Fred Schulte is a veteran investigative reporter, most recently at The (Baltimore) Sun. His projects have won dozens of journalism awards, including the George Polk Award, two Investigative Reporters and Editors awards, three Gerald Loeb Awards for business writing and the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist four times, most recently in 2007 for a series on Baltimore’s arcane ground rent system.

Schulte is the author of Fleeced! , an investigation of telemarketing boiler rooms and was a 1997 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow.  Prior to joining The Sun, Schulte was investigative editor at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, where he worked for more than two decades. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia.

He wrote this article under contract with the Investigative Reporting Workshop.