Former Detroit News reporter Jim Mitzelfeld, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The News in 1994 for exposing corruption in the state Capitol, has died at age 64 after a battle with melanoma.
Mitzelfeld died Saturday morning at a hospice facility in Virginia, one day before his 65th birthday, said his daughter, Paris Shrestha, 28.
In August, Mitzelfeld was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma, and the skin cancer was too aggressive to beat back, his daughter said.
“They tried every treatment under the sun, went to the leading cancer specialist in the country at Johns Hopkins,” Shrestha said Saturday. “They tried a litany of treatments, but unfortunately, nothing worked.”
Mitzelfeld, or “Mitz,” won the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting with Eric Freedman when they worked together in The News’ Lansing Bureau. Mitzelfeld and Freedman exposed an embezzlement and nepotism scandal in the state Legislature’s House Fiscal Agency.
Their reporting led to the convictions of 10 people for state and federal crimes. The Auditor General’s Office later found at least $1.8 million in taxpayer money had either been stolen, improperly accounted for or was missing. The House Fiscal Agency scandal is widely credited with inspiring a number of reforms in state government, including legislative term limits.
Mitzelfeld was a persistent reporter, Freedman said Saturday, the kind who would show up day after day until he got the scoop, break news from a conversation he heard from a bathroom stall and chase truant lawmakers until he caught them, red-handed, on vacation when they should have been casting votes.
“Jim had a wry sense of humor and a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm,” said Freedman, a Michigan State University journalism professor and chair of its Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.
Mitzelfeld conducted the reporting team like an orchestra leader, said Mark Hornbeck, a former Detroit News reporter who worked in the Lansing bureau at the time and helped cover the House Fiscal Agency scandal.
“It was an all-hands-on-deck project at least for a couple of months there,” Hornbeck said. “Jim was assigning stories, he was taking the bits of information we would feed to him, and he’d weave it into a beautiful sonata. It was amazing, just the focus, the tenacious nature of the guy.”
Mitzelfeld left journalism for the University of Michigan Law School and became a federal prosecutor. He was most recently working as senior counsel in the Office of Inspector General’s Investigations Division in Washington, D.C. He retired from the U.S. Department of Justice in September after his cancer diagnosis, his daughter said.
“Jim loved The News, which we saw so clearly when he inspired our staff on the occasion of our 150th anniversary just three years ago,” said Gary Miles, Editor and Publisher. “He visited again last spring and said he planned to write a book about his experiences as a reporter. Although he had moved on to the DOJ, his passion for journalism never abated. We’ll work to honor Jim’s memory by doing the public service journalism that he valued so highly.”
A ‘humble’ Pulitzer Prize winner
Even though he won journalism’s biggest prize, Mitzelfeld was not the kind of journalist who spent years boasting about it, said his daughter, who recalled a recent visit with longtime friends where the subject came up in conversation.
“The spouse of one of the friends was like, ‘Oh, he was a journalist?'” Shrestha said. “I was like, ‘Yes. He won the Pulitzer.’ She didn’t even know because he never name-dropped it. He was always extremely humble about it. I had to often tell people on his behalf — who had known him for a really long time — because I love bragging about him.”
“He definitely was very humble about (winning the Pulitzer Prize),” she added.
Journalism shaped his second career as a lawyer, as he parlayed his investigative-reporter skills into a prosecutor’s role armed with subpoena power and the ability to get people to talk, friends and family said.
“Within five minutes of talking to him, the person would start opening up and telling their life story,” Shrestha said. “He could talk to anybody. I liked to joke that he could talk to a rock.”
The characteristics that made Mitzelfeld an outstanding reporter — his tenacity and likeability — led him to another outstanding career in law, said Allen Lengel, of Detroit, another former Detroit News colleague.
Lengel said Mitzelfeld’s career pivot did not surprise him.
“It was along the lines of what he was already doing, which was about justice, about exposing corruption and being able to address corruption,” he said. “It was really an extension of the reporting, just using his tools in a little different way.”
Mitzelfeld lived in Haymarket, Va. with his wife of more than 40 years, Lisa. They met at Michigan State University as staffers at The State News, the school newspaper. They were married in September 1985, the year after Mitzelfeld graduated from MSU. He joined The News’ reporting staff in 1988.
Besides Shrestha, his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Lisa, and son, Benjamin Mitzelfeld, 26.
“Above all in life, he was the best dad that anyone could ever have,” Shrestha said. “And I attribute my success in life to him and everything he taught me. … He just really encouraged us from an early age to always do the right thing, never give up, ask the right questions and most of all, to be kind, be a good person.”
“Because at the end of the day, I think people were drawn to just what a kind and loving person he was,” she added.
ckthompson@detroitnews.com
clivengood@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Pulitzer-winning journalist who uncovered Michigan Capitol scandal has died
Reporting by Carol Thompson and Chad Livengood, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
