When Sheldon Adelson’s family secretly bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the newspaper’s reporters began digging. Photograph by Ronda Churchill / The New York Times / Redux

Last month, reporters at the Las Vegas Review-Journal undertook a remarkable investigation into the secret identity of the buyer of their own newspaper. The paper had changed hands in early December for the wildly inflated price of a hundred and forty million dollars; New Media Investment Group (formerly GateHouse Media), which had purchased the paper only months earlier, reported flipping it for an estimated sixty-nine-per-cent profit. Six days after the sale was announced, on December 16th, Review-Journal reporters revealed that the acquiring company, News + Media Capital Group, which had been represented in the sale by an executive named Michael Schroeder, was in fact controlled by members of Sheldon Adelson’s family—and that, as many had suspected, the money had originated with the casino magnate himself. “My money that the children have with which to buy the newspaper is their inheritance,” Adelson told the Macau Daily Times. He said that he wasn’t directly involved with the purchase, and wasn’t interested in owning a newspaper.

Adelson is a keen participant in the U.S. political process and a mega-donor to Republican candidates, having spent, at minimum, ninety-eight million dollars in political contributions in the 2012 cycle, not counting dark-money contributions. He also owns an Israeli tabloid, Israel Hayom (Israel Today), which is brazen in its support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line positions on Palestinian rights and other issues. To many observers, Adelson’s background, combined with the initial attempt to keep his family’s ownership interest in the Review-Journal secret, does not augur well for the future editorial independence of the paper, which was founded in 1909 and has a circulation of about a hundred and sixty-five thousand, the largest in Nevada. But the response from inside the paper demonstrated that, even for a determined billionaire and his family, it may not be so easy to gain control of a newspaper.

Last week, I met the Review-Journal’s deputy editor, James Wright, in a quiet conference room at the paper’s offices, a bit north of downtown. Wright, a soft-spoken, genial man with a mildly sardonic air, recounted for me how his team, flabbergasted at the news of an anonymous buyer, had defied (or, possibly, obeyed) the advice of their new owners to “just focus on doing their jobs,” regardless of who those owners might be.

In November, with negotiations for the paper’s sale presumably in progress, Wright had been told by the publisher that GateHouse executives wanted reporters to monitor the performance of three Clark County judges, including Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, who is presiding over Jacobs v. Sands, a contentious wrongful-termination suit filed against Adelson and his company, Las Vegas Sands Corporation. In March, Gonzalez had fined Sands China two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for withholding documents; in April, Sands China attempted to have her removed from the case altogether. (The Nevada Supreme Court ultimately rejected this request.) She later put the billionaire in his place while he was in the witness stand, with the words, “Sir, you don’t get to argue with me.”

“There was never an expectation that anything from that would result in a story,” Wright said of the request to monitor the judges. After his reporters spent two weeks engaged in apparently pointless judge-watching, Wright turned their notes over to the paper’s publisher and corporate counsel. “I told them ‘Here it is, do with it what you will,’ expecting them to forward it on.”

Shortly afterward, he received a clip from the corporate counsel, who routinely forwarded stories that might be of interest to the editors. This one was from a tiny Connecticut paper called the New Britain Herald. Under the byline Edward Clarkin, the article mentioned Gonzalez in connection with a “judging the judges” survey that the Review-Journal does every other year. The piece, which was published concurrently in the Bristol Press, was a garbled mess, veering incomprehensibly from the need for court reform to condemnation of Gonzalez’s record.

“I had a couple of thoughts about it,” Wright said. “One was, Why the heck is a paper in New Britain spending so much time in this article about a judge in Las Vegas? Second of all, Who owns this newspaper? . . . And who is this Edward Clarkin?” A brief investigation revealed no sign that Clarkin was a reporter for the New Britain paper, nor any contact information for him. “I got busy doing something else, and that was about as far as it went,” Wright said.

Soon after, on December 10th, a man named Michael Schroeder appeared at a staff meeting at the Review-Journal offices. He introduced himself as the owner of four newspapers in Connecticut, and as a representative of the paper’s new owners, whom he declined to name. “I went, ‘You know, that weird Gonzalez thing was in New Britain,’ ” Wright said. He decided to check whether it had been at one of the papers Schroeder owned. “Sure enough, it was. And so that got us starting to look at Clarkin.”

On the 16th, after a protracted tussle between the editorial staff and the publisher, the Review-Journal ran an article identifying its new owners. The authors, James DeHaven, Howard Stutz, and Jennifer Robison, revealed that Patrick Dumont, Adelson’s son-in-law, had put the deal together “at the behest of his father-in-law,” and that the Adelson family controlled News + Media Capital Group. DeHaven told me that they’d never contemplated not investigating the question publicly. “We deal with enough credibility issues, in terms of people’s general perception of media,” he said. “It’s not going to be a tenable situation when someone with that much power and influence is sitting in the shadows behind your newspaper.”

A few days later, two of the same reporters published a follow-up linking Edward Clarkin’s Connecticut articles with the purchase, noting that Schroeder was an executive for both News + Media Capital Group and the parent company of the Connecticut newspapers. The following day, the Review-Journal published an editorial that amounted to an open challenge to their new ownership. “You can be assured that if the Adelsons attempt to skew coverage, by ordering some stories covered and others killed or watered down, the Review-Journal’s editors and reporters will fight it,” they wrote. On December 22nd, though, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Mike Hengel, announced that he had taken a buyout, citing the likelihood of an “adversarial” relationship with the new owners.

Meanwhile, others had gotten in on attempting to solve the Clarkin mystery. While stuck for a few hours in an airport during the holiday rush, Christine Stuart, the editor of the local news site CTnewsjunkie.com, found a remarkable clue: Michael Schroeder’s middle name is Edward, and his mother’s maiden name is Clarkin. “At this point, the fact that Schroeder is Edward Clarkin doesn’t seem to be in any dispute,” Wright said. “It’s not been a hundred per-cent proven, but he doesn’t deny it, he won’t even comment.” (The Hartford Courant, Democracy Now!, and the Times, as well as the Review-Journal, all failed to elicit comment from Schroeder on this point.) Reportage by other publications showed that the Clarkin article also contained plagiarized material and fabricated quotes.

On Christmas Eve, Steve Majerus-Collins, a journalist who had worked at the Bristol Press for twenty years, published a passionate and much-shared Facebook post announcing his departure from the paper. He claimed to have quit because his publisher—Schroeder—had funnelled “a terrible, plagiarized piece of garbage about the court system” into the paper, “and then stuck his own fake byline on it.” Schroeder, he added, had “used the pages of my newspaper, secretly, to further the political agenda of his master out in Las Vegas.” Collins appeared on WNPR’s Colin McEnroe show a few days later, alleging that the true ownership of his own paper had been kept secret, as well: Asked whether Schroeder had bought the Connecticut papers with his own money, Collins replied, “No: he said that he had ‘a friend’ who would put up the money. It wasn’t his.” This state of affairs, he told McEnroe, was “curious,” but nobody in his tiny newsroom had ever investigated further.