Veteran investigative reporter, Bill Rempel, spent most of his newspaper career with the Los Angeles Times, playing key roles in some of the paper’s biggest stories – ranging from its award-winning coverage of the national gas crisis in the 1970s to its acclaimed terrorism coverage before and after 9/11. He was also part of reporting teams covering President Reagan’s Iran-contra cover-ups in the 1980s and exposing President Clinton’s Troopergate controversies in the 1990s. He and his reporting partners teamed in 2006 to expose widespread conflicts of interest among judges in Las Vegas, a series of critical articles that triggered reforms by the Nevada Supreme Court.

Rempel’s journalism has been recognized with numerous honors including an Overseas Press Club Award and a Gerald Loeb Award. He was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

As an author, his biography of publicity-shy billionaire Kirk Kerkorian (“The Gambler”) was a national best-seller. His inside account tracking the fall of the Cali cocaine cartel (“At the Devil’s Table”) was a true-crime best-seller and the basis for Season #3 of the award-winning Netflix series Narcos. It was also made into the 80-episode Spanish-language telenovela En la Boca del Lobo by Sony-Teleset. His first book (“Delusions of a Dictator”) featured his exclusive access at the time to the private diaries of Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos. The author’s books have been published in other languages, including Spanish, Italian, Russian, Armenian, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, and Serbian.

Rempel was born in the Territory of Alaska in 1947, the grandson of pioneering homesteaders in the Matanuska Valley. One side of the family was refugees from Northern Michigan and the Great Depression, the other side had been driven from Ukraine after WWI by the Russian revolution, civil war, and famine.

After moving to California as a boy, the future newsman took his first journalism classes at Whittier High School. and got his first reporting job as a teen sports stringer for his hometown Whittier Daily News. He attended Pepperdine College on a journalism scholarship (1965-1969) and after graduation worked three years at a Southern California suburban paper, the South Bay Daily Breeze. In January 1973, he began his 36-year career as a reporter and editor with The Times.