Journalist Profile

William Marsden

William Marsden, Canada, is an investigative reporter and assistant city editor for The Gazette, Montreal's leading English-language daily.

In 30 years with the paper, Marsden has directed its investigative team as well as conducted in-depth investigations into political corruption, white-collar crime, organized crime, and Canada’s underground economy.

In 2000, Marsden won a Canadian National Newspaper Award for his December 1999 exposé on the tobacco industry’s cigarette smuggling across the U.S.-Canadian border. It was Marsden’s eighth nomination for the prestigious award, which he also won in 1994 for his reporting on a professor who went on a killing spree at Concordia University in Montreal. In 1998, Marsden won Quebec’s top journalism award, the Judith Jasmin Prize, for the second time for a team investigation into toxic waste dumping and organized crime.

In 1986, he was the first reporter to expose international money laundering networks of the Sicilian Mafia in Canada and the involvement of Canadian banks in laundering drug money. In 2004, he received the Arthur Ellis award for best crime non-fiction in 2004 for his book “The Road to Hell,” which details how outlaw biker gangs conquered Canada’s underworld. He also recently won his third Judith Jasmin award.

Marsden co- produced “Dead in the Water” for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and National Film Board of Canada, a two-hour documentary which was largely based on the Center’s investigations into water privatization.

His book Stupid to the Last Drop, about the Canadian oil and gas industry, won the National Business Book of the Year award in 2008. His latest book, Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change, was published in the fall of 2011 by Random House and he is the co-author of Angels of Death, Inside the Bikers' Global Crime Empire.

 

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