Investigative reporter/author/speaker Richard Behar has garnered more than 20 major journalism awards over a career spanning four decades. In 1997, he was called "one of the most dogged of our watchdogs" by the late Jack Anderson—a founding father of modern investigative reporting.
His first book "Madoff: The Final Word,"—the culmination of 15 years of investigation—was published in 2024 by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. (Bernie Madoff ran history's largest and longest-running fraud—a $68 billion Ponzi scheme. Behar exposed the complicity and wrongdoing of family members, and established that the fraud dated to the early 1960s, when Madoff began his career on Wall Street.)
As a speaker, topics include: Madoff; cybersecurity; business fraud; AI scams; Russian mob; China-in-Africa; terror money; anti-Israel media bias; and Israeli-Palestinian hi-tech co-ventures.
From 1982-2004, Behar worked on the staffs of Forbes, Time and Fortune magazines. He did assignments from 2001-2008 for the BBC, CNN, FoxNews.com and PBS. In 2005, he launched Project Klebnikov, a global media alliance committed to shedding light on the Moscow murder of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov and to furthering the investigative work that Paul began. (Founding members of "Project K" include Bloomberg, The Economist, Forbes and Vanity Fair.) In 2011, he returned to Forbes as its Contributing Editor, Investigations. He is also currently at work as an associate producer (and one of the narrators) of an upcoming docuseries on organized crime in the former Soviet Union.
Behar was Editor of Mideast Dig: Dispatches from the Media Wasteland, an online investigative nonprofit media outlet. (It began life in 2014 as The Mideast Reporter, cofounded with investigative reporter Gary Weiss.) The corporate board included magazine editor and media entrepreneur Maer Roshan. Its advisory board consisted of First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams; retired editor and journalism ethics expert Gene Foreman; Palestinian human rights pioneer Bassem Eid; author and feminist Susan Brownmiller; radio host Jim Campbell; media analyst Tom Gross; Israeli journalist Lilac Sigan; former White House official Lawrence J. Haas; 100Reporters founder Diana Jean Schemo; pastor Dumisani Washington (founder if the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel) and Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser (founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy).
Mideast Dig officially closed in March 2025 due to a lack of funding; its foundational objective and an archive of its investigative pieces can be viewed at richardbehar.com.
Behar's travels have taken him to more than 40 countries—including within the sub-Sahara, where he penned a 24-page special report for Fast Company magazine entitled "China Storms Africa" (The article won George Polk and Overseas Press Club awards.)
Awards include the Gerald Loeb, Polk (twice), National Magazine, Overseas Press Club (twice), Daniel Pearl, and Worth Bingham Prize, among other honors—on subjects ranging from terror financing in Karachi to corporate wrongdoing on Wall Street to the Russian mob in Siberia. His work in the 1980s exposing corruption inside the IRS sparked a Congressional hearing that led to reforms, and he was praised by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau for his award-winning articles exposing organized crime in New York City's garbage trade.
Behar was included among the 100 top business journalists of the 20th century by The Journalist and Financial Reporter. He received the rarely bestowed Conscience-in-Media Award for "singular commitment to the highest principles of journalism at notable personal cost" from the American Society of Journalists and Authors—for a Time cover story on the Church of Scientology. In 2001, he was named "Business Journalist of the Year" by the Corporation of London (the city's governing body) for two Fortune articles: a cover story about counterfeiting in China, and an exposé on the Russia aluminum empire of the billionaire Reuben brothers.
In 2002, as part of CNN's Investigation Team, Behar received the National Headliner Award for "outstanding continuing coverage of attacks on America and their aftermath" He exposed a logistics leader of the 9-11 attacks in "The Karachi Connection," reported from Pakistan. He is the only known journalist to have read the classified "Phoenix Memo," the infamous FBI document that warned the FBI about Osama bin Laden supporters enrolling in flight-training schools across the U.S.
In 2017, the Yale Law School's media freedom clinic (MFIA) represented Behar in a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security—seeking Secret Service records identifying visitors to Trump, his family members, and campaign officials during the 2015 presidential campaign. After viewing the records in private, a federal judge required their disclosure, but an appeals court panel reversed that decision. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Behar was born in Manhattan and raised on Long Island. He is a graduate of New York University, where he has served on an advisory committee of NYU's business journalism master's program.