Peter Stone:

Three months before a mysterious article popped up in an obscure Connecticut newspaper criticizing a judge overseeing a lawsuit against Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson and his casino empire, freelance reporter Scott Whipple received a lucrative proposal from his old boss.

Meeting at the small paper’s New Britain offices, publisher and editor Michael Schroeder offered Whipple $5,000 to write a piece about Nevada judicial decisions.

This was unusual, to say the least. Whipple, a veteran business reporter who had recently retired, had accepted some freelancing projects from his former employer, but Schroeder had never offered him a sum that large before. And the assignment seemed completely unrelated to the usual issues covered by the New Britain Herald and its sister paper, The Bristol Press.