Bringing Out Your Deadly

Every week I write and cover the grisly crimes and murders of this city for the New York Post. I am in my blessed glory while I am doing this. It is when I feel most alive.

Journalism is in my blood. It flows in my veins like a fine Celtic brew. Almost as good and relieving as a pint of Guinness after a hard day's work. Before I sit down and write, I need the action of journalism to get my typing juices flowing. It's visceral and physical with me. Like playing basketball in the South Bronx. I need to bang. I need to be at the scene. I have to see, hear, smell and feel what went down. You don't do that when you're just a typist.

I like to argue with the cops on the crime scene. They enact their petty grievousness against imagined slights written in my newspaper, and I exact my revenge on them for treating me like a stray mutt in the Bronx when I was a teenage schoolyard rat.

But I need the cops, and they need me. So I back up and try to charm them for a while and then, after a few pleasant exchanges, we argue again. It's a tribal rite of passage that few understand, but it leads to quotes and a story. It has to be done. I get it done.

It's a dance that we do, and when we are simpatico we groove like John Travolta and Uma Thurman. But that can't last. The gavotte soon turns into an Ali-Frazier grudge match, and I have to back peddle. I walk the line right up to the breaking point. Then I make like Houdini, and I disappear.

I leave the high-level, flatfoots and get the real deal from the neighbors. They're the folks who see all, but you have to be able to discern who has an agenda and who just wants to tell you what they saw because they're decent. Most people mean well; they long to be an honest eye. It's easy enough to figure who is who if you were born and raised in New York.

So I work to get the real deal and the word on the street. The street talks if you stay with it long enough. After I hit the citizens, I cajole the lower-level civil servants. I talk with the beat cop, the bus driver, the traffic guard and the ignored detective. They're the people who do the real work of this city. I honor them for that, as we all should, as New Yorkers.

They're my people. Having served 16 years as a civil servant, I know what they need to hear, and I know in their hearts they want to talk as long as their jobs won't be in jeopardy. I tell them I am a senior court clerk in Brooklyn Supreme Court, and they feel safe. I'm one of them. If I hurt them, I only hurt myself. They deserve to be protected because they're the devil's sacrificial lambs. And I never make deals with the powerful devils of New York.

I only fish for big game. I want to bag the real thieves of the city, put their heads on my wall. I want the big money lawyers, the corrupt judges and the so-called players of the financial world. I want to kill the big enemies of this city; they're the people that get an easy pass lane on their road to riches.

The salaried, low-level employees are just trying get through the day and are the easiest target. This is why they take all of the hits. But not from me: They're one bull's eye I will never hit, as long as they don't kill or maim.

Civil servants want to talk. It's all very simple. Show respect to them, and things get said. Talk to a hundred people, you might get to one or two real-to-the-dirt bits of truth. A lot of journalists can be lazy. They talk to one person and make it a Universal Truth. Me and the other journalists who know the streets talk to dozens and hope for some kind of truth. It is an art form.

I love it. I do it for my own reasons. I only want to give a voice to those that have never been heard. My late father, a hero soldier in World War II and NYC fireman, taught me that, and he'd be proud of what his son does. He tells me so in my dreams. And anyone who thinks different can kiss my natural Irish ass.

Last Friday, I began my day at 4 in the morning at JFK, hunting down Naomi Campbell as she headed out to South Africa after allegedly clocking her maid over the head with her BlackBerry. Campbell, as is her wont, never showed and, by 1 p.m., I was fried.

Then the energy of my life-source surged when I went to a Lexington Avenue law office to cover a story on six buxom babes who were holding a press conference in support of a famed plastic surgeon, Dr. Brad Jacobs, who is facing a major medical malpractice lawsuit for blowing out the breasts of three disgruntled and lopsided patients. The six billowy babes wanted to speak up for their blessed breast-bender.

The women spoke well of the doctor and proudly showed off their magnificent mammarys. Then they asked me to remember that they're all mothers, and I should write an article with respect.

Well, I too am a parent, and if you're willing to talk to me about how you got silicone implants and breast augmentation to enhance your looks, you're fair game. I wrote the story in the true Post alliterative style. I typed terms like "lifted lasses lyrically lending likeable quotes for a plastic surgeon" and "marvelous mammarys made glorious maximus by medical miracles."

Then I got the bad call. It was 5 p.m., and I had put in a hard (and fun) 13 hour day by that time. My editor bid me adieu and sent me to a story about an 82-year-old woman who tried to cross First Avenue at 20th Street and got run down and killed by an MTA Queens Express bus.

By the time I got there, the woman was dead, but the bus was still on First Avenue, and the woman's blood flowed on the street along with her meager groceries and her bottle of Friday night wine. I broke the story, got the cops to talk; the MTA gave me info and witnesses told the truth. I got it all.

All the elderly stroller had wanted was to get home and have a drink and a meal. The rush of New York City traffic wouldn't allow it. The Queens Express bus mowed her down, cutting her body in two. Witnesses described how her intestines leaked onto the stretcher and the street as the EMT workers took her away, only to pronounce her DOA 30 minutes later.

I gave her a say in her death, and that's the best a writer can do. She had the last word-as she deserved.

I write about her, and others like her, to give a voice to the voiceless. She left this world with nary a mark on it, and I gave her a story so she would be heard. All the forgotten ones I write about will finally have their day in the papers.

And that's why I do what I do.

Someday, when the fates conspire to strike you down, I'll be honored to see your soul off of this city. Every one of you deserves that. You do. I believe that, and if I didn't, I couldn't watch the rats lick your blood as I make sense of your life. Kind words and good deeds done are the best obituaries.