MURDER WAS OUR BUSINESS
NEWSPAPER CRIME REPORTERS DANCE ON THEIR OWN GRAVES
Newspaper reporters and photographers gather in Spanish Harlem, Dec. 3, 2023. Photo Credit: El M. Calabrese.
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A vanishing tribe gathered in an El Barrio bar last Saturday night.
Crime was our business, but we weren't criminals. We went to murders, but we weren't killers. We were always going to court, but not as defendants. We went to Rikers Island, but only to visit. Funerals were part of our job too, but we hardly mourned.
We will likely be New York City's last generation of newspaper reporters and photographers. Our main job was—and, for a few, remains—covering all the crime and chaos that usually breaks loose on any given day. Most of us first met in the 'Aughts working for New York Newsday, the New York Times, the New York Post and the New York Daily News.
We didn't sit in comfortable chairs behind fancy desks in gleaming glass-and-steel towers. We were down on the dirty streets, chasing news all over the five boroughs, in real time. We lived our lives to the staccato beat, R2D2-like digital blips and alpha-numeric codes captured by police scanners.
If we heard the right code, we raced toward the action—not away from it. Mostly it was murders and fires. It was also mass-shootings, terrorist attacks, explosions, industrial catastrophes, plane crashes, train wrecks, prison escapes and fatal car accidents, among many other tragedies.
When the chaos receded, we canvassed neighborhoods for survivors, witnesses, family members, video recordings and, before social media, photographs of the people we were reporting about. We went knocking door-to-door like police detectives. Sometimes we worked so good and so fast we beat the real police. We've broken news of a loved one's death more than once.
We witnessed history at close range. We wrote its first draft with words and images. Our best work held a mirror up to society and urged reform—minus the preaching.
Sometimes it spit "Fuck You!"
Like workers in other kinds of rough trades where danger and death stay close, we had each others’ back and a shared a steely sense of us-against-the-world purpose. Knocking on doors after dark in bad neighborhoods, that other reporter who works for the competition is your best friend. There was safety numbers, and it bonded us.
For example, retired NYPD-detective-turned-reporter Mike Sheehan once pulled his pistol on would-be robbers in a project elevator, is how I heard the story told. Shit sometimes got that real.
Kerry Burke was and remains one of our best. He came to New York from Boston to cover the music scene only to discover the crime scene suited him better. He named his sons Lincoln and Justice. The 62-year-old still runs the streets for the Daily News. He still unabashedly calls shoe-leather crime reporting "the Game."
Back in the 'Aughts, Burke organized regular gatherings of what he called "the tribe." We met at grungy, downtown Manhattan dive bars with names like "Tom and Jerry's," "The Magician" and "Mona's." There we traded war stories, gossip, drinks and occasionally more.
By the end of the decade, Newsday killed its New York edition and retreated to Long Island, the Times killed its stand-alone metro section and the Post and News were locked in an old-school newspaper war until the Daily Mail came along and made both of them more-or-less obsolete—driving a stake through a large chunk of the advertising cash that remained.
Newspaper budgets shrank. Reporters and photographers were fired in great bunches. The tribe splintered. Many survived as news folk of some kind but most flew off in several separate ways. Many ended up with careers in public relations. Others became teachers. Those that stayed in news, most went to work for television stations or all-digital news blogs.
The tribe hadn't gathered in almost a decade.
Christopher “C.J.” Sullivan was one of us. He worked as a court clerk during the day and chased stories for the Post at night.
"C.J. was beloved among photographers and younger reporters for taking them under his wing, mentoring them and dishing out tips on the job," his Post obituary reported.
“I’ll never forget the kindness that peeked out through his gritty exterior," Lia Eustachewich, now the Post’s managing editor of news, recalled. "They just don’t make New York City reporters like C.J. anymore. We will miss him endlessly.”
C.J.'s September death was the catalyst for last Saturday's gathering, one of its organizers, William "Billy" Gorta said.
In the 1990s, Gorta was an NYPD officer who helped create COMPSTAT. Then he turned into a crime reporter. On Saturday night, Gorta got everyone's attention by blowing a police whistle.
"I want to raise a glass to our fallen colleague C.J. Sullivan, who we all miss and we all loved," Gorta said. "C.J. and for absent friends."
For a moment time stopped. I looked around the room. Something like magic fairy dust covered everything. I was part of this family. Every other person in that bar was dear to me. It seemed to me fantastic and incredible that I had the great fortune to have met all of them, and to have had this distinct, unique, hard-boiled and tender life.
I was surrounded by legends: Gorta, Burke, and John Roca, a veteran news photographer with more than 50 years on the job.
El M. Calabrese, capturing the scene on video, was right there too. When I first met him working for the Post in 2006 he was Erin.
Nate Schweber, Chelsea Rose Marcius, Kerry Willis, Lorena Mongelli, Mathew Sweeney, Daryl Kahn, Brendan Brosh, Will Cruz, Molly Crane-Newman, Victoria Bekiempis, Jose Martinez, Ellen Moynihan, Jennifer Fermino, Brigitte Stelzer, John Doyle and Corey Kilgannon were all right there too. Dozens more filled the bar all around us but these were closest.
Everyone in our "crime family" glowed with the love they felt in the magical moment. Then time lurched forward again, breaking the spell.
"I know this is something we have to start doing more often together," I heard Gorta say. "Now fuck off and get back to drinking."
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