Legendary New York tabloid’s heyday included focus on Mafia stories

Beginning in the 1970s, the New York Post’s coverage of the Mob typified tabloid journalism during organized crime’s heyday in the nation’s biggest city.

With Australian Rupert Murdoch as its new owner, the Post during the mid- to late ’70s began pumping up its coverage of violence, sex and celebrity scandal, led by scoop-driven reporters such as Steve Dunleavy, a fast-living, competitive newsman from Australia.

The Post’s place in big-city journalism from 1976-2004 is detailed in a new oral history, Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media. The book, compiled by former Post journalists Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, includes first-person accounts of newsroom (and barroom) antics while also exploring the paper’s amped-up coverage of New York’s political, sports and entertainment figures.

The tabloid’s “blue-collar, man-on-the-street sensibility,” as the New York Times puts it, was sharpened by reporters and editors imported from Australia and London’s Fleet Street, where scoops and aggressive coverage, especially of big crime stories, are a matter of survival.

At the Post, these hard-news veterans from overseas played fast and loose with journalistic ethics, including paying for interviews, while competing for major stories such as the Son of Sam murders, Beatle John Lennon’s shooting death, and feuds in the Yankees’ clubhouse. The Post’s chief rival then and now is another New York City tabloid, the Daily News.

“When Murdoch’s pirate crew of Australian journalists arrived, it was as if, a former reporter says, Sid Vicious had taken over the Philharmonic,” the New York Times wrote in its review of the oral history.

During the early Murdoch years, the Post was known for more than crime coverage. A popular feature launched during the 1970s, the Page Six gossip column, still exists. However, the paper’s stories about the Mob served notice that crime coverage would be important under the new ownership.

The staff members from overseas weren’t the only ones working the streets. Reporters such as Brooklyn-born Jerry Capeci had contacts throughout the city and pounced on stories involving the Mob.

On January 3, 1977, Capeci scored a headline on the tabloid’s front page — “Mob War Shapes Up Over Drugs” — signaling the paper’s new priorities with Murdoch in charge.

In tabloid vernacular, front-page headlines are called “wood.” As the book explains, that name comes from the pre-computer era when the larger front-page headlines had to be made using wooden type because the type made of lead only went up to a certain point size. One of the most memorable of those front-page Post headlines, “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” appeared in 1983 with a story about a beheading at a Queens bar that had been a strip club.

Capeci, who worked at the paper from 1966 to 1986, recalled how his front-page Mob story in 1977 earned respect from the paper’s new top brass.

“After 10 years of [working for previous owner] Dolly Schiff, I had a wood about two Mob bosses, Carmine Galante and Aniello Dellacroce, which I think was the first front-page story of the Murdoch-era New York Post,” Capeci recalls in the book. “The story was that Galante was out and about — he had gotten out of jail — and he and Dellacroce were the main contenders to be the so-called boss of bosses, the main mobster in the city of New York. As it turns out, it wasn’t the case. They were both major players, but Dellacroce got passed over and Galante ended up getting killed a couple of years later. But the story certainly got me creds, if that’s the right word, with the new editors Murdoch brought in.”

In the oral history, the authors state that the Post and the Mob “seemed inextricably linked.”

“In the 1980s, a crime boss emerged who captured the glamour and grit of the era and the tabloid aesthetic that Murdoch was selling to a growing audience,” according to the book. “Gambino crime boss John Gotti — dubbed ‘The Dapper Don’ by the Post, and later the ‘Teflon Don’ — and his glowering crew became an edgy storyline in the paper’s ongoing tale of the city.”

Capeci notes that Gotti “became a folk hero to some, public enemy number one to others, and the real impetus for the expanded Mob coverage.”

Gotti’s Dapper Don nickname came from Capeci.

“I wrote in my story that he looked like a dapper don,” Capeci says. “The copy editor was sharp. He changed my story, the wording in my story, to dapper mobster. He used ‘The Dapper Don’ as the headline.”

Nicholas Pileggi never worked at the Post, but he covered the Mob as a wire service reporter and magazine writer and was familiar with other journalists on the police beat. He is quoted in the oral history saying cop reporters in those days “were really good because they had such an intimate connection with the police.”

“Back then, a lot of the reporters I worked with, they hadn’t been to college or anything,” Pileggi says. “It was a blue-collar job. It was Watergate in the ’70s that really turned journalism into a kind of a fancy job.”

Two street-savvy journalists in the blue-collar mode who worked at the Post were Carl Pelleck and night rewrite man Cy Egan. Both were from “an earlier era of newspapering,” the book states, and were “as hard-boiled and colorful as some of the criminals they covered.”

Pelleck had an extensive network of sources on both side of the law, including Mafia members. The extent of his network once became clear to George Arzt, the Post’s City Hall bureau chief, during a barroom encounter.

“One day, Carl Pelleck, me, and [reporter] Rita Delfiner are having drinks in a bar, and we run into some Mob guy Carl knew,” Arzt says in the book. “The guy had run afoul of his crime family, and he said, ‘Carl, it’s goodbye.’ He left. I said, ‘What was that about?’ Carl said, ‘They’re gonna knock him off.’ And they did. But they took care of his family. It was stunning to know that the Mob really was the Mob.”

Murdoch, the paper’s owner, saw in Pileggi that same kind of connection to people in high and low places. Murdoch also valued Pileggi’s knowledge of how the city really works. Once a week for at least nine months, Murdoch went to the New York magazine office where Pileggi worked to talk about politics “and who the mobsters were,” Pileggi says.

Murdoch’s publicly traded media empire has since expanded into ownership of broadcast outlets such as Fox News, but the News Corp. branch still owns the New York Post and other print publications around the globe. These papers include not only tabloids, called “red tops” in the United Kingdom, but also mainstream dailies such as the Wall Street Journal. During the Post’s early days, Murdoch often was in the newsroom, even writing headlines.

“He’s the only publisher of a New York newspaper I ever met who was interested enough to sit down with a police reporter,” Pileggi says. “Corruption, that’s what he was talking to me about. What was the comptroller’s job? Where was the payoff there? How did it work? He was encyclopedic in his absorption of all that knowledge. He was a throwback, from another age. He was a newspaper guy. I had no idea what his politics were and I didn’t care.”

At one point, Murdoch tried to recruit Pileggi to work at the paper. “He said, ‘Magazines are for sissies. Come on down to the Post. I pull up my sleeves every morning, I get in there. You’ve got ink in your blood. You’ve got to come.’ It was a great sales pitch. But I didn’t go,” Pileggi says.

Later, Pileggi and director Martin Scorsese co-wrote the Mob movies Goodfellas and Casino, based on nonfiction books by Pileggi. Another Mob movie scripted by Pileggi, The Alto Knights, is set to be released in March. The Alto Knights focuses on an underworld feud decades ago between mobsters Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, with Robert De Niro playing both roles.

Other journalists from that “blue-collar” period of New York tabloid journalism also have moved on. Capeci runs a website, Gang Land News, about organized crime, while Post reporters such as Mike Pearl, known as “The King” because he dominated courthouse coverage, have retired. Several others have died.

Another former Post reporter, Nora Ephron, who worked at the paper for five years beginning in 1963, later became a film director and screenwriter. Her movie credits include Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and the Mob movie My Blue Heaven. Ephron was married to Pileggi from 1987 until her death in 2012 at age 71.

The book also digs into negative aspects of the Post’s history over the last few decades. This includes the paper’s homophobic and racist reputation during those years and its sexist treatment of women. In another dark chapter of the paper’s past, active criminals were on the payroll, including a Mafia made member in the delivery department. The newsroom at 210 South Street was near a Mob neighborhood. Wiseguys sold stolen goods on the premises.

The Post, now at a different location in the city, is remembered fondly by some who worked there and not so fondly by others.

Ephron saw the good and bad. “I loved the Post,” she said, according to published accounts. “Of course, it was a zoo. The editor was a sexual predator, the managing editor was a lunatic. Sometimes it seemed half the staff was drunk.”

After she left, Ephron said that when “a delicious crime or a great trial” cropped up, she wished she were covering it for the Post. “But then I quickly come to my senses,” she said.

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.