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Canisius High School Today
Q:
What sights and sounds stick in your
mind fromyour years at Canisius?
We had a senior lounge in the basement with
a Space Invaders game and a Ms. Pac Man game.
I was involved in that. I had great teachers, espe-
cially inEnglish andwriting.We playedultimate
Frisbee in the backyard. . . I was surrounded by
people who took their work seriously but didn’t
take themselves too seriously.
Q:
You went to SUNY Binghamton to
study “rhetoric and general literature.”
What does that mean?
It means they didn’t have a journalism pro-
gram. . . . I went into college wanting to save the
world. I worked at a gas station during the en-
ergy crisis, and wanted to be a physicist and au-
thor so I could solve the energy problem and
write a book about it. That seemed a little am-
bitious. I did a little bit of work for the school
newspaper, and liked being in the mix of a lot of
things — it allowed me to apply writing in a lot
of different ways. I’m a curious type, and it was
an excuse to ask a lot of questions.
Q:
What drew you to crime reporting
for The Detroit News and NewYork
Newsday after journalism school at
Columbia University?
It was kind of the defining issue of the time. .
. . I had the fortuitous timing to arrive in Detroit
at the same time as crack cocaine, so I did a lit-
tle time in the ’burbs and then covered Detroit’s
criminal court at the time when Detroit was the
murder capital of the world. I got to Newsday
when New York had 2,200 murders in one year.
…When you’re writing about crime you’re not
going to solve themurder, but you go out and get
a story about people’s lives. You figure out what’s
happening out there and let democracy figure
out what to do with it. And crime was the issue.
Q:
Your prize-winning series rattled the
rafters of corporate America. What kind of
grief did you get from powerhouses like
General Electric, which, as you reported in
March 2011, paid no U.S. taxes in 2010?
G.E. gave us no end of grief because there was
a huge outcry from that story. The problem is: It
was based on their own documents and filings.
… A lot of this [tax] debate has been so skewed
in the past 10 years. Obama says things that
Reagan wouldn’t have dreamed of saying about
tax breaks. You really upset a lot of people’s para-
digms, but I’msorry—my jobwas to report what
the numbers are.
Q:
How did you absorb news of
your Pulitzer win?
It’s a great joy, a great thrill. It made me feel
fortunate that I had the chance to do this kind
of work when so many people don’t even get to
work in the business anymore. And I feel gratified
that an issue I think is important is granted more
scrutiny. … And it almost makes up for the four
Super Bowls. I was at all four of them.
Good Lord.
Yeah.
Q:
What do you do
when you visit Buffalo?
I usually eat about 4,000 calories in the first
two hours I’m at home. Wings, beef on weck and
Labatt’s, and then I can get my bearings. I go to
Sabres games. In the summer I’ll go to the beach,
check out the Albright-Knox. I still have some
good friends at The Buffalo News.
Q:
Now here’s your chance to trumpet the
Jesuit educationmodel. What did it
teach you?
Independent thinking. And they teach you
how to teach yourself. A great thing about the
Jesuit tradition is its intellectual independence
and intellectual honesty. In terms of wanting to
be involved in the mix of the world, in terms of
trying to take what you learn and apply it in the
world— those have been great lessons.
#
Dan Zak '01 is a reporter for The Washington Post.
NewYork Times reporter David Kocieniewski
’80, born in north Buffalo and raised in West
Seneca, won a Pulitzer Prize in April for de-
crypting the complex ways that individuals and
corporations exploit the U.S. tax code—a feat of
nitty-gritty business journalism by a guy who
majored in literature and is currently writing,
on the side, a screenplay for a romantic com-
edy. Kocieniewski, 49, has two daughters, lives
in Bucks County, Penn. His desk in the Times
newsroom overlooks a courtyard of birch trees
and is adorned with piles of tax returns and
Buffalo Bills paraphernalia.
Kocieniewski ’80
Wins Pulitzer for
Journalism
By Dan Zak ‘01