ROLE MODEL
A Larger-Than-Life Reporter
Bob Greene taught Newsday Journalists How to
Investigate Corruption with a Flourish
It was thirty-five years ago this spring that Robert W. Greene began checking reports about insider dealings by politicians in Suffolk County, Long Island. He was thirty-eight at the time, with a thick head of dark, wavy hair, a torso that was starting to stretch the fabric of his size forty-six suits (impressive bulk and a Sidney Greenstreet silhouette would come later), and a face that, while beginning to fill out a bit, still reminded colleagues of a young Tyrone Power.
He had been a reporter at Newsday for more than a decade, and also had been a staff investigator for the U.S. Senate Rackets Committee, where Bobby Kennedy had been his boss, and for the New York City Anti-Crime Committee. He already had begun to bring to his newspaper reporting the techniques of a criminal investigator, and he would develop them and refine them dramatically in the years to come.
The story he was chasing concerned local politicians who were said to be secretly investing in properties and then pushing through re-zonings that would enhance their value. There also were whispers that the district attorney was reluctant to vigorously pursue an investigation that would focus on fellow Republicans, and that the paper’s Suffolk editor had been blocking attempts by his own reporters to follow these leads.
What Greene and a team of reporters found doesn’t need to be recounted here in any great detail. Suffice it to say that the rumors were true. The politicians had been making money. The prosecutors had been pulling their punches. And Newsday’s Suffolk editor — who had died suddenly of a heart attack just before Greene moved in — had been deeply involved financially.
The impact of the stories was immediate. New criminal investigations
were launched. Politicians were indicted. Government officials
were forced to resign. And even before the stories were actually
in print, the team had begun looking into reports about similar
patterns of corruption in other Long Island governmental agencies.
They found them, and one result was a Pulitzer Prize.
As more politicians fell, Greene widened his scope. Richard Nixon’s
financial dealings in Florida (yes, Greene’s taxes were audited)
. . . the international heroin trade (another Pulitzer winner)
. . . mob efforts to control a local racetrack . . . judicial
misconduct . . . bid-rigging on road contracts . . . corruption
in the Small Business Administration.
Greene had many jobs at the paper. But it was the investigative team that he created that remains his most important legacy, because he used it to help develop a culture in which public-service journalism and investigative reporting became part of the newspaper’s core mission.
“The reason readers loved what Greene was doing wasn’t just that he told them that the politicians were crooks,” said Geraldine Shanahan, a team member in the early years who now is an editor at The New York Times. “They already knew they were crooks. But he told them how they did it. They could read the stories and say ‘Oh, that’s how they did it!’”
There had been investigative reporters before, of course, and some short-lived investigative teams as well, including the high-powered group assembled by Life magazine. But much that passed for investigative reporting was leaks from police agencies and prosecutors. While Greene and his team got their share of such leaks, the thing that set them apart from most others was the emphasis on original work. They built their own databases. They developed their own chronologies. They drew their own charts to trace the flow of property and money, and to connect the political and business ties of investors. This is common today, but it was so rare in the late ’60s and early ’70s that other papers interested in setting up investigative teams, including The Boston Globe and The Providence Journal, made pilgrimages to Newsday to see how it was done. And at Newsday itself, Greene took reporters — myself included — who had been keeping notes on the backsides of envelopes and the insides of match book covers and taught them how to gather and organize large amounts of information in ways that enabled them to untangle complicated business deals and tear agencies apart.
“He had this peripheral vision that could almost see around corners,” says Joe Demma, who worked with the team and later became the team leader. “He could put seemingly unconnected, unrelated facts, separated by time and geography, together to make these connections that no one else did.” Greene was a big man during most of his years on the job, the result of an appetite that rivaled Diamond Jim Brady’s and the willingness of his bosses to let him run up whatever expense account bills he cared to. The result was close to four decades of lobster dinners and two-inch-thick steaks, double Tanqueray martinis, and endless bottles of Pouilly-Fuisse and Chateauneuf-du-Pape. He once stopped a reporter new to the team from ordering a salisbury steak in a restaurant, saying: “When you eat with the team, you don’t eat chopped meat.”
His size, his bravado, his high-impact journalism, his flaunting of expense-account living, all combined to create a persona that seemed to be drawn in equal parts from The Front Page, The Sting, and All The President’s Men. The stories were legendary and many — Greene pounding on a wall so hard during an argument with editors that he sent pictures crashing off the wall of the publisher’s office next door . . . Greene protesting a ban against reporters flying first class by measuring the size of a coach seat and the size of his behind, and then announcing to his bosses that he would continue to fly in the front of the plane… Greene refusing to take a late-night question from the news desk until assured he would be paid one hour’s overtime, and then saying, “I know nothing about it,” and hanging up the phone . . . Greene falling asleep at his desk with a cigarette in his hand and setting his own pants on fire . . . Greene running his car into a light pole off the parkway and — when the utility company insisted on payment — measuring the distance from the pole to the highway and determining that the utility had illegally placed the pole too close to the road . . . Greene covering Chappaquiddick and relishing rumors about himself. “Is it true you solved the Boston Strangler case?” a waitress in Edgartown asked. “It was pure slogging,” he began his response.
The team was kept separate from the rest of the newsroom, not allowed to talk about its projects with colleagues, particularly not with other editors. Because of the autonomy it was given, the great blocks of time it was allotted for work on its projects, the large amount of money it was permitted to spend, and the huge amounts of newsprint it was allowed to consume, it sometimes was resented in the newsroom. But the Greene team was an important training ground: several of today’s top editors and reporters had stints on the investigative team.
While most of his career was spent at Newsday, Greene is most proud of a project he did not for Newsday but for reporters everywhere. After the Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was murdered in 1976, Greene assembled a collection of reporters from all over the country that descended on Arizona with the goal of completing Bolles’s work. The “Arizona Project,” as it was called, resulted in a twenty-three-part series on crime and corruption in the state that ran in many newspapers, including Newsday. “It was the proudest moment in my career,” he said.
Working for Greene wasn’t always easy, and over the years there were some who were happy to have had the experience and also happy to be able to then move on to other things. He could be both imposing and unyielding, with subordinates as well as with the subjects of his reporting. He permitted dissent and devil’s advocacy only up to a point. While he could be considerate, generous, and loyal to a fault, he also had considerable weight, and he threw it around. He could sometimes become so obsessed with a subject — particularly if he smelled a tie to organized crime — that he would be dictatorial and unbending in his pursuit of it. The great saving grace was that he was a first-rate reporter and editor, and a magnificent teacher, who showed up every day with great renewed energy and a pure love for the craft.
Howard Schneider, who worked as Greene’s deputy when he ran the Long Island desk, says that the journalism more than compensated for the excesses and blind spots. “Bob Greene made local news glamorous. He could generate the same passion for a story about a hero German Shepherd unjustly sentenced to death as to a multimillion-dollar public works scandal,” he says. “On any given day, Bob convinced reporters that with enough hustle, persistent sourcing, or enterprise reporting they could find a story in a small corner of suburban America that could lead the paper, make the wires, or even lead to a Pulitzer Prize.”
This was impressed on me yet again in his last year at Newsday. I was driving home from work late one night, and from an overpass that crossed Northern State Parkway I saw a long line of stalled tail lights glowing red in the dark, and many flashing lights of police cars and ambulances far off in the distance. I called the office from my cell phone and told the desk there seemed to be a bad accident on the parkway. Yes, the editor said, they knew all about it, and while other reporters and photographers were on the way, the situation already was well in hand. Bob Greene had been driving home when he hit the backup. He had detoured onto a service road, and gotten fairly close to the scene. And then — at age sixty-three, with a stomach the size of a beach ball and the lungs of a forty-year smoker — he had dog-trotted down the road, climbed over a chain-link fence, flashed his press pass at the troopers, and begun taking names, getting quotes, and dictating details back to the office.
Green retired from Newsday in 1992, and in recent years he has devoted himself to building up a journalism program at Hofstra University, where he’s a popular figure on the campus, teaching classes, supervising faculty, and regaling students with an endless stream of stories about the reporting life. He was voted “Teacher of The Year” in 2000 by the entire graduating class of the university, and was awarded the school’s Presidential Medal last year for having built up the program from approximately one hundred students to more than four hundred. He insists that the program be built around practical experience, not lecture hall theory, and requires all the full-time teachers to have spent at least ten years in a newsroom.
He’ll leave there soon, heading into at least semi-retirement after a career as a reporter, editor, author, lecturer, television anchor, teacher, and government investigator, and an early supporter of IRE. But he’s said in the past that he only wants one word of description on his tombstone: “Reporter”.
That he was — and the best one I ever worked with.
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