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September 8th, 2022 
Awake Goy 
Journalist Jeff German is shown on the Las Vegas Strip on June 2, 2021. He was found stabbed to death on Saturday. (K.M. Cannon / Las Vegas Review-Journal /Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Las Vegas police arrested an elected official Wednesday for the murder of an investigative journalist, detaining a county administrator whose alleged misconduct in public office had been the focus of the victim’s reporting.
Veteran reporter Jeff German, 69, a local legend who covered crime, corruption, and politics in Las Vegas, was found stabbed to death outside his home on the morning of Saturday, September 3. On Wednesday, police searched the residence of Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles, returning later in the day to arrest him on suspicion of murder, according to German’s newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
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The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Telles, but they confirmed via Twitter that a suspect in German’s murder had been taken into custody. Clark County jail records list Telles as an inmate with an initial court appearance scheduled for Thursday on a murder charge.
Police initially said German may have gotten into an altercation on Friday, and they were looking for a suspect believed to be “casing the area to commit other crimes.” Telles, 49, had just lost his bid for re-election following the publication of a story by German detailing allegations made by office staff of a hostile work environment. Employees claimed Telles, who is married, was having an inappropriate relationship with a female subordinate, and staffers secretly recorded the couple from afar having a back-seat rendezvous in a parking garage as proof.
German’s piece, published on May 16 in the Review-Journal, said Telles’ office had been “mired in turmoil and internal dissension” for two years because of bullying, favoritism, and ongoing conflict between “warring office factions.” German also obtained copies of the secret videos of Telles in a car with his employee, writing that the footage “appears to show two heads through the tinted back window joining together before the couple leaves the back seat.”
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Telles denied having an affair with his subordinate, and was quoted as saying of his employees: “I think it’s horrible that they recorded this, and they’re trying to destroy my life and my marriage, when I’m actually infinitely in love with my wife.”
In June, Clark County held its primary election and Telles, a Democrat, came in third, losing his job to a challenger from within his office who had spoken out publicly against his leadership.
On his campaign website, Telles called the article “false” and blamed German and another reporter for “trying to drag me through the mud” and “turn most Democratic voters against me.”
“The article was intentionally gut-wrenching,” Telles wrote. “It was so ugly that you almost had to believe it was true. I can understand why you might have, with the writer’s skill at pushing buttons.”
Telles also posted about German on Twitter, writing last month: “I think he’s mad that I haven’t crawled into a hole and died.”
“Typical bully,” Telles wrote. “Can’t take a pound of critism (sic) after slinging 100 pounds of BS.”
Robert Telles tweeted about Jeff German’s reporting frequently. (Twitter)
On Tuesday, Las Vegas police asked for the public’s help with the homicide investigation, releasing a photo of a red or maroon GMC Yukon Denali SUV and video footage of a person of interest carrying a duffel bag and wearing a wide-brimmed hat, gloves, and a neon reflective shirt. Later on Tuesday evening, reporters saw Telles in his driveway next to an SUV that matched the description.
Police served a search warrant at Telles’ home on Wednesday morning, conducting an interview and eventually towing the SUV. Telles was not arrested right away, and he ignored questions from reporters later in the afternoon who observed him entering his home in what looked like a white hazmat suit. The police were back later in the evening, and reporters said they observed Telles being wheeled out of his home on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance.
German’s editor at The Review-Journal, Glenn Cook, reportedly told police that German had not reported any concerns for his safety or threats being made against him.
“The Review-Journal family is devastated to lose Jeff,” Cook said, according to the newspaper. “He was the gold standard of the news business. It’s hard to imagine what Las Vegas would be like today without his many years of shining a bright light on dark places.”
Cook was part of the paper’s team that covered the mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival that killed 60 people in 2017. Cook was best known over his 40-year career for stories about government corruption, dysfunction, and scandal and was the author of a nonfiction book published in 2001 called “Murder in Sin City: The Death of a Las Vegas Casino Boss.”
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