Jeff Gerth is a former investigative reporter for The New York Times who has written lengthy, probing stories that drew both praise and criticism. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for his coverage of how American firms gave the Chinese access to sensitive technology related to satellite launches. He came under fire for stories about the Whitewater controversy and Chinese scientist Wen Ho Lee.

Gerth attended affluent Shaker Heights High School in Ohio in the 1960s, where he was a member of the Junior Council on World Affairs and captain of the golf team. He was a varsity golfer at Northwestern University where he got a degree in business administration. Gerth began his career not in newspapers but in the marketing department of Standard Oil of Ohio; he was assigned to write down license plates of vehicles pulling in and out of gas stations to find out why drivers were choosing Standard Oil's rivals.

Gerth worked for the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign, investigating some aspects of the Watergate scandal. Then he did some freelance journalism, including an expose of the La Costa resort's ties to organized crime that ran in Penthouse. Gerth, and his co-author, Lowell Bergman, were sued, along with Penthouse, by the founders of the resort for more than half a billion dollars. Before trial, Gerth and Bergman both settled and apologized. Gerth also collaborated with Seymour Hersh of The New York Times, who recommended that the Times hire him. Gerth joined the Times in 1976 and spent most of his career in the newspaper's Washington, D.C. bureau.

Jeffrey Robinson (born 1945) is an American author of 25 books. He has been labeled by the British Bankers' Association "the world's leading financial crime author".

Born in Long Beach, New York, Robinson is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia (1967). While still at school, he wrote for television and radio, including a popular weekly children's show and was on the writing staff of The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally televised daily talk show. He continued working in the media during his four year stint as an officer in the United States Air Force. Charged with running a press and public relations office for five generals at the height of the Vietnam War, he hosted a weekly talk show, scripted and directed several film projects, wrote short stories for national magazines and moonlighted as a disc jockey on local radio.

When his military obligation was completed at the end of 1970, he took up residence in a small village in the south of France. Using that as his base, he vagabonded around the world, writing articles and short stories for leading North American and British periodicals. His magazine credits include Playboy, McCalls, Barron's, Gourmet, True, Ambassador magazine, Mademoiselle, Reader's Digest and TV Guide; his newspaper credits include The Washington Post, The San Francisco Examiner, The Christian Science Monitor and International Herald Tribune (for which he was a major contributor of features during the 1970s). In Britain his feature journalism has appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Independent and The Mail on Sunday, among others.

Walter Lane Smith III (April 29, 1936 – June 13, 2005) was an American actor. Some of his well known roles included portraying collaborator entrepreneur Nathan Bates in the NBC television series V, Mayor Bates in the film Red Dawn, newspaper editor Perry White in the ABC series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, district attorney Jim Trotter III in My Cousin Vinny and American President Richard Nixon in The Final Days, for which he received a Golden Globe award nomination.

Lane Smith was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1936. He graduated from The Leelanau School, a boarding school in Glen Arbor, Michigan where he is enshrined in the school's Hall of Fame, and spent one year boarding at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania before going off to study at the Actors Studio in the late 1950s and early 1960s along with Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino.

After his graduation, he found steady work in New York theater before making his film debut in Maidstone in 1970. During the 1970s, he regularly made appearances in small film roles including Rooster Cogburn in 1975 and Network in 1976. He also acted on television, notably playing a U.S. Marine in Vietnam in the made for television miniseries A Rumor of War.