Matthew I. Pinzur

19501 West Country Club Drive #507
Aventura, FL  33180
305-682-7842
mpinzur@alum.emory.edu

Clip Portfolio - Last Updated on November 2, 2002

Breaking News/Spot News
Investigative/Explanatory Reporting
News Analysis
Profiles
News Features
Light Features
Projects

Jump to Award-Winning Stories

All awards won in state's largest circulation category.

Florida Press Club, Local Government Reporting, Second Place, 2002
Florida Sunshine State Awards, Feature Writing, Second Place, 2001
Florida Times-Union Annual Citations, Breaking News, First Place, 2001
Florida Press Club, Foreign Reporting, Honorable Mention, 2000
Georgia Press Association, Investigative Reporting, First Place, 1999

Breaking News / Spot News

 Award WInner President Clinton visits Jacksonville , The Florida Times-Union, October 5, 2000
    -The frenzied presidential day began at 11:15 a.m. when Air Force One touched down at Jacksonville International Airport and a member of Clinton's staff made a phone call. "Eagle has landed; he's wheels-down," she said into her mobile phone as swarms of news media, security and dignitaries buzzed around.
    - This story was part of a three-story package that won the Florida Times-Union's 2000 award for Best Breaking News coverage.

Award WInner   George W. Bush wows thousands at Jacksonville rally , The Florida Times-Union, October 25, 2000
    - The man knows how to make an entrance.With thousands of shrieking fans waving glowing wands in the darkened well of The Jacksonville Landing and the primal bass beat of Van Halen's Right Now thumping through the night, he emerged into spotlights on a balcony above the crowd. Flanked by his brother and wife, with flumes of fiery sparklers in his wake, he took the stage. The governor of Texas, the Republican presidential nominee, the man known simply by his middle initial -- George W. Bush had arrived.
    - This story was part of a three-story package that won the Florida Times-Union's 2000 award for Best Breaking News coverage.

- Jet crashes off USS John F. Kennedy, Jacksonville aviators killed , The Florida Times-Union, November 16, 1999
    - Two Navy aviators from Jacksonville Naval Air Station were killed Sunday when their plane crashed into the Persian Gulf moments after launching off the carrier USS John F. Kennedy near Iraq.
    - Follow-up: Navy begins to asses fatal crash , The Florida Times-Union, November 17, 1999

- Sound of Navy helicopter trumpets tugboat's rescue , The Florida Times-Union, September 17, 1999
    - They were thrashed for eight hours on an ocean churned by one of history's most powerful and violent Atlantic storms, their life raft folding in half over 40-foot waves and threatening to capsize under 55-knot winds. The emergency beacon - their electronic lifeline - was gone, floating with the three crewmates who were left behind with a sinking tug and life vests when the raft was torn away in the powerful gusts. They were living in the middle of the worst-case scenario, quietly wondering whether a ceremonial casket would be going back to their girlfriends and mothers. And then they heard a helicopter.

- Recount halted , The Florida Times-Union, December 10, 2000
    - A day of furious politicking and legal wrangling across Florida was suddenly aborted Saturday when the U.S. Supreme Court halted hand recounts of 43,000 ballots, including nearly 5,000 in Duval County.
Investigative / Explanatory Reporting

Sunday Front   U.S. subs: No place for women? , The Florida Times-Union, March 12, 2000
   - This story was filed from onboard the nuclear missile submarine USS Kentucky
    - The rules have changed in the Navy. Women, once relegated to second-class support jobs, now are peppered through the most-sought-after positions. They fly jets, load weapons, supervise departments and command combat ships. But under water, the rules are different. Women are not allowed .
   
Sunday Front   GOP hopes to break into black Democratic monolith , The Florida Times-Union, April 25, 2001
    -  The football players at Edward Waters College don't want to talk about politics. Nothing personal, they say, and no disrespect, but practice is about to start, so let's leave the budget surpluses and bankruptcy bills to the eggheads in Washington. B ut when talk turns to party affiliation, that's something else. They'll talk about party affiliation. They'll talk about it with one word: Democrat. They're all black, they're all registered to vote, and they're all registered as Democrats. Just like the black 44-year-old barber shop owner a few blocks away, the black 35-year-old janitorial contractor from Southside, almost every black legislator on Capitol Hill and, for that matter, just about every black anybody of any age or any profession in Jacksonville .

 Sunday Front Political sway of First Baptist , The Florida Times-Union, August 26, 2001
    -  The pastor recalls Jesus' words, that his kingdom was not of this world. But the Rev. Jerry Vines also recalls the commandment to be the salt of the earth and light of the world. His flock has answered. They have gone forth, like no other church in the region, into the world of politics. Jacksonville's First Baptist Church counts among its members no fewer than eight elected officials, who have collected more than 230,000 votes just in the last two years.

Award Winner Sunday Front City bends pay rules for top-ranked employees , The Florida Times-Union, September 2, 2001
    - Top-paid mayoral advisers and attorneys reaped thousands of dollars when they were exempted from a City Hall policy that cost lower-ranking employees hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars when they left the city payroll.
        - This story was part of a portfolio that won the Florida Press Club's second-place Local Government Reporting award. 

- Legal experts say there's no clear answer to election problems , The Florida Times-Union, November 12, 2000
    - Hope for a quick resolution has faded, and the nation is recovering from the shock and the anger by exploring the obscure what-if questions normally reserved for political thrillers bought in airport book shops during long delays. A mericans with a firm grasp on their high-school civics classes are wondering what would happen if the presidential race remains unsettled on the sacred dates of Dec. 18, when the Electoral College votes, or Jan. 20, when President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore must vacate the White House. L aws about how to proceed are bound by a thorny triangle of problems; they are obscure, complex and almost entirely untested.

 Award WInner Sunday Front Backlog in Georgia's crime labs brings agony to families , The Macon Telegraph, October 11, 1998
    - This story was part of a three-story portfolio that won the Georgia Press Association's first-place Investigative Reporting award, the first time the Macon Telegraph had beaten the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At 22, I was the youngest-ever winner of the award.
    - Macon police believe they know who killed a woman was found dismembered along a roadside last December. But almost a year later, the suspect remains free despite discovery of blood evidence investigators say links him to the crime. A Savannah man languished in jail for three months this year, charged with a rape he did not commit. He was released after DNA evidence proved he could not have been the rapist, but he went bankrupt and lost his business during his imprisonment. Investigators said both of these cases should have been resolved in weeks, but a record backlog at the state's crime labs has created a delay of more than six months in testing evidence from crime scenes.

Award WInner  Children at risk , The Macon Telegraph, October 16, 1998
    - This story was the second part of the three-story portfolio that won the Georgia Press Association's first-place Investigative Reporting award.
    - Kidnapping is every parent's sweat-drenched nightmare conjuring images of middle-aged drifters snatching children from the local playground. But hundreds of thousands of parents each year learn a more frightening truth: More than 97 percent of the 166,000 children kidnapped every year are abducted by a member of their own family.
News Analysis

- 4th Congressional District race turning into David vs. Goliath , The Florida Times-Union, July 3, 2000
    - Call it the birth of a fairy tale, the kind that politicians spin for their children at bedtime when their memories of Mother Goose overlap with fixations on polling data and campaign strategy. It already has the mythical characters: a powerful and beloved queen ready to leave her throne, a well-groomed duke handpicked by the nobility for his experience and service, and a handsome young nobleman burning to duel him for the crown by winning the hearts and minds of the people. But the fable still lacks a moral. That, like history, will be written by the victor in the Sept. 5 primary, when Republican voters in the 4th Congressional District pick their nominee to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Tillie Fowler. If the voters side with Ander Crenshaw, elder statesman and prototypical citizen-legislator, the allegory will teach the value of experience, service and continuity.But if the ballots point to firebrand newcomer Dan Quiggle, the parable will extol passion, energy and youth, sending the message that sweat and shoe leather can overcome even the wealthiest and most well-organized political machines.

- Why the incumbents fell flat , The Florida Times-Union, September 7, 2000
    - One used money and one used fame. One was poor and the other obscure. One won by a landslide and the other just squeaked in. But both Stan Jordan and Tyrie Boyer toppled incumbents -- the only incumbents on the Duval County ballot -- in Tuesday's elections.

Sunday Front   Bush still not our president, blacks say , The Florida Times-Union, April 29, 2001
    - Corrine Brown is still angry. The recounts don't matter and the words of healing don't matter and bipartisan White House lunches certainly don't matter. She is still hurt and she is still bitter, and she will not get over it and she will not move on and, with God as her witness, she will not accept that man as her president. For the fiery Jacksonville congresswoman -- and many of the nation's black voters who so overwhelmingly punched their cards or penciled their ballots for someone else -- the fall election was not some abstract political loss for the Democratic Party. It was personal, a sucker-punch at the rawest nerve.

Sunday Front   Faith in democracy faltered during recount , The Florida Times-Union, December 17, 2000
    - The election seems so long ago, America's memories of Nov. 7 feel like they should be played back as a grainy black-and-white newsreel, a sepia-toned throwback to a simpler time when kids drank Nehi and everyone gathered around the family television set, confident in the smooth infallibility of presidential elections. The collective dictionary was a little bit slimmer, without a word for those little paper squares punched out of ballots. And even if anyone knew they were called chads, certainly no one thought of them as dimpled or pregnant, as if they were a hazily remembered girl from high school. The Electoral College was a junior high civics lesson, and no one minded letting the stately television anchors decide who and when to declare the winner. Sometimes the coverage stretched into the wee hours, but the winner's name was always there on the next day's front page. But the last five weeks have forced America to confront difficult questions about rules and procedures and how to decide who should lead. It also has pressed deeper, more personal questions about a national identity that has, for generations, revolved around the acceptance that America was the model for contemporary government. Even if everyone still agrees that democracy is the best system, this winter may bring questions about whether our system is still the best democracy.

Sunday Front   The Undecided Voter , November 5, 2000
    - Wafflers, procrastinators and folks just too busy with their everyday lives -- they are the legions who may ultimately choose the next president of the United States.
Profiles

- A preacher faces death threats... and the devil , The Florida Times-Union, August 7, 2001
    - The preacher with a bounty on his head has come for a showdown. He gathered hundreds of supporters and marched from his church into the heart of the blighted Ken Knight Drive neighborhood. He pitched a tent, read some Bible and now he is calling out the forces that would destroy him. If they want to shoot him -- if they want to collect the $25,000 price that drug dealers are rumored to have placed on his life -- he tells them to do it now. The Rev. John Guns came to face them, to challenge them, maybe even to dare them. And he came to save them.

Sunday Front   What's his next move: The mayor of Jacksonville's political future , The Florida Times-Union, February 4, 2001
    - Sometimes the future is a specter on the distant horizon, a black-cloaked reminder that change is never far away. Even though his future is by all accounts dazzling, Mayor John Delaney tries not to see its shadow looming, as if consciously ignoring the specter will stop its approach."If you talked to my wife, she'd have to say that even she doesn't know what's next," Delaney said. "I honest to God don't know what I'm going to do." He hears the rumors, though -- the cocktail-hour parlor game played in the city's political circles, the waves of speculation about where Delaney will go when his second term ends in 2003. He will be Florida's attorney general, they say, or president of the University of Florida or the state's next U.S. senator. Or maybe, they say, the 44-year-old who is never described without a mention of his boyish looks will quit politics for the wealth and privacy of practicing law. They marvel at what the future must hold for John Delaney. Delaney, however, remembers what they forget -- that choosing a future has a cost.

- Matt Carlucci: Free of his father's shadow , The Florida Times-Union, May 27, 2001
    -  Matt Carlucci has never had to answer a question about surpassing his father, because his father was The Legend. In an era when Jacksonville politics was a gleefully corrup frontier, Joe Carlucci was a maverick crusader, a tireless champion of public ethics who wore his vote like a loaded six-gun. Matt Carlucci, now 46, has had some of his father's success but has never been The Legend. The best he could do was make peace with answering questions about living in its shadow.
    "I can never win trying to compare myself to my dad," he said.
    But Joe Carlucci -- legend or not -- spent a decade on Jacksonville City Council and was never elected president. Last week, Matt Carlucci was. Now the son who resigned himself to never outdoing his father is struggling to wrap his brain around the fact that, in a way, he has done exactly that.

Sunday Front   Under Pressure: Sheriff Nat Glover's fans demand he run for mayor , The Florida Times-Union, May 27, 2001
    -  Maybe the only thing larger than Nat Glover is the Promise of Nat Glover. The man himself seems chiseled from the very stuff of enormity: a towering, meaty form, a commanding personal presence and a looming political energy so intense that some are literally afraid to challenge i

t. But the man is dwarfed by the Promise of Nat Glover, which is nothing less than a vision of victory in a war many people thought they would never live to see fought. In a city that saw civil rights protestors beaten with ax handles in the town square in 1960, Nat Glover became the first black sheriff 35 years later. The Promise of Nat Glover, though, goes even further; it is the tempting thought of the first black mayor in 2003. And some of the believers are so focused on the promise that they will prod, press, even torture the man in order to see it fulfilled.
- Brown known in D.C. as a fighter , The Florida Times-Union, October 30, 2000
    - Corrine Brown can sing in prayer or curse in fury, but it is always with the voice of a congresswoman. Praising Jesus with a Sunday morning hymn, her right hand is swaying with a palm open toward heaven. Her left hand is clasped with that of Richard Riley, the former secretary of education, whose presence in her church on the first stop of a campaign bus tour is testament to her political heft. Swaying to the psalms in the bright, airy light of Bethel Baptist Instiutional Church, Brown's voice is humble, singing, "Thank you, Jesus, for ever and ever and ever," but it could instantly transform into the seismic bellow that has made her legendary in Washington for getting her way.

News Features

 Sunday Front   Did a fellow cop kill the DeKalb sheriff , The Florida Times-Union, Dec. 9, 2001
    - Kneeling next to her husband's bullet-shredded body, Phyllis Brown knew in her gut what had happened. It was three days before he was to be sworn in as sheriff, three days before he could start making good on those promises to clean up a corrupt department, and his warm blood was turning cold as it ran down their driveway.

Sunday Front   Far from action, Kennedy awaits call , The Florida Times-Union, Oct. 14, 2001
    - This story was filed onboard the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy.
    - From his glassed-in perch 10 stories above the roar and the fury of the flight deck that is his kingdom, the warrior folds his arms and smiles with the smugness of a man who has waited so long. For all those years, the planners and the accountants and the bureaucrats in uniform looked at him with bemusement or even disdain, as if America was too grown-up for warriors. So he waited until those bureaucrats were forced to see. There is an enemy. The warrior has a purpose.

- Pearl Harbor's place in history getting less personal , The Florida Times-Union, December 7, 1999
    - It used to be easier for Alan Rushing to teach his students about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His classrooms did not have videotapes or Internet computers when he started teaching in 1968, but they had boys and girls whose fathers still woke from nightmares of the Japanese attack. They had fathers who carried caskets, read eulogies and handed crisply folded American flags to new widows at 2,388 funerals that followed the Dec. 7, 1941, attack. O ver time, however, it became less personal to Rushing's students. A few had grandfathers who were among the 1,178 wounded, and others understood the emotions of war from parents who were veterans of Korea, and later of Vietnam. F or most of today's students, the date that President Franklin D. Roosevelt prophesied would "live in infamy" lives mainly in history books, as distant and dusty as the Boston Tea Party and the Gettysburg Address.

- League of the South pushes separatist views , The Florida Times-Union, September 10, 2001
    - Jim Lear is waiting for the South to rise again, waiting like an old preacher waits for Jesus to return: patient, deliberate and certain.
"We're setting up the base for an independent Southern republic," said Lear, the Northeast Florida chairman of the League of the South. "We're leaving this union."
 Secession is the cornerstone belief of the Alabama-based League, whose 9,000-plus members yearn for a new South where foreign aid ends and school prayer begins, where abortion is banned, where parents educate their own children and where the state flag flies above the federal one.

- Heroes without recognition: The naval beach battalions , The Florida Times-Union, June 6, 2000
    - Even living at the end of a dirt path off an unmarked, unpaved road in Yulee, Frank Snyder is haunted by the apparition of a soldier clawing through the sand, dragging himself toward his blown-off leg as if just reaching the scorched limb would restore his power to walk. He has tried to hide from the memories of twisted bodies he could not save on the beach, but they haunt him still. The thick marsh and ancient trees that surround his home offer no protection from the ghost of the Army officer who waved for attention with what Snyder thought was a white baton, and he can remember the taste of his horror on learning it was the remnants of the officer's own arm. But if Snyder is cursed once by his inability to forget what he did on Omaha Beach, he is doubly damned by the Navy's unwillingness to remember.

Light Features

- A new life in a new world , The Florida Times-Union, Nov. 11, 2001
    -  Somehow it seems strange that the Sept. 11 babies look normal. America was hit so hard that day, we almost expect to see bruises on them. But look at Conner James Robbins or Katelyn Lewis or any of the dozens of babies born in Jacksonville that day. There is no American-flag birthmark on their forehead, no world-weary sadness in their eyes. They just happened to join the world on the day it seemed to stop for everyone else.

 - Bribes and frenzy mark the hunt for PlayStation 2 , The Florida Times-Union, Dec. 25, 2000
    -  Parents braved the most daunting odds in their Christmas quests this year. Their goal was so scarce and sought-after that by comparison, the Holy Grail is just a cup and the Ark of the Covenant just a footlocker. The brave and the tireless and the lucky found their prize, a slick blue box, no larger than a VCR. It is Sondy's PlayStation 2, this year's winner of the Cabbage Patch Kids award for driving doting parents into a capitalist frenzy.

- Service was a family affair , The Florida Times-Union, May 29, 2000
    - Eddie Walker Palmer was what folks in Vidalia, Ga., called a pillar of the community. He was a man with enough stature to host the preacher for Sunday dinner and enough money to be listed in Dun & Bradstreet, and that made him a man who probably could have kept his children far away from the Nazi submarines and Japanese bombers. But Palmer knew a little bit about what America meant, about how it was a place where he could go from spreading tar barefoot before he could afford shoes to owning a large farm and a thriving turpentine business that hardly noticed the rations on sugar and fuel oils. So what little bit he knew about America, he taught his family -- that they should cherish and protect it because it was home. And when a man called Hirohito came into their home through a door called Pearl Harbor and tore away a chunk of America that held more than 2,400 people, the Palmer children decided they were going to do something about it.
Projects
 
 Sunday Front Madison Priest and his magic box , The Florida Times-Union, May 5 & 6, 2002
    - Madison Priest's history is filled with people who call him a con artist, a geek who invented nothing more than a beautiful lie.
None of them, though, can prove it.
He appeared with his magic box, promising it could convert plain copper phone lines that run to almost every home in the country into greased-lightning pipelines for data and video, four times faster than the most advanced fiber-optic cables. It was a magic box that would shock communications like the television had, transform technology like personal computers had, redefine entertainment like Nintendo had. It was a magic box he built from $100 worth of spare parts.
He choreographed elaborate demonstrations, quickening the pulses of engineers shocked by its innovation and capitalists stunned by its potential.
He asked for money and received it, sometimes more than a million dollars at a time, enough to move him from a cobblestone street in Palatka to a gated community in St. Augustine.
And then he stalled, stymied and stonewalled. Prototypes were destroyed by lightning, floods and plane crashes, he said. They were too unstable for independent tests. Just a little more money, he said, and it would be ready. Just a little bit more.
Every time, he wore out his partners -- rich partners like Blockbuster and Intel, prominent partners like former U.S. Sen. Paula Hawkins and the son of Atlanta media czar Ted Turner, partners who brought him to Silicon Valley and partners who brought him to Capitol Hill.
Sometimes they sued him, sometimes they threatened him and sometimes they just threw up their arms in disgust, but they walked away and left their money with him. Priest -- who declined repeated interview requests -- never needed to mourn the loss of oold partners; he just found new ones. He has had many since 1994, and they have paid him at least $6 million.
They could never quite prove that his stories -- not his magic box -- were the inventions.
If it is a scam, they concede, it is truly a beautiful one.
    This two-part series led to an investigation by the Florida attorney general, which is ongoing today.
    - Part 1: Is it a magic box or a high-tech hoax?
    - Part 2: Investors shaken by amnesia, alien

 Award WInner Sunday Front   Under Fire: The U.S. Navy and Vieques , The Florida Times-Union, October 24, 1999
    - Carlos Ventura does not know admirals in the Navy. He is a fisherman on this tiny Caribbean island 7 miles off Puerto Rico, and he knows the Navy has held live-fire war games here for nearly 60 years. He knows his family is more secure because the U.S. military trains on Vieques, but he also knows his windows shake and his walls crack when the bombs drop. He knows the military owns the land legally, since buying two-thirds of it in the 1940s, but he also knows the fish are not as large or as plentiful as they used to be and the eastern tip of the island has become an ashtray of bomb craters and unexploded weapons. H e also knows people who have died because of it .  
Kevin Moran does not know the people who fish on Vieques. Moran, the commander of Navy Region Southeast, is a Jacksonville-based one-star admiral who oversees operations in Puerto Rico, and he knows most of the 9,300 residents of Vieques want the Navy to leave. H e knows protesters have built camps on the bombing range and have lived there since April to prevent the Navy from using it, but he also knows it is the only place in the world that a large American battle group can train as a team to build the skills it needs. He knows the halt on bombing there will force sailors and pilots to go into harm's way without being fully prepared. H e also knows people who could die because of it.
The battle over this 33,000-acre island, which is part of the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, erupted in April when a civilian security guard working for the Navy died in a bombing accident on the live-fire range. The fight continues to churn because of one thing that neither Ventura nor Moran knows: Is there any compromise that can satisfy both sides?
    - This four-story package won a Florida Press Club honorable mention award for Foreign Reporting, the Times-Union's first ever.
    - Part 1: Under Fire
    - Part 2: Fear and fury among the islanders
    - Part 3: The best training option
    - Part 4: Issue embroiled in politics

 Award WInner Sunday Front Inside Navy Boot Camp , The Florida Times-Union, June 18 to 20, 2000
    - Twelve hours ago, joining the Navy seemed as easy to John Hammonds Jr. as starting any new job. He raised his right hand, recited the oath of service and hugged his parents, relatives and a j