Lone journalist in Dakota Apts. on night of Lennon murder
NEW YORK — Gregory Katz, an acclaimed correspondent for The Associated Press in London who recently led the news cooperative’s coverage of Brexit and the election of Boris Johnson as prime minister, died Tuesday. He had been ill in recent months and had contracted COVID-19. He was 67.
His career over four decades took him across the globe, from Latin America to Africa, Asia to Russia, the Middle East and Western Europe. He was part of the team in 1994 that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting at the Dallas Morning News for a series on violence against women around the world.
A native of Westport, Connecticut, Mr. Katz also wrote frequently about music, particularly his lifelong passion for rock ’n’ roll. He was the only journalist inside the Dakota Apartments on the night in 1980 when John Lennon was murdered and wrote a definitive account for Rolling Stone magazine.
He recalled how as a pony-tailed teenager still in high school, he had hitchhiked to the Woodstock festival, sleeping on the muddy ground and drinking in the historic concert.
Mr. Katz was “a wonderful reporter and lyrical writer,” said Scott Kraft, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and a friend of more than three decades. “I admired his work, and I cherished his friendship.”
Mr. Katz joined the AP in London as a correspondent in 2008.
He was “a bon vivant” with an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and baseball, recalled Richard Boudreaux, of The Wall Street Journal. “He could recite the starting lineup of just about any Yankees team going back to the late 1950s, when he was only a kid.”