Robert W. Greene, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor for Newsday, and an instructor at Stony Brook’s School of Journalism, died Thursday after a long illness. He was 78.
Greene, who redefined investigative reporting at Newsday and across the country, was a long-time fighter for the Stony Brook University’s new Journalism department.
During his years as Newsday’s Suffolk County editor, he fought for expansion and funding for the university, and was always a help for its would-be reporters.
Greene began teaching at Stony Brook following his 1992 retirement from Newsday after 37 years at the daily paper. His initial appointment ended a short time later when the University delayed plans for a journalism school, and Greene jumped to teach at Hofstra University. But when the promises here became reality again, he returned.
At the start of his career, Greene left Fordham University after two years to work as a reporter for The Jersey Journal, and developed a taste for uncovering corruption and organized crime, which he felt was controlling too much of the public’s lives. He began working the docks – at night – and, as he used to tell in his stories, his wife Kathleen began receiving 3 a.m. calls announcing that he wouldn’t be coming home that night – or ever again.
“It ended when she picked up the phone and a guy said, ‘We just buried your husband in 50 tons of concrete,’ and she said, ‘I hope you really got that bastard, I’ve been waiting to cash in a million-dollar life insurance policy I’ve got on him.’ “There was a gasp, and a click, and she never got another call,” Greene said while at a hospitality suite at the 1976 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Boston.
“The life insurance thing? Oh, that was all true,” his wife said Saturday night.
Greene, who left the Journal for a few years as an investigator for the New York City Anti-Crime Committee, joined Newsday in 1955, but took a year off in 1957 to work as an investigator for the U.S. Senate Rackets Committee.
Moving from reporting to editing, the big, bearish editor developed a reputation for working his staff hard, but still treating them well.
A Newsday reporter who rushed over to the funeral home after working a day of forced overtime Saturday said all of the obituaries so far had captured the bear of a man who worked his people hard, “but left out all the fun.
“I can remember long nights at bars, Bob buying rounds, laughing, making quarter-bets with the guy from the Daily News over who’d cover the story best tomorrow,” he said.
There were more stories tossed around Saturday night.
In the early ’70s, Greene helped gather the nation’s real, hardcore, pre-Watergate handful of full-time investigative reporters to form Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a group designed to teach more reporters how to dig for news.
In 1976, IRE made history and won Greene his first Pulitzer.
After fellow IRE member Don Bolles, of the Arizona Republic, was killed by a bomb placed in his car while he waited to meet a source on a mob story, Greene assembled a team from across the nation, which descended on the Southwest, putting together a series of stories that completed and expanded upon Bolles’ work, and distributed free to any newspaper that was willing to run the full package.
“Newsday could have gone in itself, and we probably could have done a better job — but the response to this had to be national,” Greene once told a group of Statesman editors.
“You don’t kill reporters,” he said, promising similar mass responses would follow any other assassinations, resulting in swarms of the nation’s best turning up to tear the lid off organized crime, corruption in government and whatever else led to it.
Greene’s crowded office in the old Newsday Suffolk Bureau, Lake Ronkonkoma, was paneled with dark wood, and filled mainly by a desk large enough to contain him. On the desk sat an ash tray three-quarters the size of an LP, overflowing with butts — he would give up his long-time habit about 15 years later — stacks of papers in, around and pouring out of file cabinets, and a beautifully mounted Eastern Grey squirrel on a pine branch, in a mahogany and glass museum case.
His son Robert Jr. revealed the origin of the squirrel Saturday night to some who had been puzzled for years by its presence.
“My father had a love-hate relationship with the phone company,” he said, and explained that Greene had received the squirrel from NY Telephone after a reporter did a story on how the critters liked to wear down their teeth on telephone cable, cutting service, and occasionally ending their own lives in the process.
Greene’s son continued, “If this was the gift for a story on squirrels, this really nice piece of taxidermy, my father figured there must be more out there.”
That started the “516 Connection” story, he said, which had most county, town and municipal staffs searching records and crunching numbers for months, to prove how Long Islanders were getting far fewer calls in their local free calling areas than any living in New York City, a memory that caused Newsday Reporter Mitchell Freedman to visibly.
The second Pulitzer, this one a solo Newsday project, was for a story called, “The Heroin Trail.” It was an expedition Greene led from the opium-growing regions of Asia, through Europe to the streets of Long Island villages.
It was repackaged as a best-selling paperback, Greene’s only solo book project, “The Sting Man,” and was published in 1981. It was developed when he and his team of investigators found themselves running an almost parallel investigation to the FBI’s “ABSCAM” investigation of bribe-taking Congressmen.
The old Newsday Suffolk Bureau newsroom was just the kind of place where Bob Greene belonged — where reporters worked on linoleum-covered tan or battleship-grey desks sitting on a floor of black-and-white linoleum tiles, where Greene had one of the few, if not the only office with a door, where phone dials were built directly into the desktops and where reporters wore old-fashioned operator’s headsets. The only sign that the world had changed since the 1950’s were big computer terminals on turntables so two reporters could fight over whose turn it was to type.
The old newsroom was closed about a decade before Greene retired, replaced by a huge hyper-modern facility in Melville that combined Suffolk with the main Nassau Metro Desk, and a front desk about 2 floors down so folks who knew the way couldn’t just wander in through the always-open back door.
Somehow it was not a Bob Greene newsroom.
Greene died of congestive heart failure after being hospitalized for more than two weeks, friends and family said. He is survived by his wife, Kathleen, of Kings Park, and his son, Robert Jr.
“I wonder where that squirrel is,” his son said, expecting to find it amongst Greene’s other Suffolk Bureau mementos.
