Victor Malarek
Malarek has been a journalist for more than four decades. In 2017, he retired from CTV’s investigative current affairs show W5 where he was the senior investigative reporter for 17 years.
Often described as a tough crusading reporter, Malarek began his career in journalism as a copy boy at Weekend Magazine in Montreal in 1968. Two years later, he joined The Montreal Star as a police reporter.A year later, he broke a front-page story that would set the stage for his move into the world of investigative journalism. It involved the suicides of three teenage boys who hanged themselves with skate laces in their cells a sorely mismanaged Montreal juvenile detention center over the Christmas holidays.
In 1976, Canada’s National Newspaper, The Globe and Mail recruited Malarek where his work as an investigative reporter over 14 years at the paper garnered an unprecedented three Michener Awards for meritorious public service journalism.
In 1990, the CBC hired Malarek as a co-host of its current affairs show: the fifth estate, where he was awarded a Gemini in 1997 as Canada’s top broadcast journalist, and in 2000 a fourth Michener Award.
A decade later, Malarek joined W5 where his documentaries garnered four Canadian Screen Awards.
In his 27 years in television, he has worked on more than 300 investigative documentaries. Malarek has reported from across Canada, the United States, and the European Union, as well as Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, Kurdistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, South-East Asia, and Central and South America.
Malarek is the author of six non-fiction books including his internationally acclaimed The Natashas: Inside the Global Sex trade, which has been published in a dozen countries. It was followed by The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It.
His first book, a best-selling autobiography Hey Malarek! The True Story of a Street Kid who Made it was published in 1984 and adapted four years later into movie titled: Malarek, and a TV drama series on CBC called Urban Angel.
He has also written two mystery fictions: Orphanage 41, and his most recent, Wheat$shaft.
A second feature movie called Target Number One,starring Josh Hartnett in the role of Malarek, was released in July, 2020 in Canada, the US and Britain.
