Kevin Deutsch

Kevin Deutsch, is an American author and award-winning criminal justice journalist.

Career

Deutsch's first book, The Triangle: A Year on the Ground with New York's Bloods and Crips, is an account of the year the author spent covering a Bloods-Crips gang war on Long Island. It received positive reviews from critics, including a starred review from Publisher's Weekly magazine. His second book, Pill City: How Two Honor Roll Students Foiled the Feds and Built a Drug Empire, chronicles the story of how opiates stolen during the Baltimore riots sparked a wave of inner-city addiction and violence.

Deutsch has worked on staff at Newsday, The New York Daily News, The Miami Herald, The Palm Beach Post, and The Riverdale Press. His work as a freelancer has also appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Village Voice, The Forward, Columbia Journalism Review, and The New York Post. Deutsch has been interviewed about American street gangs and drug trafficking, and has received prizes for his writing about crime and national news events, including an Associated Press award for justice beat reporting.

Investigation of alleged unverified sources

Following the release of Deutsch's second book, Pill City, reporters from The Baltimore Sun and Baltimore City Paper, along with the Baltimore TV writer/producer David Simon, challenged the veracity of parts of the book's narrative. On February 10, 2017, The Baltimore Sun published an article quoting government officials that cast doubt on the core of the story, and Deutsch's practice of changing the names of individuals and places he documented.

The article also included an extended video interview with Deutsch, in which he defended his work and his use of anonymous sourcing, which he said was needed to protect the safety of interviewees. The "Author's Note" in Deutsch's book includes a page detailing his methodology. It states that "In order to disguise the identities of interviewees, most of their names have been changed. For that same reason, certain locations, physical descriptions, and other identifying details have been altered or obscured."

Within a week of the Baltimore Sun story, both Newsday and The New York Times announced separate internal reviews of Deutsch's past writing.

On February 24, 2017, The New York Times published an editors' note on the sole article Deutsch wrote for the paper, detailing its investigation and conclusion:

An article on Dec. 29, 2016, described the rise of deadly fentanyl overdoses on Long Island, based largely on official data and interviews with law-enforcement officials. It was written by a freelance writer, Kevin Deutsch, an author and former staff reporter for The Daily News and Newsday.

Several weeks later, The Baltimore Sun published a report that raised questions about claims in a new book by the same reporter, about the drug trade in Baltimore. The Sun reporters also informed The Times that, in the course of researching the claims in Mr. Deutsch’s book, they had reviewed the Times article and had been unable to locate two sources quoted by name in that article.

In response, editors and reporters at The Times conducted a detailed review of the fentanyl article. The main facts and thrust of the article, including the official data and quotes from the authorities, were confirmed. However, after extensive reporting efforts, The Times also has been unable to locate or confirm the existence of two people who were named and quoted: Jeffrey Sheridan, described as a resident of Oyster Bay, N.Y., who works as an addiction counselor and whose 34-year-old nephew died from a fentanyl overdose on Staten Island in 2015; and Andrew Giordano, described as a 26-year-old resident of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, who overdosed on a fentanyl-heroin mixture.

Mr. Deutsch maintains that the interviews and the descriptions are accurate. But he has not been able to put The Times in contact with either source, or to provide any further material to corroborate the account. At this point, editors have concluded that The Times cannot vouch for the accuracy of those sources, and that material has been removed from the online version of the article.

Following these findings, on March 2, 2017, the media watchdog group iMediaEthics confirmed that the New York Daily News was conducting an internal review, examining all 572 stories from Deutsch's career with the company. The group later shared a statement from a Newsweek, confirming that it would review the three stories Deutsch had written there as well.

In its own investigation, iMediaEthics also attempted to verify sources in several stories by Deutsch that had received significant national attention, including ones about Omar Mateen and Freddie Gray. At its conclusion, the group stated that it could not find any record or evidence of at least eight people that Deutsch quoted. Deutsch has stood by all of his reporting, stating that he used the exact names given to him by his interviewees.