Fixture of New York journalism dead at 88

NEW YORK • Jimmy Breslin scored one of his bestremembered interviews with president John F. Kennedy’s gravedigger and once drove straight into a riot, where he was beaten to his underwear.

In a writing career that spanned six decades, the columnist and author became the brash embodiment of the street-smart New Yorker, chronicling wise guys and big-city power brokers but always coming back to the toils of ordinary working people.

Breslin, who died Sunday at 88, was a fixture for decades in New York journalism, notably with the New York Daily News, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for pieces that, among others, exposed police torture in Queens and took a sympathetic look at the life of an AIDS patient.

“His was the triumph of the local, and to get the local right, you have to get how people made a living, how they got paid, how they didn’t get paid, and to be able to bring it to life,” said Pete Hamill, another famed New York columnist who in the 1970s shared an office with Breslin at the Daily News.

Breslin died at his Manhattan home of complications from pneumonia, according to his stepdaughter, Emily Eldridge.

As a sportswriter, Breslin bounced between papers until he landed at the New York Herald Tribune.

He became a news columnist in 1963 and quickly found a story when none seemed left to tell. As reporters from around the world arrived to cover president Kennedy’s funeral, Breslin alone sought out the presidential gravedigger, Clifton Pollard.

It was the rumpled Breslin who mounted a quixotic political campaign for citywide office in the 1960s; who became the Son of Sam’s regular correspondent in the 1970s; and who exposed the city’s worst corruption scandal in decades in the 1980s.

But under the tough, belligerent personality was someone else — a son whose hard-drinking father left home when he was six to get a loaf of bread and never returned. Breslin’s mother supported the family by working as a welfare system administrator.

Breslin jumped to New York Newsday in 1988, signing a contract for more than $500,000 a year.

In 1994, he underwent successful surgery for a brain aneurysm.

While Breslin had crowds of admirers, he created an equal number of enemies. One of his most enduring feuds was with ex-mayor Edward I. Koch, who once promised to “give the eulogy at Jimmy Breslin’s funeral.” Koch died in 2013.

Jimmy Breslin