John Valenti

John Valenti is an award-winning journalist, whose career spans four decades at Newsday. He's been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize nine times -- for stories reported in 1987, 1993, 1995 and 1997 as a sports reporter for Newsday; for stories reported in 2003, 2006, 2011 and 2012 as a news reporter for Newsday -- and took First Place in the national Associated Press Sports Editors competition for Best Enterprise Reporting in 1996 and First Place from the APSE for Best Investigative Reporting in 1997. He was the lead columnist on Newsday's ground-breaking "Death on the Roads" series that earned the prestigious Society of the Silurians Community Service Award in 2004, was part of a team that took First Place in the 2007 Silurians competition for "Death of a Yankee," the reporting of the plane crash that killed New York Yankees pitcher Cory Liddle, and the 2012 First Place award by Silurians for Online Breaking News coverage of Tropical Storm Irene. He has appeared on hundreds of television and radio shows, including Good Morning America, and has featured roles in the Emmy-winning ESPN 30-for-30 documentary Big Shot by Kevin Connolly of Entourage fame and the award-winning documentary The Legend of Swee’pea by Benjamin May. Big Shot is the story of how con man John Spano managed to fleece Fleet Bank out of $80 million and buy the NHL New York Islanders while claiming to be a Dallas multimillionaire -- and, in part, how Valenti led a team of Newsday reporters and uncovered the truth, resulting in the arrest and federal prosecution and conviction of Spano. Valenti has interviewed a host of high-profile national and international figures, including Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Julius Erving, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Mario Andretti, Wayne Gretzky, Diego Maradona, Pele, Billie Jean King, Grete Waitz, Steffi Graf, Mary Lou Retton and the first two men to walk on the Moon: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. He was a candidate for the 1986 NASA-sponsored “Journalist in Space Project.” He currently is shopping his debut novel, For Nothing is Hidden, based on one of the oldest unsolved cold cases in U.S. history.