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hot. Arthur Bertin dying. That’s probably the biggest.”
    â€œOh, yeah. Oh, wasn’t that a tragedy? Hey, listen, if there’s anything the company can do, anything, you give me a call. A real tragedy.”
    â€œOn mill property, too,” I said.
    â€œYeah, wasn’t that strange. Where was it exactly? Way down south of the pulp mill, wasn’t it? I haven’t been down there myself in years.”
    â€œNo reason to.”
    â€œNo—hey, what’s down there? Some storage. Empty property, really. Off the record, I can’t see any reason for Arthur to be there, off the record.”
    Curry leaned closer. I knew we were talking man to man because I could see the stains on his teeth.
    â€œNow this is really off the record—was he, you know, having problems? Despondent or something, I mean?”
    I didn’t say anything and he backpedaled.
    â€œI was just curious, you know, if he had some problems and that’s what happened. I wondered what happened, why, you know, he’d be there and all. Tragedy, really, ’cause I knew Arthur. He did some work for us years ago, pictures at the retirement dinner. Did a heck of a job, too.”
    â€œI don’t doubt it,” I said. “But I didn’t think he had any problems. No more than anybody else.”
    I paused and looked at him. Waited. Waited some more. Waited for him to get to the point.
    Because I knew what he wanted, the slimy little weasel. I was doing a story on the mill and he wanted to run more interference, do a little of what they called damage control. The story was about the mill asking for a tax break from the town. They paid $2.8 million a year and they wanted to knock off $400,000. For weeks, they’d been in “negotiations” with the board of assessors, which was the assessor and four people from the town council. Behind closed doors, they’d been talking about these state formulas which were used to decide how much companies paid in local taxes. In public, there was a shakedown going on, and St. Amand was doing the shaking.
    It really was pretty simple.
    While St. Amand went for a tax break, it leaked information saying it was considering closing the Androscoggin mill and moving the production of magazine paper to Georgia. In Androscoggin, a leak like this didn’t trickle. It hit the town like a thunderstorm, complete with hailstones. Once everybody was good and worried, the company confirmed the rumors by not denying them.
    Voilà . Four hundred grand, delivered on a silver platter.
    But not by the Androscoggin Review .
    In years past, the Review would have come out with some boot-licking editorial about the company’s contribution to the community, about the need to cooperate with the town’s biggest employer. Instead, I made a few phone calls, talked to a couple of people at the Wall Street Journal , three or four industry analysts on Wall Street, and called the city in Georgia where the Androscoggin jobs were supposed to go. The Journal guys sent up some stories about other paper companies using the same ploy to extract tax breaks. The analysts said it was unlikely that the company would move production away from its Maine wood supply. The union guys in Georgia said they’d been told their jobs might be moved to Maine.
    Not exactly Pulitzer material, but not bad reading.
    And read it was. Three page-one stories and an editorial, accusing the mill of extortion, more or less, and telling the town to tell the mill to take a hike. Curry was on the phone at eight that morning, along with a few readers who had told us what we could do with our muckraking paper.
    Nice to be appreciated.
    Curry tried the same approach, but I told him to stuff it and hung up. He called back in an hour, apologizing, fearing for his job and begging for a meeting so that I would “be apprised of all the information.”
    That had been three weeks before and now we were buddies. The