One day Milt Sosin was given an assignment by The News which took him away from Miami's warm winter. He bought an overcoat.

"He kept turning it in in his expense report, over and over again, and they kept rejecting it," Will Lester, an Associated Press political writer, later recalled.

"Finally he stopped. They asked him what happened, why he stopped filing it. He told them: 'It's in there. You find it.'"

Broken into little pieces, in the itemized accounts of meals and drinks and taxi rides, was Milt Sosin's overcoat.