Sean McGoey

Selected writing

5 ways celebrities use offshore

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists || October 4, 2021

Shakira did it. So did Ringo Starr, Claudia Schiffer, Julio Iglesias and cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar.

They have all set up companies “offshore,” in places like the British Virgin Islands (BVI), where tax rates are low or zero and where their businesses — and their identities — are hidden from the public.

And they’re among the celebrities, politicians and billionaires named in a trove of leaked files obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Those records are part of the Pandora Papers, an investigation of the offshore financial system that the rich and famous use to buy yachts and private jets, invest in real estate and protect their families’ wealth while avoiding scrutiny.

Read more at ICIJ

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Richmond is Virginia's overdose capital. Nine of 10 fatal overdoses in the city involve fentanyl.

Richmond Times-Dispatch || January 26, 2022

Virginia is on track for yet another record-breaking number of drug deaths, with the Richmond area at the epicenter, according to data released this week by the state medical examiner’s office.

More than 2,000 Virginians died of drug overdoses through the first nine months of 2021, a 17% increase over the same time frame in 2020. Virginia is on pace to record nearly 2,700 overdose deaths in 2021, a figure nearly four times higher than when the state began tracking overdoses in 2007 in response to the painkiller epidemic.

The spike in overdose deaths — 2021 is poised to be the eighth year in the past nine that Virginia saw record highs — has been driven almost entirely by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin. Fentanyl deaths have increased every year since 2012, while deaths not related to the opioid have declined in each of the past five years.

Read more at Richmond.com

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A decade of digital evolution to help reporting revolutions at ICIJ

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists || May 25, 2021

Five years ago, on May 9, 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the details of more than 200,000 offshore entities from the Panama Papers to the Offshore Leaks Database.

The addition of so much previously secret tax haven data was the culmination of more than 12 months of rigorous analysis and processing of one of the world’s largest data leaks.

But it wasn’t ICIJ’s first time working with data sets on a scale unseen in traditional journalism.

Read more at ICIJ

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‘Dirty Gold’ chases ‘three amigos’ from Miami to Peru and beyond

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists || March 16, 2021

In “Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring,” journalists Jay Weaver, Nicholas Nehamas, Jim Wyss and Kyra Gurney explore the federal investigation into three Miami-based gold traders linked to a multibillion-dollar money laundering conspiracy. The scheme originates in Peru’s illegal gold market, but sprawls out into neighboring countries as “the three amigos” aim to stay one step ahead of the law.

The book, which came out earlier this month, evolved out of a series of stories published in 2018 while all four authors were colleagues at the Miami Herald.

ICIJ interviewed Gurney, a former ICIJ reporter who investigated the illicit gold trade as part of the FinCEN Files investigation, and Weaver, a longtime federal courts reporter at the Herald, about covering a multifaceted federal investigation, the regulatory failures that enable money laundering, and the human cost of the illegal gold trade.

Read more at ICIJ

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Disconnected: Students struggle with e-learning obstacles, lawmakers earmark solutions

Capital News Service || November 20, 2020

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — After Kimberly Vasquez’s two younger sisters log into their virtual classrooms from their Baltimore home, there’s barely enough bandwidth left for the high school senior to get into her class.

“It’s a constant conflict and battle, trying to get connected, trying to learn,” the 17-year-old Vasquez said.

Her family has Comcast Internet Essentials, a low-cost broadband plan for low-income households that promises no more than the Federal Communication Commission’s minimum bandwidth for high-speed internet. But FCC guidelines caution that if several users are on a network simultaneously, the bandwidth that Internet Essentials provides may not be sufficient for video streaming on multiple devices.

The college-bound student said watching her grades fall because of remote-learning obstacles is “heartbreaking” and makes her feel “like a failure.”

Read more at Capital News Service

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Confusion over federal eviction moratorium led to selective enforcement

Capital News Service || September 2, 2020

Yochebed Israel was just the kind of person Congress had in mind when it voted in March to temporarily ban many evictions across the country as the coronavirus spread.

First, the furnace in her Tampa, Florida, apartment broke, causing her electricity bill to climb above $460 a month for five months, she said. She fell behind on rent, forced to choose between keeping the lights on or paying the landlord.

Then she said she caught COVID-19 from her daughter in April, missing two months of work without full sick pay as a certified nursing assistant at a long-term care center. She had fluid in her lungs. She was tired all the time.

And then, in May, she came home to find an eviction order attached to her door.

“It makes me feel the anxiety of being homeless,” she said.

Read more at Nowhere to Go

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At 40, WMUC-FM outlives the staples of pop culture’s past

The Diamondback || September 10, 2019

In the age of Spotify and SiriusXM, it would be easy to assume that free-form college radio has gone the way of the dinosaur. After all, so many other things that were once staples of pop culture have met the same fate: VHS tapes, floppy disks, the Walkman.

But here at the University of Maryland, WMUC lives on despite its age

The station, which sent out its first broadcasts as an AM station in 1948, celebrates its 40th anniversary on FM airwaves on Tuesday — even though the original broadcasts were cut after three days due to poor transmission quality. General manager Alexya Brown chalks up its longevity to the efforts of students who get involved.

Read more at The Diamondback

Meet the Investigators

ICIJ's podcast: interviewing investigative journalists about their career journeys

Graphics and data visualizations

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Vinyl is going to outsell CDs in 2020. How did we get here?

Resume/CV

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