Bay Area News Group reports that Rich Riggs, a former Hayward Daily Review reporter who tenaciously covered government and business, courts and politics for more than 25 years, died Tuesday in his Hayward home. He was 65. Riggs succumbed to complications from liver cancer, which had been diagnosed in early 2009. According to the obit:

A highlight of his reporting career were the stories he wrote about Mafia hit man Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, who lived in Hayward, Fremont and San Mateo County. 

Because of those stories, and because of his slender build, Riggs’s colleagues nicknamed him “Richie the Pencil.” 

Riggs was particularly proud of his 1975 work on a reporting team that investigated the relationship between a Redwood City development company and a Hayward city councilman. The councilman, who approved the firm’s Hayward hills subdivision and building plans in the late 1960s and early 1970s, received what Riggs and fellow reporter Lance Williams described as favorable lease-purchase arrangements on an expensive, company-built home.