All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Armen Keteyian is Chief Investigative Correspondent for CBS News.

---

The sun had long since set as we scanned the desert with night vision lenses, a green phosphorescent glow visible in the distance, specks of bright white light dancing before my eyes. Off to my right stood Sgt. Jim Murphy, head of the Pima County Border Crimes Unit. On this night a small army of men was searching for so-called bajadores, modern-day desert bandits that, increasingly, are bringing violence along the Mexican border into America’s backyard.

Tall and square-jawed Murphy is an ex-military operative who drives a SUV like Jeff Gordon and speaks with the quiet, confident air of an NFL quarterback in a linebacker’s body. He’s got a tough job, no two ways about it. For a little over a year now rival gangs of bajadores have been in the midst of a what authorities here call an “all out war” just beyond the back nine of some of the state’s nicest retirement communities in Green Valley, Arizona – jacking valuable loads of drugs and human cargo coming from Mexico. The drugs resold on the street, the illegals often held hostage until family members across the border pay thousands of dollars in ransom...

Read full post…

Armen Keteyian is the chief investigative correspondent for CBS News, and a former reporter for CBS Sports and Sports Illustrated.

---

Baseball’s in my blood. From my very first days growing up in Detroit, I watched it and played it, and covered it at levels higher than the Average Joe. It’s pretty much the same story with anabolic steroids, minus the personal history. So it’s not without a good deal of experience and education that I come to the subject of Barry Bonds.

Today, during a record-breaking effort of my own (a three-hour commute to New York City; see home page for details) sports talk radio was aflame with reaction to Bonds and his 756th home run. Everyone from Bob Costas to former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent to Vinny from Queens offering an opinion on where Bonds ranks on baseball’s list of all-time greats, whether or not THE record was tainted by performance enhancing drugs. (BC should win an award for his analysis)

Does Bonds deserve this record? The recognition? Not now. Not ever. Never. Being one of very best leftfielders in the history of the game, a sure-fire Hall of Famer evidently just wasn’t good enough for the godson of Willie Mays. So if you believe best-selling books and grand jury testimony and a raft of other detailed reports Barry is denying the undeniable. He got help – plain and simple – to shatter sport’s most sacred record. If not for “The Cream” and “The Clear” and a host of other pills and potions Bonds wouldn’t have come within a country mile of breaking Henry Aaron’s mark. But he did.

But he didn’t do it alone. If you’re looking for accomplices to this crime look no further than baseball’s powerful players union, which for decades built a brick wall around every attempt at drug testing; at owners who just didn’t want to know, at a feel-good media and fans blinded to a game gone wrong.

Today Bonds is the poster boy (“Bar-roid”) of that time. The embodiment of a steroid era in which I dare say hundreds of players were into the juice, some looking to sweeten their stats or cash in on free agency, others simply hoping to stay in the game. Which is why, at what should have been a moment of great joy I felt nothing but great sadness as No. 756 sailed deep into a San Francisco night. Sure, Bonds took the almighty swing.

But it was baseball, the greatest of games, that put that bat in his hands.

Armen Keteyian is the chief investigative correspondent for CBS News.

---

They could have been your brother or sister, aunt or uncle. Instead they saw themselves as victims. Ordinary folks who found themselves under extraordinary financial pressure, so desperate they made their way to the Metropolitan Money Store (MMS) in Maryland. Only to be scammed, they said, by the very people who promised to help.

In a suburban Maryland hotel I sat around a banquet table with Karen, David, George, Angel and Maureen and listened to their tales of financial woe. How in their time of need they turned to a fellow African-American from the community, Joy Jackson, and the people at the MMS to solve their credit problems and save their homes from foreclosure, only to see Jackson, they charge, steal their homes and bury them deeper into debt.

You wanted to cry. Some did. I wondered how Jackson could sleep at night knowing full well the number of lives she had ruined. I was looking at five.

Unfortunately, they’re hardly alone...

Read full post…

Correspondent Armen Keteyian has been following the latest news about climate change – and offers us this insight from Florida.

---

They serve a mean breakfast at the Seafood Depot in Everglades City, Florida. The Depot is the kind of place that’s open early and spiced with weathered-faced regulars – the fisherman and air boat operators that populate this former drug-smuggling haven. The surrounding waters shimmer in the early morning sun, and thoughts that this tourist town might one day be swallowed by the sea are as far away as far can be.

But given the news out of Washington, D.C., today residents of Everglades City, Flamingo, Fla., -- and all across the country, really -- may well have cause for long-term concern. It’s not often a team of our nation’s leading scientists gets up before Congress and accuses the very government that funds its research of censoring their reports on global warming. But accuse they did.

The outcry stemmed from the results of an anonymous survey in which hundreds of experts on climate change depicted a culture of fear and censorship when it comes to warnings about the effects of greenhouses gasses and carbon dioxide emissions. In response, a government spokesman denied White House officials had pressured the scientists to downplay the results of their research, and praised the President’s commitment to energy initiatives designed to confront climate change.

From the legendary John D. MacDonald to the hilarious Carl Hiaason, writers with a love of the ‘Glades and South Florida have long waged a literary war against developers, railing over environmental impact in the name of progress. The “Inconvenient Truth” outlined by the likes of Al Gore has only fueled a national debate, one, it appears, getting louder and more important by the day. I must say, folks at the Seafood Depot didn’t seem much concerned today when we raised the subject of global warming, despite a raging pattern of weather lately that simply defies prediction.

“Mostly,” said our waitress, “we worry about the tourists.”

Mostly, I guess, I worry about my children and grandchildren’s future. And places like Everglades City being swallowed by a rising, angry sea.

Read full post…

Chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian has been sniffing around the health care industry. His report on fraud, which aired last night, can be seen in the monitor below. Read on for more on his investigation. -- Ed.

The federal government spends upwards of $550 billion (with a B) a year on health care in this country, meaning taxpayers like you and me are anteing up staggering amounts of our hard-earned cash to cover Medicaid and Medicare expenses for the elderly.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m a firm believer in taking care of our Greatest Generation because, frankly, my generation is not all that far behind. What fries my bacon, however, is the fact as much as 10 percent of that $550 (with a B) billion – or $50 Billion-plus – goes out the window due to fraud. Actually, not out the window. More like into the pockets of health care companies like Omnicare, the pharmaceutical giant which currently controls more than 80 percent of the prescription drug market for senior citizens in long-term care facilities in the United States and Canada.

CBS News has been investigating the Kentucky-based company for several months now. It began last spring the way a lot of investigations do - with a tip, in this case, from a health-care insider to a series of whistle-blower lawsuits filed against the company. The only problem: false claim acts, as they are officially known, are routinely sealed by the courts. So we put on our thinking caps and started calling around, finding, lo and behold, groups like Taxpayers Against Fraud and state attorney generals had Omnicare in their sights for a long time.

Sights are one thing…action quite another. It wasn’t until this fall when Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox indicted the head of a major Omnicare subsidiary, charging more than 150 counts of health care fraud, that the wheels of our story really began to turn, quickly picking up steam, in late October, when Omnicare decided to settle the case, paying $52.5 million, the largest civil fraud settlement in the history of the state of Michigan.

Yet we weren’t sure we had a big national story. That is, until the news last month of another Omnicare fraud settlement...

Read full post…