This five-part series, which includes this three-part series on how we got the story, is the result of a two-year investigation, involving dozens of legal filings, scores of interview requests, several interviews, innumerable Zoom meetings, and five 311 calls. We examined hundreds of confidential documents, crisscrossed the country three times, and uncovered shocking revelations, including the fact that we were still short of Delta Medallion status.
Our investigation was driven by three questions, or what journalists call “concerns.” First, what was the relationship between company executives and government regulators? Second, was there evidence of a “quid pro quo” (literally, a reciprocal relationship that raises “concerns”)? Third, was there sufficient evidence of a “quid pro quo” to keep us from being reassigned to the sports desk?
Using cell-phone data and flight manifests, we followed Michael Tisdale, the chief executive, for months, shadowing him during a weekend at Davos, observing him as he toured factories in China, and spending ten days partially submerged in the koi pond outside his office. We also tracked his activities online, contacting him on LinkedIn more than seven (8) times. It was later revealed that we had the wrong Michael Tisdale, but the one we found sounds like he’s doing quite well as a “brand development manager” for the past “one year and 3 months,” which we are still trying to confirm.
We made three trips to company events, first posing as shareholders at the general meeting, then as coatroom attendants at a company “Kahlúa for the Cure” charity evening, and, finally, as members of the visiting Vienna Boys’ Choir. We were able to confirm a lot of this reporting during a sales team-building offsite in Scottsdale, Arizona, where we placed second in the scavenger hunt (partnered with Jamie, Southeast territory).
All interviews were conducted under strict guidelines. On-the-record interviews were quoted with full attribution. Off-the-record interviews were quoted without attribution. Off-the-record interviews with attribution were quoted anonymously. Anonymous interviews were quoted on the record without attribution but using just the adverbs, which strongly implied that the chairman’s ex-wife is drinking again.
We made more than a dozen requests for federal documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Concerned that the company might be alerted to our reporting, we also used FOIA to obtain all other FOIA requests for similar information. Worried that our own colleagues knew what we were doing, we then FOIA’d all their FOIAs.
Inevitably, we encountered roadblocks. We sent samples of company waste to an independent lab, but the results came back negative, although the technicians were able to identify the rash we got while sleeping in our rental car. We spent a month in a “coding boot camp,” after our employer, a stalwart of long-form investigative journalism, announced that it was pivoting to become an app that delivers non-alcoholic cocktails.
By then, it was obvious that the target of our story was using “black ops” to interfere with our investigation. First, we received a mysterious phone call asking us to “participate in a customer survey” for Brawny Paper Towels. Was this a message that we were getting “too close”? Then we discovered that the company had initiated a whisper campaign, when we received word that our Classmates.com profile had been visited 1 times [sic].
To protect our reporting, we moved all our research to a locked office, and communicated using only emojis. During one particularly intense night, Bruce let Stephen know that he was laughing so hard he was crying, and applauded three times, to which Stephen replied that he prayed this was true, while also wearing sunglasses. At this point, our editor-in-chief began calling us “Nimrod and DimStein,” which we took as a compliment.
We got the first draft down to just under a hundred thousand words and broke it into chapters that we uploaded to five-inch floppy disks, encrypted, and moved to another locked room, where they were de-encrypted, loaded onto CD-ROMs, and then hidden under our editor’s pillow. We then hammered out the final version, working in our editor’s garage in Maplewood, New Jersey. Then, in a room rented under an assumed name at the Holiday Inn Express Newark (King Deluxe, partial city view), we fine-tuned the edit during her weekly ketamine infusions.
We reached out to the company for comment a full two hours before publication. When we called the C.O.O. at home, he said that he was “surprised to hear from us” given that the company “had gone bankrupt a year ago.” For space reasons, we declined to print his statement in full.
We are spending the next six months filing expenses, but we are still on the story. If you have information you’d like to share, please reach out to companytips@. Be one of the first ten and receive a twenty-per-cent discount off your first Kombuchatini six-pack. ♦
