Jimmy Breslin: The Voice of New York with Richard Esposito

0:00Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozma St John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. I'm NFL linebacker TJ Watt, and this is my personal best. YPB by Abercrombie is the active wear I'm always wearing.

0:37That's why I reached out to co-design their latest drop. I worked with designers to create high-performance activewear that holds up to my toughest workouts. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in-store, online, and in the app. Because your personal best is greater than anything.

0:58The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America. And Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. From improving emergency response times to protecting against cyber attacks, local, state, and federal governments are innovating with Google AI. This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American Innovation.

1:25Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:00Anyways, let's get to it.

2:08Most of you, particularly if you're my generation, will remember the name Jimmy Breslin, a legendary journalist and champion of New York City. He was a storyteller. He was a truth teller. And frankly, they don't often make them like Jimmy anymore. My guest today, Richard Esposito, another incredible journalist, has written the first biography of Jimmy. And oh boy, was it worth the wait.

2:40I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Ostroy's great podcast, The Back Room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout out.

3:08So joining us now on Open Book is Richard Esposito. He's a five-time Emmy Award winning investigative journalist. He's also the former NYPD deputy commissioner. So there's a lot to impact there as well as the book, Richard. But the title of the book is Jimmy Breslin, The Man Who Told the Truth. And what a fascinating book. And I just want to frame this for you, Richard, before we start the interview. I was 13 when Son of Sam was prowling New York. And of course, you remember those very famous daily news composites. And of course, Jimmy Breslin was on the beat. I don't think there was a person that could read in New York that wasn't reading Jimmy Breslin.

3:48So I just want to set the scene. I was young at the time, but it was a riveting part of our lives. But it's great to have you here. What a career you've had. So I want to start with that. Tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us who you are, if you don't mind, because I think we're both fellow Italian-Americans. Tell me a little bit about your grandparents, if you don't mind, if you remember them. Sure. I think I remember them. Yeah. So I was born up in East Harlem, Pleasant Avenue, which was an Italian-American neighborhood. And my mother's family had come over from Italy in the late 1920s.

4:19My grandfather basically jumped ship and became a laborer in New York. And my father's father was a plumber. And so that's where I started. I grew up in that neighborhood and went to school in Manhattan, went to high school at Fordham Prep in the Bronx, went to NYU. So as you can tell, I wasn't allowed to go anywhere that you couldn't get to by subway. The Italians don't even let you go to summer camp, Richard. You know, we know that you go to summer camp. You know that, right? The Italians are not allowed to go. My mother said you can go to Columbia, NYU, Fordham or any place in Queens. And that's it.

4:52So I was like, OK, well, that's that's my choices. And so that's that's that's my, you know, my childhood in Manhattan, it was, you know, Manhattan was a different place, big as it was. And I thought I was going to teach. I went out to graduate school at Berkeley. And but then I was able to get a job as a copy boy, which is just what it sounds like. You took people's words, their copy, and ran them back and forth. You also shine shoes, bought cigarettes, got people beer so they can get through the day at the Daily News. And, you know, some people go to journalism school and the old system of being an apprentice where they paid you to learn, which was kind of neat.

5:36So that's that's my beginnings in journalism. I spent four and a half years at the news. I became a reporter there and I came just six months after Jimmy Breslin got there. I got there as like a 22 year old clerk. And so that's that's the beginning of my introduction to him and working. You know, my my starting job in journalism was the largest tabloid in the United States. You know, I want to I want to go there, if you don't mind, because I have a lot of younger viewers and listeners to this podcast and they're used to the Internet and they're used to reels on Instagram or TikTok. But when we were growing up and when you were rising in your profession, we had the tabloids.

6:23And so what was packed inside the tabloids, the sports section, top stories, they could have been national stories, but also stories that were important to New York City. There was a gossip column. There was even a horoscope. There were cartoons. I mean, this was the end all be all. And I can just say to you, I think you'll appreciate this. my father had the daily news delivered every day. I would go out to the front of the house and I'd get it out of its plastic wrapper and I would sit down and I would eat a bowl and maybe even a box of Captain Crunch cereal or a box of Lucky Charms. I'd start from the back, Richard, because that's where the sports section was.

7:00And I would go and I would read it backwards like I was a Talmudic scholar, right? I would read the whole thing. And so tell us about that time in New York when the Daily News was read by everybody. And the legendary Bill Gallo, the sports cartoonist, tell us a little bit about the whole thing. You know, it's, in a sense, the book is like, it's a book about a bygone era. When I started, you know, you would go into the Daily News, and if you touched the railing, you got covered with ink. You know, there were these huge presses spitting out a million or more copies of paper a day. And as a clerk, you would take bundles of those papers from the composing room, bring them upstairs.

7:40And the subways, which as you know, now are filled with all of us looking at our iPhones and we're filled with people reading tabloids. And the reason for the tabloid was one, a lot of pictures for working class people who, when the news began, might've had an eighth grade education. Two, very short stories, short stories, simple punctuation, quick to read. And three, you could open it in a crowded subway car. You didn't need elbow room to like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. So you can you could hear it almost people opening and turning the pages. You would read from the back. I would read from the front.

8:17Somebody else would read the cartoons or the horoscope. And that's how newspapers were sold on newsstands. If you went to a newsstand in New York when we were young, some papers were front page up for people who wanted to buy whatever was on the front page and other papers were back page up for people who cared about what was really important, whether the Yankees won or the Mets lost. And that's how news dealers would sell them. So it was an era where that's where most people got most of their news. And news wasn't instantaneous. News came out every day. You know, there were maybe seven editions of the news, 12 editions of the Post, a few editions of the Times.

8:56But all of this, the cycle and the compression that we live with. It wasn't there. And news was distributed from one place out to everyone, as opposed to the way we also get it now, which is we curate our own news. We're in a sense our own editors, which has some pluses and has some minuses. So I guess where I want to go though, is the feeling. Because there was a feeling. I don't know how to describe this to you. Paul Paul Castellano is gunned down in front of Spark Steakhouse in December of 1985. And the picture on the front page of the Daily News is something that is seared into my brain. I'll never forget the rest of my life.

9:38You can't get that from an iPhone, what we were all experiencing. And so you're on your iPhone, I'm on my iPhone. We may be reading totally different things and we have totally different algorithms feeding us different information. But every single one of us was reading that paper. That is, in a sense, something we've lost and we haven't regained in our new media and the way we live. Everybody was reading that paper. So Jimmy Breslin was a voice that over a million people bought. That means three million people every day would see each other and say, hey, Anthony, did you read Breslin's column today on Son of Sam?

10:18Oh, yeah, I read it. What about you? What do you think? Wow, that was something. There was a common conversation. And that was part of that era. Everyone, if you rode a commuter train in the morning, you'd come into Grand Central Station, you could tell where people worked. Some people would have the Wall Street Journal under their arms. Some people would have the New York Times under their arm. Some people would have the Daily News in their hand. And you could tell where everyone worked. And they all had common conversations with large groups of people. and it's not the same even today the New York Times is algorithm driven so you know it's not for people sitting in a room saying what are we going to put on the front page today and that's how those big headlines Ford to City drop dead you know son of Sam turn yourself into me that's how that got written that's sort of the ethos of people having a common journey to work a common conversation at work and the knowledge that all day long you would be talking about these things.

11:20It's something you don't get when you have a hybrid work life, right? Yeah. No, no question. And I wanted to set that scene for people to really understand who Jimmy Breslin was. So now, if you and I were Dr. Frankenstein and we were going to make a journalist in a laboratory, it would be Jimmy Breslin. Okay. The guy's born in the city that he loves. He's raised in the city. He gets educated here like you. And he becomes literally the go-to journalist on the beat on so many different stories. And he's a polymath. He reads everything. He's probably the best source journalist of that era as well.

11:58And people want to talk to him. Even people that he's lighting up in the paper call him to talk to him. So in your own words, sir, Tell us who Jimmy Breslin is. Jimmy Breslin was your voice. He didn't speak to you. He spoke with you. And that is what made him unique. He had all those skills you just put together and he could see the world through your eyes. So if you he understood the problems of a cab driver, his father walked out on his family when he was 10 years old or younger. He understood single mothers. He understood poverty. He lived all of that. And he lived without bills being paid and having a mom who drank too much.

12:41So you had a person who was a brilliant writer. His writing was, in essence, the poetry, like if Yates was a cabbie. He could write poetry that you would understand. And it was your poetry. He connected with you intimately. So if you're building this Frankenstein, what you had is someone who started at dawn making phone calls, didn't stop until the rest of the world was asleep making phone calls, and sat there all day sweating over every word to be sure you would understand what he thought was most important to you. And Anthony, he was only talking to Anthony. He wasn't talking to a million people.

13:21He connected with you. So that's what made him special. So let me capture something. Let's tell a story that's in your book that is so Breslin. He writes a story about the JFK assassination, but he interviews the person that dug the president's grave. So take us through that. So JFK gets killed. It's perhaps the greatest example of what hate can do in a society, right? A president who was hope and change. Everyone goes to Washington. Every reporter who's anything in the country descends on Washington. And they're all going to be there. They're all going to watch the procession down, you know, Pennsylvania Avenue, the horse-drawn hearse, the horse-drawn coffin down the street.

14:12Jimmy wants to show you what it feels like to have a president dead. So he goes to the home of the working man while he's having his breakfast, his ham and eggs in the morning, watches him put on his coveralls, watches him go to dig the grave. He's the only reporter there. And he knows this will give you a window into what the death of a president is really like, a man who's making three dollars an hour to dig a hole into which essentially America's hope is put. And that's that's what Jimmy did. He told this story. And it was a story that also changed how storytelling was done in newspapers. This was not your third person step back objective narrative.

14:55This puts you there. And when Kennedy is going to be buried, the graveder will have to wait, just like you would, to go and see that because there's no room for the guy who dug the grave at the scene of the great grieving. So it is a classic story and a technique that he used over and over again, but never just as a technique. He always used it to a point. I mean, there are many examples of it. And that was just one of the things that made him special. He was in New York when Kennedy was assassinated. And he wrote the next day a story that put you in the emergency room where Kennedy was being operated on.

15:43And you read it. He wasn't there. And yet you were there. He reconstructed it in a way that was phenomenal. And this was very new to the way reporting was being done back in 1963. The feeling for me about him was that he was the center of the city. You know, the politicians, Andrew Cuomo's father, Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch, Abe Beam, John Lindsay, if you picked an American New York poll, they were talking to Jimmy Beslan. They were part of his web, but also the criminals. Richard, tell us the story about the son of Sam and David Berkowitz. And obviously you reached out to him in prison to get some of his commentary related to this.

16:26Yeah, I mean, the criminals knew that this was the guy who would tell their story to Berkowitz. Somehow the serial killer who gone through, you know, came out in the dark of night with a handgun and killed young women. he decided that the person he wanted to tell his story was Jimmy Breslin. So he wrote him a letter, a really dark letter about the streets of New York and that he would hope to see Jimmy again, or maybe Jimmy would get to watch the cops blow him away. So that's a serial killer reaching out to him. But on another hand, when Frank Costello, who ran the Lucchese crime family, was retired, and Joe Vellacci, a mob rat, was in Washington testifying.

17:10Jimmy went to tell the Vellacci testifying story by sitting with this retired gangster while he had his last cup of coffee for the night. And Rossetti turns to him and says to Jimmy, you know, I'm not watching these hearings. My agent said I'm not going to get any residuals from the last one, so why should I participate in this one? And he brings you humor in this case of this mob stoolie taking apart the mob by being able to sit with the gangster who trusted him enough to let him in the room and sit down with him. And he did this repeatedly. He was beat up by Jimmy Burke, gentleman Jimmy Burke, who ran the Lufthansa heist of$9 million from the airline.

17:49He was once beat up by him. But when his wife had cancer, Burke called Jimmy up and said, come over. Jimmy got in a cab, he went over. And Burke said, here's$35 ,000. Your wife needs. I've known her since she was a girl. So that was his world. He lived and breathed the entirety from Mario Cuomo, who was both his friend and someone he called and tortured every day to gangsters. I mean, if you asked Andrew Cuomo, the governor's son, also a governor, he would say Jimmy knew that his father and Jimmy had different jobs. And those jobs for each of them came first. Mine was to govern. Mine was to tell people whether you were governing well or not.

18:32Yeah. They had great, great mutuality of respect for each other. I'm going to throw a name at you, Rich. You remember Donald Maness? Oh, very well. Yeah. Jimmy wrote one incredible story about him. And just for viewers and listeners, Donald Maness was in charge of many different things, but he was in charge of the parking commission. And he had obviously taken some graft and stolen some money from the parking meters and had him in his socks and all kinds of crazy stuff and ended up getting caught. And prior to trial, he committed suicide. It was a very painful thing. And Breslin wrote about that.

19:07And what I loved about the writing related to that, it was both sides of it. It wasn't just a two-dimensional Donald Maness. It was some of the things that he did well and how he went astray. And what I loved about Jimmy, at least his writing, I never met him. That's why I was so fascinated by your book, was that he was human. He wrote it from the many facets, from the kaleidoscope of what a human being actually is. Every time you turn the wheel a little bit, you get different colors in somebody's personality. And he wasn't afraid to go there. He wasn't a two-dimensionalist. So much of the writing today is Richard Esposito, good, Anthony Scaramucci, bad.

19:44Let's turn these people into pancakes and just write about them in this really overbite of stereotype, if you will. He didn't do that. He painted. He painted with his typewriter a three-dimensional character. And so what do you, why? Why was he able to do that? And I think that's really the title of your book. He's able to tell the truth about things with all of its complexity. Why was he able to do that? He was, you know, fundamentally, if you think about the people who've written about you and your life and your career, how many of them took the trouble to walk up the steps, knock on your door, walk in the room and ask you the questions to your face, not at a press conference, just the two of you.

20:24And once you do that, once you do that work, you're seeing a person. You're not seeing Donald Manny's borough president who stole money, type, type, type. It's not just the name in a story about corruption. It's a person who you've gone and you've met and you've talked to and you're able to tell your readers what he ate, where he grew up, who his friends were. One of the things about this particular scandal, and frankly, it's the biggest scandal until the one we've had in New York right now, and where half of the government is again getting subpoenaed, indicted. He knew Donald Manning's, and he knew all of his cronies.

21:03And one of the things that upset Breslin about this story was, wait a minute, you guys were stealing all this money from parking meters, and I didn't even know? That was the thing that angered him probably the most is that they pulled it over on him. How dare they, you know? And that's what made him readable. That's why you're laughing because that's how he wrote it, you know? He wrote it like he had this lawyer, Klein the Lawyer. Klein the Lawyer was actually a man named Mel Lebetkin who was deeply involved in this scandal. And that was it. Jimmy couldn't write about Klein the Lawyer anymore.

21:33He was furious because he lost the character and like the nerve of him, Like now he was just Mel Lebetkin. So this kind of voice to make things have richness and dimension, this wonderful ability to be a storyteller is what he did. So when you read the newspaper day after day or year after year, over that time, in essence, he built a world for you. And if you regularly read that newspaper or the ones he wrote for, you knew his world. So you knew these characters and even people who didn't like him respected his talent. Even people he went after respected his talent. And that comes from people looking you in the eye, you know?

22:15So there's something about him, though, too, that you write beautifully that, like you say, he is them. He is their voice. But he also, I mean, I'm thinking of the word chaotic. There's something about him that is chaotic. He almost like lived in chaos, as you write about in the book. Describe that. Like, who was he? And, you know, what was his lifestyle like? Who, you know, who did he interact with? Yeah, I mean, he didn't have a lifestyle. That's the thing. He was incapable of, he couldn't drive. He couldn't keep track of his money. If he made$200 ,000, he spent$201 ,000. His wife spent the day rubbing cigarette ash into pieces of paper to fake receipts.

22:58His bosses were constantly scraping up money for him. What made him such a compelling person to write about was he was larger than life in all these ways. He lived in complete chaos and he was born in chaos. His father was like an itinerant piano player in bars who walked out, left his mother with so little money that she had a bicycle from Queens to like where she worked at the welfare office. And he almost needed the chaos to write. His first wife, Rosemary, she ran the house. She paid the bills. She told the milkman we don't have any money. She begged his agent to get him to stop spending more than he had.

23:38His second wife, Ronnie Eldridge, who is his widow now, Ronnie drove him to the dentist. If he went to the dentist, he would tell you he was having brain surgery. That's how the experience to him was that terrifying. Right. I mean, it'd be so much of that old school way of thinking. Before I flip over to the final element of our podcast, I want to ask you about your favorite article. What was your favorite Jimmy Breslin article? That's a tough one. It's a really tough one. But one of the articles that I really loved, we just talked about two of the famous stories of the Kennedy assassination. There's another story that was far less famous.

24:18He stayed another day. Everybody else goes home. He stayed another day and he told the story of what happens with the people in the permanent government in Washington, how a lobbyist calls a press secretary and says, so look, now that he's now that, you know, I'm really sorry for your loss, but now that he's gone, you're still going to have that investigation into my industry? And Kennedy's private secretary, smart enough to know she doesn't even have a day to clear out her desk. There's somebody coming in tomorrow morning to take her typewriter and take her desk. He captured the pettiness of that in a way that when you read it, you're like, so that's what happens when the pageantry is over and everyone goes home.

24:58This is a story I otherwise. So is it my favorite? Today, it's my favorite story. So that's the way I could put it to you. But it's elemental to our lives, though, isn't it, Richard? Yeah. You know, we're lucky if our grandchildren, some of them remember us. And after that, no one remembers us. And that's it. It's like the way the impressions are on the sand after the tide comes in. And listen, our friend Robert Caro writes about the anxiousness of Lyndon Johnson wanting to get into the White House, but not stepping on the young widow, Jackie Kennedy, on the way in. And then she knows it. And so she actually goes to live in Avril Harriman's Georgetown townhouse temporarily while she's trying to find her way.