Sunday, April 14, 1996
By Paige St. John
Detroit Journal Staff Writer
U.S. Rep. Barbara-Rose Collins' current problems with the FBI, the House ethics committee and the U.S. Justice Department are testimony to the power of the press, even when that press is a tiny newspaper handed out free once a week on the street corners of Washington, D.C.
Allegations against Collins - including falsified campaign spending reports and laundered scholarship money - appeared first in The Hill, a tabloid started in 1994 as an upstart rival to Roll Call, the traditional news source for Capitol Hill insiders. The bylines belong to Sarah Pekkanen, a young reporter who describes herself as a novice to investigative work.
Nevertheless, Pekkanen scooped the big papers by following up last July on what everyone else was treating as a routine Washington scandal: the firing of one of Collins' congressional aides, a gay man. The aide had won a federal discrimination complaint against Collins after claiming he was fired because the Detroit Democrat wrongly thought he was infected with the AIDS virus.
"I had never heard of Barbara-Rose Collins until my editor put the story down on my desk," Pekkanen said recently in Ann Arbor, where she described her coverage of Collins to University of Michigan journalism students.
But after filing a short story on the bias case, Pekkanen decided it would be worthwhile to talk to other former employees of Collins (House clerk records show about 100 aides had quit or been fired from Collins' office from 1990 to 1995). What followed were eight months of front-page stories in The Hill alleging that:
In February, Pekkanen reported that Collins used her congressional credit card (paid by taxpayer funds) to fly a friend from Detroit to Washing-ton under the alias of a congressional staffer.
The gay staff member who was fired because he was alleged to have HIV told Pekkanen that Collins deduced his homosexuality by reading his palms. Others said Collins required them to pack her bags for travel, even if it meant doing so at 6 a.m. And in a previously unreported anecdote, another staff member told Pekkanen that Collins had assigned him special duties whenever she arrived at National Airport from out-of-town trips.
"He was to meet her with coffee, a croissant and slippers," Pekkanen said. "He was supposed to bend down, take off her shoes, and put on the slippers, right there at the airport. He was pretty horrified. He found it very demeaning and the whole experience for him was horrible."
Though Collins in the past has claimed the stories about her are the product of racial bias of white reporters against a black politician, Pekkanen, who is white, counters that the bulk of her information comes directly from the African-American staff members who once worked for Collins.
"The thing about the story is that she treated her staff so badly, she created a lot of resentment among staffers, and that erased any loyalty people had for her," Pekkanen said. Cultivating sources among such an unhappy lot was easy, she said.
In September, the U.S. Justice Department began investigating Collins' campaign reports. FBI agents in Detroit took over the case, questioning, among others, a Detroit interior decorator who worked on the congresswoman's private residence in Detroit in 1993. Pekkanen reported allegations that Collins used campaign funds to replace a broken mirror in her apartment.
In December, the House ethics committee announced what it called a preliminary inquiry into Collins' conduct. Ethics committee chief counsel Theodore Van Der Meid said last week the investigation is continuing. Pek-kanen's competition at Roll Call reported earlier this month the ethics committee has subpoenaed records from Collins.
Throughout, Collins has refused to provide any information to Pekkanen. The reporter said she was able to interview the congresswoman only once - when she talked to her briefly in a Capitol corridor early on. Pek-kanen asked Collins about the claim of a former staff member, Tony Mar-tin, that he was fired by Collins because he faxed a newspaper article about the congresswoman from the office to his home fax machine. Collins told Pekkanen that Martin left on good terms. Collins said: "So Tony's a fibber, isn't he?"
Since then, Collins has refused to talk to Pekkanen. At first, Pekkanen claims, a Collins press aide (since replaced) asked what it would take to convince the reporter to stop her investigation and even asked whether a lawsuit might stop the unfavorable stories.
Collins' spokeswoman, Audrey Wright, did not provide a response to the Detroit Sunday Journal from the congresswoman regarding Pekkanen's reporting and the allegations.
Pekkanen, 28, graduated from the University of Maryland in 1990 and worked her way over to the States News Service in Washington. In 1994, she was hired as a general features writer for The Hill, then the new political tabloid in Washington.
Although no one has yet filed for Collins' 15th District U.S. House seat, Michigan Sen. Henry Stallings an-nounced in December his intentions to do so. Collins has represented the district, which spans eastern Detroit and the Grosse Pointes, since her 1990 election. She was previously a Detroit city council member and a state legislator.
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