When a respected town justice in the Buffalo, N.Y., suburb of Amherst decided to run for state Supreme Court, New York's highest trial bench, he rented some billboards to announce his entry into the race.

In no time at all, he was called on the carpet by the Democratic party chief in Buffalo's Erie County, G. Steven Pigeon.

"Listen you SOB," Pigeon told the judge. "Don't you ever involve the general public in this process. It's my call. Nobody else's."

And when a veteran Supreme Court justice offered to mediate a dispute involving Pigeon at a judicial nominating convention, Pigeon told him, in the presence of witnesses including Buffalo's mayor, "Sit down and shut up you"

Both judges went on the record to recount these incidents, a rarity, as anyone who has covered courts knows. Judges, at least in New York state, don't say much outside the courtroom.

But we were able to convince these judges and others to go public in The Buffalo News last summer because of the spadework we did in discovering how political party bosses had taken over the system used to nominate judges.

A database we compiled of every state Supreme Court candidacy since 1999, and every local race since 1994, allowed us to go to these candidates and ask some tough questions. Among them:

Why did those running for judge here, even those endorsed by both major political parties, raise thousands of dollars and contribute to dozens of political campaigns when state judicial canons forbid them from doing so?

Why was it that judicial candidates here - and nowhere else in the state - were each charged $7,500 for judicial nominating conventions, when the actual costs were a couple hundred dollars to rent a hall and put out some coffee and doughnuts for delegates?

Why were sitting judges putting the arm on local lawyers for campaign contributions when these lawyers could end up appearing before the very same judges?

The three-day report helped bring down the Democratic party chairman, sparking a change in how local judges are nominated and a pledge from party leaders to stop forcing judicial candidates to raise funds for others.

Before it became a series, though, it had been one of those things that gnaws at a beat reporter, having to get a story in the paper but knowing there's a far better tale to tell if only there were time to really pull it together.

Contributions database

Robert J. McCarthy, the political reporter at The News, kept running across the same thing each election cycle. Why were candidates for seats on New York's Supreme Court - even those guaranteed election because they were endorsed by Democrat and Republican party leaders - still raising and spending thousands of dollars?

He wrote different versions of the story several times, but they always seemed to be buried among other election pieces, lost in the crush of more important election stories.

McCarthy tried several times to set aside the time to dig into this, but the pressure of beat stories kept him from getting to it. He held onto a growing pile of campaign financial reports-the beginning of what came to be a valuable database.

Finally last year, Stan Evans, an assistant managing editor at The News, allowed McCarthy to carve out some time from his beat and teamed him with projects reporter Michael Beebe to work on the judges story.

The reporters hooked up with Andrew Bailey, a researcher in The News' library and our newspaper's database and spreadsheet expert, and got to work.

The first thing we did was download all campaign finance data for every state Supreme Court race in New York from 1999 to 2002 from the state Board of Elections. The board only started computerizing these records in 1999. So for local judges we used McCarthy's paper records going back to 1994. File clerks typed in the data.

We then created a database of judicial campaign finance reports, with every contribution and expense listed for anyone who ran for state Supreme Court. Although the series would focus on candidates in the western part of New York state, known as the eighth judicial district, we wanted to know how judge candidates here ranked with their counterparts.

We also downloaded the attorney directory from the New York Unified Court System Web site. We merged this with the contributions from our database and got a list of all lawyers who contributed to those running for judge. And because judicial districts don't conform to other, more recognizable jurisdictions, we used ArcView, a GIS program that allowed us more flexibility for graphics when the series ran.

Interviewing data

Bailey set up everything in a user-friendly format that allowed us to run any number of queries on anything that struck our fancy. After awhile, we got comfortable enough so it was like interviewing someone. In this case, we asked the questions of the data.

We found, as we suspected, that only political parties in Erie County charged a $7,500 fee for a judicial nominating convention, and that the Republicans had abandoned it in recent years.

We found that we had the most expensive state Supreme Court races in New York. We found a judge without an opponent who still managed to spend $75,000 and hire the party chairman's roommate as a campaign director.

And we found that party chairmen got around the ban on judicial candidates donating to other campaigns through a loophole, one big enough to fit a buffet table through. The exemption allowed candidates to buy tickets to political dinners, some of them costing $5,000 each. So while the party chairman kept these candidates waiting months and months for endorsements, these potential judges kept getting billed for more and more tickets.

Armed with this data, we were able to interview with considerable authority and confidence the judges and judicial candidates. Once judges and candidates knew what we had and what we intended to say, the judicial veil of secrecy was dropped. It turned out they didn't like the system either, that it was demeaning and that judges were being nominated more for who they knew and how much they could raise, rather than what their qualifications were.

After the series ran, Pigeon, who had faced opposition before, withdrew from the race when it became clear he didn't have the votes to stay as party chairman. The new party chairman pledged there would be no more $7,500 judicial nominating fees, and one prominent Democrat ran for judge on a pledge he would accept no more than $100 from any lawyer.

Contact Michael Beebe by e-mail at mbeebe@buffnews.com.

Contact Robert J. McCarthy by e-mail at rmccarthy@buffnews.com.