Bob Greene

For the last three decades, Greene was a columnist and veritable institution at Chicago Tribune. That is, before a woman stepped forward and said she had sex with the columnist during the 1980s, when she was a teenager, and he was on the job.

Greene resigned due to the controversy in September 2002, admitted he had a problem with womanizing and promptly disappeared.

That is, until March of 2003, six months after he quit the Trib. In an interview with Esquire's Bill Zehme, Greene said his life has been reduced to hiding out in his condominium and carting around his old work paraphernalia stuffed into his briefcase, including keepsakes and clips, to remind him of the life he used to have.

Janet Cooke

Cooke is the grand dame of fabrication, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 while at the Washington Post for writing a September 1980 tale about "Jimmy," an 8-year-old heroin addict, that proved too good to be true. Cooke resigned from

the Post and left for France in 1985, ducking the press for more than a decade, never explaining her side of the story that ended her career.

By the time 1996 rolled around, Cooke was making $6 an hour working the Liz Claiborne counter at a department store in Kalamazoo, Mich. That year, she worked with an ex-boyfriend to tell her side of the story in GQ and then sold the movie rights for a six-figure sum, but the rehabilitation effort did little to resurrect a writing career as Cooke had hoped. The movie remains unmade.

Jonathan Broder

This former Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent resigned in March 1988 after a story about the West Bank contained passages and phrases from a similar story by Joel Greenberg, who wrote for the Jerusalem Post. The Tribune withdrew its

Pulitzer nomination of Broder's work in 1987, but the Jerusalem Post itself defended Broder and Trib editors were openly sympathetic, allowing that exhaustion from his hard work may have caused the slip.

Recognized as one of the best foreign correspondents working in the business, Broder's gaffe proved inconsequential to his career afterwards. Broder has since gone on to write regularly for Salon, teach journalism at New York University and appear as a correspondent for Fox News. In the last 15 years, no major newspaper has mentioned his name and plagiarism in the same story.

R. Foster Winans

While not a plagiarist, former Wall Street Journal "Heard on the Street" columnist Winans was convicted in 1985 on 59 counts of conspiracy and fraud for using his inside knowledge as a reporter to help himself and others profit off of stock moves.

According to the SEC, Winans made just $31,000 from his role in the insider trading scandal -- $1,000 less than his annual salary at the time.

Where is Winans today? The Black Table has more on Winans from a story published Tuesday.

Stephen Glass

As a rising 25-year-old hotshot at the New Republic, Glass took plagiarism to a whole new level, masterminding the fabrication of many stories, not only passing of these fictions as facts, but substantiating this fraud with fake Websites and phone numbers.

When his massive con was discovered in May 1998, the perils of being a young and ambitious journalist were raised and much debate ensued over why he hadn't been caught sooner.

While disgraced, Glass turned his infamy into dollars, leveraging his scandalous reputation to promote the recent release of The Fabulist, a fictional account of the plagiarism and fraud that ended his career. As is the case with everything these days, Hollywood has already filmed a movie version of his life, called Shattered Glass, with Hayden Christianson, best known for playing Anakin Skywalker in the new Star Wars movies, as Stephen Glass.

Stephen Ambrose

In May 2002, Ambrose, a noted historian and best-selling author, was caught lifting passages from other books in his works, most notably the work of Thomas Childers, which appeared without attribution in Ambrose's The Wild Blue. The

charges left Ambrose hurt but unfazed. The author responded by saying that while individual passages weren't attributed, the source materials were credited in the footnotes, leaving him guilty of sloppy attribution and not theft.

Ambrose died at the age of 66 in October 2002, pretty much silencing his critics, who remembered him as a historian that common folks could enjoy and not a plagiarist. Much like the charges against him, Ambrose's legacy of plagiarism has proven to be a misplaced footnote.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

In January 2002, the Weekly Standard wrote a story that said Goodwin borrowed passages from three different authors that eventually ended up in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, her 1987 tome on the Presidential family. Goodwin admitted this was

the case, but defended her actions, explaining the errors slipped into her book as the result of sloppy notes, but resigned her position on the Pulitzer Prize committee as a result.

As with Ambrose, Goodwin's career has been relatively unaffected by the scandal. She still appears on television regularly and is currently working on a book about President Lincoln called A Team of Rivals: The Making of Abraham Lincoln's White House.

Patricia Smith

Smith, who was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, resigned from the Boston Globe in June 1998 after she admitted to making up most or all of four different columns. The resignation was met with criticism by those, especially Harvard law

professor Alan Dershowitz, who felt the race there was a double standard at play. Earlier, the Globe had protected Mike Barnicle, a white and politically connected columnist, from charges of plagiarism and worked to clear his name in the weeks following Smiths' departure.

Ultimately, Smith's career in journalism ended as a result of the fiasco and her marriage ended. The American Society of Newspaper Editors took back her distinguished writing award. Today, Smith is a highly respected contemporary poet with three volumes of work to her credit.

(NOTE: A friend of Smith's wrote in to dispute our earlier claim that her health suffered in the wake of the scandal -- she lost weight, but wasn't ill -- and said that Smith, in addition to reading her poetry, has a variety of books in the works, including a bio of Harriet Tubman and a children's book.)

Mike Barnicle

Although the Globe initially defended Barnicle, saying a review of his work turned up no instances of plagiarism, the paper switched positions in August 1998 after another review turned up some problems. Specifically, that he borrowed jokes from

George Carlin's book, Brain Droppings, and may have fabricated a 1995 column about two cancer-stricken boys.

While never admitting fault, Barnicle resigned from the paper and had a stable of high-powered media names, including Larry King and Tim Russert, publicly defend him. The scandal did little to harm his career and may have even advanced it some, with Barnicle making the move to the New York Daily News and raising his profile with more national TV exposure, including stints as the guest host of Hardball.

Marcia Stepanek

BusinessWeek fired Stepanek in January 2001 for allegedly lifting materials from the Washington Post. Her report on Pharmatrak from October 2000 looked oddly similar to one in the Post from August of that year. Stepanek denied the charges,

countering that she did her own reporting, never read the Post's story before writing her own and claimed sloppy notes, not malice, were behind her errors.

Three months after leaving BusinessWeek, Stepanek became the executive editor of CIO Insight, a Ziff-Davis publication. In the three years since, she has remained with the magazine, regularly writing and covering a variety of issues in the business-to-business space.

Julie Amparano

In August 1999, the Arizona Republic fired Amparano, who wrote a thrice weekly column, for suspicion of fabricating sources, including one named "Jennifer Morgan," who was used in four different stories. Amparano has strongly denied any

fabrications, hired a lawyer and said the paper had trouble tracking down her sources, in part, because they were "real people" from the street who can be hard to find.

In the nearly four years since being dismissed from the Republic, Amparano's profile has lowered dramatically. For a couple years after the scandal, Amparano remained a board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. In May 2000, with her husband James Garcia, she helped launch PoliticoNews.com, a site covering Latino news issues, which was renamed AmericanLatino.net in late 2001.

Jayson Blair

Blair, a 27-year-old reporter, lifted sources and quotes from other reporters while covering a wide array of topics for the New York Times. His career advanced despite repeated warnings of plagiarism, touching off a wider controversy regarding credibility

both inside and outside the Times that may take years to sort out.

Although Blair has been huddling with a literary agent and even the producer of "A Current Affair" in recent weeks, many opine that his career in journalism is as good as dead. As the previous 11 examples show, anything can happen.

His future remains uncertain.