Jeff German was a dogged investigative reporter of the old school, excited by nothing so much as the whiff of corruption or official malfeasance and following it wherever it led. For four decades he chronicled the racketeers, mobsters, loan sharks, hard-luck grifters and big-time crooks of Las Vegas, the notoriously seamy desert city he called home.
When, to the shock of just about everyone in Sin City and beyond, German was found stabbed to death outside his house earlier this month, it was a sobering reminder of the risks that such work entails – and the threat that many journalists face in a country whose last president notoriously dubbed the media “the enemy of the people”.
