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Thomas "Dennie" Williams
Thomas “Dennie” Williams, a freelance writer, worked at The Hartford Courant for almost 40 years before retiring in November 2005. He graduated from the Choate School in 1958 and Middlebury College...view moreThomas “Dennie” Williams, a freelance writer, worked at The Hartford Courant for almost 40 years before retiring in November 2005. He graduated from the Choate School in 1958 and Middlebury College in 1962. For a short while, he worked as an interviewer and traveling spokesman in the college admissions department. He has since become an alumni interviewer for prospective Middlebury students. After college, he joined the U.S. Army, went through artillery OCS and Intelligence School before he became a military intelligence officer specializing in investigating North Korean border crossers. When he returned from that assignment, Dennie worked on secret and top secret security clearances for government employees in Washington, D.C.
He finished his military assignments in 1964 and was hired as a news reporter by The Hartford Courant in 1966. Throughout his career at the Courant, he has been a town reporter, a night police reporter, a state desk reporter, a state and federal court reporter and an investigative team reporter. He has been a supervisor of state reporters assigned to investigative work.
Dennie has worked on countless investigations of governmental and business corruption. His earliest inquiries involved the exploitation of immigrants by high priced lawyers using U.S. Congressmen to obtain private immigration bills; and the exorbitant fees charged by lawyers friendly with a Hartford Probate Judge, eventually leading to the state’s first impeachment inquiry of the judge. Still other of Williams’ inquiries included an expose of Bridgeport Superior Court judge appointing and hiring his friends and relatives for court jobs; an extensive three week two-reporter car surveillance of the state's tax collector who was loafing on state time; misspending of state and federal grants and logging funds by Schaghticoke leaders on the Kent reservation; significant pollution of potential drinking water supplies by Kaman Aerospace; monopoly trash contractors overcharging customers; contract manipulations for companies with political influence at the Mid-Connecticut trash-to-energy plant and the banking bill voting records of legislators with bank interests.
In the past 15 years, he has worked extensively on investigative stories involving so called mysterious Persian Gulf War illnesses haunting U.S. and allied troops, the hazards of depleted uranium munitions and on articles controversies over the safety and legality of the military’s mandatory anthrax vaccine. After leaving The Courant in November 2005, Dennie became a freelance investigative writer working mainly for the Internet news sites, Truthout.org and The Public Record. He is in the process of publishing a book about interactions among humans, birds, animals and other wildlife. It is a group of 13 short stories with a prolog and introduction.
During my career, I received: The New England Sevellon Brown Award for an investigation of Hartford Mayor George Athanson's law practice in which he was charging immigrants thousands of dollars for private immigration bills in Congress to delay their exit back to their home countries; The 1981 United Press International Newspapers of New England Award for an investigating leading to the first proposed impeachment in Connecticut's history of Hartford Probate Judge James Kinsella, who was conspiring with a lawyer associate to allow large fees and other irregularities in estate work; The 1981 Unity Award in Media from Lincoln University of Missouri; The American Bar Association's 1990 Silver Gavel Award for “contribution to the understanding of law and justice” through a public service investigation; the 1996 Associated Press Sports Editors Award in all categories for the best investigative reporting related to the early professional agent solicitations of basketball star Marcus Camby while he was still an amateur Springfield College player; the 2005 People's Action for Clean Energy Award for superb investigative reporting on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons; a Jack Anderson investigative award and numerous awards throughout my career from the Connecticut Society for Professional Journalists. These awards are relevant, because in order to write the book, I researched and investigated the subject matter to insure its credibility.view less
Books by Thomas "Dennie" Williams
The Spirits of Birds, Bears, Butterflies and All Those Other Wild Creatures