For the Mayborn Magazine

You never know when you’re going to run into an outrageously good idea for a story, let alone one good enough to win a spot in an anthology of the year’s best crime reporting. And usually, you don’t get great ideas from sleep-starved med students. And most of all, you don’t get fresh leads in a story 45 years old, one covered by every newspaper, magazine and investigative committee on Capitol Hill, much less one that Oliver Stone made into a major motion picture.

What’s new to say about the Kennedy assassination, after all?

Trust Mike Mooney to have the idea fall into his lap during a call with his best friend, a third-year medical student who had listened, enthralled, as a lecture about pancreatic cancer turned instead into a conversation about the harrowing, historic day in 1963 when John F. Kennedy lay on a hospital room cart, his head gaping open from an assassin’s bullet. The student, Andrew Jennings, immediately picked up the phone and called his buddy Mike to share the story of Dr. Robert McClelland, the aging surgeon who had cradled the president’s brains in his hands and massaged Lee Harvey Oswald’s heart at the same hospital two days later.

When Mike hung up, he knew he had one of the best stories of his life and he had to write it — fast.
His story, “The Day Kennedy Died,” appeared in D Magazine in November 2008 and turned Mike Mooney’s writing life around. This spring, he learned his story would be included in The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 anthology along with the likes of The New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin and New York Times best-seller David Grann. A week later, “Royal Flushed,” his story about Florida’s amateur and professional poker world, written for the New Times Broward/Palm Beach, was picked for inclusion in The Best American Sports Writing 2009 anthology, which has featured writers such as Susan Orlean and David Halberstam.

Most writers never break into those exalted ranks and here’s Mike, a 28-year-old newbie to the news biz with less than four years’ experience, scoring with two anthologies in one year, for two diverse topics. Some guys are easy to hate.

Easy to hate, until you realize how hard they work, picking stories and animating the characters that inhabit them. Mike excels at finding untold truths. As a writer for New Times, the Village Voice Media outpost in Fort Lauderdale, he has covered real-life blood-sucking vampires, gone on dates with prostitutes, and hung out with strippers. He seeks out individuals discarded, forgotten and ignored by society and he provides them a voice that is honest, raw and real.
People like Dr. Robert McClelland.

Mike knew that if McClelland’s story had miraculously gone untold for so long, he had precious little time to reconstruct it. McClelland is nearly 80, and as Mike would find out while reporting, few of the people in Trauma Room One at Parkland Memorial Hospital that day are still alive, or willing to talk. Mike sifted through newspaper and magazine archives, but found no more than a few short paragraphs about the doctor.

He felt panicked, as if McClelland’s story – languishing for 45 years – would appear at any minute in some other publication.

He mailed a formal letter to McClelland, scoured for tidbits of information about the surgeon, and poured over the Warren Commission report. He even went to Trauma Room One at Parkland — or what’s left of it — but found only a desk and a small historical plaque. (The National Archives and Records Administration bought and carted most of it away.) Finally, Mike sat down with McClelland and tape-recorded the surgeon as he relived those unforgettable days in November of 1963. Mike burned it to a CD and listened to it repeatedly, memorizing every word.

“Well, I feel like a broken record,” McClelland begins, hesitantly. “I’ve probably told this story 8,000 times.”

To understand the writer behind the story, contemplate the photo here of Mike Mooney: the bushy red beard, the ruddy complexion, the smirking mouth that seems forever ready to share a joke, the fedora hat. Or better yet, the hilarious New Times cover where he poses, flowers in hand, as a hopeful suitor seeking surrogate mom. As a child, Mike always knew he wanted to write. He wrote and illustrated books before he could read, dictating words to his mother. While studying English at The University of Texas, he remembers reading a New York Times story about strippers and the writer’s lack of emotion and color. I can write this better, he thought.

Today, that’s what he strives to do with every story. Take his New Times story, “The Real Girlfriend Experience,” which follows Mike as he goes on wholesome, all-American dates with prostitutes. Inspired by the photo-essay book, I Date Hookers, Mike asked himself, What happens when you take a hooker on a regular date? His editor in Fort Lauderdale wondered the answer to that as well, so long as it didn’t cost too much. Mooney found Sophia the prostitute on a Craigslist erotic services post. For $100, he could take her out.

Real life intruded, as it often does for reporters. Mike’s fiancée Tara Nieuwesteeg insisted going along incognito but kept her distance. Sipping a beer, she watched as Mike and Sophia bowled. Mike would text assurances when he could. Occasionally, their eyes would meet across the bowling alley; his look assured her that everything was OK. That is, until Sophia wanted a ride home. Thirty minutes passed with no word from Mike. “He’s either getting a blow job or he’s been stabbed,” Tara says she thought, growing panicked. Then Mike walks in, grinning.

After dropping $300 on hookers, Mike finished the story in three weeks. Months later, it was still on the New Times’ Top 10 Web hit list.

From strippers and prostitutes to vampires and gambling addicts, Mike’s stories tend to cover people on society’s fringes. The story, “My Bloody Valentine,” took Mike into a community of South Florida blood-sucking vampires, which turned out to be a group of nice people who just happen to enjoy drinking each other’s blood. “Sometimes I worry about him getting killed,” says Tara, torn between being serious and making fun now that her beau is safe. “I don’t want to stereotype these people. But they do drink blood and Mike has a lot of blood. He looks delicious to them and he was gone for a really, really long time.”

Mike, like most reporters, shrugs off the danger aspect. He has a compulsive need to satiate his curiosity, which overcomes any brief hesitation about approaching abandoned buildings or rough-looking characters. “I see a repulsive place and I think, interesting, how did it get that way? People who have been through interesting times want to talk and these people are regular people and they have stories,” he says.

It would be easy to poke fun at real-life vampires or even a hapless hooker bowling. But with every story, Mike questions his angles and, with his editor’s help, tries to keep the stories sweet and honest. “I don’t want to exploit anybody — ever,” he says. “I want to write about other people exploiting people. And I don’t want to sensationalize someone. It’s a careful line. I want it to be sweet without mocking.”

Mike, who earned his master’s degree this spring at the University of North Texas, says his study at the Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism, especially the time he spent at an intensive writing course in Archer City, Texas, with writer-in-residence George Getschow, helped widen his horizons — and those of his readers. “I think it’s really important to take people into worlds that they’ll never know,” says Mike. “People that read these stories would never experience them otherwise. These are stories that make deeper connections, not just state facts about people’s lives.”