Meryl, Murder, Malta, and Me.

When travel publicists' clients kill journalists.

Last September, the publicist for Visit Malta invited me to midday drinks at Ai Fiori at The Langham on 5th Avenue. If it weren’t empty it would still be a perfectly transient venue to tell someone, “I just want you to know the prime minister didn’t kill anyone,” and not worry who’s listening. She was distraught. Meryl Streep, an actress she adores, broke her heart.

She was especially distressed because the previous week had gone so well. I sat front row at a NYFW show for Malta’s most famous fashion designers, Charles & Ron, and a few days later I joined a small group of travel journalists, freelancers from TravelPulse to The New York Times, invited to dine upstairs at The Lambs Club with Michelle Muscat, wife of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat. The couple were in town for the UN General Assembly, but Michelle arrived a few days early for girl talk and a sleepover with her childhood best friend Michelle Buttigieg, the US rep for the Malta Tourism Authority, and a possible distant cousin of the former presidential candidate.

Michelle Muscat posed for photos and handed out sterling silver Maltese cross pins brought over from the Maltese jeweler Antoine Debono. We talked food. The Michelin guide was about to award its first star to a Maltese restaurant in 2020, I learned, and Muscat shared some of her mother-in-law’s favorite recipes. No one asked her about the minor scandals in her wake. How every year she claims to go on charity swims around Malta at Guinness world record speeds, how her wardrobe is furnished by cheap prison labor, how she attacks the media when they inquire about her husband’s alleged corruption. No one asked because no one cared.

Meanwhile, Streep was doing press in Toronto for The Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh’s Netflix original about the Panama Papers. She dedicated her performance to Daphne Caruana Galizia, a dogged reporter who had been pursuing the story months before it broke, and was later assassinated in Malta because of her investigation into links between online gambling and organized crime. The publicist was furious Streep veered out of her lane to make a political statement, and feared I may now no longer want to visit, if I had the wrong idea about the Muscats playing a role in Galizia’s murder. Al contrario!

I didn’t file too many stories last year. Instead I took advantage of free flights and comped rooms to research an investigative feature for Business of Fashion, exploring a certain fashion company’s ties to money laundering and sex trafficking. I loved this brand. Fifteen months ago, I sold this love story to Garage. I was so excited. It was my second story for the magazine, and I wanted to impress.

In my desire to learn as much as possible about the company, I discovered its founder had raped a model back in the 90s. Finding this took work. Even then, I could have left it out, wrote around it. My editors would never have known, or cared. They probably would have preferred it. The rape story was wiped from the internet. Even Interpol stopped searching for the guy just a few months after he evaded his prison sentence. But I was already too far down the rabbit hole, too incensed, and it wasn’t long before I found his shell companies and hidden hundreds of millions in the Panama Papers. So much of Galizia’s work made my work possible.

I had a richer story now, a once in a lifetime story, but not one Garage would publish. Instead of taking another kill fee as a win, I sold a cold pitch to BoF within an hour of emailing the magazine’s founder. I had the promise of a sizable fee and permission to dig, and I used last summer to collect my new favorite souvenirs, research library cards from around the world. A few comped nights at the NH Collection Flower Market in Amsterdam allowed me to visit the International Institute of Social History, where I found a trove of documents that traced my bad guy’s transition from sex cult leader to sweatshop kingpin. A free stay at the Corinthia in London allowed me to raid the V&A Archives for more correspondence.

The publicist for Visit Malta is also the publicist for the Corinthia, a Maltese hotel group. She hooked me up with dinner, a suite, and spa day, during Wimbledon–an investment in my future Malta coverage, and at the time, two months before Meryl spoke up, and I learned Galizia’s life story, my interest in Malta was sincere. I didn’t even yet know the subject of my fashion story was also involved in online gambling and organized crime in Malta. But once I did, I only leaned into the tourism board’s invitation. Why not make them pay, and make them pay? If I could safely explore Malta and find answers for my story under the prime minister’s protection at his own palace, while writing about his mother’s pumpkin pie–win their confidence by inflating their egos–why not take the chance?

Because here’s the thing. Before a tourism board invites you somewhere, you can ask for anything, but once you’re home you have to deliver on that experience. So even if you’re only writing a 400-word Forbes contributor network story, there’s no excuse not to be greedy, push the limits of a tourism board’s hospitality beyond buffets and business class upgrades, and expand your horizons to meet any given land’s gods and monsters. Every story you write should better inform the next, or you’ll always be writing the same story.

So last December I was ready to do something stupid and dangerous, to take a winter holiday in scenic violent Malta, make pumpkin pie with the Muscats, eat at a future Michelin starred restaurant, and poke around a criminal enterprise. The Muscats even sent over a test recipe and reference photos of their homegrown gourds. Then suddenly, on December 2nd, Joseph Muscat announced his resignation due to the ongoing investigation into Galizia’s murder. I lost the excuse for my trip, the chance to find more evidence for my investigation on their government’s dime–that story’s still ongoing. Still, it was inspiring to be reassured there’s some justice in this world, even if it’s not promised in our lifetimes.