation on Monday night. The detailed investigative pieces with the undercover video ran at 6 and 10 Tuesday and Wednesday in the book, and also on Thursday and Friday, after the book was over.

The audience responded in a big way. Not only did those nights do well in the ratings, but Kraus received many, many e-mails and calls from viewers.

She asked, "What would you say if your employees were using dollies to carry out boxes and boxes ..."
"Excuse me?"
"What would you say if you had employees ..."
"I'd want to find out what was going on."

At first he said he had no idea what was going on. Then, he changed his approach. He eventually said he considered it a perk of the job, allowing workers to skim off the top.
"If we're taking some stuff home and giving a little brother a pair of shoes or some food, I don't have much to say about that," he told her.

Since the warehouse workers began talking to WTVF, two of them quit to take other jobs, and two were fired a week before the story broke.
"The reason they came to us is because they had repeatedly tried to contact the founder, Larry Jones, and tell him what was going on. One of them even sent him an explicit e-mail during the first week of May, describing everything they had seen. Still nothing was done," she says.

After the scandal broke, Jones held a news conference and criticized the station. Instead of accepting responsibility and vowing to fix the problem, he blasted them for doing the story, saying it was sweeps-driven media out to get his organization.

Cutler dismisses the allegation. "In fact, it was a four-month investigation. We could have made this a three-month investigation, and we would have had it at the beginning of the book, rather than at the end of it," he points out.
"We had a promotion spot ready. If we had any sense that it was going to happen on Monday, we would have been running the promo starting Friday night," he adds.
"We can honestly say that the ratings had nothing to do with it. It happened to fall on that Monday, and we went with it. If it had been a week later, we would have run with it then. It just happened to occur when it did, and that was just due to developments in the case," he explains.