In 41 years as a public servant, Earl Devaney spent much of his time searching for fraud and waste. He once had a camera mounted inside a stuffed alligator head to film an Interior Department official on a fishing trip in Louisiana, where he was a guest of a company subject to regulation by the department.
The Interior Department, where he served as inspector general, provided plenty of colorful misbehavior to enliven his reports. In 2008, he reported that some employees of the department’s Minerals Management Service, responsible for collecting royalties from oil and gas companies, used cocaine and had sex with representatives of those firms.