(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone, Steve Adubato.

More importantly, I wanna introduce you to an important author, who's written a very important book.

He is Richard Esposito, and he's written the book, "Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told The Truth."

Good to see you, Richard.

- Great to see you, Steve.

Nice to meet.

- You got it.

This is the book.

Tell everyone who Jimmy Breslin was, and why Jimmy Breslin, particularly in journalism and media matters, still matters, please.

- Absolutely.

So Jimmy Breslin was one of the legendary voices in the previous era of journalism, when print was the way most people got their detailed news.

Jimmy was a New York columnist with a national footprint.

3 million people read him every day.

That's a phenomenally powerful, big voice.

And I chose to write about Jimmy because I thought the way he wrote, the subjects he wrote about, and the outcome of his writing is an important thing for people in journalism today to understand.

And it's important for the public to understand that really, the goal of good journalism is to get the facts and the truth to your audience, whether they agree with you or disagree with you.

And that's something that I think is very important at this moment in time.

- So, Jimmy Breslin, in the, particularly the '70s into the '80s, he mattered, as Richard said, on so many levels.

Columnists were columnists, meaning they set the tone, they set the agenda, and also, when horrific events, like the Son of Sam murders in New York happened in the late 1970s, Jimmy Breslin was the kind of columnist where David Berkowitz, who was in fact the Son of Sam, this horrific mass murderer, if you will, he was connecting with writing to Jimmy Breslin, and then Jimmy Breslin was publishing those letters in his column.

Help us understand that part of media history and why it mattered.

- Sure, Steve, it's as you said, at that time in the '70s and '80s, columnists were the big voices in newspapers, whether it was Sidney Schanberg at "The New York Times," James Reston at "The New York Times," Jimmy Breslin at "The Daily News," Pete Hamill, the readers looked to those voices beyond the facts of the news stories.

And Son of Sam was a reader.

David Berkowitz was a serial killer with a very good sense of language.

And he read the way Jimmy wrote, and he identified Jimmy Breslin as the person that he wanted to talk to while he's going on this killing spree, killing young women and some young men.

He explained how the demons inside him demanded blood.

And Jimmy became his muse, or his pen pal.

And through his column, he talked to Son of Sam, and told his readers who this madman was.

Son of Sam identified the person who reached the most New Yorkers, 3 million, with his message.

And this was a period when there were a lot of newspapers, so he had choices, and he picked Jimmy.

- Jimmy Breslin interacted with politicians.

He had a fascinating relationship with Ed Koch, the late mayor of New York City, with Mario Cuomo, a long connection with the Cuomo family.

When Jimmy Breslin passed, his funeral in New York City, Andrew Cuomo, the governor at the time was there.

Chris Cuomo, our good friend and colleague in the media was there.

Matilda Cuomo, the late Mario Cuomo's wife was there, the entire family.

He had these connections to politicians.

He actually ran for office in New York City with Norman Mailer on some reform liberal ticket that got crushed.

Let me ask you, Jimmy Breslin's relationship to politicians.

I'll talk about his relationship with the mob in a second, and his interactions with them, which are sometimes dangerous.

Did he like politicians, or did it depend upon who that politician was, Richard?

- So did he like politicians?

He liked politicians who did their job, and he liked politicians who were there for their citizens.

So Andrew Cuomo, who's a friend, Andrew, summed up the relationship between Jimmy Breslin and the governor, Mario Cuomo very well.

He said Jimmy understood, and his father, Mario, understood they had different jobs.

Mario's was to govern, Jimmy's was to watch him govern, and write about him governing.

So Mario was his friend, and he could be critical of him.

But when you look at Breslin's relationship with Bobby Kennedy back in 1967.

They interacted on subjects like the Vietnam War, where Bobby was still a hawk when Jimmy met him.

And Jimmy had been to Vietnam already and came back convinced that we needed to think about this another way.

But he saw Bobby as hope, and he was always looking for hope in politics, often disappointed of course.

- By the way, in the book it talks in detail about Jimmy Breslin's reporting on John F Kennedy's assassination in Dallas.

He was right there.

Who did he interview that was so unique and different?

Was it the person who dug the grave?

- Steve, that's right, as you know.

What Jimmy did, was with this one column on the assassination of the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, he changed journalism also.

Not only did he tell you a story that no one else thought to tell, he told journalists, "Hey, you might consider telling stories in a different way."

And what he did, thousands of reporters from all over the world lined Pennsylvania Avenue to watch the president's coffin go by with the flag behind the Riderless Horse, Jackie, the children standing there.

Jimmy went to Arlington Cemetery, and he talked to Mr. Pollard, the grave digger, who made $3.10 cents an hour to dig a hole in the ground where the President of the United States would be interred.

What Jimmy did in this beautiful, simple way was show you the death of a president in a very personal way.

Not only was a man buried, but a sense of American hope was buried.

Camelot, as they called it at the time, was buried.

You learned everything you needed to know about the state of America in that column.

And that's what Jimmy did.

And everybody woke up the next day, and they read that column, and now, as you know, it's part of a syllabus in journalism schools.

But that bringing you in, letting you feel, not just with your head, but with your heart, that's what he did with that story.

And it's a phenomenal achievement really.

- By the way, in Richard's books, are many of Jimmy Breslin's columns.

Lemme talk about Jimmy's personal life and share this.

I met Jimmy in 1982.

At the time, my boss, I was working at the Port Authority in New York, New Jersey as a very young government affairs person in Washington and in New York.

And my boss was Ronnie Eldridge.

Ronnie was Jimmy Breslin's second wife.

His wife Rosemary, I believe, died in 1981.

He marries Ronnie Eldridge.

And Ronnie was, she was one of a kind, also very involved in New York City politics.

Explain how chaotic Jimmy Breslin's personal life was, and how, if at all, it connected his work as a journalist.

- So you hit it right on the head.

His personal life was completely chaotic.

So Jimmy couldn't drive, Jimmy couldn't do his expenses.

Jimmy wouldn't know how to pay a bill.

Jimmy never had pocket money.

Ronnie Eldridge, and prior to Ronnie, Rosemary Breslin, they took care of everything.

All Jimmy Breslin did, the only thing he did, he woke up in the morning, 5:00 in the morning, started dialing the phone.

And he just worked.

And that's what he was good at.

He was a good writer, and at times, as his editor said, a miserable human being.

Ronnie loved him, Rosemary loved him, his children adored him.

But on any given day, as far as he was concerned, they were his drivers, or his dictationist, or they would run the letter from Son of Sam to "The Daily News" office to his home.

Everyone was a character in the play that starred Jimmy Breslin, was written by Jimmy Breslin, produced by Jimmy Breslin.

The rest of us were characters.

And yet he was a very compassionate man.

- One of the characters here, Jimmy used to hang out, like to hang out in bars, fair to say?

- Yeah, I'd say that's fair.

Yeah.

He's the clever of the bunch in a bar.

(laughs) - Richard, he had a situation with Jimmy the Gent Burke.

Jimmy the Gent Burke, who was played by Robert De Niro in "Goodfellas."

Check it out.

Jimmy the Gent Burke did not, a mob guy in the Lucchese crime family in New York City.

Jimmy Burke did not like how Breslin was writing about the mob at the time, and they were in the same bar owned by a mobster.

And if I'm not mistaken, in the book you talk about how Burke beat the crap out of Jimmy Breslin, just kept smashing his head against the bar to send him a message.

Exaggerated or accurate?

- Accurate and not exaggerated.

There are contemporary accounts.

Look, Jimmy the Gent Burke, and brave Breslin gave him the name, the Gent.

Jimmy the Gent Burke was a sociopath, not just a gangster.

He was on the far end of it.

They robbed a Lufthansa plane, of what was the largest- - $6 million, the largest heist at the time.

Go ahead, at JFK.

- And Burke then proceeded to kill everyone that worked with him on the heist, 'cause he knew that's guarantee that they wouldn't talk.

So Jimmy hung out with gangsters because he knew something that Damon Runyon knew decades earlier, which is, you find the best stories when you hang out sometimes with the worst people.

And Burke kept the relationship.

He beat Jimmy up badly that night, but when Jimmy's wife was dying of cancer, he called Breslin up and said, "Please come over."

And he wanted to give him $35,000 for treatment.

And Jimmy didn't take the money, but he told Burke, "I'll never forget this."

And he never did.

So it was a relationship where Jimmy got stories.

They got someone who they could talk to in the media.

But there was also their understanding that this guy can betray you at any time.

And that's what Jimmy would do.

- You know, the book is powerful for those of us who are in media, fascinated by media.

Some of us (laughs) get newspapers when newspapers were newspapers, where colonists really mattered, and set the tone in a way that social media may do it now in some odd way, dangerous way at times.

Breslin was extraordinary.

He also won the Pulitzer Prize, to be clear.

This is the book, "Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth," and Richard Esposito is the author.

Please read this book, and find out about Jimmy Breslin.

He mattered.

Hey Richard, thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Steve, thanks for having me.

I'm so glad you liked the book.

- Loved the book.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Atlantic Health System.

Seton Hall University.

The North Ward Center.

PSE&G.

Delta Dental of New Jersey.

Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The Adler Aphasia Center.

And by The New Jersey Education Association.

Promotional support provided by NJ.Com.

And by New Jersey Globe.

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