John Wilke

BETHESDA, Md. - John Wilke, an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal who specialized in looking for connections among business, politics and federal regulators, has died. He was 54. Wilke died Friday of pancreatic cancer at his home in Bethesda, said Ashley Huston, a spokeswoman for the newspaper's publisher, Dow Jones & Co. His investigation of earmark deals cut by members of Congress for friends or supporters led to last year's indictment of then-Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz. Another story revealed the way Democratic Rep. John Murtha used earmarks to bring federal contracts to his Pennsylvania district. Wilke's stories also included a 2005 expose on mutual-fund trader Mario Gabelli, who settled civil fraud claims for about $100 million six months after the story appeared. In 2000, Wilke landed an interview with U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who was presiding over a landmark Microsoft antitrust trial at the time. In 2006, Wilke was part of the team that reported on a corporate spying scandal at Hewlett-Packard. The computer company later acknowledged that investigators probing internal leaks to the media had impersonated HP board members to gain access to personal phone records and conducted surveillance of board members and reporters. Wilke began his journalism career in 1984 at Business Week and shortly after joined The Boston Globe to cover technology and business. He moved to The Wall Street Journal in 1989 to cover the same beat and moved to the paper's Washington bureau in 1995.