Text by Sarah Phelan
With Congress about to reconsider a media shield bill, here’s another reason why legislators should protect reporters from being forced to reveal confidential sources: it could help prevent reporters from getting mugged by the folks who they might otherwise meet in prison while being held in contempt for refusing to reveal their sources.
That at least seems to be the take away message from the February 4 mugging of Josh Wolf, who says he was attacked outside Volare’s Pizza on Haight Street by Terrell Trammell, 28, who he met when both were inmates of Dublin Federal Correction Center.
Wolf, who spent a record-breaking 226 days in prison for protecting source materials from then US Attorney Kevin Ryan, who has since become Mayor Gavin Newsom’s director of Criminal Justice, wrote about the attack in the Palo Alto Daily Post, where he works as a reporter.
Trammel was in Dublin at the same time as Wolf, following a series of violent events that included Page Street Mob members trying to murder Trammel in 2004, in retaliation for the murder of mob member Eugene Hill.
But on the night of February 4, both Wolf and Trammell were “free”, when Wolf ran into Trammell while waiting for food at Volare’s Pizza.
‘I talked to him about Greg Anderson,” Wolf recalls, referring to the Barry Bonds’ trainer, who was also at Dublin during Wolf’s tenure, ” and how I’d heard they were going after his wife,” Wolf recalls, And who has the better pizza in town. He asked me where I was working, and and I asked him, and he said, right here
“As I walked home with a box of pizza in one hand and two sodas in the other, I heard Trammell call from across the street, “Got a light?”” Wolf writes for the Daily Post. ” I awkwardly fished out a lighter from my pocket as he crossed the street. But when I went to hand it to him, I was greeted with a punch to the face. The pizza went flying.”
Wolf also describes how a friend of Trammell’s joins in, and how Trammel reaches into Wolf’s pocket and takes his iPhone, and then runs away.”
Reached by phone, Wolf told me that once he contacted Sup. Ross Mirkarimi about the attack, “everyone was bending over backwards to help,” and how he subsequently found himself in the awkward position of having to identify Trammell in a line-up, but that it was either do that or “wait for him to come back for me, like the school yard bully.”
Asked why Trammel attacked him, Wolf wasn’t sure: the iPhone seemed a likely motive, but then again, Wolf didn’t exactly “follow prison code,” while he and Trammel were inside.
Wolf also noted that while he was incarcerated the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution in his support, but that as far as he knows, Mayor Gavin Newsom never signed the resolution. Fact or Fiction? Stay tuned.
