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By Root 3398 0

” says Lipsey, “except, I think, two accounts in Switzerland. We couldn’t break through those.” The Sun’s reporters were stunned to find that Boys Town had an endowment three times the size of the University of Notre Dame. Conservatively stated, it was worth more than $200,000 per boy. Mick Rood took to calling it the “City of Little Men with a Large Portfolio.”29 The money machine was bringing in $25 million a year and could easily cover its costs out of investment income without raising another nickel.30 As the story came together, the reporting team held a meeting in a room at the Blackstone Hotel, across the street from Buffett’s office. Coincidentally, the Boys Town board was meeting at the same time in a room down the hallway. The reporters tiptoed in and out, hoping they weren’t seen.31 The intrigue heightened as they worked on the obvious questions: What was Boys Town going to do with all that money? Why did it need to keep raising more? The last phase of the investigation meant to find that out.

As administrator of Boys Town, seventy-four-year-old Reverend Monsignor Nicholas H. Wegner was in charge of fund-raising. The monsignor knew by then that the Sun was asking questions; Boys Town had already started putting together a hasty program of reforms. But the reporters were confident that as yet he had no idea they had obtained Boys Town’s tax return. Their fear was losing the story to the Omaha World-Herald, which might swoop down with its greater resources once it realized that a juicy bit of news was waiting to be served up to the readership. An even greater risk was that Boys Town might work cooperatively and exclusively with the World-Herald to launch a preemptive strike with a friendlier story.32

The reporters plotted how to get to Wegner and to Archbishop Sheehan, his superior in the archdiocese. Rood, a thirtyish badass with shoulder-length wavy hair and a handlebar mustache, went to see Wegner. His first reaction was pity for Wegner, whose bald, wrinkled skull craned from his cassock like the head of an ancient tortoise. The monsignor was obviously frail, the survivor of fifteen surgeries, some of them major. As the interview proceeded, however, he rambled on incautiously and also denied receiving state funds. Asked to justify the exhaustive fund-raising, he said, “We’re so deep in debt all the time.” Knowing that nothing of the sort was true, Rood went straight back to Williams’s basement with the tape of the interview. After it was transcribed, Williams put it in a safe-deposit box.

While Rood was interviewing Wegner, Williams was trying to nail the archbishop. They had tried to schedule his interview simultaneously with Wegner’s but were unable to get both on the same day. Sheehan—possibly cued in at that point—confirmed statements Wegner had made but declined to add anything more. With confirmation in hand, however, the team, accompanied by photographers, showed up at the fund-raising office, which was a separate operation located in an Omaha building marked “Wells Fargo” rather than in Boys Town. They walked in the door uninvited and snapped photos of long rows of women typing solicitation letters and thank-you notes to donors. They also managed to talk to some of the fund-raisers, who said, “Please don’t mention the fund-raising operation in your article. It’s easy for the public to get the wrong idea. People will think we’re rich,” and “We want people to think the boys send out the letters.”33

Meanwhile, the other reporters descended on the board of directors. It was made up mostly of people with little incentive to tip over the sacred cow. They included the banker who ran the Boys Town investment portfolio, the son of the architect who built the place and who ran the firm that stood in line to do any current building work, the retailer who supplied all the boys’ clothing, and the lawyer who handled Boys Town’s legal affairs. Apart from the financial interests many of them had in it, all the directors enjoyed the prestige of sitting on the board of Nebraska’s most respected institution while doing