Philip Sellinger had the far harder task of trying to save the Mirror from bankruptcy, and he rose admirably to this challenge. The day after I left his office, he did indeed summon George Dirk to brief a secret meeting of the Mirror’s board of directors. With Sellinger at his side, Dirk laid out his evidence that Mirror Alert’s editors—all employees of our partner, Press Alert—were profiting from inside information gathered through reporting. They were selling the information to a few crooked customers and trading on it themselves. At Sellinger’s urging, the directors voted to turn the information over to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That same day, Sellinger had Dirk deliver a briefing on the Press Alert problems to Ed Weiss. Weiss decided to rehire Dirk on the spot and assigned him to write an exposé of the Mirror’s ruinous relationship with its European partners. That was easier for Weiss—exposing the mistakes of the business side of the paper. Sellinger was uncomfortable at first with the idea of the paper washing its dirty laundry in public, but Weiss convinced him that we were better off exposing ourselves than waiting for others to do it.

Sellinger moved with remarkable speed to disentangle the Mirror from Press Alert. He hired the best corporate lawyers and investment bankers in New York to study the contract. They found language that would allow Mirror Corp. to dissolve the partnership unilaterally, because of the evidence it had discovered of criminal wrongdoing.

Late Friday afternoon after the stock market had closed, Sellinger issued a press release terminating the partnership with Press Alert. It was just two days after I had been to see him and one day after Dirk had briefed the board. The release also announced that we would be filing a lawsuit in federal district court, accusing our former partners of fraud. Press Alert countered with its own late-night press release, announcing that it was withdrawing its $500 million equity investment immediately and countersuing the Mirror for fraudulent misrepresentation of its business prospects.

That Sunday morning, the Mirror published George Dirk’s lengthy exposé of the fraudulent trading by Press Alert employees. The story was mentioned on several of the Sunday talk shows as a model of responsible self-examination by the press. In the jury of opinion, the Mirror had won: the plaudits for exposing the corrupt joint venture far outweighed the embarrassment of having gotten into it in the first place.