Slain reporter Jeff German moved to Las Vegas to start a journalism career

Early in his career, Jeff German was an intern at the Milwaukee Journal.

Despite mostly features and fluff, one of German’s stories garnered a bit of unexpected controversy from the do-gooders and teetotalers of the area. He probably didn’t care because it got him on the coveted front page.

The story covered the happy-hour bars in Milwaukee that offered all-you-can-drink booze. The Journal published nearly half a dozen letters of complaint on February 26, 1978.

Readers raged that the story was promoting drinking, drunk driving, and providing publicity to liquor establishments.

“I am amazed at the free advertising The Journal gave bars listed at the end of the article,” Bleva M. Nerlien of Stevens Point wrote. “The Journal is an accomplice in corruption. Please stop and think!”

Patti Muehlbauer, of Milwaukee, chimed in with a similar theme.

“The article by Jeff German ‘Bottoms Up:’ started as a very good putdown on the way drinking is given a sparkling attraction at many bars but at the end of the article, he sure defeated what appeared to be his purpose: All those bars just got free advertising of times, prices and locations!” she wrote. “Instead of discouraging people from joining the increasing number of drunken drivers, his article only made them more aware of all the places available!”

An editor’s note at the end of the letters said that the story “pointed out that law enforcement authorities and people who deal with alcoholics were concerned about the danger ‘happy hour’ participants pose to themselves and others.”

The minor controversy did little to kill German’s love of newspapering. In August 1978, he wrote his last story for the Journal, about neighbors clashing in court over the construction of a pier on Pewaukee Lake because it infringed on an easement.

That story foreshadowed much of German’s later career in Las Vegas covering courts. He had just graduated from Marquette in May 1978 with a Master of Arts in journalism. During his internship, it was clear to German that he would not land a full-time reporting job at the Journal.

Back then, reporters were expected to work their way up through smaller papers. If they had talent, they eventually landed on major metro dailies and then maybe the national papers.

Then, newspaper jobs were sought-after careers, especially after the fame and accolades that Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein achieved by taking down President Richard Nixon.

As he was finishing his Milwaukee Journal internship, German called Carol Vogel, for whom he had freelanced when she was an editor at a string of Milwaukee suburban papers. She had recently moved to Las Vegas.

She first worked for the now-defunct North Las Vegas Valley Times, then the Las Vegas Sun, and eventually the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Vogel had recently quit the Valley Times after a disagreement with its publisher and took a job with the Las Vegas Sun.

There was a bit of a pipeline from Milwaukee to Sin City in the 1970s as another later famous journalist, Ned Day, would move to the Valley Times and, later, the bigger news organizations in Las Vegas like the Review-Journal and KLAS-TV.

Day was known for muckraking and digging up stories on the Mob, which got his car firebombed in 1986. He died the following year of a heart attack while snorkeling in Hawaii. Some old Vegas hands think his death in 1987 at age 42 might not have been a medical accident.

German told Vogel that the Milwaukee Journal wasn’t going to hire him after the internship, and he needed a job. His timing was perfect.

Vogel’s editor had just asked her if she knew any good reporters because the Sun was looking to beef up its staff. Vogel handed the phone to then-Sun City Editor Chris Chrystal, who talked to German and basically agreed to hire him on the spot.

Chrystal got off the phone and turned to Vogel.

“He better be good,” she said, adding that she was hiring German solely on Vogel’s recommendation.

Within weeks, German was in Las Vegas for his first big-time journalism job. It would take German a while to get his bearings in the new town he had never even visited. He worked the courthouse sources and dug through documents, but he initially wasn’t producing the steady stream of articles the Sun was expecting.

Chrystal went back to Vogel.

“Hey, you know, he’s not pulling his weight here,” she said.

Vogel urged her to be patient, as German was in a new city with no sources or contacts and he was more of a guy who would dig and work on longer-term pieces. Even then German was interested in going deeper on stories and not just producing shallow, quick hits.

Vogel went to German and told him, “You gotta get some stories,” urging German to show Chrystal his skills.

After the shaky start, German started building a thick Rolodex of sources and breaking big stories that would make him a journalism legend in Sin City.

The book was published by WildBlue Press (wildbluepress.com) in April. wbp.bz/laststory