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Police crashed an SUV into the LGBTQ bar and swiftly arrested co-owner Chad Morris, who still faces a misdemeanor charge today.

ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. - The debate on who decides the next St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney goes to court Wednesday morning. A critical hearing on this case is set to happen at 9 a.m. Wednesday morning in front of Judge Brian May. The case pits Governor Mike Parson against St. Louis County Executive Sam [...]

The crash happened near the intersection of South Geyer Road and Cragwold Drive.

The Midtown project’s apartments are move-in ready—and stunning.

St. Louis native Eric von Schrader set his science fiction trilogy in an alternate version of St. Louis, taking real bits of local history and giving them a cosmic twist.

Two men have been charged after crashing into several vehicles on Highway 30, temporarily closing the highway, while fleeing a traffic stop Monday.

ST. LOUIS - Mist and drizzle will linger through sunrise Wednesday as our current system pulls away to the east. Cloudy to start with gradual clearing throughout Wednesday. Colder, highs only in the 40s. Mostly clear and cold overnight; wake-up temps in the 20s on Thursday with highs in the 40s again. A clipper system [...]

The move comes amid reports that the airline has cut more than 40 domestic routes.

The St. Louis CITY SC midfielder is eager to put all of 2024’s challenges in the rearview and start fresh in 2025.

by Paul Kiel

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Fourteen years ago, Congress set out to remedy a basic unfairness in the tax code. The tax that funds Medicare, because it’s aimed mainly at wages, hits even the poorest American workers. But the wealthy could easily avoid paying their share. So lawmakers created a new type of Medicare tax to capture the kinds of income the rich often enjoy: interest, dividends and capital gains from investments.

A host of billionaires — sports team owners, oil barons, Wall Street traders and others — have managed to avoid paying it, ProPublica found.

To study who was actually paying the new tax, ProPublica analyzed its trove of IRS data containing information on thousands of the wealthiest Americans. We identified 17 people who, in the first six years of the law, 2013 through 2018, each shielded at least $1 billion in capital gains from the tax. Together, this small group, by collectively exempting more than $35 billion, saved about $1.3 billion in taxes.

Most members of the group were able to sidestep the tax because of a huge gap written into the law, which allows owners to exempt gains from the sale of their businesses. They include Donald Sterling, the disgraced former NBA team owner who avoided the tax when he sold the Los Angeles Clippers to Steve Ballmer for $2 billion in 2014.

But others eluded the tax in ways that raise questions about how the law is being enforced.

One clear target of the new tax was investment professionals who rack up capital gains. Yet ProPublica found examples in the IRS data of financiers who claimed outsize profits but did not pay the tax. Tax experts contacted by ProPublica said they couldn’t think of a legitimate reason why those individuals were exempt.

Lynn Tilton, a hard-charging private equity manager, who has been dubbed the “diva” of distressed asset investing, is one example. The biggest avoider of the new tax in the data was Jeff Yass, the Republican megadonor who sits atop one of the most profitable trading firms in the world.

Both Medicare tax and its twin, the Net Investment Income Tax, as the new levy was called, are easily avoided by business owners. Last week, ProPublica revealed how some of Wall Street’s most powerful people use a loophole to avoid paying Medicare tax on their share of their firms’ profits. Eliminating these ways around the taxes, as House Democrats proposed to do in a 2021 bill, would raise an estimated $250 billion over 10 years. Medicare, the federal program that provides health care for some 68 million seniors, is projected to run short of money in 2036.

“It becomes a pretty glaring problem when you have ultra-rich individuals layering loopholes on top of loopholes to dodge both the NIIT and Medicare taxes,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, in a statement. “To the nurse or the janitor whose taxes come straight out of their paychecks, it’s ridiculous to see these examples of fabulously wealthy individuals enjoying huge windfalls and continuing to avoid paying a fair share.”

The NIIT, together with its holes, entered the tax code as part of the Obama administration’s push to pass the Affordable Care Act. In need of ways to help pay for a major expansion of government health care subsidies, Democratic lawmakers embraced the idea of this new tax on investments.

The aim was to level the playing field. All workers pay at least 2.9% in Medicare taxes on their wages, an amount usually deducted automatically from their paychecks. The NIIT, for high-income taxpayers (defined as $250,000 and up for a married couple), subjected investment income to a 3.8% rate. That mirrored the Medicare tax rate that workers earning over the same threshold paid under the new law.

But while the tax was a bold step, the ACA’s lead negotiators had navigated various interest groups to piece the bill together and were afraid of whom their new tax might provoke. Behind closed doors, Democratic leaders hashed out a compromise that carved active business owners out of the tax.

The small-business owner is a hallowed figure on Capitol Hill, and an army of lobbyists and trade groups stand ready to mobilize against any bill that arguably disadvantages small businesses. The Democrats crafting the NIIT were wary of such a campaign.

Democrats wanted to avoid “a swing state Dem being attacked for punishing an entrepreneurial hard-working person” with the tax, said Robert Andrews, a former Democratic U.S. representative from New Jersey who was among the negotiators.

The phrase “small business” conjures images of Main Street grocers, plumbers or garage-based startups, but the types of business that benefit from the carve-out range from small to enormous. There are millions of passthrough businesses, so called because the income earned and taxes owed pass through to the owner. Only a small number of such businesses are worth $100 million or more, yet the owners of the largest businesses are likely the prime beneficiaries of the exemption.

Owners of passthrough businesses with significant revenue already enjoy plenty of tax perks, as ProPublica showed in previous stories. The NIIT carve-out added to that list. The carve-out meant that when they sold their businesses, or portions of them, they’d be spared any extra charge beyond income tax on their capital gains. They’d pay a lower tax rate on those gains than on virtually any other form of investment.

“What we’re left with in terms of these gaps are nonsensical results,” said Steve Rosenthal of the left-leaning Tax Policy Center.

When Sterling sold the LA Clippers, virtually the entire $2 billion sale price was taxable capital gain, because he’d bought the team for $12.5 million in 1981. Sterling, who made his money in LA real estate, did not give the impression of someone who enjoyed owning an NBA franchise. He was notorious for deriding his own players and underinvesting in the team. But it was only a scandal, a leaked private recording in 2014 of him urging his girlfriend not to be seen “associating with Black people,” that forced him to sell after the NBA banned him.

It was the biggest payday of Sterling’s life by far. He paid substantial income tax on the capital gain from the sale, but the exemption from the NIIT saved him around $70 million. Neither Sterling, who is 90, nor his tax preparer responded to requests for comment.

In ProPublica’s database, most of the biggest winners from the NIIT carve-out were owners, like Sterling, selling their privately held businesses. Among those exempting gains of $1 billion or more were four moguls from the fossil fuel industry spared the extra tax when they sold off portions of their oil, natural gas or coal empires. The carve-out saved each of the four between $45 million and $87 million in taxes.

The NIIT carve-out was huge and costly, but it didn’t apply to all business owners. Owners who are merely passive investors in a business, for instance, must pay the NIIT on that income. And Congress singled out securities traders as clearly subject to the tax.

The NIIT was targeted at “high-income people who lived off investments,” remembered Andrews. It was designed to hit “someone who is day-trading, someone who is arbitraging the market,” he said, referring to the practice of exploiting mismatched prices of securities, like stocks or bonds.

That could serve as a loose description of what Yass’ firm, Susquehanna International Group, is renowned for. Yass, a former professional poker player who thrives on taking well-calculated risks, amassed an army of traders at Susquehanna to outwit the market. They are hired to execute computer-driven strategies that seize on advantages at the microsecond level and search for situations that, through a cleverly executed arbitrage, they can exploit. The firm deals extensively in options as well as other securities. Susquehanna has been immensely profitable; Forbes estimates Yass’ fortune at $50 billion.

From 2013 through 2018, Yass reported a total of $9 billion in capital gains on his taxes, according to ProPublica’s IRS trove, but excluded $8.5 billion of those gains from the NIIT. That saved him more than $300 million in taxes during those years. Two of Yass’ Susquehanna partners, Arthur Dantchik and Joel Greenberg, also excluded billions in gains from the NIIT during that time: $2.1 billion and $1.2 billion, respectively. Together, they saved about $120 million.

In 2013 and 2014, Yass managed to wipe out not only his gains for the purpose of the NIIT but also hundreds of millions in interest and dividend income. In each of those years, his tab for a tax crafted to target traders like him amounted to $0.

Tax experts contacted by ProPublica struggled to explain how Yass and his Susquehanna partners could justify excluding their firm’s gains from the NIIT.

“Although the principal here is active in the business, the business is trading in financial instruments,” said Andrew Needham, a former attorney with Cravath, Swaine & Moore who has written extensively on how tax laws apply to hedge funds and other financial firms and now teaches at New York University School of Law. That means Yass’ gains should be subject to the NIIT, he said. “I don’t know what his theory is.”

A Susquehanna spokesperson, speaking on behalf of Yass and his partners, declined to respond to a list of questions.

Yass, a longtime libertarian, gave $95 million last election cycle to conservative groups, especially the antitax Club for Growth, putting him among the largest political donors in the country.

Yass has a history of taking bold positions on his tax returns. The IRS recovered more than $75 million from Yass after one protracted audit fight that spilled into court, and Susquehanna is currently in court fighting another audit. In an earlier story, ProPublica detailed how Yass and Susquehanna engineered the firm’s investments to transform income normally taxed at the high, ordinary rate into income taxed at the 20% long-term capital gains rate. Those maneuvers saved Yass over $1 billion in taxes.

ProPublica analyzed the tax data of hundreds of the wealthiest hedge fund and private equity managers to understand how they were complying with the NIIT. Huge, blanket exemptions among finance moguls like Yass were rare, we found, but when they did occur, the cost to the Treasury was considerable.

Tilton won fame on Wall Street as the brash, stiletto-wearing head of her own investment firm. She specialized in distressed investing: Her funds purchased both the debt and equity of over 40 struggling companies, then blended those investments together and sold them to investors. Tilton sought out publicity — with mixed success. The Sundance Channel developed a reality show starring Tilton titled “Diva of Distressed,” but it never made it past the pilot. In 2011, she tried to convince Forbes that she was a billionaire, but the magazine disagreed, estimating her wealth at around $830 million.

Tilton has left a trail of unhappy investors. She’s been sued for fraud and racketeering, for misleading investors and pillaging the portfolio companies for her own profit. Tilton, for her part, maintained that she’d fully briefed investors and denied taking any improper compensation. She successfully fought off three major lawsuits, including one from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tilton’s investment funds were passthrough businesses set up so that she, not her investors, would bear the tax burden. In most years, there wasn’t much of a burden to bear. But in 2016, the funds posted a $1.4 billion capital gain. While a huge gain sounds like a good thing, for Tilton it meant a big tax bill.

The income tax hit was significant for her, about $162 million after deductions. She complained about having to pay the bill in one of the lawsuits against her firm, calling it a tax on “phantom income.” As she put it later at the trial, “But let’s be clear, I was paying taxes for money received by the noteholders.”

While Tilton did pay income tax on that big gain, she claimed that the entirety of the $1.4 billion was exempt from the NIIT. That saved her about $50 million in tax.

An attorney for Tilton declined to comment for the record but said that Tilton had correctly exempted her gains because she had actively managed the funds’ investments in the portfolio companies.

Tax experts contacted by ProPublica disagreed. Brian Galle, a professor at Georgetown Law and former federal prosecutor of tax crimes, said Tilton appeared to have invented a category of financier who is not subject to the tax. The tax clearly applies to passive investors and traders, he said. Tilton appeared to be claiming to be somewhere in between, an “active” investor but not a trader. While there is some ambiguity in the regulations surrounding the law, he said, it was a “ridiculous argument.”

Tilton, like Yass, has had her battles with the IRS. From 1996 through 2013, all but two of her tax returns drew audits, the largest change leading to $1.5 million in additional tax on one year’s return. But ProPublica’s IRS data shows no active audits of Tilton’s later returns as of mid-2020.

One reason might be the devastating budget cuts to the IRS that started in 2011 and reduced enforcement staff by a third. The agency did glance at Tilton’s 2016 return, according to the data, but concluded that, although the return had “audit potential,” no agents were available to examine the return.

Similarly, there’s no indication the agency has scrutinized Yass’ NIIT obligations. As of mid-2020, the agency did not have an open audit of his tax returns for 2013 through 2017. An audit of his 2018 return was in the early stages. The IRS declined to comment.

In just the last year, the IRS began to regain some of its lost enforcement muscle, hiring thousands of new revenue agents with funds from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. However, it’s unclear how long that resurgence will last. Congressional Republicans have continually vowed to clawback the extra enforcement money. The incoming Trump administration has supported that goal while touting a new round of tax cuts, in particular for business owners.

The Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet, tells the story of a 19-year-old Dylan as he arrives in New York in the early '60s and gets immersed in…

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As criticism of pharmacy benefit managers heats up, fear of lawsuits is driving some big employers to drop the “Big Three” PBMs — or force them to change.

At the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation in East St. Louis, TEGNA Foundation grant money will go towards the Winning in Life after-school program.

Thoughts on the Democratic post-election drift

Concessions from the 2023 debt ceiling fight continue to haunt Democrats, and tax cheats could enjoy hundreds of billions in savings.

The second in a series of ‘billionaires I have known’

by Kavitha Surana, Mariam Elba, Cassandra Jaramillo, Robin Fields and Ziva Branstetter

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In states with abortion bans, ProPublica has found, pregnant women have bled to death, succumbed to fatal infections and wound up in morgues with what medical examiners recorded were “products of conception” still in their bodies.

These are the very kinds of cases state maternal mortality review committees are supposed to delve into, determining why they happened and how to stop them from happening again.

But panels in states that have recently imposed strict bans on abortion have done little to uncover whether the laws are contributing to maternal deaths, including tracking delays in care for pregnancy complications and making these problems known, a ProPublica investigation shows.

In fact, we found that in a few states, political leaders who backed the bans have stood in the way of measuring their consequences.

They have dismissed committees, slowing down their work. They have weeded out members openly critical of abortion bans and supportive of transparency.

Texas has gone as far as to legally prohibit its committee from reviewing deaths that are considered abortion-related. This could include some miscarriage care, health officials told ProPublica.

In two deaths of Texas women that ProPublica investigated, Porsha Ngumezi and Josseli Barnica had already miscarried when they were given misoprostol to help complete the process. The committee does not review cases that involve that drug because it’s also used for abortions, said committee chair Dr. Carla Ortique: “If they received medication, if they received any procedure, we will not get those records.” Chris Van Deusen, the spokesperson at the Texas Department of State Health Services, would not say whether Ngumezi’s and Barnica’s deaths would be reviewed.

First image: Porsha Ngumezi with her husband, Hope. Second image: Josseli Barnica with her infant daughter. (First image: Danielle Villasana for ProPublica. Second image: Courtesy of the Barnica family.)

Other state committees have not made changes to systematically examine the role abortion bans are playing in maternal deaths, officials acknowledged, though some said they might note it as a contributing factor if it appears in the records. “If the committee discovers a trend that raises a particular concern, it could decide to include that information in its reports,” South Carolina officials said.

Some noted that they follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that those recommendations don’t direct committees to consider abortion access or delays in abortion care. Indiana’s law directs committee members to determine whether the person who died had an abortion and whether that contributed to their death; it does not focus on delays in access to abortion care.

States can direct their committees to look at any important health issue; Texas’ panel added new questions to its process to help capture the role of the coronavirus pandemic in deaths, for example.

ProPublica asked governors in 15 states with strict abortion bans whether committees should examine the impact of the laws on maternal deaths; most did not respond. None directly answered the question or advocated for specific changes. (Read their responses here.)

“We’re not acting like we want to know the answer to this question. And that concerns me,” said Caitlin Myers, an economics researcher at Middlebury College who is studying the impact of abortion access on maternal health. “However you feel about the ethics of abortion, we should want to understand how these policies are affecting women’s health.”

Experts interviewed by ProPublica say state maternal mortality review committees are uniquely well-positioned to examine the impacts of abortion bans on maternal health. The panels are often made up of practicing OB-GYNs, cardiologists and nurses, and they can also include doulas, medical examiners and experts in mental health, substance abuse and domestic violence. They review summaries of medical records to determine whether deaths were preventable and to identify contributing factors. This allows researchers and government officials to see patterns and come up with ways to improve the country’s poor maternal health outcomes.

Committees are not systematically tracking an issue that came up throughout ProPublica’s reporting on deaths in states with abortion bans: delays and denials of procedures, like dilation and curettage, which are used to empty the uterus during miscarriages to avoid hemorrhage and infection. The procedures are also used for abortions, and doctors face prison time for violating restrictions. Women have died after they could not access these procedures, ProPublica found.

Nevaeh Crain, a teenager whose organs were failing, was made to wait 90 minutes for a second ultrasound to confirm fetal demise. Amber Thurman suffered for 20 hours while sepsis spread. And Barnica was subjected to serious infection risks for 40 hours while doctors monitored the fetal heartbeat until it stopped.

First image: Nevaeh Crain. Second image: Amber Thurman with her son. (First image: Danielle Villasana for ProPublica. Second image: Via Facebook.)

Studying such delays “needs to be a part of these kinds of reviews,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, a leading reproductive health care researcher and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California San Francisco.

Grossman has collected dozens of accounts from health care providers detailing substandard treatment and poor outcomes in states that banned abortion. But he and others recognize who is ultimately in charge of state maternal mortality review committees.

“I can’t imagine the states that passed restrictions saying, ‘Now we want to know if that caused any deaths,’” said Eugene Declercq, a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who serves on Massachusetts’ maternal mortality review committee. “The clinicians and the public health people might want to know, but the political leaders would be aghast.”

Even if they start to pursue such answers, states are years behind in reviewing deaths, ProPublica found in a survey of 18 states with the most restrictive abortion laws. Most have not finished reviewing deaths from 2022, the year most bans became effective after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Two states are still reviewing 2021 deaths. Three states — Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota — did not respond.

Most States With Abortion Bans Are Years Behind in Reviewing Maternal Deaths Criminal abortion bans went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in June 2022. Texas enacted a civil law banning abortion at six weeks in 2021. This data was gathered by contacting each state agency that oversees the maternal mortality review committees in the states we surveyed. It is current as of November 2024. Some states did not submit a response to our outreach last month, so we are including their most recent response. Idaho is reviewing 2023 cases before it reviews 2022 cases. Texas began reviewing 2024 cases in December, skipping 2022 and 2023.

Reviews typically lag years behind deaths because of the time it takes state health department employees to learn of cases, track down records and wrestle them free from hospitals and doctors before they summarize and redact them for review. “We have one person in the entire state that has to collect all that data. Literally one,” said Dr. Stacie Geller, a founding member of Illinois’ committee. “I live in fear of her retiring.”

The CDC, which has pumped tens of millions of dollars into helping states establish these committees and standardizing their work, has tried to reduce the backlog by setting a goal for committees that receive funding to review cases within two years. However, there’s no way to compel states to do so, and not all have caught up.

Such lags matter more in places where there has been a seismic shift in abortion access, experts told ProPublica, because there isn’t a full understanding yet of the laws’ effect on maternal health care.

Marian Knight leads the United Kingdom’s maternal mortality review program, widely seen as the world’s best. She said if there were a major legal shift like this in her country, she and her colleagues would adapt to track the impact in close to real time. “I would be monitoring that in the same way as I did during COVID, where we were analyzing data weekly and feeding it in,” Knight said.

As of last month, only five states — Iowa, West Virginia, Indiana, Georgia and Tennessee — had finished reviewing cases from 2022, ProPublica found. None had yet published a report on its findings for that year.

Seven other states were still examining 2022 cases: Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Idaho, Texas and Kentucky had not yet started looking at cases from that year.

Even though North Dakota did not respond to ProPublica’s survey, reporters found that its committee, formed by state legislation in 2021, has never met to review cases, according to two members.

In some instances, state officials are responsible for delays.

Idaho disbanded its committee in summer 2023 after a conservative group argued it was unnecessary and attacked members for recommending that the state expand Medicaid for postpartum patients. The move froze the group’s work until last month, when a reconstituted, smaller committee met for the first time. Two members who had spoken out against the ban’s impacts on maternal health, and are suing the state over it, were not brought back onto the committee. The state is defending its anti-abortion laws; the Idaho Attorney General has said he “will not stop protecting life in Idaho.”

It is unclear how long Georgia’s reviews will be stalled after state officials dismissed its committee last month, citing a violation of confidentiality rules after ProPublica reported on internal documents in stories about two preventable deaths examined by the group. The Georgia Department of Public Health said in a letter about the dismissal that this would not result in any delays to the committee’s responsibilities.

In a move that confused maternal research experts, Texas’ committee said it would not review data from 2022 and 2023 and begin with reports from 2024 to get a more “contemporary” view of deaths. The committee has skipped years in the past to address gaps, and at its recent meeting, Ortique, the chair, said that the decision had “absolutely no nefarious intent.” The period it plans to skip includes two of the preventable deaths ProPublica reported.

Dr. Romy Ghosh, an OB-GYN in Austin, Texas, pleaded with the maternal mortality review committee at a public meeting this month to reconsider its decision to skip those years.

“There’s been a lot of fear in my patients. They wonder, can I save their life if something goes wrong?” she said. “I think that this information will tell us there’s either nothing to worry about or it will be damning.”

Dr. Romy Ghosh addresses Texas’ maternal mortality review committee at a public meeting in Austin this month. (Ilana Panich-Linsman, special to ProPublica)

Between the decision to skip years and the legal prohibition against examining cases involving abortion-related care, it appears Texas will not review any of the three preventable deaths ProPublica identified.

There is a limit to how much committee members can push back against state leaders.

When Texas delayed publishing its maternal mortality report in 2022, an election year, then-committee member Nakeenya Wilson, a community advocate, spoke out, saying “withholding data that does not make us look good is dishonorably burying those women.”

The next session, Texas lawmakers passed a bill changing the requirements for the position that Wilson held, effectively removing her from the committee. State officials appointed Dr. Ingrid Skop, a Texas OB-GYN who is the vice president of a prominent anti-abortion organization.

Wilson said maternal mortality review committees must be free to speak candidly about patterns they see in maternal deaths and to release information in a timely fashion.

“If it’s not the committee, then who is it?” she said. “There has to be increased accountability.”

First image: Crain’s mother, Candace Fails, cries at her daughter’s grave. Second image: Ngumezi’s husband, Hope, touches his wife’s grave in Pearland, Texas. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica) Thurman’s grave in McDonough, Georgia, on the day after what would have been her 31st birthday. (Nydia Blas for ProPublica)

Audrey Dutton, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Lizzie Presser and Amy Yurkanin contributed reporting.

From "carbon cowboys" to "snow loss cliff," these 10 terms captured the spirit of the hottest year yet.

Why did the murder rate spike in 2020? There are two obvious possibilities: the killing of George Floyd and the start of the pandemic. The problem is that both of these things happened at practically the same time, which makes it all but impossible to tease out which one was the actual cause. I took ...continue reading "Brookings: The 2020 murder spike was COVID all along"

Robyn Trautman of St. Clair, MO joined the Real Rock Army today

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