An Honor Roll

How this works · And why it works

Good, decent people

doing the right thing.

The PFC American Patriot Wall of Fame honors good, decent people who do the right thing. They take their job seriously. They do not bend to the Corrupt Blob.

The names on it are law enforcement officers who pursued cases against systemic corruption. Whistleblowers who lost their careers documenting wrongdoing. Journalists who pursued stories the Blob tried to bury. Family members and survivors who refused to be silenced. Elected officials who used their oversight authority even when the institutional pressure was to look away. Detectives, chiefs, prosecutors, reporters, and editors whose work makes America's institutions worth fighting for at all.

They did the right thing.

By children. By their communities. By the country. They took their job seriously when nothing required them to.

They refused to look away.

When the moment came — and the institutional pressure was to bend — they kept building the case anyway.

They refused to be bought.

Returned donations. Walked away from offers. Took the harder path because the easier path was compromised.

They refused to bend the knee.

Detectives, chiefs, prosecutors, reporters, editors, whistleblowers, survivors. The standard is the same for all of them.

The Honor Roll · entries

On the record. By name.

Patriot no. 001

PFC · American Patriot Wall of Fame ·

Michael Reiter was the Chief of the Palm Beach Police Department when the 2005 Jeffrey Epstein investigation began — and he refused to let the case go.

Reiter was a twenty-plus-year veteran of the department, an experienced administrator of a wealthy island police force that had handled sensational cases involving the rich and powerful before — from heiress murders to the William Kennedy Smith rape case. To him, Jeffrey Epstein was not any more formidable than any of the other 8,000 wealthy and powerful people living on his island.

He assigned the case to Detective Joseph Recarey. He backed his detective through two years of one of the most complex investigations of his career. He returned a $90,000 donation Epstein had made to the Palm Beach Police Department shortly after the investigation began, refusing to allow even the appearance of compromise.

When Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer began to pressure his department to downgrade or drop the case, Reiter publicly opposed it. When the prosecutors began to dodge his calls and emails, leak his investigators' evidence to Epstein's defense attorneys, and drag their feet on subpoenas, Reiter refused to let it go. He pursued the case as far as a local police chief could pursue it.

He did not get the prosecution his department had built. He did get one of the most thoroughly documented sex trafficking investigations in modern American law enforcement history on the record — where it would later be picked up by Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, and where it would ultimately help force the federal reckoning that came in 2019.

▸ What the record shows

Honor Roll Pathway

Nominate

a Patriot.

A cop. A whistleblower. A reporter. A survivor. A family member. Someone, somewhere, who took the harder road and did the right thing.

Posthumous nominations welcome.

Family approval requested where applicable.