Jerry Kammer

Jerry Kammer, a graduate of Notre Dame, got his first journalism job in 1974 with the Navajo Times in Window Rock, Arizona. He had gone to the Navajo Reservation two years earlier to work as a volunteer teacher and coach at a parochial school. His reporting led to a book, "The Second Long Walk," about a controversial program mandated by Congress to resolve a land dispute between the Navajos and the neighboring Hopi Tribe by relocating thousands of Navajos from high-desert rangeland east of the Grand Canyon.

After earning a master's degree in American studies at the University of New Mexico, Karnmer became the Northern Mexico correspondent for The Arizona Republic. In 1998, he transferred to Phoenix, where he joined the paper's investigative team. For the next four years, he covered the story of a Phoenix financier, Charles Keating, who became the symbol of the national savings and loan scandal.

In 2000, Kammer became the Republic's correspondent in Washington. D.C. Two years later, he joined the Copley News Service, specializing in immigration and U.S.-Mexico relations. In rnid-2005, the bureau tapped his investigative experience for work on the unfolding Duke Cunningham bribery scandal.

Kammer has received the Pulitzer Prize, George Polk and Edgar A. Alan awards for his work in disclosing the bribery of then-congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham; the Robert F. Kennedy Award for his reporting in Mexico. His work on the Keating story was honored with the National Headliner Award for investigative reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for Business and Financial Reporting, and the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for investigative reporting. He won the Bolles Award again in 1999 for work that was instrumental in winning political asylum for a former employee of a Phoenix business owned by the Chinese government. In 1993-1994, he was a Nieman Fellow.