The Smoking Gun

• 1. Introduction

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  The Smoking Gun once published a book called The Dog Dialed 911: A Book of Lists from The Smoking Gun. The title alone captures the site's taste for the odd, stranger-than-fiction end of the news. The website turns public records, court filings and police mugshots into daily reading. It chases paperwork that bigger newsrooms tend to skip. Its origins trace back to a husband-and-wife team and a journalist from a well-known family. Along the way, the site ended up on cable television and changed hands more than once. It also went after a musician's charity, a bestselling author, and a ring of prank callers who terrorized hotel workers. How did a website built on public records end up shaping national scandals far outside its own newsroom?

• 2. Founders and Public Records

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  William Bastone started The Smoking Gun in 1997. He was joined by his wife, Barbara Glauber, a graphic designer, and by Daniel Green, a freelance journalist. Green had previously written for The Village Voice and was the son of Stephen L. Green.

  Freedom of Information Act requests to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies supplied most of the site's material. Court documents and other public records filled in the rest. Those requests let the team assemble a collection of mugshots spanning both current and historical celebrities. That growing archive of documents would soon draw interest from a cable network eager to put true crime stories on air.

• 3. Cable Television Ventures

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  Court TV, later rebranded truTV, bought The Smoking Gun together with the website Crime Library in 2000. The deal pulled the site's documents into the network's true crime lineup. A television series carrying the site's name premiered on Court TV in 2005. It blended some of the site's stories with sketch comedy performed using string puppets. When Time Warner acquired Court TV in 2006, that series moved to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block.

  Starting in March 2008, truTV aired The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest.... The series began life as World's Dumbest Criminals before widening its focus and dropping the word Criminals from its title. William Bastone appeared on the show alongside Smoking Gun writer Andrew Goldberg. Both men left after the first season. By January 2011, the program had been renamed again, to truTV Presents: World's Dumbest.... In June 2014, ownership of The Smoking Gun passed back to William Bastone. Ownership had shifted more than once, but the site's sharpest moments still came from the stories it chose to chase.

• 4. Exposing Pranknet

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  In August 2009, The Smoking Gun outed members of Pranknet, a virtual community that tricked hotel and fast-food employees. Its targets were tricked into setting off fire alarms, triggering fire-suppression systems, and performing humiliating acts. The group's members included two convicted child molesters. They also carried out threatening telephone harassment and posted fake Craigslist ads to bait victims.

  Young mothers selling household goods answered those Craigslist ads and exchanged addresses with the group. Members then threatened to go to the women's homes, to rape them and murder their children. The site's exposure pulled Pranknet's members out of anonymity and into public view. Pranknet was not the only target whose credibility The Smoking Gun would go on to puncture.

• 5. Unraveling A Million Little Pieces

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  In 2006, The Smoking Gun uncovered widespread fabrication in James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces. Frey had presented the book as a memoir. It described years of alleged drug and alcohol abuse followed by recovery, filled with criminal and otherwise outrageous incidents.

  The investigation triggered a public rebuke of Frey by talk show host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey had previously championed the book as a pick for her Oprah's Book Club. That earlier endorsement made her reversal especially pointed. A different kind of scrutiny was still ahead, this time aimed at a charity rather than a memoir.

• 6. The Yéle Haiti Scandal

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  In 2010, The Smoking Gun revealed financial irregularities inside Yéle Haiti, a charitable foundation set up by rapper Wyclef Jean. Jean had just publicized the foundation's fundraising success for disaster relief after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The New York Times reported that the foundation had failed to file several years of tax returns.

  Later findings showed that funds had been illegally diverted for the personal use of Jean and members of his family. In 2019, Jean admitted that irregularities had occurred at the charity. That admission became one more record sitting in the same kind of paper trail the site was built to chase in the first place.