• Marylee Williams

I’m Marylee Williams. If you listened to the latest episode of Life of the Law, you know I’m a radio reporter interested in legal journalism. Before I dive into how I found myself in upstate New York trailing the life of Homer Marciniak, here is a bit about me. I grew up in the South, splitting my time between Mississippi and Louisiana. My hometown, Natchez, Mississippi was right on the Mississippi river – I’m talking Huckleberry Finn right on the river. I left Natchez for boarding school at Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. I stumbled into radio journalism in college at my school’s station, KLSU. I also worked at the student newspaper, The Daily Reveille. Packing my VW Jetta to the brim, I left the South in my rearview mirror for Berkeley. “Going Federal,” was my thesis for UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, a two-year professional program with various media concentrations. I found this story at the end of my first year, and I was laughably clueless to the depth and complexity of this legal issue. It was around May 2016, and I was gearing up for an internship at KALW in San Francisco, finishing the last of my class projects when a nasty bit of insomnia took hold. I’ve never been great at sleeping, and it gets worse when I’m stressed. After two hours staring at the dark ceiling, I got up and absentmindedly went to the Internet. I ended up looking through the press releases from various FBI field offices. The Buffalo office had one about a comic book collector allegedly murdered for his collection. I was captivated: Comics, a supposed murder, and a man named Rico charged with Racketeering, which is also known as a RICO charge. When school started in August 2016, I knew this would be my thesis, but I didn’t know it would be about prosecutorial discretion. I hadn’t ever heard that term. I owe a lot to my editors, teachers, and peers for their endless support. I worked on this story in my Advanced Audio class with Snap Judgment executive producer Anna Sussman and help from the Investigative Reporting Program. UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism gave me a travel grant to cover my reporting costs for this story. I flew to upstate New York, rented a car, learned that batteries don’t work as well in the cold, and talked to everyone. Then when I got back, I started cataloguing and editing the audio, and about four months later, I had a thesis.