Cold Off the Presses

David Berkowitz’s pen pal Jimmy Breslin, best remembered for hosting Saturday Night Live in its disastrous 1985-86 season when it had no idea what it was doing, has died of complications of pneumonia at the age of 88. Breslin spent 50 years with the New York Post, New York Daily News, and New York Newsday laying siege to the occupants of New York’s gilded towers and championing the nobility of the working class, preferably its white male members, one hunt and peck at a time. With a straightforward, blunt style, his columns felt like the meanest kid’s readers ever, such as the famous profile of Clifton Pollard, the man who dug John F. Kennedy’s grave: Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II”. Breslin kept working almost to the end, because he never ran out of the motivation to keep filling column inches: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.” Among the things that angered him, the plight of David Camacho, struggling with AIDS when no one outside the gay community really noticed or cared about its impact, in a column from 1986, the year he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. That same year he broke a story that Queens borough president Donald R. Manes had been implicated in a payoff swindle involving city officials; two months later, Manes committed suicide. Breslin bragged about applying the sportswriter’s creed – skip the winner’s locker room; the best stories are in the loser’s – from the early days of his career. As a sportswriter for The New York Journal-American, Breslin chronicled the foibles of the first season of the inept New York Mets in the book “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” From there he got a chance to become a news columnist, where he fostered his image as the Everyman with the dark wit that everyone wanted to tell their stories to over a beer, even as he befriended many of the city’s elite, who then had to wait for the fountain pen in the back when Breslin felt he had been slighted or that his pals had gotten too big. Breslin shared the real and fictionalized stories of union gangster Anthony Provenzano, the assassination of Malcolm X, Mafia boss Un Occhio, arsonist Marvin the Torch, bookie Fat Thomas and Klein the lawyer. He took a tongue-in-cheek stab at politics in 1969, running for City Council president on the oddest ticket ever with Norman Mailer for mayor. In 1977, Breslin received a letter from the serial killer known as Son of Sam, who had already killed five people in New York and wounded several others with a .44-caliber revolver, and who signed off: “P.S.: JB, Please inform all the detectives working the case that I wish them the best of luck.” Breslin published the note with an appeal for Son of Sam to surrender, but the killer, David Berkowitz, struck twice more before being captured. Though he was criticized for publishing the note, he actually had done so after consulting with detectives, who thought it could encourage the killer to write another note that might bear clearer fingerprints. Not everyone was as big a fan, and Breslin received a concussion in a beating from Jimmy Burke in Henry Hill’s restaurant after a column mocking another underworld associate, in a scene that didn’t make Goodfellas.