Background
His father Laurence Marcus "Larry" Stern also worked at the Washington Post, becoming assistant managing editor for national news.
His father Laurence Marcus "Larry" Stern also worked at the Washington Post, becoming assistant managing editor for national news.
Marcus Stern attended Woodrow Wilson High School (Washington, District of Columbia) and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1977 with a bachelor"s degree in psychology.
In 2005 he launched the investigation that led to the bribery conviction of Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a Republican from San Diego County, California. Journalism ran in Stern"s family. After using his psychology degree to work in several psychiatric hospitals, he turned to journalism at age 26.
He worked for the San Pedro News-Pilot in California and the States News Service in Washington, District of Columbia In 1983 he landed a job covering the Los Angeles area from the Copley News Service"s Washington bureau.
During the 1990s he wrote extensively about immigration issues. During the early 2000s he often reported from combat and disaster zones including Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan.
He worked at the Copley News Service Washington bureau until 2007. The bureau closed in 2008.
He then worked for ProPublica and Thomson Reuters.
He is currently an investigative researcher for Strategic Research. Stern stumbled across the while looking into congressional traveling Unable to explain some of Cunningham"s trips abroad, he did a "lifestyle audit" of Cunningham"s finances and discovered a suspicious sale of Cunningham"s home to a defense contractor for an inflated price.
The story, published in the San Diego Union-Tribune on June 12, 2005, did not involve any insider leaks or unnamed sources.
lieutenant was all based on publicly available information such as real estate sales and company websites. The stories resulted in government investigations, which ultimately led to the exposure of sweetheart deals and outright bribery involving Cunningham and defense contractors whose interests he supported in Congress.
"Without Marc Stern"s story there might not have been a Cunningham case," said Assistant United States. Attorney Phillip Halpern, one of the lead prosecutors. He considered Stern the "genesis of the investigation" and added "This is the first time in my career I have predicated a case upon a news story."
On July 14, just one month after Stern"s first story, Cunningham announced he would not run for re-election, and in November he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud in federal court in San Diego.
Stern and Kammer, together with Union-Tribune reporter Dean Calbreath, also shared the Polk Award for political reporting in 2005.
Stern and Kammer also shared the 2006 Edgar A. Poe Award for excellence in news of national and regional importance, given by the White House Correspondents Association.