The tabloid war simmered with the knowledge that the killer had sent a letter taunting police. The police did not release that letter, but without a doubt, this was a sensational story. The coverage had been ramping up. Soon it was a story the News would come to dominate—because Berkowitz wrote a second letter and he sent it to Breslin.
Now Breslin was typing his reply. Tie undone. A black bowl of curls. Beefy black sideburns. Rat. Tat. Tat. Tat. The people around him walk on eggshells. He needs the tension. He needs it and he needs chaos. His demons. Sam’s demon. They connect.
Over at the New York Post, they would read, and begin their campaign to get into the game. To match. To increase the fear. To add sensation. To bring the city to a boil.
Breslin was writing for the Sunday News. Don Singleton, the mutton chop sporting keyboard artist whose demeanor was as calm as Breslin’s was volatile, on Friday had effortlessly slid his carriage back and forth with deft keystrokes and smooth shifts into reverse made by pulling the return and had alerted the readers to what was coming in that thin edition that slipped off the presses Friday nights and early Saturday mornings. The Saturday paper was an appetizer. If you were a horseplayer, a Mets fan, couldn’t sleep, or stayed out late, the Final Edition slid you into Sunday. And if you had a daughter, you might have checked in on her.
The Mets fans who read the final editions were also rewarded with news of a 1-0 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies in a night game at Shea Stadium, with 20,013 in attendance. But there was no doubt about what story mattered most.
The headline on the Four Star (****) Final:
.44 KILLER: I
AM NOT ASLEEP
“Don’t think because you haven’t heard from (me) for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam. I love my work. Now, the void has been filled.”
The letter, addressed to News columnist Jimmy Breslin, was examined in the police laboratory, and . . . handwriting analysis confirms that the letter was written by the same person who wrote the first message.
In the new handwritten note the killer warns that he cannot stop himself . . . He adds that he looks forward to meeting Breslin “face to face someday or perhaps I will be blown away by cops with smoking .38’s.”
The killer closed his note: “I will see you at the next job. Or. should I say you will see my handiwork at the next job.”
Now it was Breslin’s turn for handiwork. A reply to Sam. His audience, one man. “Son of Sam.” In a city of newsstands, a city on edge, the reply was as big a piece of work as Breslin had ever been given.
Here is the letter from Sam to which he would now reply:
Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks. J.B., I’m just dropping you a line to let you know that I appreciate your interest in those recent and horrendous .44 killings. I also want to tell you that I read your column daily and I find it quite informative. Tell me Jim, what will you have for July twenty-ninth? You can forget about me if you like because I don’t care for publicity. However you must not forget Donna Lauria and you cannot let the people forget her either. She was a very, very sweet girl but Sam’s a thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood. Mr. Breslin, sir, don’t think that because you haven’t heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam. I love my work. Now, the void has been filled. Perhaps we shall meet face to face someday or perhaps I will be blown away by cops with smoking .38’s. Whatever, if I shall be fortunate enough to meet you I will tell you all about Sam if you like and I will introduce you to him. His name is “Sam the terrible.” Not knowing what the future holds I shall say farewell and I will see you at the next job. Or should I say you will see my handiwork at the next job? Remember Ms. Lauria. Thank you. In their blood and from the gutter “Sam’s creation” .44 Here are some names to help you along. Forward them to the inspector for use by N.C.I.C: “The Duke of Death” “The Wicked King Wicker” “The Twenty Two Disciples of Hell” “John ‘Wheaties’ – Rapist and Suffocator of Young Girls. PS: Please inform all the detectives working the slaying to remain. P.S: JB, Please inform all the detectives working the case that I wish them the best of luck. “Keep ’em digging, drive on, think positive, get off your butts, knock on coffins, etc.” Upon my capture I promise to buy all the guys working the case a new pair of shoes if I can get up the money. Son of Sam
One man who read J.B.’s work. Who called him Jim. Who reminded him that soon it would be a year since he killed Donna Lauria, the first brunette gunned down. Who was, it would seem, himself not a bad writer at all. Not bad at all.
The letter had come into the paper several days earlier. According to Sam Roberts, it came in to Breslin’s secretary, Ann Marie Caggiano. She brought it to the City Desk.
“I was holding it in my hands,” Roberts, the City Editor and the youngest senior editor at the paper, said. He noted that one could write a book on the letter itself.
The paper alerted Breslin. A copy was delivered to his home in Queens. According to his son, Kevin Breslin, his father had sent him to the office to pick it up and then rush it back home.
“Jimmy was genuinely scared. I know for his family because it was getting a little too close to home,” Roberts said. When a serial killer makes you his pen pal, there is every reason for concern. He could be—and at one point, in Breslin’s case, might have been—watching your house.
Meanwhile, there was a discussion among the senior editors about whether they should rush the letter and a column by Breslin into the paper right away or alert the authorities. In the end, the Daily News turned the letter over to the New York Police Department.
“Then the cops came to examine it. They had to come twice to do elimination prints on it,” Roberts recalled. Prints determined to come from the killer—ones that matched the prints on the earlier letter to Captain Joseph Borelli, which the killer had dropped onto the seat of the car of two of his Bronx victims—were obtained. They would be useful forensically; they could be useful as evidence after the killer was caught; but they could only immediately be useful if they matched a set on file with authorities. That was not to be the case.
Frank McLaughlin, who until recently had been a reporter at the News, was now the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information at the New York Police Department.
“They gave us at least a day,” he said. “But they wanted us to tell them that we thought the letter was genuine right before they published it, and we did tell them the letter was genuine because the fingerprint was on it. The print on the letter matched the fingerprint that came off the one in the car in the Bronx.”
“The police thought publishing it might somehow help,” Roberts said. And, he acknowledged, it would sell papers.
At the beginning of the column Breslin wrote, he recounts his own reaction when he first examined it.
“He’s a pretty good writer,” somebody at the table said. “Yes, he is,” I said. The letter was from the person who calls himself ‘Son of Sam.’”
Unlike most of his work for the News, Breslin had more than a day, not hours, to think about how he would tell the story. When he first wrote about crimes large and small for the news reader and earlier in life when he wrote for the sports reader, his work was informed by the requirements of immediacy and scores and results. He now used the extra time well and put all of that accumulated skill to work, creating that immediacy and the same human frame that captured a pitcher failing to twist himself backward on his mound fast enough to stop a double play, or a jockey cheating a horse by standing in the stirrups, to capture the emotion of something far more important:
Donna Lauria was the only victim mentioned by the killer in this letter, which was sent to me at my newspaper in New York, the Daily News. So yesterday, I took the letter up to the fourth-floor apartment of Donna Lauria’s parents and I sat over coffee and read the letter again and talked to the Laurias about it.
You can feel the silent reverence in those footsteps. You can feel him watch the pain form and reform on the faces. If you were to read all of the Facebook encomiums posted on his death, you would find he had educated so many younger men and women on which stairs to climb and how to climb them in order to achieve this kind of reporting. The story, he explained, was always at the top of the stairs. When you find it, tell it. And in this case, the reader would feel the Laurias grow old.
In this case, Rose Lauria, the victim’s mother, now growing old, gave an insight as good as any and better than most of the theories circulating through the city and among the police detectives:
We took out the page that mentioned her daughter and gave Rose Lauria the rest. Her large expressive brown eyes become cold . . . On the wall behind her was a picture of her daughter, a lovely brown-haired girl with the mother’s features . . . “He’s probably a very brilliant man, boy, whatever he is,” she said.
“His brain functions the opposite way.”
The next part of the column tells a different part of the story of Breslin. Here he is the tabloid showman, even while writing about great grief and pain, about fear stalking the city itself. He inserts himself into the column in a way that he had rarely done in the past. He had long played the buffoon and the bully. He had been an arrogant, difficult, and entitled man-child. He wrote bullying or cajoling memos to his editors. He bragged about his movie money. He made threats to his competitors. And every day he lobbed shattering telephone calls into the otherwise thoughtful early mornings of his editors’ lives. He would not learn to drive. He would not do his expenses. Everyone around him was a bit player in the drama of his life.
Here, it seems, he was at a pivot point. With Son of Sam, Breslin knew he was ready to become even bigger, to become larger than life to an audience of millions. Larger than life to radio listeners, readers of the print ads, TV viewers and to New Yorkers who watched as the black Daily News delivery trucks raced by with bundles of wire-tied papers inside the panels that bore posters with their own larger-than-life images of Breslin.
The only way for the killer to leave this special torment is to give himself up to me, if he trusts me, or to the police . . . If he wants any further contact, all he has to do is call or write me at The Daily News. It’s simple to get me. The only people I don’t answer are bill collectors. The time to do it, however, is now. We are too close to the July 29 that the killer mentions in his letter. It is the first anniversary of the death of Donna Lauria.
Now when he sat disheveled on a corner barstool, drinking too much, in the kind of place where he years earlier captured the arrival of the first television in a Queens, New York, bar, he could look up and marvel at something he truly loved: his own face on the electronic barroom wall. He had become, if not famous, a celebrity.
They were close, he noted, to July 29. “It is the first anniversary of the death of Donna Lauria,” he wrote. And with that sentence, you get the frame for how the tabloids now would be covering the Son of Sam.
Sam provided the tabloids a basis for massive sensationalism and the hope of greater sales. Although the editors of the News would by now have half-convinced themselves that the massive coverage was simply a public service, the headlines were: WANTED; COPS: .44 KILLER “IS TAUNTING US”; Breslin to .44 Killer: GIVE UP! IT’S THE ONLY WAY OUT
Breslin, tormented by the story, by the always-looming deadline, by his own being, would run around the News yelling “Fuck, Fuck, Fuck,” his friend, the writer Pete Hamill, recalled. He would go desk to desk chiding reporters, “He writes better than you,” and “If we had [Sam], we wouldn’t need you.” Always the outbursts. Always the creative genius married to the miserable man.
These days, every day is the worst day in Jimmy Breslin’s life. So today is no exception. If anything, it is worse than the worst. It is Monday, June 27, the day after Son of Sam’s attack on a young couple with a .44-caliber Bulldog revolver on a dark street in the borough of Queens, New York City.
Breslin thumps into his seventh-floor office at the Daily News at 10:30 A.M. His blue-striped tie is undone and his white collar is open. He is very hung over, and his face looks like it was used to catch fly balls the previous night.
Denis Hamill, the younger brother of Jimmy’s good friend Pete Hamill, wrote this for MORE magazine. You can feel all the sweat, and hard work, and misery and insecurity, that went into the making of the poetry.
The phone rings and Breslin snatches it up.
“Yeah.” Breslin says. “No, I’m the copyboy. What can I do for you? Oh, you saw the killer in your dream, hah? Good, go back to sleep and ask him his name and address and call me back later I’m trying to make a living here and I’m just about doing it, guhbye.” Slam . . .
Another call.
“She says it has to be an Armenian because of the way he crosses his t’s.”
Another.
“He says it has to be a shipping clerk.”
This goes on for three hours . . . the callers have told Breslin that Son of Sam must be a state trooper named Sampson, a Jew because of the way he spells Beelzebub, a parochial schoolteacher who must have tried to put the make on one of the female students but was rejected, someone who works in a car wash where he spots all the victims, a priest, a rabbi, and a sewer worker . . .
“I’m tellin’ you it’s nuts,” he says. “The biggest story in town is not Son of Sam himself. It’s the fuckin’ unanimous insanity of the fuckin’ general populace. The whole town, all the citizens, have gone fuckin’ nuts. I’m tellin’ you. And every one of them prefaces the call with the same phrase: ‘This isn’t a kook or a crank call, but I think I know who he is . . . And the worst part is that any one of them could be right so I just pass the information to the cops. I must send a full box of letters and phone messages over to homicide every week.”
Hamill might have been the younger brother of a good novelist and a dashing man about town who dated Jackie Onassis and Shirley MacLaine, but he lived in no shadow and would soon be writing his own City Column.
Breslin, in one of his many columns on the killer, wrote: “He’s the only person I know who understands the proper use of the semicolon.”
To which a writer friend of Breslin’s recently remarked: “Jimmy doesn’t have to understand the proper use of the semicolon. He writes simple declarative sentences. He learned how to write them from studying his collection agency letters.”
“One of the cops on the case called me up and said to me that he writes better than most guys on the police force,” Breslin said. “I said, ‘Fuck the police force, he writes better than most of the reporters in the city.’ ”
Hamill’s firsthand observations, recorded as the events were unfolding, have an immediacy all their own, and insights that you cannot get even if you use a telescope to look back at the past.
He finally rolls a sheet of paper into his Olympia typewriter (He doesn’t use an Olivetti like it says in the ads.) This is how Jimmy Breslin types: BAM. SLAM, BANG, BANG. BANG. KABOOM. BANG, SLAM. And then tears what he has written out of the machine, balls it, flings it at the glass partition and walks out of his office. “It’s all over,” Breslin yells. “I’m old. I’m fat. I’m over the hill, nobody reads the shit I write. I belong in pajamas watchin’ The Price Is Right all afternoon, eatin’ Raisinettes, and sluggin’ some kind of diet soda shit. I gotta give up drinkin’. Today. When I went home last night, they had the house locked up like the fuckin’ Bastille. Son of Sam would need a tank to get in there. I banged and banged on the door but none of the kids or my wife would answer the door. It was like a reprieve because I had to stagger up the block to the saloon to make the phone call to get into the house. I didn’t make the call until an hour and a half after I got into the bar.”
He yanks the bifocals off the bridge of his nose and walks defiantly back to his typewriter. He sits down and rolls the paper into the machine again. He clamps the glasses onto the peak of his nose again and begins to write. Slam. Bang. Boom . . . when he writes he actually speaks the story aloud like this:
“The detective walked down the street . . . nah. fuck it,” he says as he backspaces and x’s out the last word. “Make it the avenue, it makes it sound bigger, right? Yeah, avenue. The detective walked down the avenue. That’s better.”
This is what it is like in a smoke-filled, glass-walled cage, pacing and pounding and trying to ignore the knowledge that the clock in the oak case down in the center of the city room cannot wait. He will make it wait. He wants every word right. Or as good as he can get them in the time he has left. Denis Hamill describes what it is like to watch a fragile ego ballooning.
Deadline at the News for the columnists is 4 P.M. It is 3:30, and Breslin is on take five of his eight-page story. A copyboy is sent in to pester Breslin for copy.
“Please, hah, it’s the worst day of my life,” Breslin tells the copyboy. “Get me two Sankas and I’ll love you for a son. I’ll buy you a drink.” Breslin pulls out a pocketful of change and dumps it on the table. “There, that’s the whole bankroll. Big-shot reporter and all I got is change. Go next door and get greens off Pete Hamill. He’s got all the money. I don’t make any money. I got six kids and a wife and take car service everywhere so I’m broke. And bring me in one of those green vouchers for the mad money. Tell Sam Roberts I need money and tell him it’s the worst day of my entire life.”
Breslin is punishing the typewriter now, trying to put his fingers through the keys. The paper he is typing on is punctured with holes where the o’s should be.
When the copyboy returns with the two Sankas he tells Breslin that Sam Roberts said he can’t get a money voucher until the column is in . . .
He finally gets the copy in at 5:05 P.M. Now he wants his voucher for money from Sam Roberts. When Breslin learns that the cashier is gone for the day he goes berserk. Charging through the city room, he overturns chairs, kicks waste baskets, throws papers in the air, shouts obscenities, and threatens to blow up the building.
Roberts, half amused, begins a frantic collection to calm Breslin down. Once Breslin gets his money he starts for the Exit.
You can see why Son of Sam picked this guy. You can see why Sam knew they understood each other. You can see how the story infected the city and how Breslin’s paper had begun to use it to drive circulation and take circulation away from its rival, the New York Post.
Looking back at when he was young and a City Editor, Sam Roberts on his 75th birthday offered: “Well, we unabashedly milked that story for everything it was worth now . . . but eventually we’re running out of things to do. We even ran the postmark on the letter to say, you know, does anyone recognize this post? We were going to run the gum on the envelope. If we could have, you know—uh, I mean, this was shameless after a point. Oh, but we had the story, we owned the story.”
That is much of what you need to know about the tabloid wars. One paper—the New York Daily News—owned the story and combined two things that were key to the blue-collar tabloid’s credo: inform and entertain. To sell newspapers. That could be read and could inform in the space of a subway ride.
Then there was the other paper, the New York Post. It had just undergone a gender change from the liberal left, socially conscious paper run by Dorothy Schiff with a history going back, mostly proudly, to Alexander Hamilton, to a paper now in the hands of Rupert Murdoch, an arriviste who was a brilliant proprietor and who knew one thing: Win. And a second thing: how to make a newspaper sing. And a third thing: side with the powerful.
He had learned his craft in Australia, a place few in New York knew much about. In turn, he did not have any connection to the city, its audience, or what they cared about. What he cared about was power. Stories in the front of the paper served power. Soon pictures of women sunbathing also would grace its pages. Those who worked at the Post during the period after the change affectionately called it a comic book. The mantra was, “There is one side to every story and if we like you, we leave you out.” It is easy now to see this as prophetic of the divisive world that Murdoch’s Fox fueled several decades later.
But at that moment, Murdoch was getting beat. He called on Steve Dunleavy. Straight from the docks of Sydney, not known for any intake of solid food, wearing leather and his black hair swept back from a pompadour wave to a ducktail. If Joseph Conrad had scripted their lives, Dunleavy, forever loyal to “The Boss,” was Murdoch’s Secret Sharer. Murdoch conquered the boardrooms, Steve the streets. Each had attained a kind of wisdom. And each fought, even as they aged, as ruthlessly as when they were young.
A testament to Murdoch’s loyalty to Steve—just one, there are several at least—came at the Aussie’s memorial service. It was held in the basement of a large Irish-themed bar off Times Square. Murdoch was there. So were his empire’s editors from around the globe. So were the reporters, editors, cops, and flacks who had worked with Steve. No grand valediction by Murdoch. A short, “Steve was a good guy,” he muttered into the mike, then Murdoch receded. And he stayed. Through the night. With the rest of his hacks.
Dunleavy pulled every cheap trick he had—and he had plenty—out of his sleeve, from behind his back, wherever he hid them. The best came later, well after Berkowitz claimed his final victim, Stacy Moskowitz. But until then he never beat the News, its reporters or Breslin. They continued to own the story.
In the case of Stacy Moskowitz, Dunleavy recalled in an interview, he did, however, get to the family of the victim before Breslin. But he was unlucky. It was a Sunday morning. The next editions of his newspaper would not be until the following afternoon, when the Post, which was an afternoon newspaper, next appeared—well after Breslin’s morning newspaper.
“And I was saying, ‘My God! Dear me!’ ” He knew what he had. “But Jimmy Breslin turns up. Now he did what all of the other reporters should have done. He just walks in, says, ‘How’s it goin’.’ And he got a story and it appeared before mine.”
By the time Breslin got there, Dunleavy recalled, there were about “fifteen to twenty people” from the family of Moskowitz and her boyfriend, Robert Violante, gathered in an area of the hospital that the police and hospital security had cordoned off for the families. And the reporters were all waiting on the other side of the cordon. Such pack mentality was mystifying to Steve.
“And up till that time I was the only reporter there. Now, Jimmy comes in. He walks right past the cordon,” and they have a Monday morning story. “So, I had all this tremendous stuff but Breslin would appear first. I mean, I wished I could have appeared first because I had so much, much, much more than Jimmy had.”