The day Cassandra Smith was promoted to captain in the Camden Police Department, she went outside to check out the unmarked car that would be hers. She had been excited to drive the car home — but found the inside covered with cigar ashes and needing a good cleaning. Then she found three bags of crack in the door pocket. “This is big league. It’s hardball. Possession of cocaine is a criminal offense, I could have very well — not just ended up being terminated, but could have

The amount of effort Sally Herships put into her first investigative journalism piece….. well, it’s enough to drive you to smoke! “The Five Percent Rule” is Sally’s 10-month-long foray into investigative reporting, a story on the under-pricing of tobacco on military bases. The piece aired on Marketplace in June of 2011 as part of a series on tobacco.On this edition of HowSound, Sally talks about some of her behind-the-scenes work on the project. It’s a bit startling, actually

Last month on Marketplace, I published a report from my year-long investigation about how Army, Air Force and Coast Guard bases in more than a dozen states sold tobacco at illegally low prices, even as the Department of Defense (DoD) spends more than $1.5 billion a year on tobacco related costs. While reporting this story, one of the big questions nagging at me was this: If a base did adjust its prices for tobacco, raising them to legal levels, how much would be saved on heal

Tess Vigeland: Brown tobacco leaves are costing the military a lot of green. The Department of Defense spends over $1.5 billion a year of taxpayer money on tobacco related expenses. Members of the armed forces are 1.5 times more likely to smoke than civilians. But an investigation by reporter Sally Herships shows the military regularly fails to comply with its own tobacco pricing restrictions. It sells millions of dollars of cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco at prices lo