Some nights there were more bodies than others. Same with the nightmares. The constant crime had driven others in his profession to carry guns. But despite the paranoia his job caused him, Mark Obbie wanted it no other way.

He had always wanted to catch the bad guys. And as a crime reporter in Texas, he had his chance.

‘There were so many murders in Houston when I was covering cops that we would have to pick and choose which murder scenes we would go to every night,’ Obbie said of his time at The Houston Post from 1983 to 1986.

Though he spent only a handful of years covering the police and courts beats in Texas, Obbie – now a professor in the magazine department at Syracuse University and head of SU’s new Carnegie legal reporting program – has spent much of his life uncovering wrongdoing.

But those close to him know him as more than a man with an impressive resume, an accomplished investigative reporter and the former executive editor of American Lawyer magazine.

He’s the kid who dreamed of being a cop. He’s the college student who was always a thorn in the administration’s side. He’s the romantic who married his high-school sweetheart. He’s the farm boy who, after 21 years in big cities, still feels most at home in the woods outside his upstate New York log cabin. And he’s the avid blogger always looking for a news story to critique.

‘It is that difference between just this incredibly nice, wonderful family guy and your worst nightmare if he’s reporting about you and you’ve done something wrong,’ said longtime friend John Mecklin, who worked with Obbie at The Houston Post.

No matter what hat he dons, Obbie attacks each part of his life with the same passion and tenacity that have driven his professional career.

‘My dad is a very passionate person,’ said his 20-year-old daughter, Rae Obbie. ‘He does everything from work to relaxing with more passion than most people are even capable of.’

***

In a state infamous for the death penalty, Obbie saw his fair share of capital cases covering the criminal-courts beat for The Houston Post. He still remembers the first case that made him question his stance against the death penalty: the trial of one of the men who murdered five teenagers working at an amusement park near his apartment complex.

Obbie always loved the rush of hearing a verdict – the racing heart, the fast breathing that would ensue while waiting to hear the jury’s decision.

‘It’s exciting. It’s a secret, and you’re about to hear the secret,’ he said.

Usually, he didn’t care which way the verdict went. But this time it was different.

After weeks of sitting through the case, of seeing the evidence, of speaking to the victims’ families, Obbie realized he wanted to hear the defendant sentenced to death.

Obbie got his wish.

‘From that moment on, I actually thought maybe some people deserve to die for their crimes,’ he said. ‘And I was ashamed of myself that I was feeling partial and that I had changed my personal beliefs about the death penalty. But I just hated that guy. I kept thinking it could have been me. It could have been one of my brothers or sisters.’

***

Though Obbie covered many criminal cases and trials, he focused on investigating the rampant drug trade within Texas. His courts beat became a drug beat of sorts.

It was the ’80s, and Houston was in the middle of a drug war. In 1981, Houston was named the murder capital of the world for its 701 homicides, and Obbie placed himself in the thick of it.

The federal government was cracking down on drug smuggling on the Texas Gulf Coast, and the local drug dealers were at war, Obbie recalls. It was a bloody time.

‘That picture is from a raid in a cocoa plantation in Peru,’ Obbie said, pointing to a picture hanging on his office wall.

The raid before the pictured one all 19 agents had been murdered. He went with them this time, anyway.

‘Yeah, that was scary,’ he said.

***

The grandson of Italian immigrant farmers, Obbie grew up in rural Webster, N.Y. His family had little history of higher education. Neither of his parents had gone to college. His grandparents hadn’t even gone to high school.

‘They were very bright people, and they could have, but it wasn’t in their culture,’ Obbie said. ‘It wasn’t considered where they were headed.’

But for their son it would be different. His parents made that point quite clear.

Obbie always wanted to be a cop, but his parents saw things another way. As a lawyer, they told him, he could still catch bad guys, but with his education as a backup.

But his classes at St. John Fisher College bored him, and he decided to join the college newspaper. Just for fun, he said. Obbie quickly realized this was fun.

‘I remember my first story just feeling like I had this amazing entre into the world,’ he said. ‘That I could just walk up to people and ask them questions and they, they thought they had to answer me.’

The Pioneer, of which Obbie eventually became editor in chief, quickly consumed his life.

‘I remember very, very vividly with Mark, myself and a couple of people, never going home,’ said Doug Mandelaro, Obbie’s newspaper buddy. ‘We literally would be in The Pioneer office all the time, at the sacrifice of our classes.’

When they did leave, Obbie was always the last to go.

Mandelaro described a time when he found Mark asleep at his desk, with the newspaper’s proofs on one side of him and a history textbook on the other.

Mandelaro likened the newspaper office to a scene out of ‘Casablanca,’ with a heavy cloud of smoke hanging in the office air at all times.

‘All of us were chain smokers,’ he said. Obbie even brandished an old-fashioned pipe for a time and would walk around the office with it. ‘We would literally just pound our ashes into the typewriters. I don’t know how they kept working.’

***

Obbie and his newspaper team raised hell on the quiet St. John Fisher campus in Rochester, N.Y.

‘They were trouble makers,’ said Tom Proietti, the head of the journalism school at the time. ‘The college administration was not used to having journalists on campus. Our quiet little Catholic campus suddenly had a newspaper come to life.’

While Obbie worked there, the paper ran several investigations aimed at keeping the administration in line. Pieces ranged from rooms being raided for marijuana to a look at the school’s accreditation process.

Obbie distinctly remembers his sense of questioning authority from the beginning.

‘I just had this instinct to confront people who I thought were hiding something, and I just thought this was fun,’ Obbie said with a laugh.

Proietti remembers receiving phone calls from the college president begging him to stop Obbie and his crew from printing such probing stories.

‘He was concerned that he couldn’t control it,’ he said. ‘And that’s healthy.’

And to his coworkers, Mandelaro says, Obbie was the glue that kept the newspaper staff together – many of whom are still close friends 29 years later.

‘All of us were inspired by his own passion for it and his drive,’ he said. ‘He held us all together. He was kind of like our chief.’

***

While Obbie was working at The Pioneer, Lane, his high-school sweetheart, was finishing up high school and then studying to be an artist in Maryland. The two would go months at time without seeing each other and could only talk on the phone infrequently due to exorbitant long-distance rates.

‘It was really hard,’ said Lane, who started dating Obbie, a senior, during her sophomore year of high school. At one point in her college career, she was in Rome while Obbie was at grad school at the University of Missouri.

Lane still has a box of ‘good ole-fashioned’ letters he sent her in their time apart before they married after Lane graduated in the summer of 1982.

‘He’s really expressive of his emotions. You always know how he feels,’ she said, joking it must be his Italian roots. ‘He wears his heart on his sleeve.’

His daughter agrees. She said that while her father’s ’emotionally explosive’ personality annoys her and her 18-year-old brother at times, she couldn’t imagine him any other way. The way he makes it quite clear when his work has been interrupted with a loud sigh or the way his laughter fills the house when he watches his favorite TV shows (‘South Park’ and ‘The Colbert Report’) – that’s what makes him who he is.

‘What I love about my dad is how raw all of his emotions are,’ she said in an e-mail. ‘I always know what he’s feeling, because he makes it so painfully obvious. When he’s happy, you’d think it’s the best day of his life. When he’s irritated, God, I think you could be in the next state and know it.’

***

Though Obbie spent 21 years of his life in big cities, he always knew he would get back to the country, where he truly felt at home.

Obbie, however, does remember his decade in Texas fondly.

He loved his friends; one even got him an ‘honorary Texan’ certificate signed by former Gov. Ann Richards that he proudly displays on his office wall. He loved the food; his favorite was homemade tamales his daughter’s babysitter would make. He loved the music; his favorite an alt-country style that most people in New York have never even heard of. But he didn’t love the constant Texas sun.

‘I just melted in the heat,’ he said with a chuckle.

And when Obbie moved to New York City in 1994, he was excited for the possibilities, his wife recalls. But 12 years later, after working for the business end of American Lawyer Media and then as executive editor of American Lawyer magazine, Obbie was ready for an escape.

The city took a toll on Obbie. He especially hated the crowds.

‘I can’t even get him to go to the mall with me,’ his wife joked.

He just never felt quite like he belonged.

‘The money, the glitz, the pace of New York was not to my taste,’ said Obbie, an avid outdoorsman. ‘I belong in a cabin out in the woods. That’s really where I feel at home.’

The breaking point was the night he slept on the sidewalks of New York City during the Northeast blackout of 2003 that trapped him in the city with no way to return to his Westchester home, Lane said. He eventually managed to get home early the next morning, but something had changed.

‘He just felt so helpless and so stuck there,’ Lane said. ‘I think something kind of snapped in him and he said, ‘I have to figure out how to get out of here.”

Obbie quit his job and bought a log cabin in Canandaigua, N.Y., south of Rochester and 45 minutes from where he grew up. It was time to be back in the country, closer to family.

And he is much happier now that he is back in the country, where he can work outdoors like he did on his grandfather’s potato farm. Their home is heated entirely off of firewood, which Obbie chops himself.

‘He is a crazy man when it comes to firewood,’ said his wife. ‘He is happiest when it is a winter day and he is standing in the wood with a chainsaw looking at all the dead trees around him. I think that’s heaven to him.’

***

Obbie was waiting for the moving vans at his former Westchester, N.Y., home when he received a phone call offering him a job as a contract professor at SU.

He had already purchased a house 80 miles from campus, and it was only a week before classes would start. There were many reasons to say ‘no,’ but Obbie said ‘yes.’

Having taught a night class at the New School in the city, Obbie saw teaching as a great next chapter for his life.

‘I think part of the reason Mark went back into teaching is it really replenishes him,’ his college friend Mandelaro said of Obbie, who recently was placed on tenure track in the magazine department. ‘It’s very easy when you get older to forget why you chose a career to begin with.’

***

It’s 2:35 p.m. on April 11, and Obbie is waiting for the announcement.

‘Sources: Duke charges likely to be dropped,’ reads the headline on CNN.com, which he has pulled up on his computer screen.

‘They haven’t announced it yet, but it’s going to be announced any minute,’ he says.

He has already spent several hours today working on a post for his blog, Lawbeat, about the news coverage of the controversial Duke lacrosse rape case. Once the charges are dropped, he can search for legal stories on the case to critique, the whole purpose of his blog.

‘This is such a big legal case, and the news coverage has been so controversial that I need to say something about it,’ he said.

Obbie started the blog to help start the Carnegie Legal Reporting program, which he heads, but it was more than just that. He saw it as a way to stay in contact with the world he was leaving behind.

‘I didn’t want to be cut off from all of my reporter friends,’ he said. ‘I wanted to still play in their sandbox … people in newsrooms think that if you’ve gone to teach then that means you’ve gone on vacation. So I wanted to show them that I was still here, still working.’

Obbie is a workaholic, no doubt about it. Just ask his wife and kids.

Even now that he lives in his dream home in the middle of the woods, he is constantly working, said Rae. ‘We thought he’d cool down a little bit,’ she said of the move upstate. ‘But he’s still found a way to work for his job 24 hours day.’

‘The work has not dropped off as much as I hoped it would,’ Lane agreed. ‘I just think it’s in his nature to work.’

Scouring the news is one of the first things Obbie does every morning when he awakes at 4 a.m. He takes a break to exercise and shower, but then it is back to newspapers with his morning breakfast. And during his 90-minute commute to campus, he listens to NPR, scribbling notes or leaving himself voicemails when inspiration strikes for a blog or lecture topic.

Coffee helps keep him going, but he admits the long days aren’t quite as easy as he gets older – he will turn 48 in May. Last night he didn’t get his minimum six hours of sleep, and he is feeling it.

‘I’m just kind of tired,’ he says.

But his love for his family and friends and his passion for his job keep him going. They always have. They always do.

‘Once he decides to do something he throws himself into it, heart and soul,’ Lane said.

Many comment on Obbie’s fervor, but for him it is simply a way of life.

‘So many people are blas these days,’ said college friend Mandelaro. ‘But he really just sinks his teeth into things. He’s like a bulldog. No matter what it is, he just sinks his teeth into things and drags into it until he wins.’

Published on April 29, 2007 at 12:00 pm