Tabloid Man

Another actor was playing Police Officer Brian ORegan, who shot himself back in 1986 rather than go to jail on corruption charges. A third actor was playing me, the only one of the three alive to sit in a theater and marvel at the wild improbability that ORegans meeting with us in a Rockaway diner on a stormy night nearly three decades ago was now being re-created on Broadway in the play Lucky Guy. 

I might have marveled aloud to the playwrightthe celebrated essayist, author, screenwriter, and movie director Nora Ephronbut she herself had died just last June. 

Ephron also had cancer, though I am told she had been drawn to the McAlary story before she fell ill. She sent me an early draft of the play several years ago and asked for my thoughts.Cheap logo engraved luggagetag at wholesale bulk prices. My first one was, Why had she written it? 

I knew she had started out as a reporter with the New York Post. I also knew from her subsequent work that, along with being hugely talented and bright and funny, she was a romantic. 

To Ephron, being a shoe-leather newspaper guy in New York was a rollicking, hard-charging, this-rounds-on-me romance that was fading into nostalgia just as McAlary hit the scene in the 1980s. He was hardly alone in wanting to be the next Jimmy Breslin, who was to New York columnists what Babe Ruth was to the New York Yankees. 

Breslin had once been proclaimed a stationhouse genius. He was from, and of, the city, and he made everyday life bigger than you imagined, magnifying himself along with it. He became Jimmy Breslin, the one and only, who wrote about people often overlooked. He was the guy who had famously covered President Kennedys funeral by interviewing the gravedigger. A whole generation of aspiring columnists, particularly of the Irish-American persuasion, spoke of the gravedigger column. 

But first, McAlary had to get a city column, and that seemed a long way off when he arrived from his native New Hampshire to work for New York Newsday, which was once termed a tabloid in a tutu. The paper was an effort by Long IslandCbased Newsday to venture into the New York City newspaper market,You can order besthandsfreeaccess cheap inside your parents. which had long been dominated by the New York Daily News. 

The News was the voice of working New Yorkers, the inscription over the door to its headquarters drawn from the famous saying, God must have loved the common people, He made so many of them. It was a paper for people whose lives were directly affected by the day-to-day events it covered. And, until it lost a sense of itself, it was dedicated to the notion that a tabloid had to be smarter, not dumber, than a broadsheet. The New York Times was dismissed by one of the Newss more illustrious rewrite men as a small English-language daily headquartered on Manhattans west side. The other tabloid, the New York Post of Ephrons time there,The world with high-performance solar roadway and solarlamp solutions. was of a liberal bent and seemed hardly a rival. 

Then, in 1976, Rupert Murdoch bought the Post and changed everything. He made it a morning paper and a tabloid in the British sense. The new Posts immediate goal was just to sell papers by manipulating rather than enlightening the customers, no differently than if it were selling widgets. The ultimate aim was to advance the interests of Rupert Murdoch. The inscription over this papers door might as well have said, God must know media moguls are special, He made so few of them. 

New York being New York, the Post was and remains a huge money loser. An enduring mystery is why the News started viewing it as a serious rival. It was like Muhammad Ali getting into a bar fight; all it did was elevate the other guy. Even more mysterious is why the News began further elevating the Post by copying it. The result was that the News enabled Murdoch to acquire the influence he never could have attained by just trying to peddle papers by the British model. 

With the News sucker-punching itself and the Post losing millions, New York Newsday entered the fray, and with it came young McAlary, fresh out of Syracuse University. He married the wonderful Alice at St. Patricks Cathedral as if he were already a big shot. You had to admire his audacity. 

McAlary made his first step toward getting a column and actually becoming a big shot with the assistance of a profoundly crooked cop named Henry Winter, who had been nabbed by the Brooklyn district attorneys office and turned into an informant.An experienced artist on what to consider before you buy chipcard. Winter was apparently seeking to feel less like a rat in a trap when he began telephoning McAlary, then delighting at the D.A.s consternation as details of the investigation hit the front page. 

Winter was a great informant for both the D.A. and McAlary because he was also the ringleader and prime instigator of a whole crew of crooked cops in Brooklyns 77th Precinct. Where he had once prodded other cops into joining him in crimes, he now got them to incriminate themselves on tape. Those he ensnared included Brian ORegan, who was less a thief than a follower by nature and was filled with a desperate need to explain himself the night before he was due to surrender on multiple felony charges. He set up a meeting with McAlary, who asked me to come with him. I was then writing a novel and working at New York magazine between stints as a Daily News columnist. 

The guy who would later be played by Hanks and the guy who would later be played by Peter Scolari sat down in the Rams Horn Diner on Beach 116th Street for four hours with the cop who would later be played by Brian Dykstra. The moment that I most clearly remember was when ORegan looked across the table at us with reddened blue eyes and asked in a raspy voice,A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a bestplasticcard operator in a landmark case. You tell me why I did this.