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After months of reporting and scores of newspaper stories deep into their investigation of Utah Attorney General John Swallow and his predecessor, Mark Shurtleff, Salt Lake Tribune reporters Robert Gehrke and Tom Harvey felt the bottom drop out from under them.
It was Sept. 12, 2013, and Shurtleff was on KSL Radio's "Doug Wright Show" divulging — soon to be confirmed by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — that federal prosecutors were dropping their probe without bringing charges.
"It was like, 'Did we spend the last year and a half of our lives kind of going after somebody who didn't deserve it? Maybe we got scammed just like Jeremy Johnson had allegedly scammed some of those people at I Works," said Gehrke, referring to an indicted businessman whose allegations against Swallow played a key role in breaking the story.
"It was really a low point," Harvey said. "[I thought], 'Oh my god, we're all alone in this and nothing is ever going to happen and no one is going to come in and back us up. This thing is going to go away and John Swallow is going to be attorney general.' "
That day of desperate anxiety — and the subsequent sense of validation when, two months later, Swallow announced his resignation — was among the behind-the-scenes details revealed Wednesday night at a Tribune town hall called "Anatomy of a Scandal."
More than 150 people attended the free event at Salt Lake City's downtown library, many of them readers who have devoured news coverage of the scandal — 307 Tribune stories and counting — and still have an appetite.
Several audience members asked the reporters to get to the bottom of why DOJdecided to stop looking at the allegations when, according to later investigations by the Utah House and county prosecutors, there was fire behind the smoke.
The reporters agreed it is one of the big, tantalizing mysteries of the saga.
"We filed open-records requests and so forth to get the email traffic between the decision-makers who ultimately decided they were going to shut this down and we were denied those," Gehrke said. "I think it warrants some additional scrutiny."
"It just leaves lots of questions," Harvey added, "and that's an area where you have to be really skeptical because public corruption cases are exactly what they [DOJ officials] have people investigating all the time. That's one of their big things. So why did they pull out? It's a real black hole."
Gehrke noted the unusual circumstance that FBI agents continued to work with local authorities and, in fact, did most of the investigative work after the DOJ bowed out.
The split of the federal agencies is "pretty curious," Gehrke said. "We haven't quite answered that one yet. I know that's not a very satisfactory answer but I think we want to keep looking."
The Tribune team covering the ongoing story includes courts reporter Marissa Lang, who has been writing most of the pieces lately as the criminal cases against Swallow and Shurtleff proceed.
She described the scene July 30 as the two stood together for their initial court appearance.
"Kind of a still came over the courtroom," Lang said. "All the lawyers there, the state officials and media realized they were witnessing something very unique: These two former Utah attorneys general up answering these felony charges. No one has seen anything like it."
If convicted on all counts, each of the men could face up to 30 years in prison. Both proclaim their innocence.
Between such moments of history in the making, bursts of anxiety and adrenaline, the reporters also shared a few of the more absurd tangents of the story.
During that first court appearance, for instance, Lang recalled how Shurtleff's wife and daughter "pondered whether they could take a selfie in the courtroom. You can't do that … so the selfie was shut down."
Gehrke recounted the antics of Tim Lawson, a former Shurtleff protégé who was the first person arrested in the scandal and whom Gehrke described as "a character and a half." "[In] one conversation in particular he wanted The Tribune to pay to send him to North Korea so he could negotiate and declare an armistice with Kim Jong Il," Gehrke said. He added, joking, "It sounded like a pretty good idea and I ran it by editors — and they said no."
Twitter: @danattrib