Tenacious reporter dead

Lenny Levitt, 79, was a thorn in the side of the NYPD

Legendary news reporter and award-winning author Leonard “Lenny” Levitt, who for decades was a thorn in the side of the NYPD, died Monday after a two-year battle with cancer. He was 79.

Levitt, who lived in Stamford, Conn., wrote a column for Newsday called “One Police Plaza” from 1995 to 2005 that took a deep dive into the inner workings of the NYPD, then continued that column on his blog, NYPD Confidential.

Levitt’s take-no-prisoners column tackled police corruption, personality clashes and incompetence within the department and, when it warranted, media coverage of the NYPD.

“It became a very iconoclastic piece of journalism. He sort of set the standard for covering the NYPD inside out,” said a colleague and friend, longtime Newsday reporter Anthony DeStefano.

Levitt graduated from Dartmouth College and the Columbia School of Journalism, and reported for The Associated Press, The Detroit News and Time magazine. He also took a job as the New York Post’s investigations editor.

He joined Newsday in the 1980s, DeStefano recalled, covering the police and the judiciary.

He started working in “the shack” — the press offices at 1 Police Plaza — as one of the paper’s first reporters there as Newsday was launching its now-defunct New York Newsday.

Levitt (inset) covered “the politics of the department, the backstabbing that was going on, the machinations,” DeStefano said. “He made some friends, and he made some enemies.”

In 2007, the NYPD, then led by Commissioner Raymond Kelly, yanked Levitt’s press credentials, prompting him to sue for information on how the department decides who gets a press pass and who doesn’t.

“During the dark Giuliani years when this column criticized the man who had fired him as commissioner in 1994, Kelly — then in Washington in the Clinton administration — would say, ‘You’re the only reporter in New York with balls,’ ” Levitt wrote about his struggle for his press credentials. “That all changed when Kelly returned as commissioner in 2002.”

Levitt surmised that Kelly was unhappy that one of his columns questioned the departure of the NYPD’s counterterrorism head. In 2005, Kelly assigned a handler to follow him around Police Headquarters, Levitt said.

In 2006, he was barred from entering 1 Police Plaza and dubbed a “security threat” — at least until the New York Civil Liberties Union got involved.

“They had a photograph of him at the front desk, announcing that he was persona non grata,” Christopher Dunn of the NYCLU recalled.

“He was targeted because he was Lenny Levitt and because of what he wrote, and that became completely clear when we challenged it and they almost immediately backed down.”

Levitt continued writing columns up until the end of 2019, when he questioned whether NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan was being frozen out by Commissioner Dermot Shea.

He’s survived by his wife, Susan; two children and a grandchild.