Jim Mulvaney, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who was one of the top American scribes in Belfast during the 1980s, has left the news business and become a private investigator.
Mulvaney, who’s 44, has joined KPMG Forensic and Litigation Services as director of research. He will concentrate on investigative due diligence, fraud and medical compliance as part of his job for the giant accounting firm.
"The detective work here isn’t that much different from investigative reporting," Mulvaney said recently. "You find out bad stuff and write it up. The big difference is that the circulation is a lot less, but we charge a lot more than a quarter."
In the weeks since he joined KPMG, Mulvaney has gotten a taste of the world of a modern private I.
"It’s mostly computers now," he said. "When I started investigative reporting 20 years ago, the best way to find out about someone was to rifle through their garbage, look at old bills, love letters and the like. Now, you put an experienced hand on the worldwide web and the secrets come flying."
The KPMG forensic unit does sophisticated investigations for clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to international labor unions and the nation’s top law firms.
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Mulvaney spent 15 years at Newsday as an investigative reporter, overseas bureau chief and national correspondent. In 1984, he received a fellowship from St. John’s University and spent more than a year living in Ireland and researching journalistic coverage of the war.
"When I arrived in Belfast, there were no full-time American news reporters based anywhere on the island of Ireland, "Mulvaney said. "All of the news was reported through London. I did an academic study that showed coverage of Irish news by American reporters living in London had a pro-British slant. It seems pretty obvious, but at the time, none of the big papers were prepared to face it."
From Ireland, Mulvaney moved to Latin America where his big scoops were on Iran-Contra scandal and the Panama crisis. His next stop was Asia, where he witnessed the Tiananmen Square massacre.
"I started that day at a luncheon at the Irish Embassy in Beijing," Mulvaney said. "The city had been under martial law for a couple of weeks and the acting Irish ambassador, Brendan Ward, laid on a spread for some diplomats, journalists and businessmen with Irish connections. I started the day with smoked salmon and ended the day counting bodies of dead students."
In 1996, he headed a team of reporters that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for uncovering a scandal at a California fertility medicine clinic.
In 1998, he was recruited by Pete Hamill to serve as assistant managing editor of the New York Daily News. During his nine months at the paper, his team produced an award-winning series on the failure of government to address the city’s asthma epidemic. Hamill fell out of favor with the publisher, in part, for refusing to print a special section on the British royal family. Eventually Hamill and Mulvaney were forced out. Mulvaney spent the next year working on a nearly completed first novel and developing two movie treatments.
He lives with his wife, the writer Barbara Fischkin, and their two sons in Long Beach.