Jelter Meers

Jelter Meers is the Research Editor of the Pulitzer Center's Environment Investigations Unit, which includes the Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) and Oceans initiative. 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. 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, using his expertise to uncover hidden assets, international money trails, offshore company ownership, and transnational organized crime groups. Before becoming a research editor, he was the editorial coordinator of the Rainforest Investigations Network and helped RIN Fellows deepen their investigations by tracking supply chains and finding the ultimate beneficial owners of companies linked to deforestation.