Journalist, 71, who wrote Donald Trump biography

Wayne Barrett, an investigative journalist who pursued the deeds and misdeeds of New York City politicians and players during four decades with the Village Voice, skewering mayors — and future president Donald Trump — with stories collected through the time-honored traditions of muckraking, died Thursday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 71.

He had interstitial lung disease, but the immediate cause was complications from pneumonia, said his wife, Fran Barrett.

Barrett was a journalistic institution in New York, where he was dreaded if not loathed by the same public officials who, in occasional unguarded moments, conceded a certain respect for his intellect and doggedness on the trail.

He dredged from the past such reports as the imprisonment at Sing Sing of Harold Giuliani, the father of former New York mayor and federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, for the armed robbery of a milkman in 1934. In recent months, as Trump rose from tabloid staple, businessman and realitytelevision star to president of the United States, Barrett was recognized as perhaps the first reporter to have probed Trump’s life, his business dealings and his potential importance on the national stage.

He wrote for the Voice, a counterculture weekly with a reach that outpaces its modest circulation, from 1973 until he what he described in a New York Post column as his “sudden and involuntary end” amid budget woes in 2010.

The New York Times called him “the junkyard dog of city political reporters who has drawn blood from generations of elected officials.”

“Our credo must be the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign givers and takers,” Barrett once said, accepting an award at Columbia Journalism School. “So I say: Stew, percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level, care.”

Barrett began writing the Voice’s “Runnin’ Scared” column in 1978, the day that Edward Koch (D) became mayor of New York. (“He became mayor and I became his weekly tormentor,” Barrett later quipped.)

His reporting for the Voice fueled the publication of four books — one about contracting malfeasance during the Koch administration, one about Trump and two about Giuliani (R), whom Barrett derided as a “hero prosecutor” transformed into a “used 9/11 memorabilia salesman” — that established Barrett’s reputation far beyond the city’s five boroughs.

He profiled Trump in a Village Voice series in 1979 and wrote the book “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall” (1992).

“Nobody took him seriously when the book came out, so nobody was interested in reading it,” Barrett said ruefully in May 2016, days before Trump secured the number of delegates necessary to win the Republican presidential nomination. “It had a very short life.”

The book was re-released in 2016 under the title “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth.”

“He took Trump seriously as a public figure and approached him with an earnestness in his reporting,” Timothy O’Brien, a former research assistant to Barrett and the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” said. O’Brien described Barrett as the “godfather of everyone else’s coverage,” crediting him with drawing the first “map” of Trump’s family, his business operations and their intersections with politics and New York life.

Barrett’s book provided a thorough look at Trump’s life to that point, from his early days in business when his father, Fred Trump, dispatched a lawyer to buy $3 million in gambling chips at a Trump casino that was about to go under.

Barrett unflatteringly documented Donald Trump’s sway in New York power circles and his mentorship by Roy Cohn, the defense lawyer and former aide to Joseph McCarthy, RWis., during the disgraced senator’s communist witch hunts.

“I have not read it, it’s a piece of fiction, it’s a very boring book,” Trump said in 1992. “Wayne is a very bad writer.”

After Trump began pursuing the White House in 2015, dozens of reporters covering his campaign called upon Barrett and the documentary archives that he housed in his basement in Brooklyn.

When Trump ultimately triumphed, Barrett told the New Yorker from his sickbed, “Donald just has no interest in information. He has no genuine interest in policy. He operates by impulse. And I don’t see any of that changing . . . . Why would you change it? You got to be President of the United States.”

In 1969, he married Frances McGettigan. Besides his wife, survivors include their son, Mac Barrett, both of Brooklyn; and several brothers and sisters.

Speaking to the New Yorker the day after Trump’s presidential win, he said he could scarcely accept the admonition by Hillary Clinton, the defeated Democratic nominee, that the country owed Trump “an open mind and a chance to lead.”