Andy Furillo

Andy Furillo

Andy Furillo has been in the newspaper business since 1972 when he began as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He went on to work as a sportswriter in 1974 for the Downey Southeast News and spent the following six years with the Goleta Valley Today and the Santa Barbara News-Press. In 1980, he shifted to news reporting and for the next 35 years focused on criminal justice issues with the Santa Maria Times, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner and, since 1991, the Sacramento Bee. Furillo won the 2002 Broun Award for his reporting on a Sacramento neighborhood’s descent into one of the most crime-ridden areas of town. He won other national journalism awards for his coverage of L.A. street gangs, California’s prison crisis, and the implementation of the state’s “three-strikes” sentencing law. In 2015, the Sacramento Bee made him a sports columnist. He lives in Davis, CA.