environment, allowing cocaine to be brought to Borneo on its ships, bribing foreign officials, evading foreign nations' laws on land ownership, forcibly preventing its workers from unionizing, and a host of other misdeeds. Chiquita denied all the allegations, and sued after it was revealed that Gallagher had repeatedly hacked into Chiquita's voicemail system. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate, because the elected prosecutor at the time had ties to Carl Lindner, Jr. Gallagher had claimed to have obtained over 2,000 voicemails from a Chiquita executive, but in truth he had obtained them by hacking into Chiquita's voicemail system as often as 35 times a day. He had continued hacking into the system despite being explicitly directed not to do so by editors and lawyers. According to McWhirter, he also refused to give straight answers about his source to editors and outside lawyers–facts that aroused the suspicions of McWhirter and other reporters. Six weeks after the stories ran, Gannett reached a settlement with Chiquita, averting a lawsuit. Under the terms of the settlement, on 28 June 1998, the Enquirer retracted the entire series of stories and published a front-page apology saying it had "become convinced that [the published] accusations and conclusions are untrue and created a false and misleading impression of Chiquita's business practices". The Enquirer also agreed to pay a multi-million-dollar settlement. The exact amount was not disclosed, but Chiquita's annual report mentions "a cash settlement in excess of $10 million". Gallagher was fired and prosecuted and the paper's editor, Lawrence K. Beaupre, was transferred to the Gannett's headquarters amid allegations that he ignored the paper's usual procedures on fact-checking. In an article examining the Chiquita series, Salon.com said the "Chiquita Secrets Revealed" series "presents a damning, carefully documented array of charges, most of them 'untainted' by those purloined executive voice mails." Payments to foreign terrorist groups In the 1990s and early 2000s, faced with an unstable political situation in Colombia, Chiquita and several other corporations including the Dole Food Company, Fresh Del Monte Produce and Hyundai Motor Corporation made payments to paramilitary organizations in the country, most notably the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Chiquita paid the AUC $1.7 million in a ten-year period. Although official accounts from the company state they only made these payments as the AUC was extorting payments from Chiquita in order to ensure their security, these claims are disputed as Chiquita also