A Meek Miscellany

He is Glen, but he is not meek, although he is, in fact, Glen Meek. Which is to say, he has the doughy American anonymity, the pure American plainness, the Middle American averageness, suggested by the name Glen. Here, says his sidekick, Steve Jackson, "is Everyman!" As Glen himself puts it, with the easy self-deprecation common to the American Glen, "I'm pudgy, bald and middle-aged," which is weird, because he's also on TV news, a medium not known to embrace the pudgy, the bald or the middle-aged.

But meek? No way, friend. No one who's asked a complete stranger, on camera, "So why did you send pictures of yourself masturbating?," can be said to be meek, even if he is, indeed, Meek. That gripping scene was part of KTNV's recent buzz-generating sting job on Internet predators. Meek and Jackson, his cameraman, engaged an online watchdog group, Perverted Justice, to pose as a 13-year-old in chat rooms, to gauge whether predators (legal disclaimer: alleged predators!) would respond in person. They rented a house, wired the porch with cameras, and waited to see if anyone would show up. Eleven guys did. To watch Meek fling open the door on a guy expecting to find an underage girl, the creep reeling back as he's confronted by this guy with thinning hair and righteous evidence—copies of the creep's skanky e-mail to the entirely fictitious 13-year-old—well, it was good TV, good journalism, and it certainly showed Meek defying his last name.

We talked with Meek and Jackson at Meek's Downtown home, a house, apropos of nothing, in which Ted Binion once lived but did not die.

How did the Internet pedophile investigation come about?

GM: Originally, it was suggested by the general manager; it had been done by a sister station in Milwaukee, and he thought it was something we'd want to do here. So we started contacting people, and one of the groups we contacted was the one you saw in the story, Perverted Justice.

Turned out they were actually planning to do something in Las Vegas anyway. They were concerned because, as one aspect of the story suggests, they believe there are some problems with the law the way it's written in Nevada. There have been a couple of controversial decisions up in Reno where judges have said, the way the Nevada law is written, when cops do the Internet sting it doesn't fly. It has to be an actual child, not an undercover cop posing as a child. So Perverted Justice was looking for a group to do this with anyway.

Was there much discussion of the ethics involved? Was there any skepticism to be overcome about, you know, the trickery involved?

GM: [Turning to Jackson] Do you any recall any ... ?

SJ: I think, between you and me ... I dunno, do you wanna talk about that? ...

GM: Well, hmmm ... I don't think we're giving anything away by telling this ... The way this was set up, we felt very comfortable with it because A.) even though we're monitoring all the chats, we ourselves are not doing the chatting. It was a group that was going to be doing it anyway; it was a group that has worked with law enforcement; it was a group whose work with law enforcement has resulted in a number of convictions. So we felt comfortable with the approach.

So from that standpoint, I don't think we had any problems with that. Anytime you do a hidden camera investigation there's a certain amount of—I don't know if you want to say subterfuge or whatever word you want to use. Obviously the whole aspect of a hidden-camera investigation is, you can't go into it with the camera rolling because everyone knows what you're doing. What you're really trying to do is create a condition as if you didn't have a camera and they didn't know you were there.

Was there any concern that you might be drawing people out who might otherwise not have come out at that moment? Obviously these guys are creeps and weirdos, but they might have remained closeted creeps and weirdos had not something in that particular conversation drawn them out?

SJ: I think they would have been doing what they were doing regardless. We had an untold amount of guys chatting with these people they thought were 13. But 11 showed up at the house.

So you got the hard-core ones?

SJ: Yeah.

GM: And beyond that, frankly, it takes a lot to travel across town. Some of these guys stopped to buy gifts. A rose or—

SJ: One guy came on a bike.

GM: On a bike from across town. Another guy stopped and bought pies. Another guy brought hard cider. These are guys who had multiple opportunities to chicken out or say, What am I doing? This is something where these guys actually acted out.

One of the reasons we liked the way the sting was set up: We didn't expose anybody who chatted and didn't show. We didn't go to their houses and knock on their doors. They had to actually physically show. Someone who said, Well, that wasn't me online, or claimed it was their kid online because he'd forgot to log off—you can't do that when you're 35, 40, 45 years old and that's your physical being on the porch.

So we think we did just the opposite—we exposed people who had a propensity for this. If you saw the update one week later, we showed a guy who'd been exposed by another group two months earlier. Now that shows a propensity. First he gets nailed, there he is, his picture's up on their website. And then he shows up two months later to our porch and says, Oh, I really only came to buy her a pair of shoes.

I remember the guy who said he'd shown up to warn her parents or something, and you said something like, So why did you send pictures of yourself masturbating?

GM: Exactly. And that's another thing. A lot of these guys took a number of overt acts besides simply chatting. Sending pictures of themselves naked, sending pictures of their genitalia. And the way this thing was set up, these people posing as the children never brought up sex, at all. They always let the man bring it up first, and invariably it happened.

I don't want to use the word sympathy, but ... obviously these are sad, pathetic guys, most of them driven by something they probably don't have full control of. Was there any sort of ... maybe sympathy is the right word for that aspect of it—not for the sexual-predator quality, but just for the fact that these guys are so screwed up?

SJ: I did. I did. I remember the first guy who came to the house. I told Glen, "I feel bad about that." It's almost like—a smoking habit, almost. He can't control himself.

But then, we got the guy who'd been busted two months before, and I didn't feel bad anymore.

GM: Because this is not the first time he's been around that block.

So many of these guys admitted what they were doing. If you look at the videotape, we had 11 guys and only a few denied it. There was one guy who initially denied that that's what he was there for. He said his car broke down, but then he drove away successfully after we came out with the camera. Of all the places for his car to break down ... especially after he sent a big picture of himself, so we knew he was the right guy.

And later—they have a thing at Perverted Justice called "right of reply," and if [men caught in a sting] respond, sometimes Perverted Justice will remove their chat from the web page. This guy, who had originally claimed he was there because his car broke down, actually sent a right of reply that said I admit it, I was there, I'm getting help, blah blah blah. And several others did that as well. There were only two who, throughout, maintained that either they were there innocently or that—one guy continued to maintain that he thought it was a fantasy.

So what's been the response?

GM: It's been overwhelmingly positive. We did get a relative of one of our guys, some pathetic thing, you know: "Yeah, my son did that, but you keep showing his picture and it's terrible hard for him at work ..."

We did have one guy who said we should have met them with counselors instead of cameras because they obviously can't help what they're doing. Well, we're not counselors and we're not cops. We just did this to show how widespread this sort of thing is.

I did not anticipate there would be that many people in such a short period of time who would actually travel across town to meet someone that they had no information about.

SJ: That was my impression, too. I mean, a guy every half hour for four hours or so.

GM: It actually got to the point of ludicrousness. Some of these guys would actually stay and talk. And we had someone scheduled 15 minutes later. We had perverts practically bumping into each other to get to this house.

What's it like to open the door on one of these guys and step out there and spring it on them?

SJ: It was an adrenaline rush. Your heart's racing, you don't know what's going to happen.

Were you afraid that any of them were going to take a swing at you?

SJ: I think there were two guys. And one guy we actually watched on the video monitor for a good long time before we opened the door because I saw something in his hand. It looked metallic. It ended up being a rose and a teddy bear. We had security on site and everything, so I wasn't too scared.

GM: I wasn't too scared. We do that all the time. We've gone up to felons. When it's someone we're concerned about, such as if it's an ex-felon, if there's violence in their past, we try to catch them in a neutral location. We have surveilled people when they're going out running errands and caught 'em in a parking lot at a supermarket. They are not on their home ground; they feel less secure. We feel more secure; we're in a public place. We're not going to get kicked off the doorstep. They know there's nothing they can do. If there's someone we suspect might blow a fuse, we'll do that.

In this situation, we had rented the house, we controlled the premises. And we had safety in numbers.

But! By the same token, you don't know what their purpose for coming over is. You don't know if their purpose is to buy her a pair of shoes, to rape her, to kidnap her. So that was in the back of my mind.

GLEN IS THE NEW (AVERAGE) JOE

Glen, you don't have the look or demeanor of a typical TV reporter.

GM: Really?

SJ: You should see some old footage: full beard—

GM: Yeah, I had a really bad haircut.

I've been told, politely, You have a unique look.

Do you think that helps or hinders your connection with the viewer? You don't look blow-dried.

SJ: Yeah, I think it helps. He's Everyman, right there.

GM: I think it helps to be an Average Joe. But I think it's harder to be an Average Joe initially.

Initially in your career, it's really hard to be an average guy and get a job. The news director is going to sit there and go, I can have this average guy go to the fire or I can have this really good-looking guy going to the fire. He's going to appeal to the 18-to-54-year-old females. What are you gonna do? To be an average guy on TV anymore, you almost have to have lasted long enough where you can build up a body of work, where they say, we're not interested in Glen Meek's appearance, we're interested in his track record.

I used to go to IRE (Investigation Reporters and Editors) convention 25 years ago, and everyone looked like me. And now I go and they all look like models.

How hard it is to work the line between what's good journalism and what's good TV?

GM: Just because a story is complex and just because a story has to be done, doesn't mean it has to be done in a boring fashion.

It's as old as television: We do a newscast; we call it a show. It has a producer. It's on a screen, just like your favorite reality show. There are show-business elements to television news. That's the way it is. You have to use techniques that were pioneered by the movie business, which were generally meant to entertain. I don't think you can get away from that totally.

• They exposed a high-tech fence who was allegedly moving stolen goods on eBay. "It was really a funny story," Meek says. "Some people had had a Rolex watch and some family heirlooms stolen during a home burglary. They filed papers and a report. Nothing happened. Then the folks get on the Internet, and they're like, there's our watch! There's our Rolex! So they call the cops and they get this guy."

Meek and Jackson found other merch the guy was peddling online, saw from police reports that there were "allegations, repeatedly" about his fencing activities, and confronted him on-camera.

• The pair are especially happy with an investigation into a Las Vegas cowboy who was supposedly engaging in a charity trail ride—Mexico to Canada—to raise money for and awareness of abused women and children.

"It turns out the guy was here the whole time," Meek says. "We reconstructed the weblog, and when he said he was in Montana riding the high country, we found a court record that showed he was in muni court with his lawyer that day facing a domestic battery charge, which is kind of ironic."

"We got 27 days out of the two months when we could prove he was in Las Vegas," Jackson adds.

"This is so Playboy After Dark," says Meek, who came to Las Vegas in 1983 and has worked for Channels 3 and 13, and for the federal public defenders office.

He's standing on the second floor, where the landing looks out through curved openings onto the den below—it's an atmosphere of Vegas swank perfect for a mid-'60s cocktail party, helped along by bits of decor reflecting Meek's love of mid-century style. (Nice Calder print in the hallway.)

Downstairs, Meek opens the glass doors to what he assumes was Binion's pool room and announces, "This is what it looks like when a suicide bomber walks into FAO Schwarz": toys everywhere. It's a playroom for his daughters, ages 10 and 6.

The best bit of leftover Binioniana is in the back yard: an old aviary apparently maintained by Binion's daughter. The door still has the notation in chalk, "Bonnie's birds." Meek's been trying to figure out what to do with this space? Sun room? Jacuzzi?

"My dog likes to poop in there," he says.

How much does an element of social good play into your idea of whether or not it was a successful good?

GM: For me, I wouldn't do it if I didn't think there was a social good. I'd be working for a casino, doing PR, something that handed me a good paycheck with relatively little heavy lifting involved.

But am I saying we're the champions of good and justice? No, not necessarily. You know, we work for a television station, and you have to do certain things to keep the lights on.

I'm not a crusading type.

SJ: That's one of the reasons the cowboy is one of my favorites. Just knowing that our report aired, and it was picked up by all these horse magazines, and the guy will never ride again under the guise of being a charity.

On Jon Ralston (Face to Face, Las Vegas Sun): "Does the political stuff better than anybody I know."

On John L. Smith (Review-Journal): "The Mike Royko of Las Vegas."

On George Knapp (KLAS Channel 8): "Does his own thing. He's well-known for the UFO thing. I know that back in my early years, I went a different direction on that.

"But he does his thing. He's very well-sourced and people trust him. He does more of the political stories than I do. George is more law-enforcement or political stories."

On Darcy Spears (KVBC Channel 3): She does a great job, but I think she does different kinds of stories, too. She is much more inclined to do a story about an illegal puppy mill than I would be, for example.

I'm not trying to be critical of anyone, at all, and I hope it doesn't come off that way. I just think I go in a different direction.

"Glen is a tough hombre, a genuinely good guy, and a worthy competitor. On those rare occasions when he scoops me on a big story, it ruins my whole damned week. He and I have discussed this very issue while sipping iced tea once or twice. We both agree that it is far more satisfying to kick the hell out of our print colleagues than it is to bang heads with each other. I like him."

Internet predator: "It shook the town up. I've been here 18 years, and I've never had a story where, when I'm out, and the plumber says, "Yeah, caught that story." Everybody's talking about it, most everybody's been positive about it.

Crazy Horse Too: "We named names, we showed pictures. We had bits of videotaped depositions. That was a very important story."

Static electricity: "We did the original story about static electricity causing these gas-pump fires and how this little girl out in Henderson had been terribly burned as a result of one of these fires. That was very memorable. It was moving emotionally and it led to change. (Warning labels on gas pumps.)"

G-Sting: "It's not one that I broke, but after it broke, I broke a lot of elements to it. And that was fun. It was a developing investigative story, where who was going to turn the next page?"

Does this aggressive sort of journalism come naturally to you?

GM: It's not something I really enjoy doing. It's something that, if it needs to be done, I can handle it. I'm a guy that really ... it's like Alfred Hitchcock making movies. To me, it's all the research, and actually making the movie isn't that big of a deal. To me, making sure I've really got the story, and I know what questions to ask and I know what the answers should be before I ask them.

My adrenaline rush—it's not so much an adrenaline rush for me, it's always a knot of fear. I just don't want to be wrong. I don't mind hanging this guy out—if I'm right.

I always have nagging doubts: Have I done everything? Have I researched everything? Have I checked every fact? Have I looked at everything in the criminal record file? Do I know everything I need to know before I stick a microphone in some guy's face and say, "Where's the money, senator?"

I'm not worried about what he's gonna do or what he's gonna say, I am worried about being wrong.