This is a good example of why re-writing another person's stories is not journalism. I've been saying that for over 25 years in newsrooms across the country. Eventually, your laziness bites you.
> I spent a week seeking out his family, friends, and coworkers and imploring them to talk to me.
> I went to the tunnel control center, and to the local ‘Carabinieri’ post, where I spoke to managers and cops who must have known that the accounts published in 1999 were exaggerated. But all the witnesses and officials were under gag orders, and records – including security video and recordings of radio traffic – were sealed due to ongoing criminal and civil investigations.
> As I write this, I’ve spent the last week going back over 76 pages of handwritten notes I made on that trip.
He tried to. And when that didn't turn up anything, he decided to go on ahead anyway with no evidence of his own.
> Four years later, in 2003, I was living in France. And my curiosity finally got the better of me. I traveled to Val d’Aosta on my own dime to write a story that I eventually came to call “Searching for Spadino.
> I spent a week seeking out his family, friends, and coworkers and imploring them to talk to me. Through them, I felt I got to know a subject who was so self-effacing that his closest friends could barely even find a snapshot of him.
I'm very frustrated with the author for not crediting the New York Times. I don't think it's a coincidence that the story fell apart when he was commissioned to do a piece for an outfit with journalistic standards. It's possible the NYT's name opened some doors for him, too, but he doesn't describe experiencing any frustration or serious misgivings in his original investigation. He just says "in hindsight" and "I suppose a part of me always worried" but that's fifteen years too late. Clearly he approached it more critically this time, but he leaves the reason for that completely unexamined.
EDIT: Also, "He was just a quiet man who had tried to do the right thing in the face of an inferno. And maybe that is enough," clearly thinking about himself, clearly not taking responsibility.
So it seems one of the lessons for journalists is: when you encounter witnesses that behave as if under gag orders, there is a real story underneath, and you must catalogue it as a story to return to repeatedly to pressure the unsealing or reinvestigate after unsealing... I also think it's quite perverse that witnesses are under gag orders...