There, he wrote a series about alleged drug smuggling in Michigan's prison system, for which the Federal Bureau of Investigation accused him of fabricating an anonymous source.
[1] In 1987, Lawrence Beaupre hired Gallagher to work as a special investigative reporter at Gannett Suburban Newspapers in White Plains, New York.
He reported and wrote a series the next year about problems with Fluor Daniel's cleanup of the uranium processing plant at Fernald Feed Materials Production Center.
[1][4] Two days later, on May 3, 1998, The Enquirer published an 18-page, 21-story special section, titled "Chiquita Secrets Revealed",[5] that accused the fruit company of mistreating the workers on its Central American plantations, polluting the environment, allowing cocaine to be brought to America on its ships, bribing foreign officials, evading foreign nations' laws on land ownership, forcibly preventing its workers from unionizing, and a host of other misdeeds.
According to McWhirter, he and his colleagues first got suspicious when Gallagher tried to push for "strange follow-up stories" about the investigation, and refused to give straight answers about his source to editors or outside lawyers.
Under the terms of the settlement, the Enquirer printed a front-page apology to Chiquita for three days beginning June 28, 1998, announcing Gallagher's termination and the retraction of the entire series.
[2] The Hamilton County sheriff's department appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Gallagher's alleged theft, because the elected district attorney had ties to Chiquita owner Carl Lindner Jr. (who previously owned the Enquirer).
[4][10] In a 2008 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, McWhirter criticized Gallagher for waiving his reporter's privilege afforded under state shield law and divulging his sources in order to receive a more lenient sentence.
[14][16][17] In 2024, a Florida court ordered Chiquita Brands International to pay $38m to the families of several Colombian men murdered by a paramilitary death squad, according to The Guardian, after the company was shown to have financed the terrorist organization from 1997 to 2004.