Finalist: Miami Herald, by Michael Sallah, Emily Michot, Joanna Zuckerman Bernstein and Sohail Al-Jamea

To the jurors:

A police task force from Bal Harbour, a South Florida town known for elegant boutiques and motorist speed traps, was caught three years ago tapping into federal funds seized in drug investigations to pay for police salaries -- a blatant misuse of the money.

Bal Harbour agreed to end the operation and pay a hefty fine. The case was closed by the FBI; the records locked in storage.

That is, until the Miami Herald demanded to see them. 

What followed was a Herald investigation that went far beyond anything turned up by federal agents. In a remarkable series of stories, reporter Michael Sallah exposed one of the most corrupt sting operations in the nation, a unit that spun recklessly out of control laundering millions for the drug cartels, and a band of cops who managed to cover up the troubled enterprise for years.

For three years, the police -- posing as money launderers -- flew across the country to pick up drug cash in deals with the cartels that soon grew into the largest undercover operation in Florida in a generation.

Much was at stake: The Tri-County Task Force, consisting of Bal Harbour and the Glades County Sheriff's Office, said its goal was to infiltrate dangerous drug organizations at a time when cocaine smugglers were finding new routes into Florida and a wave of violent crime swept Miami.

The cops assumed fake identities and set up shell companies to help launder the money without being detected. But it all went wrong.

Through hundreds of internal records, the Herald found the task force members quietly turned the operation into a cash generator for themselves and their informants, laundering a stunning $71.5 million -- skimming millions off the top for themselves -- then returned the rest to the same criminal groups selling drugs in U.S. cities.

During the three-year sting ending in 2012, police never made an arrest or drug seizure on their own, while doling out more than $1 million to informants -- nearly all in cash.

License to Launder appeared in June in an online splash page and series of stories, complete with intricate graphics showing the storefront businesses and offshore banks that were used to launder the money and videos that broke down the errant operation and the complex laundering system used by police.

As the series unfolded, the findings grew more troubling: Sallah found officers repeatedly withdrew cash from the bank -- tens of thousands at a time -- without any records to show where the money went. Bank records showed they traveled 40 times on first-class flights, frequently stayed at four-star hotels in Las Vegas and San Juan, and bought more than $125,000 in Apple computers and FN P90 machine guns.

The story was built from the ground up: hundreds of bank documents and emails betwen the criminal money brokers and the police to provide for the first time an accurate accounting of the task force's spending. In important follow-up stories, reporters continued to strip back the layers of the operatuon to show its relationship with the local banker and a profile story of the man at the center of the machine: Police Chief Tom Hunker, a powerful wheeler-dealer who forged ties with local law enforcement agents to shield his task force from scrutiny.

The Herald exposed breakdowns in major financial institutions, including a bank headquartered in Venezuela that was used by the task force to launder millions in drug money. The bank admitted receiving the money, but challenged the Herald on one fact: The bank said it did not receive any dollars for a customer who later became an assistant to the Venezuelan president, as reported in a December story. The bank said the drug money went to a Venezuelan money launderer with multiple accounts who had the same first and last names. Reporters and editors met with the bank. It has thus far declined to provide the Herald with internal records refuting the information, which was based on a federal government consultant on money laundering, who vetted it with three bank representatives. The subject of the story hasn't disputed the report.

In a region struggling to stem the scourge of drug trafficking, few issues struck as deeply as License to Launder, which prompted the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service to open wide-ranging corruption investigations in October. The agencies were joined by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which began its own investigation.

The federal probe is expected to take time. Tracking the millions wired into hundreds of bank accounts requires a team of forensic accountants. But the Herald's important work has already turned up a host of critical leads that IRS agents are tracking. Without the Herald's relentless digging, the case would have remained buried -- and one of the nation's most troubled sting operations would have never been expected.

We are proud to nominate Michael Sallah for the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting on Issues of Local Concern.

Sincerely,

Aminda Marqués Gonzalez