The Paper Chase

The interview strategy was good cop, bad cop. Mark Zusman, the editor of the Portland, Ore., alternative newspaper Willamette Week, would lay out a few softball questions for the city's newly inaugurated mayor about the extent of his past relationship with a teenage legislative intern. Zusman would give Sam Adams a chance to cooperate, to come along quietly. If Adams stonewalled, investigative reporter Nigel Jaquiss would move in and lay out his case, compiled over the previous 16 months with the same kind of dogged shoe-leather work that had earned the former Wall Street oil trader a Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism in 2005.

In the end, Jaquiss told Adams nearly everything he'd dug up over the past year and a half, identifying the sources who'd contradicted the 45-year-old mayor's virulent denials that he'd been anything more than a mentor to the intern. Adams still stood by his story.

The meeting was a disappointment to Jaquiss, who at age 35 had traded in an 11-year career in the marketplace for a reporter's notebook after the death of his parents caused him to re-evaluate his life's purpose. He knew if he went to press with a piece that Adams publicly called false, the reporter would spend weeks fending off critics who'd call him a sensationalistic homophobe, hungry for a repeat performance of the scoop he snared four years earlier when he dug up evidence that former governor Neil Goldschmidt had had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old babysitter in the 1970s, when Goldschmidt was Portland's mayor.

Jaquiss had already taken heat for the stories he'd written about Adams's relationship with Beau Breedlove, who was 17 when he first met the mayor in the hallway of the state Capitol in 2005. All of the city's local government reporters had covered the allegations against Adams during his 2007 campaign to become the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city. But the rest of the press corps mostly stopped chasing the story once Adams went on the attack that September, calling the charges from a would-be opponent in the mayoral race nothing more than a "nasty smear" campaign.

"It plays into the worst deep-seated fears society has about gay men," Adams told Willamette Week's competitor, the Portland Mercury, in 2007. "You can't trust them with your young."

But Jaquiss, who moved to Portland after an unsuccessful attempt at writing a novel about the Russian mob, didn't buy it. Something about the mayor's refusal to discuss certain details of the time he'd spent with Breedlove and the intern's inconsistent descriptions of the relationship aroused his suspicions. He wrote several stories that raised questions about what really happened, drawing fire for a "gay witch hunt," as he puts it, and then quietly kept pursuing the piece, searching out former boyfriends of the mayor and of Breedlove, city staffers, acquaintances—anyone who could help reveal the truth about whether the two were just friends or more than that.

The good cop, bad cop meeting came a few days after a new anonymous tip reached the inboxes of reporters at newspapers throughout the city, one that suggested Breedlove and the mayor had some kind of encounter in a city-hall bathroom and that the mayor's former boyfriend, reachable at an included cell phone number, could provide details.

Jaquiss was worried he'd get scooped on a story he'd been reporting for more than a year, so he and Zusman decided to kick the reporting into high gear, confronting the mayor with what they knew and exposing what they believed was the truth about Adams's public deception and private bad judgment. The mayor's denial in the meeting meant things were about to get ugly, and it meant Jaquiss couldn't be absolutely positive he was about the print the truth. He spent the weekend writing and rewriting, trying to convince Breedlove to go on the record and visiting one of his off-the-record sources to look him squarely in the eye and make sure his portion of the puzzle was as beyond reproach as possible.

By then, reporters at the largest newspaper in the Pacific Northwest, The Oregonian, had begun to circle. On Martin Luther King Day, Jaquiss and Zusman decided, they would publish the allegations on Willamette Week's Web site. Just as they were working on the layout, putting the final touches on the piece, Jaquiss's cell phone rang. It was Mayor Adams, ready to come clean.