Longtime journalist Steve Dunleavy retired this week, after a four-decade career spent drinking and outraging his way through New York City and elsewhere. I rarely agreed with anything he wrote, but Dunleavy was one of the last of a dying breed- the older, hard-drinking, foreign New York reporter, along the lines of the Peter Fallow character in Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities." Christopher Hitchens is one of the only others remaining.
During the years I read him in the New York Post, Dunleavy had two basic columns that he repeated over again: Whenever a white police officer shot or assaulted an unarmed black man, he would defend the cops, often in several columns in a row. And whenever a mob trial was in progress, he would go on and on about what honorable gentlemen the mobsters were and what rat bastards the witnesses were. His tolerance for criminals, though, never expanded beyond the Mafia; anyone else was an "animal" or "vermin."
Posted by Stephen Silver at October 3, 2008 04:10 PM