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“Jimmy the Gent” Burke, leader of the $5 million-plus Lufthansa heist at JFK International Airport featured in the film “Goodfellas,” had a problem with Jimmy Breslin’s columns: He didn’t like the way Breslin wrote about one or more of his associates. This was years before Burke was fingered in a baker’s dozen of murders chronicled in the film, in with De Niro played a character inspired by Burke.
Breslin and Burke were regulars at Henry Hill’s saloon in Queens, The Suite. One night in the early 1970s, Burke grabbed Breslin by the neck, twisted his tie and banged his face a couple or three or more times on the bar.
Hill wondered whether death would come to Breslin by strangulation or broken neck or fractured skull.
“I’m all right,” Breslin said afterwards. He told people he had a concussion.
This is from Richard Esposito’s new book, “Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth,” published Oct. 15 by Crime Ink, an imprint affiliated with Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan.
Esposito and his longtime colleague Ted Gerstein report Breslin was not about to alter his social or news gathering habits, quoting him, “I knew where to find people who were somewhat less than our civic best.”
Burke and Breslin would keep in touch, though at a meeting years later Breslin would bring along a little muscle just in case. In between, Breslin’s columns about the Lufthansa case reported in a way few others did or could – from the streets up. That’s how he did all his columns, whether in Selma, Vietnam, Crown Heights, Harlem, with the Son of Sam serial killer and the subway vigilante cases and with the gravedigger at President Kennedy’s grave.
Now and then Breslin would call out phonies, racists and the corrupt. It was like watching a talented boxer pick apart a foe. Often, he’d land a big punch.
When David Dinkins became the first Black mayor of New York, he tried to institute a measure of police accountability – independent citizen overview. Thousands of mostly white off-duty cops stormed city hall, causing a lockdown.
“The cops held up several of the most crude drawings of Dinkins, black, performing perverted sex acts,” Breslin wrote. “And then, here was one of them calling across the top of his beer can held to his mouth, ‘How did you like the [N-word plural] beating you up in Crown Heights?’ ”
During the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn, Breslin had taken a taxi to get as close as he could to the scene. He suffered a severe beating covering the story. Wearing only his undershorts, he wandered into a police station.
Leading the chants against Dinkins from a bullhorn was Rudy Giuliani, the former prosecutor, future mayor and election meddler, now disbarred. Breslin called it back then, characterizing Giuliani as “a small person in search of a balcony.”
I first encountered Breslin well in to his career, reading his columns over about a dozen years in the New York Daily News. I had become fond of the Daily News in kindergarten, when I would snag it out of my uncle’s lunchbox and mostly read the sports section. By the time Breslin was at The News, I had started as a sports writer, then worked as a rookie news reporter covering a town with more cows than people.
At some point, Breslin became my Oracle at Delphi, as in I looked to him for guidance and inspiration by example. I came upon his earlier work, including a column about a guy named Marvin The Torch. Marvin built empty lots. Yeah, he was an arsonist. Somehow this column stuck with me more than the others that are cited in journalism textbooks. Maybe it was because Marvin once tried to be a reasonable guy in the wrong business and it cost him. Or maybe it was because around the time I read this column a classmate told me he used to torch doughnut shops overnight with his father and drive cars to New Jersey and it brought them together. Breslin had serious father issues, as in abandonment by his father, and by comparison, my guy’s situation almost seemed romantic.
Esposito has compiled a wealth of facts and anecdotes and fragments of what might be a lost civilization, if you can call it that. During the tabloid wars of decades ago – when print ruled – Breslin noted that a guy with money paid for full-page ads in the tabloids and the New York Times calling for the execution of five Black men, later exonerated, in the Central Park Five case.
There are more than a few good national columnists and reporters and anchors out there sizing up where we stand today in the run-up to 2024 election. The best stories and columns are like sculptures with everything gone through revisions and editing but the essence, and because of this, I long to hear Breslin’s voice again.
“As he ran his ad,” Breslin wrote, “it did not occur to [Donald] Trump that they might not be guilty of the crime. In his life such a thing is dust for the maid to vacuum.”
The author Esposito has put together what reads as good as it gets for the whole package of Breslin the writer, husband, father and neighbor. There’s even a chapter, “One Great Act of Bigotry,” about Breslin.
As for the hood, Breslin once put up a sign in his yard that read, in part: “I also am announcing a special service for people who ring my bell to tell me what my children did. This service includes a man who answers the doorbell. Why don’t you come and ring my bell and see what happens to you?”
Esposito, as a newspaper editor and top network news producer, perhaps attended as many or more meetings than Breslin wrote columns over the years. We’re talking thousands. Somehow this did not dull Esposito’s senses as a writer. The passion and wit of Breslin jump off the page, even an electronic page. I felt it, especially at the end.
In a reading of the Prayer of the Faithful at Breslin’s funeral Mass, a Breslin granddaughter asked those attending to join her in asking “ … for the poor and overlooked, the discarded, the unwashed and unwanted … be visible to us as we walk the streets of the city … as we imbibe some of the ‘rage’ that was Jimmy’s gift to us all … we pray … ”
Disclosure: I’ve worked with Esposito over the past few decades on projects including coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing trial. We also crossed paths in the 1980s and ‘90s working for the old Times Mirror newspaper chain.
Andy Thibault, co-author of “You Thought It Was More – New Adventures of the World’s Greatest Counterfeiter,” teaches investigative reporting at the University of New Haven.