William Gaines, Prizewinning Investigative Reporter, Dies at 82

William Gaines, an investigative reporter for The Chicago Tribune who shared two Pulitzer Prizes for exposing corruption in Chicago and was a finalist for a third, died on July 20 in Munster (IN) He was 82. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his daughter, Michelle Gaines, said.

Gaines, who joined The Tribune in 1963 and uncovered malfeasance for most of his tenure, until he retired in 2001, won his first Pulitzer in 1976 for local investigative specialized reporting on a newspaper team that exposed mortgage abuse in federal housing programs and horrific conditions at two private hospitals — including one where, while working undercover as a janitor, he was enlisted to assist during surgery. “The experience was frightening to me; it was depressing,” he wrote in a Tribune column in 1975, “for I knew that it was not just a fluke that I, a janitor, had been called on to do the work of trained orderlies and nurses’ aides.” He shared his second Pulitzer in 1988, for investigative reporting, with Dean Baquet, now the executive editor of The New York Times, and Ann Marie Lipinski, now the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognized a series of articles that uncovered waste and self-dealing in the Chicago City Council. The Pulitzer board called the series “a model of municipal reporting.”