Make Them Pay

Jesse Eisinger is an Assistant Managing Editor at ProPublica. He is the author of The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. In 2011, he and a colleague won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression. He was the lead reporter on the Secret IRS Files series that exposed the tax avoidance strategies of the ultrawealthy. The series won several prizes, including the Selden Ring in 2022. He also won the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary. He was the editor on the Friends of the Court series, which revealed how a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel; it won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2024. He was a consultant on season three of the HBO series Succession. Before joining ProPublica, he was the Wall Street editor of Conde Nast Portfolio and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, covering markets and finance. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the journalist Sarah Ellison, and their daughters.

Paul Kiel covers business for ProPublica. He has won numerous awards, including the Selden Ring Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, a Barlett & Steele Award, a Scripps Howard Award twice, a Hillman Prize, and a Philip Meyer Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. His work has appeared in several newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times. He has also produced stories for NPR and American Public Media’s Marketplace, as well as appeared on This American Life.