LAS VEGAS (KLAS) – Standing in the back of the TGI Fridays at East Flamingo and Spencer in the late 1980s Jeff German mingled with a “who’s who” of Las Vegas city officials, casino execs, and federal agents—on the hunt for the next big story.
Not far from the restaurant bar stood Jeff Burbank, former Las Vegas Sun reporter, scanning the crowd alongside German who sipped his diet coke and rum, a moment he remembered nearly four decades later.
“Jeff German loved that place,” Burbank said. “We’d stay there much longer than happy hour. He would meet sources there and we just had a lot of fun imbibing.”
The two “desk-mates” at the newspaper would listen into each other’s phone calls, according to Burbank. The calls with sources would sometimes invite one of the reporters, typically German, to cut in if the story sounded exciting.
“He’d wait for me to finish, and no longer then when I put the receiver down, he’d say, ‘I want in on that story,’” Burbank said. “We had a lot of co-bylines until I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Moving to Las Vegas from California in 1987 Burbank said German was one of his few counterparts in the newsroom. The ego of German, who also worked as a columnist, sometimes would draw contention, but at the end of the day, it was about the story.
“He was boastful, but he had great sources,” Burbank said. “There was a kind of a friendly rivalry, you know, and Jeff was a personality.”
Hank Greenspun, former head of the Las Vegas Sun, and Mike O’Callaghan, former Nevada governor, would prove to be powerful sources for German, according to Burbank.
“The caveat, though, was he had to write in favor of their friends and against their enemies,” he said.
Eventually, German left The Las Vegas Sun and moved to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2010. German’s boastful nature would lessen over time according to Burbank who said he still remembers his former desk-mate’s humor and knack for finding a lie.
“He would talk to somebody on the phone, put the phone down, and then start talking about how they were lying to him,” Burbank said. “Those were really fun years.”
