All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Armen Keteyian is Chief Investigative Correspondent for CBS News.

---

Sgt. Yves LeBlanc of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police tracks down leads for a living. No, not murder, assault or arson leads – more like robbery. Only the victims aren’t banks or convenience stores but rather senior citizens in the U.S. See, the kinds of leads LeBlanc is after are the ones used by Canadian con artists to contact and, more often than not, scam hundreds of thousands of older Americans out of billions of dollars every year.

Driving around Montreal with LeBlanc not long ago I had a hard time believing what I was hearing. That this scenic North American city was home to hundreds of so-called “boiler rooms,” round-the-clock telemarketing operations with one purpose in mind: drain as much money out of American bank accounts through a variety of sweepstakes and lottery scams, even bogus government grants, before LeBlanc anti-fraud task force closes in and shuts down their operation.

You can’t help but picture your grandparents on the line listening to one of these sweet-talking voices informing you that, “Mrs. Johnson, you’ve just been selected as a grand prize winner in our most recent drawing!!!” and all you have to do to collect is send or wire, say, $3,000, to pay Canadian taxes, insurance or other fees.

I know, I know. How can so many be so gullible, so naïve or greedy as to accept this kind of hokey from a stranger over the phone...?

Read full post…

CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian covered the NFL for CBS Sports from 1998-2006.

Human nature dictates you develop certain favorites in life. A favorite uncle. Favorite restaurant, car or coach. It’s no different covering the National Football League. After eight years, safe to say, I enjoyed visiting certain cities more than others, spending time with one or two clubs more than the rest. The Denver Broncos were one of those teams.

The characteristic admired more than any other in the NFL is professionalism, and the Broncos carry that across the board. Pat Bowlen is one of best owners in all of sport; Mike Shanahan as smart and committed head coach as there is in pro football; and players like John Elway, Rod Smith and John Lynch set the standard of what it means to be a professional athlete.

Over the years I’ve spent time in the homes of Shanahan, Elway and Lynch, doing interviews, talking sports, narrowing the gap between reporter and friend. During eight years of working the sidelines for CBS Sports and reporting features for The NFL Today, I’ve come to know others in the organization as well. Fine men like Jim Saccomano, the team’s director of public relations, and a staff of assistant coaches and employees unmatched in the league. Good people, smart people, people who care, one and all.

Which is why I can’t stop thinking about the loss of Darrent Williams.

Read full post…

I don’t know about you, but I fly a lot. I was in the air ready to land at La Guardia on the morning of 9/11 only to be diverted to – of all places -- Boston. I was on a virtually empty flight three days later and I’ve been on plenty of packed ones since, accustomed to long lines at security and fellow passengers who don’t know the difference between three and 30 ounces of gel. I feel safer knowing as a nation we’re on alert – folks are getting screened, wanded, and otherwise patted down, and cockpit doors are bolted and secure.

But what troubles me, as the result of a two-month investigation by CBS News, is what may be sitting in the belly of my plane and thousands more every day in this country: some 50,000 tons of air cargo, as little as 10 percent that’s actually subject to security checks. You read that right…50 thousands tons. Sitting unscreened in the cargo hold of major commercial jetliners.

“We have a very serious risk here,” aviation expert Steve Flynn told me. “If I wanted to penetrate the air cargo security system it’s a pretty straight forward thing to do.”

Which is pretty much what we did. For our story on tonight's CBS Evening News, we tested the system by sending specially-designed packages from London, Paris and Rio to the United States, then domestically on cargo-only planes from Dulles to LAX. The upshot was this: five of our six packages went unopened and were never x-rayed, even though a top Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) official told us they might have been checked by explosion detection devices or bomb sniffing dogs. Maybe. Maybe not.

On the heels of our reporting the TSA issued a new series of directives designed to tighten requirements for air cargo on passenger flights and increase background checks on what are called “Known” shippers. Kudos and plaudits for those steps. Still not every package will be screened for bombs, not even close. And in this day and age I’m not crazy about the odds when I’m up in the air.

Read full post…

I can’t tell how many times I’ve taken the Long Island Expressway – known as the L.I.E. around N.Y.C. – and never noticed the sign at Exit 68 for the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Today I got an inside look at the sprawling government site as part of my “Loose Nukes” piece for the Evening News. The purpose of my visit was to interview Dr. Ralph James, the man in charge of Brookhaven’s high-tech attempt to detect the movement of nuclear materials smuggled into the United States.

As Barb Turner will attest (she helped me pass the class) science was never my strong suit. But I do have a pretty good Geiger counter when it comes to terror, and just in the short time the I-team has been working this story, it’s clear the issue of rogue states with a long history of being a major player in the weapons market (can you say North Korea) must be handled on two fronts: As former Senator Sam Nunn, an expert on nuclear proliferation told us, sensitive nuclear material or equipment MUST be secured overseas FIRST because once it gets here it’s hard to find and harder to control. “It’s the needle in the haystack,” Nunn told I-team producer Laura Strickler. “If you can get the haystack – you’re much better off.”

Dr. James agrees wholeheartedly but he’s principally in the business of finding the needle these days. In a 90-minute tour and interview in one of his labs, he calmly and carefully explained the ever-evolving search for more sensitive equipment that can differentiate between gamma rays emitted by the 11 MILLION people every year who undergo some sort of nuclear medical procedure – yes, 11 MILLION – and a dirty bomb packed into the back of a truck.

The biggest challenges, he said, is the range of the current equipment and the unacceptable number of false positive triggered by the vast array of detectors he had laid out during a show-and-tell. Some light enough to hold in your hand; others occupying the lion’s share of space, costing 100K or more, too bulky and expensive as yet to make it into mainstream use.

As we were winding down I asked Dr. James this question: “Given the news from North Korea – are we in the race against time to find these dirty bombs, to detect nuclear material in the U.S. and around the world?”

“I think one thing is certain,” he said. “If the materials were available and they could deliver them to the U.S., there’s a good chance they would. So that really defines where we need to go in developing technology. We need to develop better radiation detectors.”

And given my visit to Brookhaven, my sense is there’s little doubt they will. Even less doubt they will need to.

Read full post…

CBS News Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian covered tne NFL for CBS Sports from 1998-2006. We asked him to weigh in on the news yesterday about Terrell Owens. - Ed.

Wednesday night brought me speaking before a men's group at an Armenian church in White Plains, N.Y. Before my remarks, taking full advantage of the setting, I asked those in attendance to bow their heads in prayer.

"I think we all should just thank God that T.O. is all right," I said.

Suffice to say the punch line hit home. As I said that evening, not to make light of what is normally a very serious matter, but the latest chapter in the "As T.O. Turns" soap opera would register a helluva lot higher in my mind had Terrell Owens not long ago exhausted my supply of personal sympathy.

We've all heard of A.D.A. and A.A.D.D. Frankly, I think Owens suffers from A.A.D. — Acute Attention Disorder. To me, he's pathologically incapable of being out of the limelight for more than a just few days before some deep, dark need kicks in and T.O. creates some new drama in his life, planting himself firmly in the eye of yet another media storm. Sucking attention, like oxygen, as a living, breathing life form...

Read full post…