In April 2024, medical staff testified before Louisiana’s House Health and Welfare Committee about just how bad things had gotten at the Glenwood Regional Medical Center. 

The West Monroe hospital had been under fire from the state Health Department over lapses in patient care that seemed to be escalating. The hospital had stopped paying bills for oxygen supplies, the blood bank, and repairs to the elevators that take patients up to surgery. 

Former Glenwood nurse Debra Russell testified that there wasn’t a cardiologist available when a man suffered a heart attack or a $5 piece of equipment she needed for a routine procedure. 

“You would send a nurse to go get it,” Russell said. “And she would come back and say, ‘Oh, Miss Debra, I don’t have any.’ I said, ‘Go to another unit.’…‘We don’t have one.’” 

Glenwood was run by Steward Health Care, at the time one of the country’s largest for-profit health care operators. But its building was owned by Medical Properties Trust—a real estate company based in Birmingham, Alabama, that charged Glenwood monthly rent.

State Rep. Michael Echols, a Republican whose district includes Glenwood, had been flooded with concerns from community members. Echols had begun to wonder whether the high rent to MPT was fueling Glenwood’s financial crisis. He struggled to get real answers. 

Glenwood is just one of nearly 400 health care facilities owned by MPT and rented out to hospital chains. Nine companies that leased hospitals from MPT have gone bankrupt—including Steward, Glenwood’s former operator. And while dozens of hospitals have been sold, entangled in bankruptcy proceedings, or become depleted shells, MPT’s top brass has earned millions.  

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Hannah Levintova and Reveal producer Ashley Cleek dig into MPT—its history, its business model, and how treating hospitals like financial assets leaves them gutted.

Dig Deeper

Read: Wall Street Gutted Steward Health Care. Patients Paid the Price. (Mother Jones) 

Read: The Plundering of America’s Hospitals (Business Insider) 

Read: How a Small Alabama Company Fueled Private Equity’s Push Into Hospitals (The Wall Street Journal)

Read: Steward Health Care Spent Millions on Surveillance of its Critics—Even Amid Financial Crisis (The Boston Globe)

Watch: Gutted: Inside One of the Largest Hospital Scandals in US History (Fault Lines and Mother Jones)

Watch: Spies, Lies, and Surveillance: The Steward Health Care Scandal (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project)

Credits

mother jones logo

Reporters: Hannah Levintova and Ashley Cleek | Producer: Ashley Cleek | Data reporting and research: Melissa Lewis | Additional research: Artis Curiskis | Editor: Cynthia Rodriguez | Episode executive producer: Kate Howard | Fact checkers: Artis Curiskis and Kim Freda | Legal review: Victoria Baranetsky and James Chadwick | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda, with help from Claire Mullen and Julia Haney | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Khadija Sharife and Brian Fitzpatrick at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Ian Gordon at Mother Jones

Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you, and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson, and let me set the scene. It’s spring 2025. We’re in West Monroe, Louisiana. It’s the kind of small town where you stop for lunch on a road trip, and you’re pleasantly surprised. It’s pretty big, live oak trees, good Cajun food, fancy coffee, and a river.  
Michael Echols:We’re heading across in just a moment the Ouachita River into West Monroe. Take a left here.  
Al Letson:This is state Representative Michael Echols and this is his district. Michael’s in the passenger seat while Mother Jones reporter Hannah Levintova drives.  
Hannah Levintov…:You’ll be fine. Tell me more about where we’re at right now.  
Al Letson:And producer Ashley Cleek records.  
Ashley Cleek:I’m not sure whether to call you Representative Echols, Michael-  
Michael Echols:Just call me Michael.  
Ashley Cleek:Mike, Mike. Okay, Michael.  
Al Letson:The three of them are on their way to the local hospital, Glenwood Regional Medical Center.  
Hannah Levintov…:We’re driving up to Glenwood right now.  
Michael Echols:Yeah, that red brick building is Glenwood with the green pyramid entrance.  
Al Letson:The hospital was built back in the 1960s, and once it opened, businesses mushroomed out around it. All along the road leading to Glenwood are red brick doctor’s offices.  
Hannah Levintov…:I’m seeing eye care. There’s a lot-  
Michael Echols:These are medical offices.  
Hannah Levintov…:These all medical, yeah, the dentist.  
Al Letson:Most of these buildings are closed, their lawns overgrown, and their windows dark.  
Michael Echols:There were more. There were a lot more, so like right up here on the left.  
Al Letson:Michael, Hannah, and Ashley pull up to the hospital  
Michael Echols:Normally this parking lot would be just absolutely full of cars, and you see maybe 30 cars here at the most.  
Al Letson:Inside there’s a wood reception desk. The TV in the waiting area is on low and something immediately feels off.  
Michael Echols:There’s nobody here.  
Ashley Cleek:It’s very empty.  
Michael Echols:This is crazy. There’s nobody here.  
Al Letson:The hospital is open, but there are no patients anywhere. No one is at reception. Every chair in the waiting area is empty. There’s no security. To the right is a room with empty shelves.  
Michael Echols:The gift shop doesn’t have any gifts.  
Al Letson:They walk down a quiet, empty hallway to the cafeteria, which is closed.  
Michael Echols:There’s an out of order sign on their main elevator. I mean, these are how patients get to and from surgery and other places. And so when you don’t have functioning elevators, you don’t have functioning cafeterias, you don’t have functioning gift shops, that’s bizarre. You can’t run a hospital that way.  
Al Letson:They walk past the hospital’s labor and delivery wing. It’s also closed. All the lights are off. Glenwood stopped delivering babies temporarily, but that was three years ago.  
Hannah Levintov…:It still says labor and delivery NICU. All of those are closed.  
Al Letson:The other thing they notice, and this is a 278-bed hospital, is that there are no intercom announcements. There’s no sound at all, just their echo-y footsteps.  
 Hannah, Michael, and Ashley spend about 10 minutes walking up and down public hallways before they leave and walk outside.  
Ashley Cleek:This is wild. I feel like we just walked into a vacant building.  
Hannah Levintov…:Like a movie set.  
Michael Echols:Like Chernobyl-ish, right?  
Al Letson:Chernobyl, an empty wasteland.  
Ashley Cleek:I’m sorry, but your face looks shocked and you look actually upset.  
Michael Echols:I’m pissed. I mean, this is terrorizing the health care market. That’s why I called these people health care terrorists. They have blown up our health care delivery system and we are lucky we only have one hospital. Communities across the East Coast have multiple that they’ve looted and left.  
Newsreel:Boston EMS is bracing for the closure of Kearney Hospital.  
 We are learning Northside Hospital in Youngstown is closing its doors next.  
 Shutdown leaves thousands without a job.  
 For nearly 40 years in business, Texas Vista Medical Center on the south side is shutting down.  
Al Letson:Louisiana, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania. All across the country, hospitals like Glenwood owned by the same company are falling apart. Today with the help of documents obtained by journalists from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, we are bringing you the story of how this happened, how profit-driven companies and Wall Street traded these hospitals back and forth like stocks while staff and patients suffered.  
 At the heart of this story is a publicly traded real estate company that at its peak claimed to be the second-largest private owner of hospital real estate in the world, second only to the Catholic Church.  
 Hannah picks up the story in West Monroe.  
Hannah Levintov…:Walking through Glenwood, it felt like there should have been yellow caution tape strung across the front door, an indication that something happened here, something that fundamentally upended this hospital. Glenwood is the only hospital in West Monroe. For a long time it was the biggest employer, so we started talking to nurses, maintenance workers and residents about what they had seen.  
 Can I just ask why you even agreed to talk to us?  
Charlie:Tough to answer that.  
Hannah Levintov…:This is a person we’re calling Charlie. That’s not their real name or their real voice. We hired an actor to read out their interview because they’re worried that they could lose their job at Glenwood.  
Charlie:I would say that it’s just been so much bad on top of negative it just reaches a tipping point. You just get sometimes tired of seeing what you see. And on top that, being told you don’t see what you see and you know good and well you do.  
Hannah Levintov…:For decades, Glenwood had been a busy hospital and for years it was profitable. And then Charlie and others told us around 2022, 2023, they started to notice big changes: doctors leaving, major departments closing.  
Charlie:Well, you lost neurosurgery, labor and delivery, rehab, and urology. All those we had, we don’t have today.  
Hannah Levintov…:And then there started to be issues with supplies.  
Charlie:It was a nonstop escalating buildup of… I’ll just say nonsense to be nice.  
Hannah Levintov…:In the course of reporting, we talked to more than a dozen people connected to Glenwood, and so many of them said the same thing. The hospital stopped paying its bills, all kinds of bills. They didn’t pay the landscaper, so the grass went uncut. They didn’t pay contractors who monitor and fix the HVAC and the elevators, so sometimes those stopped working. They didn’t pay the blood bank or the company that manages the oxygen supplies. They didn’t pay for the aquarium in the lobby, so the local business repossessed the fish.  
Charlie:It got so ridiculous. They ran out of toilet paper. You cannot understand how across the board it was. It was embarrassing is what it was mostly.  
Hannah Levintov…:And it was also dangerous because Glenwood stopped paying some of its on-call doctors.  
Charlie:And it would have to get months out before they said, “Okay, we’re not taking call till you pay us.”  
Hannah Levintov…:Behind Glenwood’s stack of unpaid bills was a for-profit chain called Steward Health Care.  
 I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on Steward. At its peak, the company ran 41 hospitals all over the country. It became the largest for-profit hospital operator in the nation. The CEO, Ralph de la Torre, bought himself a yacht and an apartment in Spain while hospitals like Glenwood suffered.  
 And then last year, Steward went bankrupt. I reported extensively on patients who died in Steward hospitals. So did the Boston Globe. The company got a lot of bad press. Senator Bernie Sanders subpoenaed de La Torre, the now-former CEO, to testify in front of the Senate. And when he didn’t show up, Sanders put him on blast.  
Bernie Sanders:Perhaps more than anyone else in America, Ralph de la Torre, the CEO of Steward Health Care, is the poster child for this outrageous type of corporate greed that is permeating our for-profit health care system.  
Hannah Levintov…:At first, it was easy for Charlie and others in West Monroe to put all the blame on Steward or de la Torre, but there was more to it than just Steward.  
Charlie:I think a lot of people didn’t know MPT was in the loop for years. I mean many years.  
Hannah Levintov…:Steward was running Glenwood, but MPT, Medical Properties Trust, is the company that actually owns Glenwood. In fact, MPT owns almost 400 medical facilities around the world: the real estate, the buildings, and the land the hospitals sit on. MPT is a landlord and Steward was its tenant.  
 Steward and MPT joined forces at Glenwood in 2017 as part of a massive real estate deal, where MPT bought a bunch of hospitals around the country and then Steward agreed to run them. The promise of this deal was growth, a bunch more hospitals paying rent to MPT, and for Steward, a huge expansion and a large infusion of cash.  
 But at Glenwood, Charlie saw no signs that any of the money swirling from this deal was trickling down. We reached out to Steward for comment on this story, but they do not respond to our questions.  
 By 2023, things were really bad at Glenwood and Michael Echols, the state rep, was getting calls from doctors and nurses every week.  
Michael Echols:I mean, they were telling me, “Michael, don’t go to that hospital. It’s a dangerous situation.”  
Hannah Levintov…:So Michael called the state health department. When the state came in, they were shocked at what they saw. There weren’t enough staff or doctors on call, and patients were at risk of being hurt. Three times in four months, the state gave Glenwood what’s called an immediate jeopardy citation, meaning the hospital was unsafe and wasn’t allowed to admit patients until it fixed its problems.  
 By 2024, Michael is at his wit’s end. He hears that staff at Glenwood are being asked to clean the hospital themselves.  
Michael Echols:These are health care professionals and they’re cleaning the lobby. They are cleaning out trash and other things.  
Hannah Levintov…:As Michael’s talking to hospital staff, he’s trying to figure out why Glenwood is so broke. He keeps hearing that Glenwood’s rent to MPT is a big part of the problem, only no one at Steward or MPT will show him the lease or tell him how much the hospital owes each month.  
 So Michael and his colleagues in the legislature decide to hold a hearing. They ask hospital staff and other people from the community to come testify.  
Debra Russell:My name’s Debra Russell. I’m an acute care nurse practitioner. I’ve been at Glenwood for, and I don’t want to get emotional, 33 years. I walked out this past November.  
Hannah Levintov…:Debra is trying to communicate to a room full of legislators, most of whom have never been in her hospital, just how much working there has meant to her.  
Debra Russell:I wrote all these bullet points, but I’m just going to speak to you from my heart. We had a patient that was having a heart attack. This fella, I want to be real general so it’s not violating anything, we run him to the emergency room. I look, the ER doc’s taking over. Things are looking okay. They start calling a cardiologist. Well, guess what? They didn’t get paid, so I don’t even have a cardiologist on call.  
Hannah Levintov…:Debra doesn’t say what happened to this patient, but we looked through hospital inspection reports and federal deficiency reports from this time and found a similar case. In that one, a patient needed to be transferred from Glenwood to another hospital that had a “higher level of care.” The doctor on call at Glenwood didn’t answer their phone to approve the transfer. The patient coded, was given CPR, and died.  
 And there were so many other issues in these reports. Not enough staffing, no one to run the ultrasound machine, no one to put in catheters. They were so behind on their bills that the blood bank would only supply blood if they were paid in cash upon delivery. They had to move a patient to a different bed when the vendor came to repossess hospital beds in the middle of the night. And because there weren’t enough beds, they also had to transfer patients out of state. Glenwood frequently ran out of the basic supplies needed to do biopsies, dialysis, and other things.  
Debra Russell:I don’t know how many of you are physicians or in the health care field, but you would ask for a guidewire. Now, I’m talking about a $5 piece of equipment, and you would send a nurse to go get it. She would come back and say, “Oh, Miss Debra, I don’t have any.” I said, “Go to another unit,” and I’m standing here holding, keep blood from flowing. “Go to another unit. Go find me one. Call every unit.” “We don’t have one.”  
Hannah Levintov…:Michael Echols and his colleagues wanted answers about how things got this bad and who was responsible.  
Michael Echols:Sir, would you introduce yourself, please?  
Jonathan Turton:Good morning. Good afternoon. My name’s Jonathan Turton. I’m a board-certified health care executive with more than 30 years of experience.  
Hannah Levintov…:This is the interim head of Glenwood. At the time of this hearing, he’d only been there about six months.  
Stewart Cathey Jr.:But let’s walk through your model. Okay.  
Hannah Levintov…:This is state Senator Stewart Cathey Jr. and Glenwood’s in his district, too. And these lawmakers want to know if Steward’s rent to MPT is contributing to the hospital’s financial crisis.  
Stewart Cathey Jr.:What’s your monthly payment to the Medical Properties Trust in rent for Glenwood?  
Jonathan Turton:Senator, to be quite honest, with all due respect, I actually don’t know because I have had my hands full focusing on the health and safety of our patient population.  
Stewart Cathey Jr.:As the CEO of the hospital, you don’t know what your monthly rent payment is?  
Jonathan Turton:I do not know right now.  
Stewart Cathey Jr.:Who in the audience is from Steward that can make…can you answer these questions?  
Michael Echols:Sir, you can’t talk from the audience [inaudible 00:14:50]  
 Mr. Turton, who are your colleagues?  
Jonathan Turton:My colleague here today is Josh Putter. His role is the south region president, Steward Health Care.  
Michael Echols:I think that his testimony would be very valuable.  
 Is Mr. Putter going to come to the table? He’s refusing to testify. Okay, thank you. Let the record show the south regional president of Steward has refused to testify.  
Hannah Levintov…:Michael and others are at a loss over this secrecy.  
Michael Echols:I’m going to wrap up my commentary now. Do you feel personally responsible for any deaths or declining care at your facility?  
Jonathan Turton:Yes.  
Michael Echols:Thank you, so that will conclude my questions. I just want to say what has happened at Medical Properties Trust Steward Health Group and Glenwood Regional Medical Center is a disservice to our community. You’ve killed people, you’ve maimed people, and you’ve forced our market into places it should never go. I’m embarrassed that we even have to have this hearing today. It is an absolute disgrace to our patients, our people of northeast Louisiana.  
Hannah Levintov…:A month after this hearing, Steward declared bankruptcy. In those filings, Steward admits that it is $9.2 billion in debt across its dozens of hospitals. The majority of that debt? More than $6 billion is rent payments to MPT.  
 For its part, MPT has tried to distance itself from Steward, but these two companies are intertwined, and for years, they were involved in a series of hospital takeovers that would benefit their companies at the expense of patients.  
Al Letson:Steward is bankrupt, but MPT is still a multibillion-dollar company good at selling the promise of its business.  
Audio:Medical Properties Trust at the very heart of health care.  
Al Letson:An inside look at MPT as hospitals are collapsing. That’s next on Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. We’ve been telling you about a hospital in West Monroe, Louisiana that was so strapped for resources, its CEO admitted he felt personally responsible for the deaths and declining care. But the company running the hospital didn’t own the facility, it was a tenant. A real estate company called Medical Properties Trust owned the hospital building and the land it sits on. MPT is based in Birmingham, Alabama. And the company’s founder, Ed Aldag is well known there.  
Ed Aldag:What I thought I’d go through today is a very brief overview of who Medical Properties Trust is-  
Al Letson:This is a 2011 Rotary event for young business people.  
Ed Aldag:… maybe inspire some of you guys to do the same things that we did.  
Al Letson:Ed Aldag wouldn’t talk to us for this story, but we found this speech where he lays out the origins of MPT.  
Ed Aldag:So I went to New York, packed my bags, went to raise all this money. I got at least 100 no’s, but we didn’t quit there.  
Al Letson:It’s a good founder’s narrative; perseverance, gumption, success after loads of rejection. And for Ed, this is the true culmination of an American dream. He says his grandfather came to the U.S. from Germany and worked as a locksmith on Wall Street.  
Ed Aldag:And here we were, almost 60 years later, and I was ringing the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. And that’s true-  
Al Letson:Ed rang the bell in 2005, which meant that now MPT could sell its stock. And here’s what they were selling. MPT is called a REIT, a real estate investment trust. REITs are companies that typically buy up malls or apartment buildings. But MPT found an undeveloped niche, it buys up hospitals.  
Ed Aldag:They’ve got that asset there in that big box building of theirs that they can do one of three things with; nothing, or they can mortgage it, or they can come to somebody like us where we’ll give them 100% of the value in that building-  
Al Letson:But that 100% value doesn’t come cheap, because once a health care company sells its hospital to MPT, it’s got a landlord and it’s on the hook for rent and many won’t be able to keep up. We dug through bankruptcy documents and found that at least nine health care companies that had lease agreements with MPT have gone bankrupt, impacting more than 50 hospitals all over the country. Nine hospitals closed permanently. Dozens of others were sold or remain entangled in bankruptcy proceedings. And then there are those, like Glenwood, that became depleted shelves.  
 Mother Jones reporter Hannah Levintova and Reveal producer Ashley Cleek wanted to learn more about the company lurking in the background behind these bankruptcies. But as they reported, they found a code of silence around MPT. So many people would not talk, and when they did, they wanted their names withheld, including a woman we’re going to call Samantha.  
Samantha:I told a friend, I’m like, “This is the last time I will speak on these people because,” I’m like, “I’m just so exhausted.”  
Al Letson:Samantha didn’t want to use her real name because she was worried about retaliation. Hannah is going to take it from here.  
Hannah Levintov…:When MPT offered Samantha a job in 2018, it was for more money than she had ever made in her life.  
Samantha:And to be honest, I had never been anywhere like Medical Properties Trust.  
Hannah Levintov…:The company knew how to impress. They gave her a corporate Amex card and tickets to galas. They had a couple of corporate jets, threw lavish Christmas parties, and the office was gorgeous; open and airy.  
Samantha:When you step in, you’re like, oh, this is so beautiful and peaceful. But you spend time there and you realize that it’s a very tense environment where you’re not encouraged to speak up because there are people who are early in their careers and who are less likely to rock the boat.  
Hannah Levintov…:Alex Hubartt joined MPT a few months after Samantha. It was his first job out of business school. He was young and hungry.  
Alex Hubartt:And you’re like, I can be CEO in three years. Not really, but it’s like, you just got a lot of excitement.  
Hannah Levintov…:Alex worked in underwriting, so he tried to figure out how much MPT should pay for the hospitals it was buying. He would check financials, look at how much the hospital made every year and how much other hospitals nearby had sold for. And then he would bring his research to his bosses. Here’s what we should pay for the hospital, and here’s about how much rent the hospital could afford. But all his work, Alex says, it was not reflected in the final numbers he saw.  
Alex Hubartt:MPT has a great educated team of asset managers, but when they do the analysis, come back and bring what they believe to be reasonable and market rate, the executives go a different direction, and a different direction is typically offer more money for the same real estate, request more rent from that, more money.  
Hannah Levintov…:Alex remembers a deal in 2019 where Steward Health Care bought a hospital in Texas for $11 million. The same day, MPT bought that same hospital from Steward for $26 million. And as I started looking into it, I saw that actually from the beginning of their relationship, MPT overpaid for Steward’s hospitals. For example, in 2016, MPT bought St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Massachusetts for $189 million. That is 10 times more than Steward had paid six years earlier. MPT also bought Kearney Hospital for $263 million. That is 21 times more than Steward paid for it eight years earlier.  
 Why would MPT pay so much? Well, according to MPT, these values make sense. Ed Aldag often says that big, upfront cash payments like this help hospitals improve. These purchases, though, also drive up the value of MPT’s portfolio and make the company look more successful to investors.  
Rosemary Batt:What we’re seeing is a clear example of health care being used purely as a financial asset.  
Hannah Levintov…:This is Rosemary Batt. She’s an academic at Cornell University. Rosemary studies all the different Wall Street actors that have turned hospitals into assets; MPT, for-profit providers, like Steward, and the investors who own them.  
Rosemary Batt:And what we mean by that is that a health care organization is not conceptualized in terms of serving patients. It’s purely conceptualized as an asset to be bought, managed for extraction of wealth and sold.  
Hannah Levintov…:Health care that’s bought, managed, and sold like a stock. And that language masks what hospitals lose when greed overtakes care, important supplies, entire departments and dedicated staff, like what happened at Glenwood.  
Rosemary Batt:I think this is predatory. I think these are financial actors that prey on the vulnerable, that prey on systems where there’s very lax regulation and where they know they can get away with financial deals that enrich themselves at the expense of the public.  
Hannah Levintov…:So how does MPT make money if it’s overpaying for hospitals? Rosemary says that this is a key part of their business model.  
Rosemary Batt:MPT is willing to do that because it will be able to charge very inflated rents for a long term, so it’s going to make a lot of money over time.  
Hannah Levintov…:And Alex had a front-row seat to these kinds of deals. He was monitoring Steward’s hospitals and he could see that some of them could not afford their high rents.  
Alex Hubartt:So if you produce zero cash because all of your revenue goes to just pay your expenses, then that hospital can’t sustain the rent that’s allocated to it.  
Hannah Levintov…:Alex says on rent days at the office, there was this intense flurry where executives would be monitoring which companies were paying and which weren’t. And if they weren’t paying, did they need a loan? Eventually, Alex says he stopped believing MPT’s story that it was helping hospitals and improving health care. It’s one of the reasons he ended up leaving.  
Alex Hubartt:It’s really frustrating from an analyst perspective for me to do all this reporting stuff and then, ultimately, when the metrics are not good to just say, oh, well, Ed and Steve will just take care of it.  
Hannah Levintov…:That’s Ed Aldag and Steve Hamner, MPT’s chief financial officer. And what Alex understood was that Ed and Steve would find a way to underwrite a deal with the numbers they wanted and keep the purchase price and the rent high. And there was another incentive to do this. In public filings from this time, MPT wrote that executives’ pay would be based on the dollar amount of acquisitions. So the more hospitals they bought and the more they spent on them, the more money the executives made.  
Ed Aldag:2021 is shaping up to be another fantastic year for MPT.  
Hannah Levintov…:This is Ed on an earnings call talking to shareholders and Wall Street analysts. The company’s stock price is at a high point, nearly $23 a share.  
Ed Aldag:We have successfully executed approximately $5 billion in transactions.  
Hannah Levintov…:To Wall Street, big purchases can signal growth, a company that’s on the rise, and more money for investors. These billions in purchases also meant more money for MPT executives like Ed. That year, his salary and bonuses totaled $17 million. MPT staff would listen to these earnings calls, and for Samantha, the CEO’s message of growth and success was always confusing because she was hearing a very different story inside the company.  
Samantha:Just always somebody was saying, Steward’s broke. They’re asking us for money because they’re broke.  
Hannah Levintov…:Samantha says this was a regular refrain. She heard it all the time. In fact, at the same time that Ed is announcing this massive growth, he’s also telling investors that MPT has loaned Steward $335 million. But he doesn’t say it’s a loan, he puts it like this.  
Ed Aldag:We’ve also increased our investment in Steward by an additional $335 million investment, which provides strong returns and additional opportunities with Steward.  
Hannah Levintov…:What were your thoughts when you heard that from MPT leadership on the earnings calls?  
Samantha:I don’t know. You don’t know what to think. It’s like, well… It’s like being a kid, right? And your mom’s at home, everything’s falling apart. Mom’s at home and then somebody out, neighbor at the grocery store says, “Oh, how you doing?” And mom said, “Everything’s great.” And you’re a kid, you’re like, “Mom, you’re lying.” But who’s going to tell mom she’s lying? You know that it’s not true, but you don’t know how far it reaches.  
Hannah Levintov…:Samantha says she didn’t really get how bad Steward’s finances were until years after she left MPT. But this whole time, journalists and analysts have been digging into MPT’s public disclosures and pointing out numbers that just don’t make sense. First, a series of articles in The Wall Street Journal questions the close connections between Steward and MPT. The journalist shows that Steward is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And Steward is MPT’s largest tenant. So Steward’s survival is essential to MPT. And the journalist starts to connect the dots. Maybe MPT’s loans to Steward are a way to keep it afloat. MPT pushes back.  
Ed Aldag:We have heard from many of you, our shareholders and others, that we should take the opportunity to set the record straight and correct some of the erroneous information that has been published.  
Hannah Levintov…:On an earnings call in the spring of 2022, Ed says that its relationship with Steward was like that of any landlord and tenant. And if one day Steward can’t pay rent, MPT would have no problem finding new tenants, but analysts keep poking.  
Speaker 1:Did you provide any operators at all, financial support in fourth quarter?  
Speaker 2:Do you anticipate a need to provide any additional loans to any of your tenants?  
Hannah Levintov…:All of this starts to affect MPT’s stock price, and we know how MPT’s executives are reacting as the share price plummets. We got access to leaked documents obtained by journalists at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP. In emails, executives at MPT speculate that some analysts are working to together to sink the company’s stock price. Ed asks an employee to make a list of “bad actors” who listen to their earnings calls. Ed writes to him, “I sure wish we could prove the collusion.” And then six months later, something really serious happens to one of MPT’s most provocative critics.  
Fraser Perring:Sorry, I was just shutting the door.  
Speaker 3:No problem.  
Hannah Levintov…:This is Fraser Perring. He runs a short-selling firm called Viceroy Research, and he’s on the phone with his bank.  
Fraser Perring:Okay. Thank you for getting back to me.  
Speaker 3:Am I speaking to Fraser Perring?  
Fraser Perring:Yes, I am.  
Speaker 3:Good. Thanks very much, Mr. Perring.  
Hannah Levintov…:Short sellers like Fraser play the stock market in reverse, betting that companies are going to fail. They do this by digging deep into a company’s financials to see if it might be hiding something. And Fraser’s firm, Viceroy, had been publishing multiple reports about shorting MPT, saying it was a “fraud.” And then Fraser learned that someone had impersonated him and broken into his bank account.  
Speaker 3:It was a very long call. It was over half an hour.  
Fraser Perring:Jesus Christ. Can you tell me what that they used to identify themselves then?  
Speaker 3:Date of birth, post code, and overdraft limits.  
Fraser Perring:Jesus Christ, I can get that data on anyone, you know.  
Hannah Levintov…:The impersonator didn’t take any money from Fraser, but some of Fraser’s bank transactions ended up in the hands of a private security firm. We know this because we reviewed a document obtained by OCCRP. That document analyzed Fraser’s transactions and questioned who he was sending money to. Was he getting payments from Viceroy? Sending money to his ex-wife? And in the months after this call, Fraser would learn that what was happening to him was much bigger. A team was following him and his young daughter and filming him while he watched TV at home.  
 The Boston Globe and OCCRP detailed this in a big investigation last year. They found that it was Steward that had hired the private surveillance firm that was tailing Fraser. Steward, MPT’s biggest tenant. MPT denied any involvement. And when we spoke to Fraser, he said that the surveillance was the most extreme backlash he has ever received over his research and that his daughter still lives in fear. Fraser’s lawyer, Richard Elias, explained what Fraser had been publishing about MPT.  
Richard Elias:The allegations were that MPT was engaging in these transactions with Steward that was really a means to help Steward stay afloat so that they could pay rent.  
Hannah Levintov…:Viceroy claimed that MPT was overpaying for hospitals so that hospitals could then use that money to pay it rent to maintain the illusion that it is a healthy landlord. MPT called Fraser’s criticism defamatory, a giant lie. All of this is in court documents because MPT sued Viceroy and Fraser. By that spring, there had been a lot of bad press about MPT and its stock had sunk to around $7. MPT had started trying to salvage its image. In leaked emails, the company’s head of investor relations asks a crisis PR firm if there’s a way to clean up criticisms on its Wikipedia page, he writes, “without it being traced to MPT or anyone known to be connected to MPT.” Favorable edits on MPT’s Wikipedia appear less than a week later. And while all this is going on, anonymous accounts are attacking MPT’s critics on X.  
Richard Elias:There’s a guy who tweets under the handle, I think, Abe.  
Hannah Levintov…:Abe is one of the most active MPT defenders online. He posted the home address of an analyst who criticized MPT and insinuated that his kids might be in danger. And one day, while Richard is at a soccer game with his kids, he says he gets an email from someone named Abe.  
Richard Elias:And it just said, “If you keep down this route, something bad’s going to happen.” This is not normal, okay? And it’s a little scary.  
Hannah Levintov…:We don’t know who sent this or who impersonated Fraser to his bank, but we do know that the private intelligence firm Steward hired to surveil Fraser also hired people to question other MPT critics online with anonymous X accounts and even a fake Reddit user. We reviewed emails from the firm, Audere International, telling the contractors which analysts to focus on. They call them targets. One of the analysts Abe harassed, he was a target. We reached out to Audere, but the firm told us they could not respond to questions about confidential work. MPT also didn’t answer our questions, but in emails entered into the court record when MPT’s lawyer was asked if MPT was involved with the surveillance of analysts, the company acknowledged hiring Audere, but for different work. MPT settled its lawsuit against Viceroy last year.  
Ed Aldag:I’d like to express my deepest appreciation to all the shareholders who continue to place their trust in our company.  
Hannah Levintov…:Throughout all of this, Ed Aldag never wavered in his public message that MPT is doing well financially and doing good for hospitals.  
Ed Aldag:We pride ourselves on maintaining the high road even as our share price has come under pressure from others who stand to benefit financially from such a decline.  
Hannah Levintov…:By the time Ed put out this video in October 2023, Steward had stopped paying most of its rent.  
Al Letson:Back in Louisiana, Glenwood Hospital is open and still struggling and lawmaker Michael Echols wants MPT held accountable.  
Ed Aldag:Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to come speak today.  
Al Letson:Ed Aldag makes an appearance. That’s up next on Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.  
Hannah Levintov…:So we’re going up here.  
Al Letson:It’s June in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and spring is in full bloom.  
Ashley Cleek:Smells good. Smells really good. Honeysuckle. It’s Honeysuckle right there.  
Hannah Levintov…:Which one?  
Ashley Cleek:Right there. Honeysuckle.  
Hannah Levintov…:The white thing?  
Ashley Cleek:Yeah.  
Hannah Levintov…:Good thing you know plants.  
Ashley Cleek:That’s why I flew down.  
Al Letson:Not exactly. Mother Jones reporter Hannah Levintova and Reveal producer Ashley Cleek are here to attend a pretty important legislative hearing.  
Hannah Levintov…:We are walking over to Rep. Michael Echols’ house to quickly chat with him. So here, let’s go on the sidewalk.  
Al Letson:Michael’s the lawmaker that first took Hannah and Ashley to Glenwood Regional Medical Center. When they get to his house, the doors open, and he’s drinking coffee. He looks excited.  
Michael Echols:I’ve got probably two of the most important bills that I’ve ever run going today. Obviously, the biggest one in my opinion is the Medical Properties Trust, holding those corporate raiders accountable.  
Al Letson:Michael is taking a big swing. His bill would require landlords like MPT to pay a hospital’s expenses for one year if their tenant falls into serious financial distress like Steward did. It would fine executives and board members if their hospitals become insolvent and landlords like MPT would have to reimburse the state of Louisiana for any money that goes towards saving the hospital. MPT’s hired lobbyists.  
Michael Echols:They’re doing everything in their power to kill this bill. I think from a narrative standpoint, they’re going to come and say they have no relationship with these operators, but if you go back and look at these transactions between them where they’re doing these loans back to Steward, this is not a normal business practice.  
Al Letson:Steward is gone now, but MPT isn’t. It’s still the landlord and a new health care company is now running Glenwood. Hannah and Ashley wanted to know who this new company is and whether it’s connected to MPT. Here’s Hannah.  
Hannah Levintov…:When Steward Health Care went bankrupt in 2024, people in West Monroe, Louisiana, were really worried about what was going to happen to their hospital.  
Rick Guillot:The word bankruptcy is kind of scary. When you hear hospitals in bankruptcy, you’re probably not going to go there for care.  
Hannah Levintov…:This is Rick Guillot. Rick’s a local banker, and he was on Glenwood’s advisory board for years.  
Rick Guillot:But then the more we thought about it and understood the process, now a judge will be involved. Now Steward’s going to be told that they have to pay their bills. We did feel a little sense of comfort.  
Hannah Levintov…:Rick and members of a local health care governing board wanted Glenwood to be taken over by a good company, and they thought, “Why don’t we help drum up some candidates?” So they hired a consultant, and the consultant came back with good news. Many local Louisiana health care companies were interested in Glenwood, but they soon learned the hospital would need some expensive repairs. So they got in touch with MPT to negotiate, and that’s when Rick says the conversations turned.  
Rick Guillot:The recurring theme was, “We can’t afford the lease. It’s not feasible. No one can afford that lease, not just us.”  
Hannah Levintov…:According to Rick and others we spoke to, MPT wouldn’t lower the lease and one by one, Rick says all those local hospital systems walked away from Glenwood. Soon after Rick and others were relieved to learn that a company had been chosen to keep running Glenwood to keep it open, it was called Healthcare Systems of America, HSA for short. The news went around town and reached Michael. He had never heard of HSA before, so he called, left a message and then emailed and around 8 P.M. on a Friday, executives from HSA called him back.  
Michael Echols:I asked them about what they thought about the property because they were about to take over and they said, “Well, we’ve never been to the property.” And that is so bizarre that if you’re about to take over operations of a hospital and your executive and your leadership team have never set foot in the building, you don’t know whether the building’s caved in or if it’s operating efficiently. I mean, you don’t know anything. So again, just a bunch of red flags when it started.  
Hannah Levintov…:Some employees told us this was just Steward 2.0.  
Charlie:This just was like a, “Hey guys, we got sold today.” There was no, “Okay, well where’s the new this? Where’s the new that?”  
Hannah Levintov…:This is Charlie again. They still work at Glenwood and again, this is not their real name or voice.  
Charlie:And there was nothing. Everything was still operating under the way Steward did it.  
Hannah Levintov…:A week after we visited the hospital, Charlie called Ashley to tell her supplies were starting to run short, things like procedure trays, even toilet paper.  
Charlie:And we’re having to stop offering services that are pretty important services in the hospital.  
Ashley Cleek:Like what?  
Charlie:Thoracentesis, which is draining fluid off the lungs, which happens in a hospital a lot.  
Hannah Levintov…:To Charlie, it felt like a pattern.  
Charlie:To me, this whole thing has been a big scam, for lack of better words. It’s just it walks like a duck, talks like a duck. It’s still a duck.  
Hannah Levintov…:Here is what we know about HSA. Just last year, American Healthcare Systems, HSA’s umbrella company, took over a hospital in Texas owned by MPT after another one of MPT’s tenants went bankrupt, and the Wall Street Journal has reported that HSA has been accused of not paying suppliers or doctors at some of its hospitals. HSA never responded to our questions for this story, but the company told the Journal that HSA takes over hospitals that are struggling, so some unpaid bills are from before they came in. HSA also pointed out that it hasn’t cut services or done mass layoffs. And then there are the connections to Steward. Remember that guy who refused to testify at the hearing when Glenwood was collapsing?  
Michael Echols:Let the record show the south regional president of Steward has refused to testify.  
Hannah Levintov…:Well, he’s now a regional president at HSA. It’s hard to know what to make of these connections. Michael thinks MPT handpicked HSA because it would agree to pay high rents. Is that true? Is HSA Steward 2.0, or is it just a company struggling in Steward’s shadow? That’s why we went down to the hearing in Louisiana, and there’s a real chance to get some answers because sitting in the third row at this hearing is MPT’s CEO Ed Aldag. Michael won’t get to ask Ed any questions. He’s only allowed to make a brief statement, and Michael tells the room this bill is targeted at landlords like Medical Properties Trust.  
Michael Echols:Folks, all I want is a little bit of accountability for the person that owns the asset. I have a shell of a hospital that is sitting there that was a vibrant hospital with great vibrant employees. People call me crying that they’ve had to take jobs in other places because they cannot continue to serve the standard of care that they think is fair in that facility.  
Hannah Levintov…:The senator who’s running the hearing expresses concerns right away. He fears the bill is an overreach and then Ed comes up. He opens a manila folder and begins.  
Ed Aldag:Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to come speak today and to address some of the inaccuracies that I’ve heard from Representative Echols and others.  
Hannah Levintov…:At first, Ed is just repeating things he said before, that MPT helps hospitals access money that’s just sitting there unused in their real estate, and he defends his company.  
Ed Aldag:We don’t run hospitals. We don’t manage patient care. We’re not allowed to by law. What we do is to provide the infrastructure, the buildings, the financing, the long-term stability that makes care possible.  
Hannah Levintov…:Ed reminds lawmakers that MPT recently put up $26 million to help Glenwood.  
Ed Aldag:When Steward ran into financial difficulties and ultimately filed bankruptcy in 2024, MPT didn’t pull back from Glenwood. We stepped in.  
Hannah Levintov…:Ed denies any connection to the new company running Glenwood. He uses the company’s umbrella name, American Healthcare Systems, saying that MPT did not pick them to run Glenwood.  
Ed Aldag:Ultimately, the court selected American Health Systems through a competitive bid process, not MPT.  
Senator:Can you repeat that one more time just for make sure everybody understood that?  
Ed Aldag:We were precluded from the entire replacement of tenant process during the first nine months of the Steward bankruptcy process. There was a competitive bid process, AHS another entity maybe more, could put in a bid. The courts, the bankruptcy court chose who the operator was going to be.  
Hannah Levintov…:But Ed left some things out. First, because MPT lent money to Steward during the bankruptcy to help keep some hospitals running. MPT was given the right to directly negotiate a new lease with any bidder, and second, there were three bids for Glenwood and MPT chose to negotiate with HSA. So while the bankruptcy judge did sign off on the deal, there would have been no deal without MPT. The questions during this hearing cover a lot of ground. State Senator Katrina Jackson-Andrews asks about the bankruptcies of Steward and of another large MPT tenant, Prospect Medical, and her question gets to the heart of the issue.  
Katrina Jackson-Andrews:So do you accept any responsibility for the collapse of operators like Steward, Prospect and Glenwood’s prior lease, especially when MPT handpicked or endorsed many of them during the leaseback transactions?  
Ed Aldag:No. No. We certainly don’t have any responsibility for the operations that failed at Steward or the operations that failed at Prospect.  
Hannah Levintov…:After an hour of testimony, the committee votes 4 to 1, the bill fails. It’s not even close. For months, MPT hasn’t responded to our questions, so as everyone leaves the room, we try to finally get Ed to talk to us. Can I ask you, I have tried to reach out a couple of times and haven’t had any success.  
 Why have so many hospital systems MPT has worked with gone bankrupt? So far, we’ve counted nine.  
 And I’m wondering if you can tell me why that pattern keeps happening or why you think it’s happening?  
Ed Aldag:I’ll be happy to answer that question when we have more time.  
Hannah Levintov…:Okay. Definitely. I’ll reach back out to everyone. Ed is whisked out of the Capitol. Afterwards, we request an interview again. He never agrees to one. When we talked to Michael, he says he’s not giving up.  
Michael Echols:There’s so many different ways we can attack this.  
Hannah Levintov…:He’s already sent letters to the US attorney general and the Securities and Exchange Commission asking them to look into MPT.  
Michael Echols:Because this is just, it’s not fair.  
Hannah Levintov…:There’s still a fear in West Monroe that Glenwood could close and that MPT would just let it sit empty, like a hospital it owns in Florida or one in Texas or another in Massachusetts that have been closed for years, a landscape of ghost hospitals and a landlord that claims it’s not responsible.  
Al Letson:This story was reported by Hannah Levintova from Mother Jones and Ashley Cleek from Reveal. Ashley is also the lead producer for this week’s show. Melissa Lewis contributed research and data reporting. Thanks to Khadija Sharife and Brian Fitzpatrick at OCCRP. Cynthia Rodriguez edited the show. Kate Howard executive produced today’s episode. Special thanks to Ian Gordon, editor at Mother Jones. Artis Curiskis and Kim Freda were our fact checkers. Artis also acted as a researcher. Legal review by Victoria Baranetsky and James Chadwick. Our production manager is the great Zulema Cobb. Score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. They had help from Claire “C-Note” Mullen and Julia Haney. Taki Telonidis is our deputy executive producer, and our executive producer is Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Comorado, Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.  
 Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember there is always more to the story.  

Ashley Cleek is a producer for Reveal. She helped develop and launch VICE News’ flagship podcast, VICE News Reports. As a reporter, she's worked with This American Life, VICE, NPR and Latino USA. Her work has won a national Edward R. Murrow Award, a Gracie Award, an International Documentary Association Award and a Third Coast award, and she was a 2020 Livingston Award finalist. She has reported stories across the American South, Turkey, Russia and India. Cleek is based in New York.

Melissa Lewis is a data reporter for Reveal. Her work has appeared in the Oregonian, the Los Angeles Times, and New York Times Magazine. She’s passionate about programming, data visualization, open source, Korean food, and libraries. You can reach her at mlewis@revealnews.org or via her website, melissa.news.

Cynthia Rodriguez is a senior radio editor for Reveal. She is an award-winning journalist who came to Reveal from New York Public Radio, where she spent nearly two decades covering everything from the city’s dramatic rise in family homelessness to police’s fatal shootings of people with mental illness.

In 2019, Rodriguez was part of Caught, a podcast that documents how the problem of mass incarceration starts with the juvenile justice system. Caught received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for outstanding journalism in the public interest. Her other award-winning stories include investigations into the deaths of construction workers during New York City's building boom and the “three-quarter house” industry – a network of independent, privately run buildings that pack vulnerable people into unsanitary, overcrowded buildings in exchange for their welfare funds.

In 2013, Rodriguez was one of 13 journalists to be selected as a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where her study project was on the intersection of poverty and mental health. She is based in New York City but is originally from San Antonio, Texas, and considers both places home.

Kate Howard is an editorial director at Reveal, based in Louisville, Kentucky. Previously, she was managing editor at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and spent nearly 14 years as a reporter before that. She is a member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and Louisville Public Media. Reach her at khoward@revealnews.org.

Nikki Frick is a copy editor for Reveal. She previously worked as a copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and held internships at the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and WashingtonPost.com. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an American Copy Editors Society Aubespin scholar. Frick is based in Milwaukee.

Victoria Baranetsky is general counsel at the Center for Investigative Reporting (d/b/a Foundation for National Progress), where she advises the organization on its full range of legal activities, including counseling reporters on newsroom matters (newsgathering, libel, privacy, subpoenas), advising the C-level on business matters, and providing legal support to the board. She has litigated on various issues on behalf of the organization, including arguing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Prior to CIR, Victoria worked at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the New York Times. She also clerked on the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She holds degrees from Columbia University, Columbia Journalism School, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University. She teaches at Berkeley Law School as an adjunct professor and is a fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center. She is barred in California, New York, and New Jersey.

Claire Mullen worked at The Center for Investigative Reporting until September 2017. is an associate sound designer and audio engineer for Reveal. Before joining Reveal, she was an assistant producer at Radio Ambulante and worked with KALW, KQED, the Association of Independents in Radio and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She studied humanities and media studies at Scripps College.

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the wellbeing of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care, and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs, and cat.

Jim Briggs III is a senior sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014. Jim and his team shape the sound of the weekly public radio show and podcast through original music, mixing, and editing. In a career devoted to elevating high-impact journalism, Jim’s work in radio, podcasting, and television has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, IRE, Gerald Loeb, and Third Coast awards, as well as a News and Documentary Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound. He has lent his ears to a range of podcasts and radio programs including Marketplace, Selected Shorts, Death, Sex & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, NPR’s Ask Me Another, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s live music performance show Soundcheck, and The 7 and Field Trip from the Washington Post. His film credits include PBS’s American Experience: Walt Whitman, the 2012 Tea Party documentary Town Hall, and The Supreme Court miniseries. Before that, he worked on albums with artists such as R.E.M., Paul Simon, and Kelly Clarkson at NYC’s legendary Hit Factory Recording Studios. Jim is based in western Massachusetts with his family, cats, and just enough musical instruments to do some damage.

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the music, editing, and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast, and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured internationally as a DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He also worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, as well as for clients such as Marvel, MasterClass, and Samsung. His credits also include NPR’s 51 Percent; WNYC’s Bad Feminist Happy Hour and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker; Wondery’s Detective Trapp; and MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening?. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with jazz, classical, and pop ensembles such as SFJazz Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc., and the New York Arabic Orchestra. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. Learn more about his work at FernandoArruda.info.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.