A patriotic true crime biography is an entertaining read of legendary newsman Jimmy Breslin
Author Richard Esposito brings a news legend to life through the lens of true crime - from the JFK assassination to the Son of Sam murders.
In more ways than one, Jimmy Breslin had a big head. As a lion of the New York and American press, Breslin counted nearly a century’s worth of politicians, operators, gangsters and cops as friends, targets, sources, and blood-foes.
He carried an ego the size of Manhattan and a sense of humor bigger than Queens.
He also had a large skull, once covered with black Irish curls, that into his gray 80s was often wreathed in cigar smoke and curse-words.
One night in 1970 that skull, with the rest of the garrulous newsman’s head, was found bouncing off the bar at a tavern called The Suite, as Breslin took a beating from Jimmy “The Gent” Burke, a mafia associate later played under a different name by Robert DeNiro in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.
Entertaining true crime - with a twist
As recounted in Richard Esposito’s Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told The Truth (Crime Ink, 360 pp.), Breslin's head pounded the bar with such force that witnesses differed over whether he went home with a concussion or a fracture.
The reasons for this beating are lost in the mists of Rheingold beer and Dewar's White Label scotch. Whatever the transgression, there was no call to the police, no complaint to the powers that be – either at City Hall or La Cosa Nostra. The assault was kept – so to speak – in the family.
Esposito’s book is a fizzy, entertaining, rather patriotic time machine, told through the Pulitzer winner’s many true crime adventures, from Burke's $5 million JFK airport heist ($28 million in today's money) to Nixon and Watergate, to the Son of Sam murders (the killer sent lurid letters to Breslin before he was caught), to the Catholic Church’s clergy abuse scandals.
When the 1980s "City for Sale" graft case broke, Breslin learned many of his friends were involved. He took them apart.
“This is the scandal of our times and from now on I will bring it to you first and with the most fury because I am personally aroused," he wrote in the Daily News. "I have been betrayed on my own Boulevard.”
You could call that era of grime, crime and laughter a lost world, but it still exists – there are just fewer reporters living there with the discretion and talent to publish it, warts and all.
How was the Burke beating a family affair? Like this: A decade after he stumbled onto Queens Boulevard reeling from The Gent’s handiwork, Breslin was called to a darkened street corner. Burke was there holding a paper bag with $35,000 cash – a small fortune now and a much bigger fortune then.
Breslin’s first wife, Rosemary, was in a losing battle with breast cancer and Burke, who believed the professional world was as corrupt as his own, offered to bribe her doctors into saving the mother of six.
“Don’t worry about getting it back to me,” the man behind as many as a dozen homicides said. “I just want to see her cured.”
Breslin is rightly known for his detailed and sensitive coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, his interview with JFK’s gravedigger, and his Zelig-like presence at the murders of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and of Malcolm X. Powered by poetry, shoe leather and moral anger, he got the biggest stories.
That’s the topline, sure.
But, as Richard Esposito shows, the foundation's as basic as it is elusive: Live in the real, write it, and don’t stop – even after your head is sent bouncing off an oaken bar.