Starkman Serves as Senior Editor of FinCEN Files

The FinCEN Files investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and BuzzFeed News reveals the role of global banks in industrial-scale money laundering. Our Fellow, Dean Starkman worked as a senior editor in the project.

The FinCEN Files investigation is based on thousands of so-called “suspicious activity reports” and other US government documents that BuzzFeed News obtained and then shared with ICIJ and its more 100 partners, news organizations around the world. It offers an unprecedented view of global financial corruption, the banks enabling it, and the government agencies that fail to stop it.

The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system.

Dean Starkman, Fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society served as senior editor in the project. He shared with us the most important takeaways:

Dean Starkman has worked as an investigative reporter for more than two decades, and he has won many awards for his writing on finance, media, and the business of news in an age of digital disruption. He covered white-collar crime and real estate for The Wall Street Journal and helped lead the Providence Journal's investigative team to a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Later he worked as the Wall Street correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, reporting on the intersection of finance and society from New York. He is the author of The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2014), an acclaimed analysis of business-press failures prior to the 2008 financial crisis.

He was also part of the ICIJ team working on previous projects like Luanda Leaks, China Cables and Paradise Papers.