R.I.P. Jimmy Breslin

Michael_ Gee · Mar 19, 2017

Daily News reporting he has died at age 86. One of the reasons I became a newspaper person. All-time great writer. He would've made a good City Council President, too.

cranberry · Mar 19, 2017

Breslin was my definition of a columnist....

Legendary Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin dead at 86

cyclingwriter2 · Mar 19, 2017

Wow, I would of swore he was 86 about 20 years ago. Great writer, I quote him often.

lcjjdnh · Mar 19, 2017

Nerd that I am, I remember being inordinately excited when I discovered in college that I ask the library to obtain pretty much any book I wanted, including collections of Breslin's columns that had been published 35+ years earlier. Probably studied those closer than I studied some textbooks.

YankeeFan · Mar 19, 2017

cranberry said: ↑

Breslin was my definition of a columnist....

Legendary Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin dead at 86
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A legend.

lcjjdnh · Mar 19, 2017

Went through my notes and found some quotes of his I collected. I'll post them throughout the day.

First up, from the World According to Jimmy Breslin, a collection of his columns:

"In relating this to the court, Pistone showed that gangsters, just like politicians, have yet to find anything that is too small to steal."
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O'Connell always said, "There are three kinds of people can never be elected president: A Roman Catholic, a Jew, and Thomas E. Dewey." When John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, O'Connell said, "I'm still right on two of them. And on one of them I'll be right on forever. Ask that -- Dewey."

His power came from the streets around him, from the saloons and from the municipal workers. Insecure about himself, he favored Wasps as the mayors of Albany. He could run the town from his living room. He had Albany orgranized and financed: committeeman always had money to send flowers to a wake. Because of this, he could say to Paul O'Dwyer, running a primary for United States senator, "I'll see that you carry it up here. So don't waste your time campaigning. You'll win by fifteen thousand votes whether you come up here or not." O'Dwyer won by a few votes over fifteen thousand.

O'Connell died believing that cockfighting was the greatest sport in the world, because it is the only one that you can't fix, and that Harry S Truman was the greatest leader in the history of the world. This was not because Truman saw to it that O'Connell received patronage. It was for something more important: Truman beat Dewey.
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"Look out for him, he's tough," Nixon kept telling his people in the 1968 campaign, an election in which O'Brien controlled, at the most, one vote.
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"The males who it are either white-haired or bald. The bellies protrude, the eyes weaken, the faces grow flush from even a flight of stairs. A touch of emphysema is the badge of a great political pro."
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"The depression arranged all of her life. Since the Depression, she always has regarded any other problem as a bothersome dwarf. When the last Depression ended, she immediately began to prepare, financially and mentally, for the next. Once, she only suspected it would come. Now, reading the headlines, seeing the prices, she is certain that everything will snap."
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This is probably the official proclamation of males who live in a world where the value system is the gross annual income of the person you're talking to. The man focuses singly on his job, reaching for as much glory as possible in the way of money and titles. If the job does not produce sufficient glory, then a few drinks after work allow the guy to start talking about himself in terms so flattering that even he finds himself unrecognizable.
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lcjjdnh · Mar 19, 2017

From the Good Rat, about the "Mafia Cops"

On paper, Kaplan named Eppolito and Caracappa in eight murders that could be proved at the moment, with many more to come, all committed by the men while wearing the badges of the Police Department of the City of New York.
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That alone is a crime. And under RICO the sentences are diabolical. For a cup of coffee, you could do decades.
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Herewith to the government's rescue comes the only crooked accountant whose clients might have been more dishonest than he was. Before Weinstein the U.S. Attny. now states that a man named Stephen Corso can show that the criminal conspiracy kept going even after the cops retired to Las Vegas. Corso himself is quite a solid citizen: He stole clients' tax-return money, then told them that if they didn't wire him more funds immediately, they'd be arrested for fraud. Of course he had never sent in the clients' taxes to begin with.
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I do know that illegal gambling, which once was a glorious fountain of cash for the outfit, now is a government-owned lottery machine that buzzes in every newsstand and deli in the city. Years ago the state looked upon gambling as a low vice, a depravity; and those who profited from it were no better than cheap pimps and deserved years behind bars. That opinion held right up until the government took it over, at which it becaome a civic virtue to lose the rent and all other money you didn't have on rigged games of chance.
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The Mafia no longer sends great chords crashing down from the heavens. As it dissolves, you inspect it for what it actually was, grammar-school dropouts who kill each other and purport to live by codes from the hills of Sicily that are either unintelligible or ignored.

It lasted longest in film and print, through the false drama of victims' being shot gloriously with machine guns but without the usual exit wounds the size of a soup plate.
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It is the end of the year 2006. They are mugging mafia bosses on the street.
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"Our people" means the Bonanno family, one of the five outfits that once ruled the streets and now fill the courtroom.
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There can be no surer enforcement against the Mafia than a stopped heartbeat.
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As gangsters did not have the legs to remain standing on street corners all day, and most certainly could not sit at home or their families would flee, they opened their own social clubs. There these men could sit and do nothing, at which they were excellent.
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He was the Teflon Don. You put me on trial, I fix your fucking jury and walk out in your face.
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Once, years before, Lou Eppolito and Steve Caracappa had supposedly tried but been unable to blow Sammy away, according to Burt Kaplan. Who can remember why? All these men had ample reasons for wanting one another deceased.
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HanSenSE · Mar 19, 2017

Belongs here, and perhaps should be required reading along with "Death of a Racehorse:"

Breslin: Digging JFK grave was his honor

lcjjdnh · Mar 19, 2017

From I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me, his memoirs

There is no such thing as an ex-Catholic. At the start, you have no choice nor do you even know where you are or what they are doing. But once they put water on your head and adult speaks for you, you are a Catholic for all the days through all the years until the pray over your grave.

You can always fall away from the religion as long as you please, for years, for decades, you can deny it through a thousand cock crows, you can luxuriate in sin. But let there be one sharp chest pain, one depp moment of dizziness, and that is some loud bawl that you let out for a priest.

Perhaps the ambulance crew can save your life, but for sure the priest saves your eternity.

The Catholic Church is held together by one word: calamity.
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Robert was the model for the judge character in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. I have to live with the guy and Wolfie counts the money.
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Re: the Domino Theory: "Kennedy believed it and so did everybody he knew, all these geniuses who helped get kids from Ozone Park killed."
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You never lose your freedom all at once; the books show it happens one slice at a time.
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Standing there that day in November, I wondered if he ever had a choice between this grandness that shines brilliantly, especially if recently polished to keep any traces of the temporal away, and an important life with his two children growing up around him. Of course he had a choice, and he made the wrong one. He wound up with a few instants of apparent importance. Then he got a bullet in his brain and he left two children he never knew without a father.
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The way I had it is all gone now. The bars are gone, the drinkers gone. There remain the smartest, healthiest newspeople in the history of the business. And they are so boring that they kill the business right in front of you. A central reason why newspaper circulation is dropping so alarmingly is that reporters have all the excitement of a Formica table.

The newspaper city room, then, has become the home of the boring and homely and stammerers who write in precise terms of how politicians are having difficulty in reaching voters by television. Men without funds for a new car write learnedly about the price of gold. All cannot wait for something to occur that is so trivial that it can be written about without thought and the public will be expected to love the story for days, which they do not.

Once, this sort of life was regarded as a form of diphtheria.
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Deskgrunt50 · Mar 19, 2017

RIP. A giant.

Deskgrunt50 · Mar 19, 2017

His deadline story the night John Lennon was murdered is just incredible.

John · Mar 19, 2017

He was a consistently superb read. The Good Rat is one of the best books I've ever read.

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R.I.P. Jimmy Breslin

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R.I.P. Jimmy Breslin

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