Rupert Murdoch directs coverage in the Post’s newsroom, 1977.
Photo: Martha Cooper
In the summer of 1977, New Yorkers were forced to deal with crime, a stifling heat wave, and a major blackout — along with simmering dread over a string of shootings of young couples in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. The city’s tabloids amped up the tension with front-page stories and even appeals to the shooter, who was initially dubbed “the .44 Caliber Killer” because of the bullets he used. The Daily News, especially its star columnist Jimmy Breslin, jumped ahead in the tabloid competition to cover what turned into one of the most lurid tales in tabloid history — especially after the killer, who called himself “Son of Sam,” began writing to Breslin. The New York Post — purchased the year before by Rupert Murdoch, and at this point edited by him as well because he’d fired his top editor — did its best to catch up, its coverage largely driven by the notoriously aggressive reporter Steve Dunleavy. In this excerpt adapted from Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media, by Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo (Atria; October 8), Post veterans and observers recall the furious race to get the story.
ERIC FETTMANN, associate editorial page editor, columnist, 1976–1991, 1993–2019: The Post was late to the Son of Sam story.
CARL DENARO, survivor of Son of Sam shooting, author of The Son of Sam and Me: From March ’77, when the police announced that it was a serial killer, for the next basically two years, both papers ran sometimes 10, 12, 15 pages a day on the Son of Sam. It got to the point where it was obvious they were running out of information, and they were kind of regurgitating the same story. Of course, it was a lot of guesswork; you know, reporters making assumptions.
DICK BELSKY, metropolitan editor, 1970–1989: Murdoch takes over in January and then right after that, we suddenly have the most sensational serial-killer case ever. The timing was pretty incredible.
RICHARD GOODING, metropolitan editor, 1976–1993: I did the first Post story in [March] 1977 when it started to look like there was a pattern in the Son of Sam shootings, and by the spring, Dunleavy and I were doing Son of Sam all the time.
DICK BELSKY: He was not Son of Sam until he wrote a letter [to Jimmy Breslin] referring to himself as that.
PAT SULLIVAN, reporter, night editor, 1972–1980: The cops were definitely helping out Breslin. They were more used to dealing with him. Dunleavy, even though he was making a name for himself, was not Breslin. Dunleavy was trying to match Breslin, and he wrote a story about a cop that thought he was chasing Son of Sam. I remember talking to the cop later on, and he says, “Boy, your man has one hell of an imagination.”
DAVID ROSENTHAL, reporter, desk editor, 1974–1977: Murdoch could not stand the fact that the killer was writing to Jimmy Breslin and not to us. There was pressure not only on Dunleavy but on all of us. We needed to get some of Sam’s attention, and anything that could be done, we would do. That’s when [Dunleavy] really came into flower, because he did a terrific job of being a tabloid inventor. I mean, the whole thing was such a terrible sordid story, but Steve knew how to handle it — in some ways better than anybody else.
CARL DENARO: Certainly from June of ’77 on, the News might have been worse than the Post as far as keeping the story going and sensationalizing the story. That mostly can be attributed to Jimmy Breslin. I can understand Jimmy Breslin’s excitement, being the guy that received the letter from Son of Sam. But I think he really screwed up a lot of the investigation. Even though the cops told him “don’t release the letter,” he couldn’t help himself.
ERIC FETTMANN: Jimmy Breslin may have owned the Son of Sam story, but Dunleavy owned the last shooting — Stacy Moskowitz. Steve made friends with a lot of cops. He did what reporters do — he hung out with them, he drank with them. The Post was becoming a force, so there was no reason why he shouldn’t have gotten a favor from the cops.
On July 31, 1977. Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, both 20 years old, had been making out in Violante’s parked car on a street in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, when Son of Sam approached and shot them both in the head. Violante survived but was left legally blind. Moskowitz died the next day.
JOE DE MARIA, photographer, 1977–1993: We were staking out different areas. Every time he hit, we wanted to be close by. The last one, Stacy Moskowitz, we were all sitting in Queens, thinking it was gonna happen somewhere in Queens. Then we ran to Brooklyn and got to the scene and then went to the hospital. I had called Steve Dunleavy and told him where I was at the hospital. I was able to get him to the hospital front door, and I pointed him to where the Moskowitz parents were.
RICHARD GOODING: It was late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, and I got a call at like two in the morning to get to Kings County Hospital, which I did. At some point in the middle of the night, I was roaming the halls of the hospital trying to find people to talk to, and I passed a rather large room with windows. Through the windows, I could see Dunleavy with this woman, who turned out to be Stacy Moskowitz’s mother, Neysa. They were alone. It turned out that Dunleavy had passed himself off as a grief counselor and was talking to her. The next day, when he wrote her story, she knew she’d been tricked, but she didn’t care. She’d been so charmed by this guy. He sent her flowers. He’d send cars to take her places, to bring her to lunch. He was her personal chronicler throughout. She didn’t care that she had been conned. But you talk about this change in the way of doing journalism. That’s when it really hit home that the Brits and the Aussies did things differently — and they did things we wouldn’t do. It never would have crossed my mind to do what Dunleavy did, and if it had crossed my mind, I would have never done it. We had lines we wouldn’t cross. They had no lines.
ERIC FETTMANN: I don’t know at what point they realized he was from the Post, but by the time he finally told them, they had already grown to trust him. Everything the Moskowitzes said was all over the Post. One headline was something like, “‘I Want to Scratch His Eyes Out.’”
JOE DE MARIA: Because they knew I had a gun-carry permit, Dunleavy wanted to do a setup to get [Son of Sam] to shoot at us. Dunleavy was going to put a blonde wig on somebody and have another reporter next to him, like they’re making love, with me hiding in the back seat [with gun and camera]. And hope that [Son of Sam] would show up so we could get him. With Steve, I said, “Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do.” He was my hero. When I was young, I never thought about [getting killed]. It’s like, Whatever I have to do to get the picture, I’ll do. I was going to shoot him and then take the picture of him lying there. Steve was setting this whole thing up. It was being kept quiet, but it never happened because I think that was probably right before Stacy Moskowitz. I think he was gonna use two guys because he didn’t want to use female reporters and get them hurt.
Ultimately, the police traced a parking ticket on a car spotted near the site of the Moskowitz-Violante shootings to 24-year-old David Berkowitz. He was arrested in Yonkers on August 10, 1977.
MYRON RUSHETZKY: That night, a few of the reporters who got off at midnight got a slide, which is permission to leave early. At five of midnight, [Carl] Pelleck called. He said, “Get me Andy [Porte, the metropolitan editor] quick.” Pelleck told Andy they had caught Son of Sam.
PAT SMITH, night city editor, 1977–1989: Andy Porte would come on at midnight. He had just come to the desk, and we were having our change-of-shift conversation. Myron says, “Pelleck’s on the phone.” Carl Pelleck, ace police reporter, totally plugged in, totally wired. Andy starts to wave him off for a second, and Myron says, “They got Sam.” Andy takes the call from Pelleck. The shift is changing, and there are people getting up to leave. The midnight shift is coming in. I call out to the newsroom: “Everyone, please stay where you are. If you need to move your desks, do.” Because remember, in the newsroom, you don’t own your desk. You have your desk for eight hours and then someone else gets it for eight hours. But I wanted to keep everyone there. The fact that it happened at almost exactly midnight means we had twice the number of reporters.
MYRON RUSHETZKY: My instruction was to find Dunleavy. There were no cell phones, very few beepers. I knew he was out and about, and Gloria [his wife] was with him. I started calling every single bar, restaurant that I could think of that Steve might be at. I am running in overdrive. I’m calling places like Elaine’s, Costello’s. But I had to be very conscious that I couldn’t tell anyone why I was looking for Steve. I couldn’t call Elaine’s and say, “I’m looking for Steve Dunleavy because they caught Son of Sam.” There might be other journalists there.
PAT SMITH: Pelleck called every couple of minutes with a new detail. One of the phone calls said he’s in Yonkers. We end up sending three teams to three different points in Yonkers, so that by the time we get an address, we can be first there. Then Dunleavy showed up. Milton drove Dunleavy and Marc Kalech.
MILTON GOLDSTEIN, copy editor, 1974–present: They grabbed me and said: “Take Dunleavy and [Marc] Kalech up to Yonkers.” I drove them in my VW Rabbit. Dunleavy was drunk, of course.
PAT SMITH: Kalech walks into the lobby of this apartment building. There is an embossed tape of names on the different mailboxes. The one that says “D. Berkowitz,” Kalech peeled it off and stuck it in his pocket. (A) he wanted it as a souvenir, and (B) he did not want anyone else to find Berkowitz’s apartment. He was trying to burn the trail. Marc has passed on, but I bet he had that souvenir till the end.
MILTON GOLDSTEIN: In the city room, when they found out [Son of Sam’s] name was Berkowitz, I remember a copygirl saying, “Uh-oh, he’s Jewish.” Then it turned out he had been adopted. Alan Whitney started musing about a headline that we would never write: “NOT REALLY JEWISH.”
DICK BELSKY: It was a very unusual page one for the Post [on August 11, 1977]. It was one word, but in red ink. “CAUGHT!” I’m not sure they had really ever done that before. A color headline as opposed to just black.
PAT SULLIVAN: When Son of Sam was arrested, it was DEFCON 1. Rosenthal was on the desk, and I was saying, “Give me a piece of it, give me a piece of it.” Finally, he said, “Okay, go on up to the 109th Precinct” — that was the headquarters. I lucked out, ran into cops I knew pretty well. They had debriefed Son of Sam. Late, late in the day, way past deadline, I called in and said, “Hey, I have his confession. I know nobody’s got it.” I guess they ran into the afternoon meeting and all of a sudden I get a panicked call: “We want you to do it now.” Poor Tommy Topor was going to have to take it in [on rewrite]. They put out an extra, which surprised the hell out of everybody. I still have it on my wall — it was one of the few times, apparently, that the Post went over a million [circulation] and it’s on my byline.
JOE BERGER: The ethics of the workplace began to change. Some of the reporters that were brought in had a kind of cutthroat competitiveness. I mean, journalists are all fairly competitive, but there are boundaries. When you work for the same paper, there’s a certain amount of cooperation. The day they caught David Berkowitz, I was sent to the home of the last victim, Stacy Moskowitz, to interview her mother. When she came out, I said, “My name is Joe Berger. I’m a reporter for the New York Post. Can I have a few minutes to ask you about your reaction to the arrest of David Berkowitz?” She said, “I can’t talk to you. I promised Steve Dunleavy, who I’m talking to right now, I wouldn’t talk to other reporters.” I said, “But I’m from the New York Post. I’m with the same newspaper.” She said, “He especially told me, ‘Don’t talk to any reporters from the New York Post.’”
The headline on the August 11 extra edition was “SON OF SAM’S OWN STORY. ‘Killing was my job …’” As the paper was selling out at newsstands, the Post — and every other news outlet — sought other angles on the story.
MYRON RUSHETZKY: That morning, Pat Smith had to go to Mutchie’s to throw Carl [Pelleck] and Steve [Dunleavy] out of there — they were celebrating — because he had to remind them: We have to do it again today.
DAVID C. BERLINER, former New York correspondent for the Washington Post: I woke up early that morning and heard on the radio that the police had captured the prime suspect in the Son of Sam case. They said he lived in Yonkers, so I called down to the national desk, but since it’s a morning paper, they don’t get in until later in the morning. My instincts told me to get dressed, get in my car, and head up there. There were some curious people milling around, but I was way ahead of everybody else from the press. Periodically a detective would come out with a box of evidence, and I asked one of them could I go up to the apartment. He said, “When we’re done taking out evidence.” At that point, I knew I would have a few hours to kill, so I did exactly what you see and read when a murderer or serial killer is arrested. I went to the nearby delicatessen and other stores, and I talked to people on the street. To a one, they said, “Oh, he was such a lovely boy. He was a very nice young man.” I was taking notes and thinking if I was writing this as a novel, it would be so trite that my editor would just X it out.
ROBERT KALFUS, photographer, 1977–1993, 2002–2015: I thought, While everyone’s standing around, I’ll take a look around the building. What I’m telling you is absolutely, totally true. I walked down the long driveway. It was a seven-story building with more than a hundred apartments. I was 25 at the time. Just then the garage door rumbled open. I thought, Okay, and walked in. The garage door closed behind me. I was scared. I’m telling myself, Calm down. I let my eyes adjust to the darkness and saw that there was a door. I walked up the steps to the first floor. I was at the lobby. I continued up, and at each floor I would look out. I didn’t see anything unusual until the top floor. I opened the door and off to my left, there’s a police officer sitting in a chair outside the apartment. I thought, That’s it. I walked up to the cop and said, “Excuse me, Officer. I’m Robert Kalfus with the New York Post. The officers downstairs said they’re finished. Can I get some pictures looking inside?” He said, “What, are you crazy? Get out of here!” I went back to the stairwell and walked up to the roof. I went down the fire escape and in front of me was a top-floor window and there were three or four police hats lined up against the edge of the window. There was no one inside, so I pressed my camera against the glass and took pictures looking inside the apartment. After about two minutes, I went back up the fire escape, and back down the seven flights to the lobby. I nodded hello to the cop on duty behind the concierge desk. When I walked out of the building, my photographer buddies said, “Did you get pictures?” I said, “I know where the apartment is. Do you want to go in with me?”
DAVID C. BERLINER: As I’m going into the building, I see three guys and one of them was Kalfus. They said, “Are you going upstairs?” I was not happy to see them because I didn’t know that they were all photographers; I didn’t want another reporter coming up. This was a worldwide exclusive, and I wanted the story. I said, “Yeah.” We went upstairs, and there was no cop there. There was yellow police tape across the door. I recall that Bob Kalfus said he was going to go out on the fire escape, open the window, and then open the door.
ROBERT KALFUS: Four of us went into the building — Lenny Dietrick, from the News; Ted Cowell, who was working for Time; and David Berliner, from the Washington Post. The cop in the lobby said, “Where are you going?” Once more, I said, “The cops told us they’re all finished and we can go up.” He didn’t do anything, so we pushed the elevator button and went up to the seventh floor. Outside Berkowitz’s apartment, the chair was still there, but the cop was gone. We tried the door. It was locked. I said, “Guys, I think I know how we can get in.” Ted Cowell and I went up to the roof. We crossed over to the fire escape. Cowell [said] I should lean out — seven stories up — and push the window open while he held my belt. I didn’t trust him to not lose his grip. I held his belt, and he pushed the window open. We went inside, and we let the other photographers in. We were in wonderland.
DAVID C. BERLINER: I went across the narrow hall to the door directly across from Berkowitz’s. A woman lived there whose apartment wrapped around to his, and Berkowitz had punched a huge hole through the wall into this woman’s home. I interviewed her with my back to Berkowitz’s door, and when I turned around the door to his apartment was open. Lenny Dietrick, who was with me in the hallway, went in, and I stood at the precipice, debating whether I should walk into the biggest story certainly in the country. It would be a real coup being the only reporter. Or do I not go in, because of journalistic ethics. The Washington Post was very strict about that. The New York Post couldn’t give a damn. I decided, I’m going in.
ROBERT KALFUS: I got at least two rolls of film documenting everything inside the apartment: Berkowitz’s bed, which was a mattress on the floor; the damage he’d done to the walls; and the slogans he’d scrawled. The inside of his refrigerator and his cabinets. Everything. While I’m taking pictures, the batteries for my flash died. I asked if someone would let me use their flash or had spare batteries. They all said, “No!” “But I got you in here!” Everything I shot from then on was using available light.
DAVID C. BERLINER: The walls of the apartment were covered with all sorts of crazy wording and stuff about Satan and Sam the Dog. It was all in red paint. It was terrifying. It looked like some kind of witch’s coven. The whole apartment was a mess. I doubt it was neat before, but the cops came in and they probably tore everything apart. The photographers were taking pictures, and each of them is picking up souvenirs, like greeting cards and stuff, and shoving them into their pants. I said, “Guys, we got in here under questionable circumstances. You don’t want to be caught taking any evidence, anything out of this apartment.” A couple of them mused about that and, as far as I knew, put the stuff back.
ROBERT KALFUS: That’s incorrect. Lenny Dietrick and I were making photographs. Cowell told us he was working for Time, but we did not see him make any photographs. We did see him take Berkowitz’s Army web belt, which said “Berkowitz” on it, and a letter from Berkowitz’s grandmother, among other items.
DAVID C. BERLINER: Then I found something that totally shocked me — a manual for the .44-caliber gun. I go, “Oh my God, how could they have missed this?” I was really thinking about taking that, but then I realized not only would it be unethical; it would make the cops look really bad, and I might be followed for the rest of my life. I left it.
ROBERT KALFUS: We stayed there far too long and made too much noise. We were shouting, “Look at this! Look at this!” We found out later that a neighbor on the floor below had called the police.
DAVID C. BERLINER: I’m writing notes furiously, and there’s a knock on the door. We asked, “Who is it?” “Police.” So someone said, “What are we going to do?” I said, “Don’t do anything. It’s not the cops.” “How do you know?” I told the guys, “I know how cops act, and these are not cops.” I opened the door a little bit and there was some guy there. I said, “You’ve got to get out of here. Otherwise I’m calling down.” I let him infer that I was a cop. He left. A little while later, there’s more banging. Again, the photographers said, “Oh shit, it’s the cops!” Again, I said, “That’s not the cops.” I went to the door and opened it. The guy on the other side said, “I want to come in. I know there are reporters in there.” I said, “No, there’s not. You’ve got to go away or I’m going to call downstairs.” I had this police radio, and I turned the squelch control to the part where it went totally staticky and I said, “This is Williams,” or whatever name I gave. I said, “I may need a couple of guys from patrol to come up here.” The guy left like the Green Hornet. Sometime later, there’s this huge banging on the door and somebody yelling, “Open up the fucking door! Open up the fucking door!” I said, “That’s the cops.” At that point everybody is scrambling. Bob was saying, “Oh my God, I got the film in my camera. What am I going to do?” So, I told him, “Take the roll out. Take out a new roll of film. Put the exposed roll in the box and then pretend that you’re taking out the new roll from the camera. That way they’ll think the new roll is the exposed roll.” That’s what he did. I didn’t see Bob as competition, because (A) the Washington Post is not in competition with the New York Post and (B) he was a photographer and I was a reporter.
ROBERT KALFUS: Four Yonkers cops showed up. We let them in and told them we had found the apartment open. Before we opened the door, I took my two rolls of exposed film and put them in one pocket. I figured we would be searched. One of the first things I was told when I started working for the Post was when you are out in the field, you have to be in constant communication with the office. We were given two-way radios, but the Daily News monitored our frequency, and we monitored theirs. And Newsday shared our frequency, so we wouldn’t put out important information over the radio. We used pay phones, which were a dime then. I always carried a whole roll of dimes. I broke it open, emptied them over the film, then blew my nose into a tissue and put that on top of the dimes. In my other pocket, I put several rolls of blank film.
DAVID C. BERLINER: These cops came charging in, and I got slammed against the wall face first. I’m lucky I didn’t break my nose. I thought they were going to pull my arms out of their sockets when they handcuffed me. The lead cop was red faced, and they were furious. The reason was that Berkowitz, who had been committing all these murders in New York City, lived in Yonkers. And it was the New York City cops who found him. They had nothing to do with the arrest other than to come in and arrest the newspeople. Years later, I spoke to a Yonkers cop — he had retired, I think — and he basically said it was one of the worst days the Yonkers Police Department ever had. I think they took it out on us because we weren’t dangerous.
ROBERT KALFUS: We were taken to their precinct and handcuffed to these little schoolroom desks. We were made to feel very small. Lenny Dietrick asked to use the bathroom, and they made him drag the school desk with him to go pee. At one point while he was sitting there, he crossed his legs and one of the cops noticed a bulge coming from his ankle. I remember hearing, “Sergeant, look at this.” The sergeant looked at Lenny and said, “What do we have here?” He rolls down Lenny’s sock and sees the roll of film. The cop pulls the film all the way out, holds one side up to the light and then the other, then rolls it back up. He says, “Here, Sonny, have this back.” At that point, I had the only pictures. David Berliner was a reporter. He took notes. When the cops told me, “Empty your pockets,” I pointed out that I was still handcuffed. The cop confiscated the rolls of film in my one pocket. Then he put his hand into the other pocket and pulled out the tissue — eccch. He put it down, reached back in, and pulled out a whole bunch of dimes. He said, “We have to voucher all of your equipment.” He wrote down my name and “money.” I said, “Hey, I want all that back. You have to count it.” So he counted it. I said, “You made a mistake.” Instead of counting it again, he put it back in my pocket, and I thought, This could work out okay.
A policeman stands guard outside the apartment of David Berkowitz in Yonkers, August 11, 1977.
Photo: Bettmann Archives/Getty/Bettmann Archive
DAVID C. BERLINER: Once our mug shots were taken and we were fingerprinted, we were allowed to leave. I got on the pay phone at the police station and called the national desk. I told them I had the story and that I had been arrested. I didn’t tell them how I got into the apartment. More and more editors got on the line. [Washington Post editor-in-chief] Ben Bradlee was on the line. They’re saying, “Okay, we’ll get you a lawyer, but you’ve got to file your story.”
ROBERT KALFUS: One of the photographers gave me a lift to my car, which was parked back on Pine Street. I found a phone at a gas station. I called the Post. “Get in here, get in here,” they told me. I park on South Street, and there’s Carl Pelleck, who I knew only a little bit, on the street with his porkpie hat and a big lit cigar in his mouth. He looked like Tony Soprano, with his unflappable attitude. I said, “Carl!” He said, “Hey, kid, how ya doin’?” I said, “Carl, I’ve just been arrested.” He took the cigar out of his mouth, flicked it, and said, “First time, huh? Ahh, fuck you,” and walked on.
DAVID BERLINER: My report was headlined, “Neighbors Recall Quiet Man, a Little Strange, But Nice.” The New York Post had what they call a double-truck layout: two facing pages with pictures inside the apartment credited to Kalfus. The headline was “Inside the Killer’s Lair.” There was no “allegedly” or “according to the police.” It just said he was the killer, which Berkowitz could have sued over if he had not been convicted. The New York Post and the Washington Post were a universe apart.
ROBERT KALFUS: The day my pictures ran, I had to be in a Yonkers court. Ira Sorkin, who later became Securities and Exchange Commission chairman in New York, was working for Murdoch’s law firm. He was assigned to represent me in the Yonkers court that Friday morning. He’s driving me to Yonkers, and he says, “Tell me the full story.” I’m telling Ira the story, and he suddenly pulled over onto the shoulder and doubled over laughing. I said, “What are you laughing about? I got arrested.” He said, “They can never let you testify as to what happened. The Yonkers cops left the apartment unguarded, and you got in and took pictures. And one of the guys took things? If they let you speak, Berkowitz can get off. He can claim it was a contaminated crime scene.” He said, “Don’t worry about a thing.”
IRA LEE SORKIN, former partner, Squadron, Ellenoff, Plesent & Lehrer: I don’t recall pulling over and laughing. What I do recall is the legal position we took — myself and another lawyer who represented the Daily News photographer — which was that this was private property and only the owner or the renter could grant or deny us permission to go into the apartment. No one was about to go to the jail and ask David Berkowitz if it was okay to cross the police line and go into his apartment and take pictures because the police couldn’t keep us out of it. The judge was pissed off, as I recall, but I think he thought it was a novel argument and dropped the case.
DAVID C. BERLINER: When we were brought in for arraignment or at one of the hearings, Kalfus told us he’d gotten a $10,000 bonus. I caught hell with the Washington Post. My story ran at the top of the front page, but because I had gone into the apartment, they said I violated their [ethics] policy. It wound up turning out bad for me even though I got congratulated by every editor and reporter I knew. I was punished for that story. Because I had been charged with trespassing, the hierarchy decided that I could no longer report and write for the paper. I was blackballed. It was a decision that left me shocked, disappointed, and very, very sad.
ROBERT KALFUS: I didn’t receive any bonus. I should have.
Photo: Atria Books
Copyright © 2024 by Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo. From PAPER OF WRECKAGE: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media by Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
