How did a housekeeper at the Crockett Hotel fall six stories to her death down an elevator shaft?

A scathing report by a state inspector offers a theory.

I shot some video over the weekend but it was so windy most of the audio was obliterated. So I ended up making a music video.

It wasn’t exactly what I planned. But maybe it was better.

Maggie’s was the place to go in the 1990s if it was late and you were a hungry college student (like me). Nestled among the car dealerships on San Pedro Avenue outside Loop 410, the two-story restaurant was open late and offered some of the best shakes ever.

Maggie’s permanently closed, reopened as a Champ’s restaurant, closed, then reopened in 2009 as Barbaresco Tuscan Grill and Enoteca, a swanky Italian restaurant.

Barbaresco was a lot different from Maggie’s. On its opening day, guests were treated to readings of Romeo and Juliet while an attractive, semi-nude woman lay on a table, her body strategically covered with pasta.

Brothers Mauricio and Alejandro Sánchez Garza had bought the old Maggie’s restaurant, along with numerous other businesses and properties in San Antonio, and heavily invested in it. Now the Drug Enforcement Administration has accused the brothers of using those businesses to launder millions of dollars in drug money from Mexican cartels.

Express-News reporters Jason Buch and Guillermo Contreras wrote about the money-laundering case in a story published Sunday. The article detailed key properties and businesses the brothers were involved in, which is a hell of a way of grabbing readers’ attention. A lot of people like me remember Maggie’s. Finding out the building is tied up in a federal money laundering investigation definitely piqued our interest.

Jason typed in more than 250 entities and their related entities in a spreadsheet, and NodeXL displayed that information in a graph that showed spokes between each connection. Here’s an example of the main players and entities:

“It allowed us to see, literally see, how everything was connected,” Jason told me.

In complicated stories with lots of moving pieces, building a chronology to keep track of key events is also important. By chance I learned about a new open source, interactive timeline tool by Zach Wise and told Jason about it. Timeline is also based on information contained in a spreadsheet. In Google Docs, you type in the dates and chatter, provide links to photos, videos, or other media, and then Wise’s Timeline tool uses javascript to display an interactive chronology that you can publish on a website.

Jason and Guillermo were going to have to write a chronology in their notes anyway. Wise’s Timeline tool let them share their relevant information with readers in a really compelling way. Their timeline looks drop-dead gorgeous. And they linked to federal documents in the timeline, so readers could see the allegations for themselves.

Maggie’s is long gone. But it was fascinating to see what became of it.

Sued by the Texas Attorney General and accused of squandering donations, the Texas Highway Patrol Museum in King William is a step closer to its demise.

What happens when you’re hit by a city vehicle and file an insurance claim against San Antonio? Now you can find out by searching a database that tracks every claim filed against the city in the past decade.

I stumbled across this story by using Google’s advanced search options. Google lets you search specific websites for specific files and specific terms. So a way to find little-known databases and interesting stories is to search a government website for spreadsheets, pdf’s, and other type of documents.

For example, let’s say you want to focus on the city of San Antonio. In Google’s search box, you’d type site:sanantonio.gov, to limit the results to pages from the city’s website. Then use “filetype” to focus on specific types of files. The term filetype:xls searches for spreadsheets. Filetype:doc searches for Microsoft Word documents. Filetype:pdf searches for … you guessed it, pdf files.

You can do broad searches or get creative and add words you think might lead to interesting stuff. Check out this search with the term “injuries.”

One of the top results is a form for a vehicle accident report that is filled out by city employees whenever they’re involved in an accident. All the entries and check boxes in the form suggest this information is typed into a database of some kind. And if that’s the case, that means you can request the data, analyze it yourself, and see if there’s a story lurking in those numbers.

Using the Texas Public Information Act, I asked for any database the city had that tracked insurance claims from vehicle accidents. The process took awhile and there was a lot of back and forth. At first, the city’s Risk Management Office only sent me a pdf with two categories of information: case numbers and dates. The format and info was worthless.

But eventually they sent more complete spreadsheets that tracked the dollar amount of the claim, whether it was denied, and a brief description about what happened. It was interesting reading.

No one outside City Hall had ever looked at this data before. Thanks to a nifty Google search, now everybody can.

Our wacky kids acting like themselves in public. No ducks were harmed in the making of this video.

This is pretty great.

First, a new, in-depth journalism project called Matter set a fundraising goal of $50,000 on Kickstarter.

They reached it in 38 hours.

They set a new goal of $75,000.

They reached it in four days.

They kept going. This time, the goal was $100,000.

It took them nine days.

Can we stop talking about how people don’t want long stories online? Some people obviously do.

Let’s start talking about the best way to give them those stories.

When you work the weekend shift at a newspaper, you never know what you’re going to cover.

Yesterday I witnessed a shy, hard-working girl named Caeley Cody win a record $112,000 at the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo for her grand champion steer, Rabbit.

But winning can be bittersweet.

The Texas attorney general’s office announced yesterday that it has sued the Texas Highway Patrol Museum, a nonprofit telemarketing organization based in San Antonio that raises millions of dollars in the name of helping state troopers.

I had always been curious about the museum, which is housed in a brick building at St. Mary’s and Alamo streets but attracts few visitors. In October, we examined the museum’s tax records and found that only a fraction of the nearly $12 million in revenue raised by the museum’s telemarketers actually went towards the charitable causes it touted. For every dollar raised, less than a penny was spent on Department of Public Safety troopers and their families.

Attorney General Greg Abbott’s lawsuit reveals new details about what, exactly, donors’ money was spent on. State investigators obtained financial information and credit card statements from the museum, and found employees had paid for cigars, liquor, vacations, meals and “exorbitant” vet bills for an “office cat.” The lawsuit describes an organization with few controls over how money was spent, and an absentee board that seldom asked questions.

Here’s an annotated copy of the lawsuit:

In our last story, I interviewed Scott Henson at the criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast, who had received a telemarketing call from the museum in August. Scott wasn’t happy that the caller initially claimed to be with the Texas Highway Patrol — as if the caller were really with the Department of Public Safety. “This group is about as much about helping troopers as buzzards are about helping roadkill,” Scott wrote at the time. He called yesterday’s lawsuit “way past time.”

The museum’s assets have been frozen and it’s been closed since Friday. Its lawyer, Kim Brown, called the lawsuit “heavy handed” and said the expenses were justified.

What about the cigars?

Prizes for telemarketers, he said.

Liquor?

Drinks for office parties.

The office cat?

The vet bills for the cat were unavoidable.

The lawsuit lays out more expenses for trips, meals and cars that the state describes as wasteful spending. But Brown said the museum is hardly a fly-by-night organization that defrauds people. The small museum has operated in San Antonio for years, he said, and while it has high overhead costs, it does spend money on charitable causes.

The attorney general is seeking to dissolve the nonprofit museum and its related entities. The next step is a hearing for a temporary injunction that has yet to be scheduled.

Here’s a searchable library of all primary documents we’ve obtained about the museum. If you’ve had any experiences with the museum or its telemarketers, feel free to contact us.

One of the golden rules of writing is show, don’t tell. The same holds true for stories based on public data. Check out this cool interactive map by Nolan Hicks and Yang Wang showing food stamp recipients by Zip code for the whole state of Texas.