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, n the chilly afternoon of December 3, 2010, Barry Levine was trying to write the final chapter in the scandal that had come to define the National Enquirer.

For three long years, ever since the tabloid disclosed that John Edwards was having an affair with his campaign videographer, the paper's exec­utive editor had been consumed by the story. Levine

viewed Elizabeth Edwards as the woeful victim of her philan­dering husband, her declining health a sad footnote to John's be­trayal. Now Levine was about to take a step that seemed down­right ghoulish: asking her to confirm her imminent death.

After two weeks of reporting, the paper had learned that Eliza­beth was about to abandon her valiant struggle against can­cer. Levine had a source in North Carolina sign

legal documents agreeing to testify in court if the paper was sued. His assistant sent Elizabeth's camp an e-mail informing a spokeswoman that "the Enquirer will report Elizabeth has told close friends she's giv­ing up on further treatments to sustain her

life.... Please kindly attempt to provide any comment by noon EST, Monday, December 6."

That Monday Elizabeth Edwards decided to preempt the paper that had turned her into an object of national sym­pathy and ridicule by exposing her family's darkest secrets. The 61-year-old woman posted her own statement on Face-book, implicitly announcing that the end was near and offering "love and gratitude" to her supporters. The next

day, she was dead.

The Enquirer, which had gone to press the night before, was stuck with an out-of-date headline based on an unnamed friend quoting her as being "ready to die." And the paper couldn't resist adding, "In a final stab to her heart, as Eliza­beth was hospitalized, [John] spent Thanks­giving with his mis­tress and their toddler daughter Quinn."

Edwards had fum­bled away his politi-

cal future, his cred­ibility and his marriage, but Levine was not ready to move on. A balding man with a soft voice and a hard edge, he had helped guide the supermarket weekly to its greatest triumph, the exposure and humiliation of a presidential candidate and the

WOULD EDWARDS GO TD JAIL? WOULD

TESTIFY ABOUT

TAPE?

HUNTER RELIEVE HE WOULD MARRY HER?

revelation of his, in tabloid parlance, "love child." The series of exclusives had put the Enquirer in contention for a Pulitzer Prize and won it grudging respect from the main­stream media, which had long denigrated the paper as a slimy bottom-feeder.

But Levine wouldn't let it drop. He remained in hot pursuit as federal investigators examined whether Edwards had misspent campaign funds on his mistress, Rielle Hunter. If Edwards tried to pick up a woman in a bar, the Enquirer was there to blow the whistle.

Why the obsessive pursuit? The answer provides a clue to what drives this oddball collection of journalistic cow­boys. They are addicted to the thrill of the chase, whether the story is major or marginal, whether the quarry is a big-time politician or a small-time celebrity. It's no accident the same cast of characters busted Tiger Woods for the

first of his multiple mistresses, sending the

golfer s career into a tailspin, yet it also ran a weak, unconfirmed report

that Sarah Palin "feared" her

16-year-old daugh­ter, Willow, might be pregnant. If the Edwards saga was a moment of triumph for Barry Levine and his crew, they seemed determined to keep reliving it.

Levine believed readers were still fascinated by the players: Would Edwards go to jail? Would he have to testify about the sex tape he made

with his lover? Did Rielle still believe that her Johnny would one day marry her, with the Dave Matthews Band serenad­ing them? Levine was determined to cover every blip.

But sometimes the Enquirer overreached. Back in March 2010 it ran another huge headline: grand jury ready to indict JOHN Edwards. While the piece flatly declared that "insiders say an indictment is imminent" over Edwards's alleged payments to his campaign videographer, the year ended with no charges having been filed. Predicting indictments is risky business.

Whatever the paper's excesses, what its staff does for a living no longer seems so alien to the mainstream news orga­nizations that are increasingly encroaching on its tabloid turf. Even elite journalists have been spending their time chroni­cling the sexual misbehavior of David Letterman, Nevada senator John Ensign, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford and many other public figures, stretching back to Bill Clinton's dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. If there was a difference between The New York Times win­ning a Pulitzer for exposing Eliot Spitzer's predilection for prostitutes and the Enquirer falling short on the Edwards story, it was not immediately apparent.

Obviously the Enquirer pays for information, and the prac­tice of writing checks to sketchy folks casts its journalism in a dubious light. But the television networks and celebrity mag­azines get around their prohibitions by paying news subjects six-figure sums for photos and videos, and besides, when it comes to Edwards and Woods and a growing list of other high-profile targets, the Enquirer has gotten the goods.

Once, its aspirations were not so lofty. Generoso Pope Jr.,

a former member of the CIA's psychological warfare unit who launched the modern Enquirer as a scandal sheet in the 1950s, felt he had his finger on the country's pulse and was untroubled by the paper's cash-for-trash reputation. "A Pulitzer Prize ain't going to win us two readers," he declared in 1975. "I don't care if other media respect us or not."

But the tabloid did change some minds in 1994, six years after Pope's death at 61, when it broke story after story about the O.J. Simpson murder case. In the first glimmer that the media's tectonic plates were (continued on page 104)

NATIONAL ENQUIRER

starting to shift, The New York Times drew flak for quoting an Enquirer scoop about Simpson supposedly confessing in a jail-house meeting with his minister.

Levine joined the tabloid in 1999, and his career seemed to trace the inexorable rise of the gossip media. A onetime sportswriter for the old News-American in Baltimore, he signed on to the Star after Rupert Murdoch launched it in the 1970s as a rival to the Enquirer. As tabloid television continued to be the rage in the 1990s, Levine was tapped as manag­ing editor of/i Current Affair on Murdoch's Fox network. He occasionally bought Enquirer interviews for the show, and the editors he dealt with later lured him to the paper.

That paper was now under more cor­porate management. A consortium led by Boston Ventures, which had bought the Enquirer from Pope's estate in 1988 for $412.5 million, morphed into a fledgling company called American Media Inc. By the end of 1999, the new publisher also owned the Star and the Globe, bringing the country's once-warring supermarket papers under the same roof. (Currently AMI owns 15 pub­lications and also handles certain business operations for playboy, though it has no editorial involvement in the magazine.)

While the Enquirer occupies an unmarked one-story building behind a peach-color Dunkin' Donuts in Boca Raton, Levine works out of American Media's Manhattan headquarters at 1 Park Avenue, in a small, dark, cluttered office overlooking an alley frequented by flocks of pigeons and not much else. About all that distinguishes his space from an ordinary worker cubicle are the taped-up tabloid covers, the safe under his desk and the metal file drawers with such labels as cum on females.

Levine, whose photographic memory made his bulging file cabinets almost redun­dant, proved to be a good fit with the new owners. He nudged the Enquirer toward more political fare, most notably the disclo­sure in 2001 that Jesse Jackson had fathered a child with one of his aides. Little did any­one know that in the coming decade he would scoop the rest of the media on two of the biggest stories in the Enquirer's history.

But scoping out scandals doesn't neces­sarily equal financial success. Just weeks before Elizabeth Edwards died, the Enquir­er's parent company, American Media, filed for bankruptcy protection. After a difficult meeting with his staff, Levine wondered whether the filing would lead to cutbacks or a more cautious approach to his brand of dirt digging.

HUNTER BECOMES THE HUNTED

The John Edwards tale began, like so many Enquirer investigations, with a phone call. When the tip line rang in the paper's Santa Monica office, reporters often raced to answer it. Rick Egusquiza grabbed it late one afternoon in fall 2007, knowing full well that nine out of 10 calls were worth­less, just wackos promising the story of the decade. Egusquiza, 44, had been a Venice Beach bartender, his only writing experience

reviewing porn movies for Adult Video News. But he quickly learned the Enquirer culture; his first scoop was that Angelina Jolie had gotten a bii.i.y bob tattoo on her arm.

The caller haltingly explained—she felt bad about spilling the beans—that John Edwards seemed to be having an affair.

"What proof do you have?"

She claimed to have e-mails from a woman named Rielle Hunter. Half an hour later, having gotten the source's name and num­ber, Egusquiza typed up a lead file—the typical Enquirer procedure—and faxed it to Barry Levine and the Boca headquarters.

The next day, the woman sent the four e-mails. Hunter didn't name the politician—she referred to him as Love Lips—but said he was married with kids and was unhappy.

That was enough for Levine. Hunter, after all, had been the videographer for Edwards's campaign, shooting footage in which the grinning candidate flirted with the camera. It was September, and Edwards was running neck and neck with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the upcom­ing Iowa caucuses.

This, of course, was not just another alle­gation about a handsome politician who couldn't keep his zipper zipped. The emo­tional heart of Edwards's candidacy was his wife's battle against cancer. If John was indeed cheating on the smart and likable Elizabeth, his career was over.

Now the paper's challenge was to find Hunter. Levine dispatched Alexander Hitchen, a 35-year-old British reporter with a shaved head, pastel shirts and charm to spare, to a home in South Orange, New Jer­sey, where, they had learned, Hunter was living with her friend and business part­ner, Mimi Hockman. Hitchen, who had once worked for the British tabloid News of the World and handled press for the Egyp­tian business magnate Mohamed Al-Fayed, wanted her to play, and he was ready to pay for the privilege.

Hockman answered when he knocked. Hitchen said he was from the Enquirer, had information that Hunter was having an affair with Edwards and wanted to see if she would cooperate. Hockman quickly closed the door.

Hitchen knew that people in trouble some­times had second thoughts, so he waited awhile, knocked again and gave Hockman his card. "This will probably come as a shock to Rielle," he said. "I'm going to stay in the area for an hour. I don't want to trouble you further. Just call me and I'll come straight around." There was no call.

Instead, Hunter made a different call, to Andrew Young, an Edwards confidant who had worked for him since his first run for the Senate, in 1998. He patched her through to the candidate, who later told Young he was worried she would spill the beans to the Enquirer. Edwards asked the married aide to allow Hunter to move into his North Caro­lina home, and Young agreed.

The campaign was determined to stop the story. Edwards made two impassioned calls to Roger Altman, a former deputy Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton whose invest­ment firm had taken a controlling stake in American Media, and pleaded with him to

quash the piece. Elizabeth Edwards, whom Altman had never met, called in tears, plead­ing with him to intercede during a long, painful conversation (though it turned out her husband had already confessed to a one-night stand with Hunter). Altman, who never interfered with the paper's reporting when he was an owner, did not mention that his firm had given up its stake two years earlier. I le checked with David Pecker, American Media's chief executive, who assured him the paper had taken its usual precautions.

As it turned out, David Perel, then the Enquirer's editor in chief, was troubled by the lack of direct evidence. A wry, some­times acerbic man who never seemed to lose his boyish enthusiasm for hot stories, the 47-year-old Perel did not want to be reck­less. Even as his reporters developed further information from people around Hunter, he remained unconvinced.

"I don't think you have enough to name her," Perel told Levine. "I also don't think you have enough to put it on the cover. If you want, you can run it inside." The tip­ster was given a few hundred dollars; had the story made the cover, the Enquirer, with its own version of the minimum wage, would have paid at least a thousand. (The paper has forked over more than $100,000 on occasion but purchased the famous Elvis Presley coffin photo from a cousin of the King for just $18,000.)

The piece, about Edwards's "shock­ing mistress scandal," landed with a thud. Levine was upset, convinced that Perel had buried the article by not even allowing a headline on the cover.

But Perel was not giving up. A onetime sportswriter for The Washington Post and Gannett newspapers, he had joined the Enquirer in 1985 because he craved the sense of adventure that came with being able to charter a plane or a helicopter in pursuit of a sizzling lead. In 2005, after four years as editor in chief, he was fired, then restored to the job a year later, and one thing he had learned over the years was patience. Perel assembled what he called a ghost team to quietly pursue Hunter, float­ing on the edges of her secretive world.

Egusquiza eventually developed a second source who knew Hunter fairly well. She had the photos and phone records to prove it and also divulged a highly pertinent piece of information: Hunter was pregnant.

Levine was skeptical. Could Hunter be setting up Edwards after getting preg­nant by someone else? The paper kicked into love-child mode, because what Levine desperately needed was a photo. When he learned that Hunter had been moved to another home in the Governors Club, Young's gated community in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Levine had his team rent a cottage there.

At the Boca headquarters, Perel assem­bled a series of Google Earth satellite photos of Hunter's neighborhood, placing them on a board he covered with a white sheet except when team members gathered for a meeting. He had to be able to visualize the buildings, examine the entrances, weigh the options, track her movements so they could maximize their chances of success.

PULLING THE TRIGGER

Perel was growing obsessed with the chase. During a video conference with Pecker in New York, Perel outlined the plan from Flor­ida and declared, "I think this is going to be the Enquirers greatest political story ever."

Egusquiza's source had said Hunter was six months pregnant—and had an upcoming doctor's appointment—so the Enquirer team spent days sitting in four rental cars, staking out the offices of the two closest gynecolo­gists. They grew bored and got into fights that Perel had to referee. As they waited, they were armed only with a photo of Hunter and a description of the BMW she was driving. Perel had run through the likely scenarios and drawn up a list of seven options, based on their quarry's movements.

When Hunter walked out of one of the medical offices, she was wearing a black long-sleeved shirt and jeans in the mild weather, and a baby bump was visible. A photographer snapped away through the car window while the reporters summoned another car as backup. But Levine had given strict orders.

"If we had hit her coming out of the doc­tor's office, she would've jumped right in the car," says Levine, who can sound like a mob­ster ordering someone bumped off. "That would have been a risky venture. I didn't want to get in a high-speed chase."

Instead the cars followed Hunter to a Whole Foods across the street—that was one of Perel's predicted scenarios—and when she emerged and started loading groceries into the trunk, Enquirer reporter Alan Smith raced over and identified himself.

"We know you're having John Edwards's baby," he said. "We're publishing a story."

His colleague, Alan Butterfield, approached from the other direction: "Are you dating John Edwards? Is that John Edwards's baby?"

"I don't know who you're talking about," Hunter said. The two men said they knew precisely who she was.

Smith tried a softer tone: He knew that this was an ordeal. Perhaps they could have coffee and talk off the record? But he got nowhere.

Butterfield called Levine for instructions. "You need to go hit up Andrew Young," Levine said.

It was pitch-black when the reporters arrived. They mistakenly went to the side door of the large two-story house. When they finally found the front door and knocked, Young's wife, Cheri, dialed 911 and asked for help dealing with two intruders.

"They said they're with the National Enquirer," she told the dispatcher. "They're press. And they're at our...on our private property, peeking in our windows."

Moments later her husband arrived at the 50-foot driveway, blocking their Jeep Liberty with his car. "Go get my gun!" Andrew Young told his wife, though they didn't own one.

He broke a broomstick in half to make a threatening sound. The reporters rushed from the front door to the driveway, where Young was standing. "You're trespassing," he warned them. They denied it, trying to coax the comment they needed. "Does Elizabeth know you're covering for John?"

Butterfield demanded. But Young would not so much as confirm his identity.

Butterfield came face to face with Young and felt they were on the verge of coming to blows. No way he was going to let that hap­pen, Butterfield thought. He got paid well, but he wasn't going to hit some weasel who was covering for a married man.

As the standoff continued, Butterfield called a company lawyer in Boca Raton for advice. A portly sheriff's deputy arrived, and the report­ers argued that there was no sign warning against trespassing. A supervisor showed up next and concluded he could not arrest them for doing their jobs. But, he said ominously, "you can get shot out here in North Carolina just knocking on someone's door."

The mission had been accomplished, albeit in madcap fashion: The paper, at the insistence of its attorneys, had given both Hunter and Young a chance to comment.

Young and Hunter quickly lawycred up. Their attorneys called Levine and said that while Hunter was indeed pregnant, it was not John Edwards's baby—it was Young's. Levine asked if the two would take poly­graphs, but the request was rejected.

The paper was ready to pull the trigger. Levine placed a call to Jonathan Prince, a top Edwards campaign official. Prince had been flatly denying the rumors for weeks, based on a personal assurance from Edwards that there was no affair. He tried to dissuade mainstream journalists from writing about the matter, arguing that they couldn't run something based solely on the Enquirer, which, he said, had printed plenty of false accusations.

When Levine reached him, Prince insisted that a story about Hunter would destroy both |ohn and Elizabeth Edwards. This was nothing but an affair between two campaign workers. Why was that worth publishing?

'Jonathan, you're all being lied to," Levine said. "This is a cover-up." Prince told him he was completely wrong.

The Edwards team made one last-ditch move, floating the idea of giving the Enquirer a sworn affidavit affirming that Young was the father of the unborn child. Perel was stunned by how preposterous the suggestion was. While his ghost team had been monitoring Hunter, they saw she had gone to Young's home for dinner. What kind of man brings his pregnant mistress to dinner with his wife and kids? Perel knew the cover was a farce.

In the December 31, 2007 issue, the Enquirer published its i.ove child scandal.! cover—over a larger headline about Kelly Ripa's marriage supposedly being in trouble—and reported that Hunter had "told a close confidante that Edwards is the father of her baby!" Hunter was shown in the supermarket shots wearing a snug black shirt with a peace symbol embedded in a heart, along with photos of John and Eliza­beth and the Governors Club. The paper included a statement in which Hunter com­plained that the "innuendos and lies" were "completely unfounded and ridiculous."

But the bombshell, to use a favorite tabloid word, immediately entered a strange limbo. It had exploded and virtually everyone in America knew about it, but mainstream news organizations steadfastly refused to acknowledge it. This was not, as some con­spiracy theorists believed, because the liberal press was protecting a favored Democrat but because the story relied entirely on anony­mous sources whose allegations could not be confirmed by other journalists. And it was, after all, in the Enquirer.

But a funny thing happened. The media gatekeepers could no longer slam the door shut. Over the next few months bloggers for Slate and the Huffington Post openly debated the story and taunted the main­stream press for its resistance. Some North Carolina papers, led by The Charlotte Observer, nibbled at the edges of the tale. But the national newspapers remained silent, with

a Los Angeles Times editor telling his bloggers "not to cover the rumors or salacious specu­lations" because "the only source" was the Enquirer. Journalists incessantly debated the subject in their newsrooms but, because they lacked independent proof, felt compelled to keep the story from a public that already knew all about it.

"PUSH HARDER"

A few months later, in July 2008, long after John Edwards had quit the campaign, Rick Egusquiza was spending a week in the New York office when his second source deliv­ered some real-time intelligence: Edwards was about to visit his mistress and newborn baby at the Beverly Hilton.

"Holy shit," Levine said. But Egusquiza felt stranded on the wrong coast. It was, he said, like missing your kid's birthday party.

Alexander Hitchen was dispatched to lead the stakeout. Alan Butterfield, who was based in California, joined the team as well. The 44-year-old Butterfield, who first hooked up with the Enquirer when he was repossessing a car for Toyota's financing department that belonged to Larry Fortensky and learned the man was dating Elizabeth Taylor, was something of a legend at the paper. After 9/11 he went to Pakistan, landed interviews with Taliban fighters and posed for a picture next to a rocket launcher.

The team members, equipped with walkie-talkies, arrived at the Beverly Hilton and checked in as guests. The place was crawling with celebrities because NBC was making its annual presentation to the television critics; Butterfield saw Keith Olbermann, Brooke Shields and Hayden Panettiere. Around 8:30 p.m. he spotted a friend of Hunter's named Bob McGovern, a 64-year-old Cali-fornian who described himself as a New Age healer. Great, he thought, this guy is going to pick up Edwards. Butterfield hid in the parking garage and, within 15 minutes, saw their dark BMW pull in. As Edwards headed toward a staircase to the basement, where he could catch an elevator without attracting attention, the reporter followed from a safe distance before dropping back. "We had to let him commit the act," Butterfield says.

The hours dragged on as Edwards met his daughter for the first time. Hitchen, having thoroughly cased the hotel, decided to plant himself on a couch next to a basement stair­case, gambling that Edwards would have to pass by on his way back to the garage. It was just after 2:30 a.m.

Three minutes later, Edwards walked by. Hitchen sprang up, identified himself and shouted, "Would you like to explain why you were with your mistress Rielle Hunter and your love child tonight?" Edwards went white, briefly stared at the Brit and contin­ued up the stairs toward the main lobby.

I litchen hoped to prompt a human reaction about the man's flesh and blood: "Mr. Edwards, for the sake of your child, don't you think you should admit to being the child's father?" Edwards kept walking, so Hitchen waved to Butterfield, who came sprinting over with his video camera and began shouting questions as well. A photographer was shooting pictures from down the hall. Edwards promptly turned around, raced back down the stairs, ducked into a restroom and slammed the door.

The scene was downright comical. Hitchen, unable to pull the door open, brusquely reminded his prey that the reporter was a guest at the hotel and he was not. Edwards, or at least his body, was unmoved by this logic.

Levine called Perel, woke him up and apprised him that Edwards was in the bath­room and blocking the door.

"What should we do?" Levine asked.

"Push harder," Perel said.

Two security guards, who had hap­pened to pass by, assessed the situation, entered the bathroom and emerged with the unsurprising news that Edwards did not want to talk to his pursuers. Nearly a dozen reinforcements arrived, pushed the reporters back up the stairs and escorted Edwards out of the hotel, one guard holding up a jacket as a shield. "He did something so stupid," Hitchen says. "A man who's clearly an incredibly smart lawyer, who has amassed millions of dol­lars and was going for the highest office in the land, tripped himself up."

The paper had missed its Monday night deadline, but there was no holding this one. The sun had barely come up in California on Tuesday when Perel posted the story on the tabloid's website, adorned only with head

shots of a grinning Edwards and a dazed-looking Hunter, taken at the Whole Foods stakeout. Edwards met the "blonde divor­cee," the story said, while his "wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer—and the National Enquirer was there!" The sheer immediacy of the posting, Perel felt, would launch the revelations into the stratosphere.

But there was no liftoff. The media black­out continued. For Perel, it was downright depressing. He started calling his contacts at news organizations, lobbying them to run something. I'm telling you, he said, this story is rock solid. The general reaction was that it was indeed a terrific tale, but the other out­lets couldn't match it, couldn't prove it.

The Enquirer had one more trick up its journalistic sleeve. Egusquiza had arranged in advance for what he called a spy photo, to be surreptitiously shot by someone inside Hunter's hotel room. A week later he opened an e-mail and there it was: a blurry picture of Edwards, in a sweat-stained blue T-shirt, hold­ing up his daughter Frances Quinn against the telltale backdrop of the Hilton drapes.

Damn, Egusquiza thought, this is it. He can call us trash, but there's no way he can get out of this. Perel paid thousands of dollars for the picture, but he considered it a bargain. Still, there was a great internal debate over whether

the Enquirer could be legally liable for running pictures taken on private property.

The paper posted the photo on its website on August 6, 2008. Two days later Edwards went on Nightline and finally admitted to the affair. Levine and Hitchen watched from the Park Avenue office and then went out to Elaine's for celebratory drinks.

American Media chief David Pecker told Perel he had been right; it was their greatest political scoop. Yet Edwards still insisted—as he did that night to ABC's Bob Woodruff— that he was not the baby's father. After all, he said with a smirk, the report was "pub­lished in a supermarket tabloid."

The paper's public posture of sanctimony—"For the sake of your child!"—could be a bit rich. The Enquirer hardly qualified for the high-minded role of safeguarding American morality. The holier-than-thou stance was a combination of street theater and shtick, a way to harass its famous targets in the name of some lofty standard of fidelity. The tabloid lived off bad behavior, exploiting it to the fullest for the entertainment of its readers. If no one was having affairs—check that, if no one famous was having affairs—the paper would be out of business.

In the aftermath of the Beverly Mills con­frontation, journalists and bloggers began to pressure Perel to release all the pictures and videos, but he wasn't ready to show his cards. Perel was married to a psychothera­pist, and he had been studying what made Edwards tick. Edwards never admitted anything unless he absolutely had to. Perel wanted to flush him out, and the best way to do that was to let him wonder what else the paper had, to let it prey on his mind. Unbe­knownst to most of the Enquirer staff, Perel had a small team stay on the case, telling Edwards's political pals that the chase wasn't over, that their man had to come clean.

The team got results. Days later the tab­loid reported that Hunter had been "secretly receiving $15,000 a month as part of an elaborate cover-up," and other journalists con­firmed the funds had come from Fred Baron, the former finance chairman of Edwards's two presidential campaigns. In April 2009 the Enquirer disclosed that a federal grand jury was investigating possible campaign finance viola­tions involving the fees funneled to Hunter. In July came the headline John kdwards sex tape shocker, and Young would eventually surrender the X-rated video to a federal court. (Although the story said Edwards and Hunter were accusing Young of secretly taping them, he'd actually found the tape among the trash in a home where Hunter had stayed with his family.) In October Levine wrote that Young's forthcoming book would reveal that Edwards once discussed trying "to fake a DNA report to cover up the paternity of his love child!"

In the January 25, 2010 issue, Alexan­der Hitchen and Rick Egusquiza reported that Edwards had been prowling the bars of Figure Eight Island, North Carolina and repeatedly "attempted to bed a female bar­tender." Hitchen had paid the divorced bartender, Stephanie Breshears, for her account. "She named a figure," he says.

Days later Edwards acknowledged what anyone with a pulse already knew, that he had clung to a second lie, that the Enquirer had

been right all along about the baby's paternity. With Young's book on the verge of publication, Edwards told the Today show in a statement that "it was wrong for me ever to deny she was my daughter." I n another week Elizabeth Edwards let it be known through People magazine that she and her husband were splitting up.

Levine was flabbergasted to click on an e-mail and see a note from Young: "Barry, good luck on the Pulitzer!" Young, who had fallen out with Edwards, called Levine the next day, and they chatted like two opposing generals after the war. Levine forwarded the e-mail to his editors with the header "Now I know pigs can really fly...."

After the denouement, the tabloid's pick­ings on the story seemed to grow slim. At one point it was reduced to running a story on the "lonely life" of Hunter's two-year-old daugh­ter, complete with a picture of a toddler.

And the Enquirer sometimes undercut its own credibility by running thinly sourced sto­ries that never quite cleared the bar. When the paper carried the headline f.li/abf. n i edwards'

CHILLING CONFESSION TO A PAL: "jOIIN BEAT MF.!"

the words to a pal were in tiny type. The charge was attributed to an unnamed "close friend."

After Hunter was spotted lunching at a Los Angeles cafe called Toast, Rick Egusquiza called several of his sources—he had paid them over time, though now the reward money was down to a couple hundred bucks—and heard that Hunter had told friends she had secretly met with Aaron Sorkin. The West Wing creator, not coincidentally, was making a movie about her romance with Edwards, and she believed she might win a small part in the film, the sources said. Sorkin denies any such meeting, raising questions about whether Hunter was indulging in a fantasy. In fact, Egusquiza says, Hunter—who posed without her pants for G(5 magazine—later told friends she didn't get the part because she would have to be nude.

Egusquiza also learned that Hunter had tried to look up some famous ex-boyfriends, including actor John Cusack and former Friends star Matt LeBlanc, leading to this screaming cover line shortly before Thanks­giving: RIEI.1.E "CIIEATINC." ON JOHN EDWARDS.

Soon after the passing of Elizabeth Edwards, who cut her estranged husband out of her will, the Enquirer reported that in an "outrageous disregard for his wife Elizabeth's deathbed wish," John has proposed to Rielle—which an Edwards spokesman flatly denied.

Levine staunchly defends the accuracy of each piece. "To some people it may be an old scandal. John's admitted it; now it's over," he says. "But at the National Enquirer it's never over."

ENQUIRING MINDS

How did the tabloid clean everyone else's clock on Edwards and Woods, two of the big­gest scandal stories in recent years? Paying off sources helps loosen tongues, of course, but the Enquirer functions like a detective agency, conducting surveillance, surreptitiously shoot­ing photos, administering lie-detector tests, turning recalcitrant witnesses and confronting targets with incriminating evidence. In an era when newspapers, magazines and networks have slashed their budgets, the tabloid will keep a group of reporters on the streets for weeks in pursuit of a major scoop.

Despite the fact that AM I emerged from

bankruptcy in December, certain challenges remain. The Enquirer has already downsized. Circulation, which peaked at more than 6 mil­lion in the 1970s, is down to 750,000. But by raising the newsstand price 200 percent over the past decade (it's now $3.69) and recruit­ing more consumer-products giants (roughly doubling advertising revenue, to nearly $8 mil­lion), the tabloid has remained viable.

Journalistically not every story has turned out as well as Edwards's fall from grace. After the 2008 election David Perel spent six months checking out an allegation that the newly elected president had once had an affair. The supposed episode, back in 2004, was said to involve a Senate campaign fund-raiser named Vera Baker—who, inconveniently, had long ago denied any romance with Barack Obama. Perel and his team talked to a limo driver who said he'd driven Obama and Baker to Washington's Hotel George one night and that she never asked to be taken home. But Perel concluded there was nothing there and was wary of the allegation because the people pushing it had a political agenda.

In May 2010, months after Perel had left and Tony Frost, a former editor of the Star and Globe, took the helm at the Enquirer, Levine decided it was worth reporting that anti-Obama operatives were still pursuing the allegation. But the Enquirer trumpeted the tale as true, declaring that the president "has been caught in a shocking cheating scandal" involving Vera Baker, though the real shock was the lack of confirmation. Alexander Hitchen, who had spoken to the unnamed limo driver, reported that "on-site hotel surveillance camera footage could"— could!—"provide indisputable evidence."

Despite a Drudge Report headline, there was absolutely no evidence to support the claim, and even gossipy media outlets dumped on the unsubstantiated tale. If you aim at the

president, you'd better have the goods, and the Enquirer, simply put, did not.

The tabloid was on somewhat firmer ground last June when it carried a claim by a Portland, Oregon masseuse that Al Gore had sexually assaulted her, because the alle­gation was confirmed in police records. But Molly Hagerty had waited weeks to report the alleged incident and declined to be inter­viewed by detectives for two years, after which the authorities cited insufficient evidence to launch an investigation. The Enquirer paid for her on-the-record account—that Gore was "a pervert and a sex predator"—and those familiar with such transactions put the sum at a quarter of a million dollars. But Levine would not call the former vice presi­dent's office for comment for fear of losing his exclusive. This time, though, major news organizations followed the tabloid's lead, despite Gore's unequivocal denial, and police investigated again before closing the probe.

As the Enquirer boosted its profile, Levine appeared on Nightline, National Public Radio and even The View. But Barbara Walters ripped into him for a story she called "just baloney"—that she and Frank Langella had moved in together and were planning a sum­mer wedding, with the blessing of the actor's ex and Walters's co-host Whoopi Goldberg.

Levine put his hands over his face, trying to laugh it off: "All I can say, Barbara, is that we trust our sources."

Trust: That, in the end, is the question about the National Enquirer. When its sources are spot-on, the paper can lap the field and bring down major celebrities. At other times, the sources make sensational claims that never quite pan out. For all its recent suc­cess, the storied tabloid still labors under a shadow partly of its own making.

"A man who's clearly an

incredibly smart lawyer, who

has amassed millions of

dollars and was going for

the highest office in the land,

tripped himself up."