Joe Shea started out in journalism by covering the 1968 New York City riot the night of the April 4 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., submitting his first article in longhand to the Village Voice where it was selected by editor Ross Wetzsteon over 18 other submissions from New Left writers including Dave Dellinger and Michael Harrington.
Shea rolled a coin across his fingers on both hands while tap-dancing and singing "The Impossible Dream" on the Gong Show in 1978, and also wrote about the experience for the Village Voice.
His most important investigative article was a cover story for the L.A. Weekly in Nov., 1989, describing the large influx of monied Iranians into Beverly Hills, where they altered the economic and sociocultural underpinnings of one of the world's wealthiest cities.
The article had the effect of preventing the appointment of an SEC member who might be open to blackmail and of producing a vacancy that was filled by a history-making candidate.
Joe's collection of Shakespearean sonnets, "A Native Music", was published in 1989, and he appeared at the Zephyr Theater in Los Angeles for a three-week run reading a selection of them.
He won the Greater Los Angeles Press Club's First Prize for the Best Internet News Story of 2000, in which he revealed the inside secrets of a pyramid scheme and was instrumental in securing seven no-contest pleas from perpetrators of the infamous multimillion-dollar "Family & Friends" fraud.
Shea appeared as The Tourist in the original Brooklyn Academy of Music production of Robert Wilson's 12-hour opera, "The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin", in 1976.