Gary Cohn, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Inquirer reporter, has died at 72

Gary Cohn, 72, formerly of Philadelphia, an Inquirer alum who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize at the Baltimore Sun during a decades-long career devoted to investigative reporting, died Monday, Dec. 23, after collapsing in a Los Angeles bookstore.

The cause of death was undetermined, according to his son, Jacob Cohn.

A longtime investigative reporter who most recently taught aspiring journalists at the University of Southern California, Mr. Cohn was good-natured and generous to colleagues, those who knew him said, but tenacious in his pursuit of a story. While at the Sun, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for an investigative series on the dangers posed to workers and the environment when old ships are dismantled. The reporting led to congressional hearings and the Navy suspending plans to discard warships overseas.

Mr. Cohn had been a finalist for the Pulitzers two years earlier for disclosing the activities of a CIA-trained Honduran army unit that abducted and murdered political suspects, and was a finalist again in 2002 for reporting that suggested university research was being tainted by profit-seeking drug companies.

“He was a stellar journalist — tireless, fearless, and ferocious,” said Bill Marimow, who was at the newspaper in 1986 when Mr. Cohn arrived. Marimow, who eventually became the editor of The Inquirer, left for the Sun in 1993, the same year that Mr. Cohn also moved to Baltimore, and helped edit Mr. Cohn’s work.

Despite his mild-mannered demeanor, Mr. Cohn was nicknamed “Mad Dog” because “whenever he got onto a story, he really was like a dog with a bone,” said Ginger Thompson, a former Sun reporter who partnered with Mr. Cohn to expose the Honduran army unit. “He just wouldn’t let it go until he had gotten what he had set out to get, whether it was documents, an interview … to tell the story in a way it had never been told before.”

He was a great reporting partner, especially when challenges emerged, said Thompson, now managing editor of the investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica: “He was always the person who … would remind me of why this was important.”

Mr. Cohn grew up in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended college at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he graduated with bachelor’s degrees in psychology and political science. He went on to law school at the University of California at Berkeley, but attended for only one year — deciding he wanted to be a journalist instead. (Jacob Cohn said his father described himself as being on “the world’s longest leave of absence from law school.”)

Starting in 1975, Mr. Cohn spent five years reporting for Jack Anderson, a nationally syndicated investigative columnist, before joining the Lexington Herald-Leader. There, he wrote investigative stories that explored the silencing of a public official at a state university, and the quality of research at a taxpayer-supported tobacco and health research institute.

In September 1986, he came to The Inquirer, where he partnered with reporter Walter Roche on a series of stories documenting corruption by Earl Stout, then the president of the city’s largest municipal union. Roche died in 2022.

“On March 21, 1986, Earl Stout signed papers as president of District Council 33 of the city employees’ union to buy a new Cadillac Fleetwood sedan for $25,000. Exactly one month later, Stout signed paperwork to sell the same Cadillac for $100 — to Earl Stout,” Mr. Cohn began one story in February 1988, detailing how Stout had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in union funds to buy cars for his family and associates. Stout was later convicted of corruption in federal court and imprisoned.

Mr. Cohn had a particular ability to persuade sources to talk to him: “I think he was very, very trustworthy,” Marimow said.

Jacob Cohn said his father would trail public officials and pepper them with questions — but often started by talking about sports. “Even though he was some young dude from New York who was a reporter, the last person” they wanted to talk to, his son said, “at least he knew about football and basketball.”

Mr. Cohn was loved by colleagues, and when he became a father at age 48, Marimow and John Carroll, his former editor and mentor, were among those who threw him a baby shower.

Mr. Cohn was a dedicated father who prioritized attending his son’s sporting events — “even the ones where I wasn’t playing,” Jacob Cohn said. (Thompson said that Mr. Cohn’s “pride and joy, above everything else, was his son. … It just radiated through the phone when he would talk about Jacob.”)

With his son, he didn’t talk much about his professional accomplishments. Growing up in Los Angeles, his son noticed “all these glass pillars and what looked like flipbooks” in their garage. He later learned they were his father’s journalism awards.

But a theme from his father’s work that was apparent in his parenting was the lesson that “it’s important to do the right thing,” Jacob Cohn said. Though not always popular, “what you believe is right is important.”

While working as a freelance investigative reporter, for the last 20 years, Mr. Cohn was a part-time journalism professor at USC.

He was an effusive teacher, said Gordon Stables, director of USC’s journalism school: “You would run into him in the hallway, and he would be raving about working with students” and how much fun he was having.

Mr. Cohn was an advocate for his students — periodically calling Thompson, for instance, to tell her about students she should consider for possible jobs.

Outside of his career and caring for his son, Mr. Cohn stayed active — priding himself on his fitness and working out for upward of two hours a day. On birthdays, he would bike the number of miles that matched the age he was turning. He went to a boxing class the day he died, and had been planning to meet someone for lunch to work on a story, his son said.

Colleagues and his son noted his relentless optimism. “You would think after decades looking into death and despair, and people doing things for the wrong reasons, you would start to believe that’s how things work. He was not like that,” Jacob Cohn said.

In addition to his son, Mr. Cohn is survived by a large network of friends.

A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 29, at Beth Shir Shalom Temple, 1827 California Ave., Santa Monica, Calif., with a reception to follow. There are plans to stream the service online.