ProPublica hires Bandler to cover business

ProPublica announced Wednesday that James Bandler is joining its staff as a senior reporter covering business.

He starts on Sept. 4.

Bandler has made his reputation writing deep-dive, high-impact articles about corporate fraud and the misdeeds of business moguls, principally at Fortune magazine and, before that, at the Wall Street Journal. He began his journalism career at the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.

At the Wall Street Journal, Bandler was a co-author of “The Perfect Payday,” a 2006 investigation that exposed the widespread practice of backdating stock options by business executives. The series, produced by a team of reporters, led to the paper’s first Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as criminal prosecutions, massive fines and disgorgements.

It also forced dozens of companies to issue corrected financial statements and remove more than 70 senior executives, including the CEO of UnitedHealthCare Group.

Bandler’s work at the Journal also included stories on a global price-fixing ring in the chemical shipping industry, an expose on the criminal life of Wal-Mart’s vice chairman, and stories on accounting fraud at Xerox Corp. As editor-at-large at Fortune, he produced in-depth pieces on a con-artist who swindled Fortune 500 companies, the collapse of AIG, the fall of IBM Corp.’s CEO heir-apparent in an insider-trading scandal, the travails of Hewlett-Packard, and a Gerald Loeb Award-winning story on Bernie Madoff.

After leaving Fortune, James worked as partner at a New York investment fund, where he performed due diligence on potential investments.

“James comes to ProPublica at a time when we’re expanding our coverage of abuses of corporate power,” said ProPublica managing editor Robin Fields in a statement. “In addition to defining his career as a sharp observer of some of the country’s most powerful companies and industries, he is a gifted storyteller who moves between analysis and narrative writing. We are pleased to bring him onboard as we carry out this expansion.”