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Photo by James Keivom

Andy Furillo

It's appropriate that Andy Furillo of The Sacramento Bee won the 1997 Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting. Nakkula was the quintessential old-school reporter -- a man who sometimes secured access to city and county officials by sweetening up their secretaries with chocolates. He worked for the Rocky Mountain News for 46 years, until his death in 1990.

Furillo is cut from the same bolt of cloth -- a man who will sit out on a curb all night to get a story if that's what it takes.

Sponsored by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Press Club, the Nakkula contest attracts more than 60 entries each year from reporters at daily newspapers across the country. The winner gets $1,000 and a trip to Boulder to talk to classes at the School.

Furillo, who covers the state corrections department, won with a series on California's three strikes law. He is the seventh winner of the award. The judges said Furillo's work was chosen because it represented exhaustive research that led to "hard-hitting, clean stories written in brilliantly crafted paragraphs."

Furillo, 43, started in newspapers as a copy boy at the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner when he was in high school. He worked at smaller newspapers while in college then returned to the Herald Examiner for eight years. He went to the San Francisco Examiner for a year and then joined the Bee in 1991.

Furillo is the second winner from the Bee. Diana Sugg, now a medical reporter for The Sun in Baltimore, won the first Nakkula award in 1991.

In the four months he worked on the winning series, Furillo traveled to 30 counties and went through 233 case files by hand.

Furillo found that people sentenced to 25 years to life under the law were, in most cases, career criminals. He said he didn't find any "innocent" people who had been sent to prison for life under the law. Instead he found many offenders "doing life on the installment plan."

"They were using prison to get their teeth fixed, new eyeglasses, to get in shape, see a doctor and their friends. It was like it was their job," Furillo said.

Despite his series' strong finding that the law was working, Furillo told the classes that reporters should avoid becoming advocates.

"To guard against becoming an advocate, you can present the data and allow the people in the community who are advocates to take action," Furillo said. "It's up to the public to look into it and pick it (the issue) up . . . it's time for the paper to back off and let the community do its thing."

In visits to 10 reporting and editing classes, Furillo shared enthusiasm and optimism about the profession -- even after 25 years in the business.

"I love reporting," he told the students. "You can meet anyone you want to meet. It's rewarding personally, you can make enough to live on -- you could get rich if you want to, if you get the right story and get a book or movie or something. But most people in newspaper reporting are doing it for the respect and freedom."

His "post-college" tour of duty on the overnight desk at the Herald-Examiner was where Furillo worked on a story that got his career rolling.

Furillo was working late one night when a juror, who had been the sole holdout in a court case allowing the Oakland Raiders to move to Los Angeles, finally gave in. Furillo's editor sent him out to talk to the juror.

Furillo got to the hotel where the juror had been staying and found swarms of other reporters, all waiting to talk to the hold-out. But luck intervened. Furillo said that he saw the man get into his car, and he followed him.

Furillo caught up with the man outside of his home and asked for an interview. The man turned him down, went inside and went to sleep. But Furillo sat down on the curb in front of the man's house -- and that's where he stayed, all night.

In the morning the man got up to go to work, saw him sitting there and "must have taken pity" on him. The juror called him into his house and gave him the interview.

Furillo had succeeded in scooping every reporter in town. He found himself working the day shift very shortly thereafter.