had won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service reporting on breaking the Bell scandal. The L.A. Times announced the winners of its in-house editorial awards May 2011. The paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning Bell coverage won in the "investigations" category as well as the Publisher's Prize. The Times publisher Eddie Hartenstein said of his paper's Bell coverage: "Robert Rizzo and his cronies, I think, savored their windfall and knew all too well what they were doing and knew they had to keep it secret. And if anyone was bold enough to uncover it, it was some of our folks here. They went to ask the city clerks at Bell, Calif., and the response they got repeatedly was 'Those records aren't available; come back in two weeks.' But they wouldn't accept that ... [W]hen [the lid] finally came off the Bell salary scandal, it was not because of a grand jury or a conscience-stricken official or anything like that. It was because of two intrepid L.A. Times reporters." In popular culture True Detective season 2 is loosely based on the events in Bell, California. References External links Robert Rizzo as street art, from the Los Angeles Times Bell, California Political scandals in California 2010 in California 2011 in California