Jelter Meers

Jelter Meers is an editorial coordinator for the Rainforest Investigations Network at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He started as an investigative reporter at the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting in Illinois, where he wrote accountability stories on housing, migrant labor, and big agriculture.

He joined the University of Illinois’ Investigative Journalism Education Consortium as a researcher and later became an assistant editor, collecting resources for students, reporters and educators and promoting collaborations between educators and
professionals.

After a year of reporting on human trafficking and the migrant crisis in Europe, he began to specialize in organized crime and money laundering. He joined the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in 2018 as a daily news reporter and then as a researcher. In 2020, he became the global network’s coordinating editor.

As a reporter, researcher and editor, he worked on projects such as Dubai’s Golden Sands, the Troika Laundromat, the FinCEN Files and Blowing Unsmoke, often using his expertise on uncovering hidden movable and immovable assets, international money trails, offshore company ownership, and transnational organized crime groups.

His investigations and literary features have been published in the U.S. and Europe and he has coordinated speaker tracks and workshops at the 2017 and 2019 Global Investigative Journalism Network conferences.