David Barstow

A ground-breaking investigation into the potentially illegal financial schemes, tax evasions, and grandiose lies employed by Fred Trump and his son, Donald J. Trump, designed to create the illusion of the president as a self-made billionaire, and to falsely raise and lower the values of their holdings as needed to make money, and hide it.

How Wal-Mart de Mexico used bribery to build a store near the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacán:

“Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000, for example, Wal-Mart built a Sam’s Club in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit. Thanks to nine bribe payments totaling $765,000, Wal-Mart built a vast refrigerated distribution center in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away.

“But there is no better example of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s methods than its conquest of Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field. In Teotihuacán, The Times found that Wal-Mart de Mexico executives approved at least four different bribe payments — more than $200,000 in all — to build just a medium-size supermarket. Without those payoffs, records and interviews show, Wal-Mart almost surely would not have been allowed to build in Mrs. Pineda’s field.”

The worst of the explosions gutted the Deepwater Horizon stem to stern. Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage. Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck. It was no better there.

For more than 30 years the anti-abortion movement threw everything into driving Dr. George Tiller out of business, certain that his defeat would deal a devastating blow to the “abortion industry” that has terminated roughly 50 million pregnancies since Roe v. Wade in 1973.