William Rempel

Rempel's 36-year newspaper career with the Los Angeles Times began covering Southern California suburbs where his stories about fraudulent remodeling contractors led to state consumer protection legislation. A stint covering the waterfront led to a series of investigative stories about oil tanker safety. Audubon Magazine published a cover story based on his first-person account sailing aboard the Arco Juneau from Alaska to California, a decade before the disastrous grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound. Rempel joined the newspaper's national staff in 1980 as a Midwest correspondent based in Chicago.

As an investigative reporter assigned to the paper's financial staff, he was part of a team that exposed international arms and technology smuggling schemes that eventually became the Iran-Contra affair. Investigating the corrupt Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines, he obtained then-secret Marcos diaries. Rempel's reporting from Arkansas in 1992 produced a series of exclusive stories about Bill Clinton that eventually became the Troopergate scandal in 1993. His role as a reporter and editor delving into terrorism threats led to exclusive reports about Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization two years before the 9/11 attacks. Among other major investigative projects was a report on widespread conflicts of interest among Las Vegas judges that resulted in statewide reforms. Rempel's work has also appeared in the International Herald Tribune, CNN.com and the Huffington Post.[4] He has been a guest on various television news shows, including ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Today, CNN’s Reliable Sources, Entertainment Tonight and Hardball with Chris Matthews.

His most recent book, “The Gambler," debuted as a national bestseller. It is a narrative biography of Kirk Kerkorian, the media-shy billionaire and American business giant who transformed modern Hollywood and Las Vegas. Rempel's first book, Delusions of a Dictator – The Mind of Marcos as Revealed in His Secret Diaries, (Little Brown, 1993), chronicled the former president's rise to dictatorial power. It was revised and updated as an eBook titled Diary of a Dictator – Ferdinand & Imelda: The Last Days of Camelot, (Smashwords, 2015). His second book, At the Devil’s Table – The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel.[5] (Random House, 2011) was based on secret contacts spanning nearly a decade with a former cartel chief of security under federal witness protection. The book has since been translated into Spanish as En la Boca del Lobo (In the Jaws of the Wolf), Portuguese, Polish, Dutch and (soon) Italian. His story was featured in a public radio broadcast of This American Life (2012).