New York's Tabloid Heroes

I guess I am just going to have to admit it to myself that I now am a “senior citizen” aka a “ geezer” an “ old-timer etc. but I prefer to put myself in the category of what my fellow Puerto Ricans call “la tercera edad” …the third age. Regardless of my age or racial/demographic grouping I do have the advantage of long-term memory. Accordingly at O-Dark-Thirty this morning the mélange of media stories about Donald Trump’s maleficent presidency stored in the ancient but serviceable hard drive in my cranium suddenly spit out the names of at two of New York Tabloid writers of the years gone by who warned us about him.

So, if you are a millennial, i.e., a member of the generational cohort often accused of being, apathetic narcissists, who get all their opinions from their smartphones, Facebook and Twitter accounts, you probably have no idea who, what when and where these blue collar journalistic war horses were. Therefore as a public service to the pensionless and medically uninsured whippersnappers out there, I will now proceed to name a few of the brave, the proud and often very vane corps of news columnists “Marines” who stormed the slums, political club houses and watering holes of Gotham in search of tell-all stories about a class citizens of l “Generation M” the mobster generation. I’m not referring to plain old-school, Mafai Made-Men but to all sorts of malefactors be they of the in crime, sports, entertainment, political genres.

The first street-smart newshound that came to my sleep-starved brain this morning was Jimmy Breslin. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986 “for columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.” Reportedly he once said that his approach to Big Apple journalism came from his early days as a sports writer. Breslin’s was, “Don’t go where the others go. Go to the losers’ dressing room at all times.” I think he stole that idea from the “If it Bleeds it Leads School of Newbie Newsies. And, unlike most of today’s Columbia School of Journalism graduates who studiously shy away from self involvement in their story telling. Breslin’s columns in great part were about him. One of the best examples his informative but charmingly egotistic writing is found in his reporting of the infamous Son of Sam case. In one of them Jimmie’s closing statement was, “The only way for the killer [David Berkowitz] to leave this special torment is to give himself up to me, if he trusts me, or to the police.”

He also covered the crime bosses of New York and wrote novel named “ The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight” loosely based on the peripatetic and supposedly incompetent antics of Brooklyn mob led by Crazy Joe Gallo a real life Mafiosoc who violated every principal of Vito Genovese’s book on “the Art of Mob Leadership. It then occurred to me in my sleep-starved state that if Breslin was still alive his next novel would be, “The Gang That Couldn’t Lie Straight.” It’ would be about President Donald John Trump and his legion of liars and other assorted scoundrels and vassals like Rudy Giuliani and Sean Hannity who incompetently support the Orange one’s legendary falsehoods.

In a 1982 Daily News column, Breslin said that Trump’s “ civic responsibility in the past consisted of getting tax abatements.” In later columns he regularly slammed mainstream media reporters for their slavish promotion of Trump’s questionable projects. "Donald Trump handles these nitwit reporters with a new and most disgraceful form of bribery". Among his other bon mots about Trump’s manipulation of the media by always returning their phone calls he once said: , “He uses the reporters to create a razzle dazzle: there are five stories in the newspapers in the morning papers leading into 11 minutes of television at night. The financial people, who lead such dreary lives, believe what they read and see on television. Trump is larger than life."

In the brotherhood of blue-collar New York journalists that if now alive or at the very least active, one of the other writers that would be changing the mindset of Trump’s white middleclass supporters is Pete Hamil. He like Breslin also had the working class ear because he grew up and never forgot that he was from what he called, “the Democratic Republic of Brooklyn.” Nonetheless, he accused the Democratic Party of “ moving away from service-oriented politics — you know, your-kid-needs-a-bail-bondsman stuff that was useful — into abstractions, and arguments about Vietnam and issue-oriented politics.”

Early on in Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign he and Hamil had a chance meeting and as fate would have it Hamil, became RFK’s guru on working class America trying to trying to explain to this rich Harvard educated guy from Boston what the working-class neighborhoods were like in New York. As Hamil describes it he told RFK to “not to make politics too rhetorical or about the meaning of life—it was about trying to get a better grip on the world you live in. “ I urged him to do that and, in particular, to work on, in addition to the civil rights movement, to work on convincing working-class white people, to understand that this was in their interest too.”

This convincing is a tall order but I do believe that if Breslin and Hamil were still among us today they could go a long way toward decreasing the hold that President Trump and his near illiterate and hate-filled tweets have on the hearts and minds of white blue collar Americans. The fact is that these two Brooklyn-born sons of Irish immigrants wrote cogent and influential opinion columns that were actually read and discussed by Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack and even if they were not always immediately agreeable, their long lasting hard copy nature, one similarly situated human to another approach provided a chance for reconsideration because beneath it all they sensed their trust me! I’ve been there quality. Clearly, Breslin and Hamil were guys they could see themselves with at a wedding or a wake. Jonathan Cahit and Molly Ivans; not so much.