Author’s note: Even before Jeff German was murdered – allegedly by a politician who was upset at stories he wrote – he faced violence from people who were the focus of his stories. In 1980, German was at a retirement party at the Sands Hotel when he confronted a man he was writing about and who he believed was threatening him and vandalizing his vehicle. The man responded with a sucker punch.

Early in his Vegas career, German got on a story about court officer Seymour Freedman collecting debts for loan shark Jasper Speciale at the same time as he collected campaign contributions for the sheriff. Freedman was also collecting a paycheck from taxpayers for his court job. The storyline was, not surprisingly, unpopular with Freedman. After the columns, German’s car window was smashed and air let out of the tires. He also received threatening anonymous phone calls, warning him to be careful about who he was writing about. 

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One evening in the fall of 1985, German was drinking at a retirement party at the Sands Hotel for Justice Court Chief Clerk Eileen Carson. German noticed Freedman, a former New York cop and boxer, at the event and confronted him about the threats and damage to his vehicle. German always prized the cars he drove, favoring upscale Volkswagen sedans and owning a black Mustang in the late 1980s. An attack on his always well-maintained vehicle was like an assault on his person. 

“Sy, when are you going to call off the dogs?” German demanded. 

Freedman didn’t blink. He threw the drink he was holding in his right hand right in German’s face. With his left hand, Freedman sucker punched German. A ring Freedman was wearing slashed German’s lip. German had to have four stitches, but the encounter didn’t stop him from writing about corruption and organized crime. 

After the assault, Metro Police Sergeant David Groover came to take a report at the hospital from German. Groover had been a target of German’s reporting for a high-profile incident that dominated the local news and was even portrayed in Casino with some artistic license. On the evening of June 9, 1980, Groover, an intelligence detective at the time, and Sergeant Gene Smith were staking out the Upper Crust Mob-run pizza joint. Spilotro and Cullotta were sitting outside the pizza joint shooting the shit when a Lincoln driven by Frank Bluestein pulled up. Bluestein went in, ordered food, and joined the mobsters outside while his dinner baked. Bluestein was a maître d’ at the then-Mob-controlled Hacienda Hotel & Casino. His father was a member of the culinary union and was a subject of a search warrant related to the Spilotro investigation. The maître d’ chatted with the mobsters until it was time to grab his food. 

Groover and Smith watched the exchange. Bluestein then took off at high speed, and Groover and Smith pursued him to determine who was associating with Spilotro. The undercover car pulled over Bluestein for traffic infractions, and he exited the Lincoln gun in hand. The undercover officers shot him. In Casino, the portrayal of the incident shows Bluestein only had a hoagie wrapped in foil instead of a gun. Then the movie officers planted a gun to justify the shooting. 

In real life, Oscar Goodman called the shooting a police execution, and German reported those allegations regularly. But at the coroner’s inquest, Groover presented evidence that showed the gun was bought in Chicago by Bluestein’s brother so it couldn’t have been a plant. It was ruled a clean shoot. Despite that evidence, Bluestein’s family sued, but the officers prevailed. The controversy only ended when the U.S. Supreme Court denied hearing an appeal in the civil lawsuit. 

Groover and Smith had bigger things to fear than civil lawsuits. Authorities in Chicago notified Metro that the Mob had put out a contract on them over the Bluestein shooting. Police wanted a wiretap on Bluestein’s father, but Clark County District Attorney Bob Miller didn’t like wiretaps. Metro Intelligence Commander Kent Clifford, as he told a Las Vegas author before his death, got into an argument with Miller about associating with a person connected to the casino skim for the Mob so there was bad blood when Miller’s office went to a judge for the wiretap. On the second day of the tap, the judge told police someone in the DA’s office tried to get the wiretap closed down, but the judge refused. When that failed, German received a tip about the wiretap, writing a front-page story in the Sun on August 21, 1981, titled “Purported Kill Plot led to Bluestein Wiretap.” 

The phones went quiet. Metro was pissed.

Miller, who would later be elected Nevada governor, contends he doesn’t remember giving German a story on the wiretap, though he had “an off-again, on-again” relationship with German. Miller contends his only association with the Mob was his father’s business partner who went to prison for skimming from casinos. As DA, Miller thought wiretaps should be used sparingly since they were an invasion of privacy. He concedes he did not have a good relationship with the sheriff at the time and supported his opponent in the next election.

Breaking the story of the wiretap put German into the hotseat. Clifford called German into his office on August 25, 1981, read German his Miranda rights against self-incrimination, and then grilled German on his sources for the wiretap story. Clifford told German he wasn’t a target of the investigation but his cooperation was necessary to determine if someone broke the wiretap disclosure law, which was a felony punishable by up to six years in prison. German and his bosses refused to reveal the source of the story, citing the state’s reporter shield law. Protecting sources was one of the bedrocks of journalism and one that German took very seriously. 

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German had previously been subpoenaed by lawyers for Spilotro. U.S. District Judge Harry E. Claiborne quashed those subpoenas citing the Nevada Shield Law and the First Amendment. The issue was so important to Nevada journalists that there would be a fight about German’s sources that went to the state Supreme Court even after his 2022 death. 

The Chicago hitmen targeting Groover and Smith came to Vegas and were closely tracked by Metro officers. They left without carrying out the contract. Nevertheless, Clifford didn’t like something like that hanging over his officers. He flew to Chicago and threatened Spilotro’s bosses to get the contract cancelled. German wrote dozens of stories about the Bluestein shooting, often taking the side of the family as it was being represented by Goodman, who was then friendly with the young reporter. 

When Groover arrived at the hospital to take a report from German over the Freedman assault, German was crestfallen. 

“Shit, I can’t catch a break,” German told Groover. 

The reporter complained that not only was he punched in the face but now the officer investigating the incident had it out for him. German decided not to press charges in the case, and Groover thought it was because he was getting a lot of favorable publicity over the sucker punch. 

German, who later called the punch a “badge of honor,” didn’t let a little violence stop him from writing about Freedman or the incident. On September 30, 1985, German’s column on the front page of the Metro section laid out the incident, harping again on Freedman collecting money for the Mob while also collecting campaign funds for the sheriff. 

“Mom never told me journalism would be like this,” the tongue-in-cheek column says. It’s “going to take more than a sucker punch to scare me off.” 

John L. Smith, then a colleague at the Sun, congratulated German on his column about the incident, saying: “Great story. Somebody should punch you in the mouth every day.” The incident became somewhat of a joke around the newsroom as German would detail in an October 2, 1985, column. German quotes city editor Bill Guthrie asking him to contribute to the Sun’s blood drive and then reversing course to say: “Oh, I forgot. You’ve already done that.” 

Freedman’s violence did not stop his name from appearing in Jeff German’s columns. On October 9, 1985, German updated readers that he received an FBI report, apparently leaked to him, while recovering from his encounter with Freedman. He details Freedman’s loansharking work for Speciale day by day as it is listed in the document. That was the typical fearless German. 

Nevada remained a tough place throughout the 1980s. It wasn’t just gangsters and their henchmen who practiced media criticism with personal attacks and even physical altercations. 

In 1988, Nevada Attorney General Brian McKay called German a “venomous little man” during a television interview on KTVN-TV’s Face the State program. He charged German had no credibility, failed to pay attention to the truth, and didn’t “know fact from fiction.” 

McKay had been traveling to national and western attorney general conferences. German started keeping a “McKay Mileage Meter,” urging readers to contact him if they saw McKay or his wife outside the state. That really got under McKay’s skin. 

A Republican, McKay charged that German was doing the bidding of and working as a “hit man” for Bob Miller’s supporters. Miller, a Democrat, had moved on from district attorney to lieutenant governor and would be elected governor for his first term in 1989. The Sun leaned Democratic, and the Review-Journal supported Republicans. McKay felt the Sun, and German, were attacking him based on partisan politics and not for substantial journalistic reasons. 

German responded to McKay’s attacks in the United Press International article by saying he was pleased that the attorney general was an “avid reader” of his column. 

“I’m not little,” he also told UPI. 

Of course, when Miller was elected governor, German started writing about his travel, which also irritated Miller. Miller was traveling to Washington, D.C., to confer with national leaders. He thought if the president of the United States and Congress would come to Nevada, he wouldn’t have to travel, but they weren’t going to do that.

Arthur Kane has been an award-winning investigative reporter, editor, producer and executive producer for three decades. At The Denver Post, he exposed problems with the state medical board’s discipline of doctors that sparked a change in state law, and at KMGH-TV he produced or oversaw investigations that won the Peabody and two duPont-Columbia awards. He is currently investigations editor at the Las Vegas Review-Journal and was named Nevada’s outstanding journalist of the year in 2020 and 2022 by the Nevada Press Association.

Type of Story: Q&A

An interview to provide a relevant perspective, edited for clarity and not fully fact-checked.