For more than four decades as a journalist in Las Vegas, Jeff German was a pugnacious investigator. The rollicking, glamorous, but gritty news town provided plenty of dramatic sagas and malevolent characters for German to explore with his blend of curiosity, vigor, tenaciousness, fearlessness, and eye for detail.

Nurturing a list of contacts most other journalists can only dream about, German unearthed compelling stories and captured behind-the-scenes context of ongoing local issues. He pursued scoops with what his colleagues frequently said was “courage, relentlessness and an innate sense of fairness and justice.”

First with the Las Vegas Sun and then with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, German [pronounced GARE-mun] reported on organized crime, government, politics, and the courts. He told the story of the 1997 murder of bookie and mob associate Herbert Blitzstein. He reported on an FBI investigation into bribes and unreported campaign contributions accepted by Clark County commissioners. He and a team of reporters uncovered a public-private partnership’s wasteful spending. He examined inspection failures that preceded a deadly apartment fire.

After a gunman perched on Mandalay Bay’s thirty-second floor killed 58 people (two others later died from their wounds) and injured hundreds more at a concert on October 1, 2017, German reported that the sniper also fired at jet fuel tanks at the nearby airport, apparently hoping to produce an explosion.

Beyond his long-term print reporting, he provided additional insight into the history and diminishing role of the mob in the city while co-hosting an award-winning podcast, Mobbed Up: The Fight for Las Vegas.