Caught in the act Smoking Gun editor William Bastone knows how to get the goods on just about anyone BY TAMARA WIEDER

EVEN IF YOU’VE never visited thesmokinggun.com, chances are you’ve seen evidence of the site’s sleuthing in any number of newspapers and television reports. The discovery that Who Wants To Marry a Millionaire’s Rick Rockwell had been accused of domestic assault? Brought to you by the Smoking Gun. Nick Nolte’s horrifying mug shot from a drunk-driving arrest? You have the Smoking Gun to thank (or curse, if related nightmares persist). The 1993 deposition of the 13-year-old allegedly molested by Michael Jackson? First published on thesmokinggun.com. And if you’ve heard about any embarrassing or criminal act perpetrated by a reality-show cast member, chances are the information was taken from the Smoking Gun.

But the Web site, which took shape in 1997 and was bought by Court TV in 2000, doesn’t simply write about the gems it digs up. Instead, it gives viewers access to its evidence, posting court documents and other official records for the world to read for itself. "We just kind of have flipped the equation," says the Smoking Gun’s editor, William Bastone, who spent more than a decade as a reporter for the Village Voice. "So instead of giving you all the words and never seeing the documents, we give you the documents and try not to muck them up with too much of our own prose."

Q: Tell me how the Smoking Gun got started.

A: The site started in April of 1997, and had been on the drawing board for probably a year or so prior to that. That was myself and Dan Green, who is a friend and colleague of mine for many years. I’m a former Village Voice staff writer and was at the Voice at the time we started the Web site. Anyway, we were kind of latecomers to the Internet, were fascinated by it, and thought it would be fun to have our own Web site, essentially nothing more than a side project to our regular writing gigs. We had no technical expertise, and really still don’t, but we’re journalists, we know how to hunt down stories. I in particular had spent a lot of time covering court cases and gathering up documents. I wrote about the Mafia for the final 10 years of my stay at the Voice, I’ve done loads and loads of investigative pieces, used FOIA [Freedom of Information Act], blah blah blah. And I kept every document that I’d ever obtained. I was fascinated with them, love documents, love looking at old FBI records, and it just seemed natural, back in ’96 when we were thinking about this, well, maybe we should do something that revolved around documents, because that’s what we know, we know how to get them, we think they’re interesting. And we thought there would probably be other people out there that would think that they were funny, stupid, profane, whatever, just kind of interesting to look at. At that point, it seemed to us that there really was not a lot of that going on online. People didn’t post documents. We liked the idea of creating a site on the Web that was all about paper. It was the last thing that the Internet’s supposed to be about, you know, the whole idea of the paperless office.

We ran it for a few years just as a side project to our regular jobs, and then in the end of 2000, we sold the site to Court TV and then started running it as our full-time job, and from that point the site started to grow pretty significantly, because it was all we did. When we were running it as our little side thing, we really could only do updates a couple of times a week because we had regular gigs to do, but then when it became our thing, we became essentially a news site that can report things on the fly and publish whenever we want.

Q: How surprised are you at the popularity of the site? Did you ever expect it?

A: No. I mean, I think if the site never took off, and it was still at the level that it was a few years ago and we were still at our old jobs, we probably would still be doing it, just because we get a kick out of it. At the point that we were figuring out what the site was going to be and how it was going to work, people would tell us, try to figure out who the audience is going to be. And that idea had never even dawned on us, that that was something we should take into account. I guess if we were looking at it at the time we started the site or mulling over the site as a commercial venture, I think that probably would’ve been an important thing to think about.

As it turns out, there’s not a lot of other people that do what we do, and I think we do it fairly well and quickly. If you come to our site, what we have is real, the stories are legit. We break a lot of stories on a lot of different things, some silly, some serious. So am I surprised at the size and the number of people that come to the site? Yeah. Am I surprised that people are interested in it? No, because I always had a sense that there would be interest in it, because I figured there had to be other people like me who hopefully would find a document — the ability to look at something that you normally can’t see and hopefully take away something interesting or newsworthy out of it — that that would be an interesting experience. I figured there had to be people who would think that.