Mark Fineman

Times Correspondent Mark Fineman Dies in Baghdad

By James Gerstenzang, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON – Mark Fineman, a veteran Los Angeles Times correspondent, died today, apparently of a heart attack while waiting to conduct an interview in Baghdad. He was 51 years old.

Fineman and a Times colleague, Alissa J. Rubin, were at the office of the Iraqi Governing Council when he said he felt ill and collapsed, Times foreign editor Marjorie Miller said. She said he was rushed to a hospital, where U.S. doctors "worked on him for quite a while and weren't able to revive him."

Fineman's final story filed from Baghdad appeared on the front page of today's newspaper. It delved into the anger and anxiety of Iraq's business class over efforts to open the country to foreign investment.

"He was great. He was crazy. He was irascible. He was loving. He was wonderful. He loved a good story. He had news in his blood," Miller said.

In a statement distributed within The Times, Publisher John Puerner said: "Mark was a highly gifted and enterprising correspondent who will be deeply missed by his friends and colleagues at The Times. We extend our condolences to his wife and family."

John Carroll, editor of The Times, noted: "It was fitting that on the last day of his life, Mark's byline appeared on a front-page story from Baghdad. He was a classic foreign correspondent. His enthusiasm was boundless, and he couldn't bear to miss out on the big story regardless of personal inconvenience, or physical danger.

"Over the last 17 years, he gave readers of The Times a brand of journalism that was penetrating, rich in color, and accurate."

In his career with The Times, Fineman's travels took him over much of the world. He had been The Times' bureau chief in the Philippines, India, Cyprus and Mexico City. Before moving to Washington several years ago, he had been the paper's Caribbean correspondent, based in Florida.

Dressed in a denim shirt and suede jacket, a cigarette often between his fingers and his blond hair tied back in a ponytail that reached below his shoulder, Fineman was able to move into a foreign society and write about all aspects of its culture -- about the downtrodden, about business, about violent uprisings -- all in a foreign correspondent's day's work.

His work was singled out on Monday by the online journal Slate, commenting on his coverage of a mortar attack on the Abu Ghraid prison late Saturday:

"The LAT's Mark Fineman, who files the best dispatch on the mortar attack, reminds that the prison has been coming under almost nightly mortar fire. 'We've been lucky,' said one sergeant, adding, 'Last night wasn't one of our nights.'"

The Slate account continued: "Fineman also hoofs it out to two villages near the prison -- one described by GIs as hostile and one as friendly. Fineman found the supposedly friendly village plenty hostile -- 'We don't want the Americans here' -- while residents of the hostile village say they had been supportive until GIs began responding to the nightly mortar attacks by firing machine guns into the town. Fineman says 'most of the houses' were pockmarked with bullet holes."

Rubin said in an e-mail to a Times editor this afternoon that she and Fineman had been waiting at a checkpoint to interview Ayad Alawi, the head of the Iraqi National Accord, an opposition group funded by the CIA, at the offices of the Iraqi Governing Council.

She said that as he fell ill, but before he had collapsed, Fineman, encountering a Nepalese Ghurka guard, managed to speak Hindi to the soldier -- a reflection of the time he had spent in south Asia.

During that assignment, he found himself one day in Srinigar to cover the ongoing civil unrest there. He decided that the conditions were too dangerous to drive into the region in a rental car, recalled another correspondent, Steve Coll, now the managing editor of the Washington Post. At Fineman's insistence, the two of them rented bicycles and pedaled into the riot.

"He lived large, he was an incredibly aggressive reporter, had tons of ideas, energy and excitement to spare," Rubin wrote. "I always half dreaded the moment when he would materialize in the Baghdad bureau at the end of the day because as soon as he walked into the room, an hour and a half would vanish in a flash as he swigged beer and told me about every interview he'd had that day -- the great quotes, the new stories. He was a force of nature. Nothing was too hard to tackle. Caution? He wasn't familiar with the word. Passion, he knew well."

Fineman's work brought him many prizes, among them the Overseas Press Club award in 2001, a National Headliners award in 1991, an American Society of Newspaper Editors award for deadline writing in 1987 and a George Polk award in 1985.

Before joining the Times, he was a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He was a graduate of Syracuse University.

Fineman is survived by wife, Michelle Prosser-Fineman of Washington; stepdaughter Harmony Little of Lexington, Ky.; stepson Sebastian Hulthen of Stockholm, Sweden; his mother, Juanita Fineman, Highland Park, Ill., and his brother, Glen Fineman, of Omaha, Neb.