Behar, Richard

Richard Behar has garnered more than 20 major journalism awards over a three-decade career. He was called “one of the most dogged of our watchdogs”” by the late Jack Anderson, a founding father of modern investigative reporting. Since 2012, Behar has been the Contributing Editor of Investigations for Forbes magazine, and is writing a book about Bernard Madoff — to be published by Simon & Schuster. He is also the Founder-Editor of Mideast Dig, a non-profit investigative news enterprise focused on the Middle East.

From 1982-2004, Behar was a staffer at Forbes, Time and Fortune magazines. In 2005, he launched Project Klebnikov, a media alliance committed to shedding light on the Moscow murder of Forbes-Russia editor Paul Klebnikov. (Members of “Project K” include Bloomberg, The Economist, Forbes and Vanity Fair.)

Awards include: Gerald Loeb, George Polk (twice), National Magazine, Overseas Press Club (twice), Daniel Pearl, and Conscience-in-Media — on subjects ranging from terrorism and money laundering in Karachi, to counterfeiting in Beijing; from the garbage-carting mob in New York, to the Russian mob in Siberia; from wrongdoing on Wall Street, to a Time cover exposé on Scientology (“The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power”) that prompted a decade of litigation by the church. Behar’s work exposing IRS corruption and cover-ups sparked a Congressional hearing that led to reforms.