Cracking criminal code wins Emory alumnus Pulitzer for reporting in Chicago

With twenty-three years of experience as a newspaper reporter, Frank Main 86C has nabbed the top honor: his team won a Pulitzer Prize in the category of Local Reporting for the Chicago Sun-Times. “This comes as a lightning bolt for me,” he said. “It’s something that you never dream of when you’re doing your daily reporting job.” Main and colleagues exposed the “no-snitch code” that hobbles Chicago police and courts. The team spent a year investigating an epidemic of unsolved, unprosecuted shootings, including the gang-related murder of a teenager in which homicide detectives were blocked at every turn because witnesses refused to cooperate. 

The Pulitzer committee cited the “immersive documentation of violence in Chicago neighborhoods, probing the lives of victims, criminals, and detectives as a widespread code of silence impedes solutions.”