Stinger: James O’Keefe’s Greatest Hits
By ZEV CHAFETS
Published: July 27, 2011

The temperature was hovering near 90 degrees on the afternoon of Memorial Day when James O’Keefe III emerged from the woods and ambled over to my car. He was tall and thin, with pale skin and matted reddish hair. When his mug shot ran in the papers, some people told him he looked like Matthew Modine. Others said Lee Harvey Oswald. On the day I met him, he wore muddy work boots, filthy jeans and, despite the heat, a long-sleeved shirt. ‘Keeps the mosquitoes off,’ he said. All day he was in the outback of a regional park just west of the Hudson, breaking rocks with a pickax to construct a trail. As a boy he was an Eagle Scout, but this wasn’t a nature project. O’Keefe, the man whose video stings helped take down high-ranking people at National Public Radio and led to the demise of Acorn, the nation’s biggest grass-roots community organizing group, was doing federal time.

James O’Keefe

Eighteen months ago O’Keefe and three confederates, two dressed as telephone repairmen, walked into the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. This was during the debate over President Obama’s health-care plan, and angry opponents of the bill, which Landrieu supported, claimed their calls weren’t being answered. Landrieu’s staff said the voice-mail system was not working properly because of high call volume, and O’Keefe’s guys were out to get her staff to say that the phones were really fine while he captured the exchange on film. Similar strategies worked well in the past, but this time he was arrested and brought before a federal judge. In the end, he pleaded to a misdemeanor charge of entering federal property under false pretenses, paid a $1,500 fine and was sentenced to three years of probation and 100 hours of community service.

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