R.G. Belsky
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    YESTERDAY'S NEWS

    4/30/2018

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                                                                        Opening Credits
                                  THE RULES ACCORDING TO CLARE

     
           I always tell the same story to the new reporters on their first day.
          It goes like this: Two guys are sitting in a bar bragging about their sexual exploits. As they get drunker and drunker, the conversation becomes more outrageous about how far they’d be willing to go. Would you ever have sex with an animal, one of them asks? Of course not, the other guy replies angrily. What if someone paid you $50 to do it with a dog? That’s ridiculous, he says. How about $500? Same answer. Okay, the first guy says to him, would you have sex with a dog for $5,000? The other guy thinks about that for a while, then asks: “What breed?”
           The point here is that once you ask the question “what breed?” you’ve already crossed over a very important line and can never go back.
           It’s based, I suppose, on the famous old Winston Churchill story. They say Churchill was seated at a dinner party next to a very elegant and beautiful lady. During the meal, he turned to her and asked if she’d be willing to have sex with him if he gave her $1 million. The woman laughed and said sure. Then he asked if she’d have sex with him for $25. “Of course not, what do you think I am?” the indignant woman replied. To which Churchill told her, “Madame, we’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
    This is a crucial concept in the news business where I work. Because there is no gray area for a journalist when it comes to honesty and integrity and moral standards. You can’t be just a little bit immoral or a little bit dishonest or a little bit corrupt. There is no compromise possible here.
          Sometimes I tell a variation of the dog story.
          I call it the Woodstein Maneuver.
         The idea is to come up with a new scenario for the Watergate scandal. To speculate on what might have happened if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (“Woodstein!” in the Robert Redford-Dustin Hoffman movie) had not written their stories which led to Richard Nixon’s ouster, but instead gotten hush money to cover up the scandal. What if Nixon had paid them to make it all go away?
          I ask a new reporter to put themselves in Woodward and Bernstein’s place and think about what they would do if offered such a bribe.
          Most of them immediately say they would never take money under any circumstances to compromise a story. I’m not sure if they do because they really mean this or simply say it because they believe it’s the answer I want to hear. A few laughingly say they’d go for the money, but I’m not sure I believe them either. I figure they’re just trying to be outrageous or different.
          Only a few reporters ask the key question.
          The “what breed?” question.
          “How much money?” they want to know.
           Those are the ones I worry about the most.


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    BLONDE ICE - READ AN EXCERPT

    10/20/2016

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    BLONDE ICE

    CHAPTER 1

    THE best thing about being a newspaper reporter is working on a big story. A big story is what it’s all about in the news business. It gets your adrenaline flowing. It makes you remember why you wanted to be a reporter in the first place. It makes you forget about all the problems in your life. A big story always makes everything better.
    I did not have a big story.

    Gil Malloy, the hotshot reporter, did not have anything to report.


    It was 9 a.m., and I was sitting in the newsroom with my feet up on my desk, sipping black coffee and pondering this dilemma—along with trying to remember exactly why I had ordered that last tequila the night before—when the phone rang.


    “There’s someone here to see you, Malloy,” said Zeena, the receptionist outside the New York Daily News offices.


    “Who is it?”


    “A woman.”


    “What’s her name?”


    “She didn’t say.”


    “What does she want?”


    “She says she has a news story.”


    “What kind of a news story?”


    “She didn’t tell me.”


    Zeena was a practitioner of the minimalist school of receptionists. She never gave you anything more than she had to. Getting information from her was like interrogating a prisoner at Gitmo.


    “Have her talk to one of the other reporters,” I said.


    “She asked for you.”


    “I don’t do walk-in news tipsters.”


    “Why not?”


    “I’m a TV star now, remember?”


    “Okay.”


    “Anything else?”


    “Stacy was looking for you before you came in.”


    Stacy Albright was the city editor of the Daily News.


    “Any idea what she wanted?”


    “No.”


    “Where is she now?”


    “Beats me.”


    “Good job, Zeena,” I said.


    After I hung up, I checked my voicemail just in case the Pulitzer people had called, Hillary Clinton wanted to do an exclusive sit-down interview, or Bob Woodward was looking for any reporting tips from me. There was a series of messages. All of them from the same person. Peggy Kerwin.


    I listened to them one after another. The basic highlights were that she really wanted to see me again, she thought we hit it off as a great team, and—if you read between the lines of what she was saying—she hoped to be the mother of my babies.


    Now I remembered why I’d had that last tequila.


    To try to forget about Peggy Kerwin.


    Peggy Kerwin was the worst kind of date. Nice woman, decent looking, good job. But she was completely boring. She talked about working at some big accounting firm, about her family, about her life and dreams and world peace and a zillion other things during the entire damn evening. By after-dinner drinks, she’d made my Top 10 list of all-time worst dates. Hence, that final tequila.


    Marilyn Staley, the Daily News managing editor, walked over to my desk. Marilyn was in her fifties, had a husband and two kids in Westchester, and was my city editor at the News for many years. Then she got fired when the paper went through a big youth movement—stressing a digital-first strategy, enhanced social media presence, and total demographic makeover—that they decided she was too old to be a part of. They told her she didn’t understand what the new media newspapers needed to embrace in order to survive. But eventually they realized that they needed someone like Marilyn to . . . well, run the news. So they hired her back and promoted her to managing editor. Go figure. As editors go, she was all right. Of course, the bar isn’t set very high when it comes to newspaper editors.


    “What are you doing, Gil?” she asked.


    “Being introspective.”


    “You look hungover.”


    “Yeah, well there’s that too.”


    “Rough night?”


    “I had the date from hell.”


    “You’re getting too old for this.”


    “But I still have my boyish charm, right?”


    I sipped on some more of the black coffee. It helped.


    “Any idea what Stacy wants to talk to me about?”


    “Bob Wylie.”


    “Ah, yes. Our nationally renowned crime fighter and potential future mayor.”


    “I think he wants to drop a big trial balloon about his candidacy for mayor through the News. Do it with you on the air as part of Live from New York. Stacy thinks that would be a terrific opportunity to promote us as a new media/print crossover. We put it on the air, we live tweet it, we post podcasts on the website, and eventually, of course, we put it in the paper.”


    Life used to be so much simpler for me.


    I was a newspaper reporter, which is all I’d ever wanted to be. I rose from cub reporter to star writer to columnist at the Daily News like a skyrocket. I thought it would always be like that for me. But then things went horribly wrong—some of which were my fault and some that weren’t. I almost got fired from the paper, then did get fired at another point—but wound up breaking a couple of front page stories that got the Daily News national attention. Now I was a star again. Just not in the same way as before.

    Somewhere along the line the paper decided to take advantage of all the notoriety I’d gotten by using me as a publicity vehicle. I wound up doing a lot of webcasts, social media live chats with the readers, and making appearances on TV and radio and everywhere on the Internet to promote the paper’s biggest stories.
    Then, a few months ago, Stacy came up with the idea to partner with a local TV news station to promote our big stories on air. It is called Live From New York. We talk about the news the paper is covering and give viewers an inside look at the Daily News people who are covering it. At the same time, the telecast is livestreamed on both of our websites. Guess who Stacy picked to be a big part of it? That’s right: yours truly.
    Now I was on TV regularly talking about the big news stories—even more than I was actually reporting them. It was heady stuff, I must admit. People recognized me on the street, there was more money, it was kinda neat being a broadcast celebrity. But I missed being a real reporter.

    Marilyn Staley sat down now in front of my desk.

    I asked her if she wanted to hear all the details about my date the night before.
    She said she’d just as soon not.
    “Hey, is that a touch of gray you’re getting there?” she said to me.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Your hair. I see a speckle or two of gray.”
    “Probably just the light in here makes it look like that.”
    “Sure, I guess that’s it,” Marilyn agreed.
    I looked out the window next to my desk. Spring had finally come to New York City. We’d had a helluva winter—four months of relentless snow, ice, and cold that seemed like it would go on forever. Now I could see the sun shining brightly, people walking on the sidewalk outside in their shirtsleeves. It was as if Mother Nature had finally said, “Enough already.”
    I loved spring. My favorite season of the year. A time for new beginnings, a fresh start, another chance to make right all the things in your life that had gone wrong in the year before. Spring always cheered me up and made me feel young again and optimistic about the future.
    “Damn, that’s going to bum me out all day,” I said.
    “What?”
    “Your comment about me getting gray hairs.”
    “Getting gray hair isn’t the worst thing in the world, Gil.”
    “Not the best either.”
    “How old are you?”
    “I just turned thirty-eight.”
    “Well, people do start turning gray at that age. And somehow they still manage to go on with their lives.”
    “You mean like George Clooney?”
    “Interesting comparison.”
    “An apt one too.”
    “You’re telling me you think you look like George Clooney?”
    “On his good days.”
    Marilyn sighed and stood up. She had a higher threshold for my personality than most people did at the News, but I think I’d just about reached it with her. She started to walk away toward her office, then stopped and turned around.
    “By the way, there’s a woman waiting outside to see you,” she said.
    “So I heard.”
    “She apparently wants to talk to you about a story.”
    “Yeah, people keep telling me that.”
    “Do you know what the story is?”
    “No, Zeena didn’t feel compelled to ask her that question.”
    “The woman’s name is Victoria Issacs.”
    I stared at Marilyn.
    “Do you know her?” she asked.
    Yeah, I knew her, all right.
    Not really as Victoria Issacs though.
    I remembered her by another name.
    Houston.





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    Shooting for the Stars: Read an excerpt...

    8/16/2015

     

    The Midnight Hour: Read an excerpt...

    1/24/2015

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                                                                              CHAPTER ONE

            
             My cell phone rang while I was interviewing Madame Tina the Spiritual Reader. It was a feature the New York Daily News, my newspaper, was doing on the legitimacy of fortune tellers and tarot card–reading businesses around the city. Until then she’d had three visitors—an ex-customer claiming to have been swindled out of her life savings; a process server with a complaint from the Better Business Bureau; and the building landlord threatening to evict her for forging a phony name on the rent check. Being an investigative reporter and all, I was beginning to suspect that Madame Tina might not be completely on the up-and-up.

                “You’re not gonna believe what just happened,” Zach Heller, an assistant city editor, said on the phone.

                “I won a Pulitzer Prize?”

                “No, Malloy,” he sighed, “you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize.”

                “Wait until you see the story I’m working on now.”

                “Dani Keegan is dead.”

                “Our Dani Keegan?”

                “Yes,” Heller said. “Dani didn’t show up for work today. They found her body in the lobby of a building in the Lower East Side. She’d been shot to death. The cops have no clues, no leads whatsoever at the moment. Marilyn wants all hands on deck to cover the story. Even you.”

                He hung up the phone.

                I thought about asking Madame Tina if she had any leads or clues. But she had her eyes closed now, snoring loudly with a half empty wine bottle next to her. Probably communing with the spirits. I let myself out, got on a subway downtown, and headed for the Daily News office. 

               
                 Dani Keegan was the daughter of legendary Manhattan District Attorney Jack Keegan, who’d been putting mobsters and corrupt politicians and other bad guys in jail for more than twenty years. Dani had a law degree too, but she’d also gotten a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University and had wanted to try her hand as a reporter. So she got a job—through her family connections, we all assumed—at the Daily News.

                I’d worked with the kids of other prominent people over the years. A lot of them were just going through the motions, trading in on their family name and background. But Dani had seemed liked the real deal. She’d covered some front-page stories and even broken a few exclusives during her brief time at the News. Many of them were about law enforcement, where her father’s distinguished background and connections gave her a unique advantage over other reporters in town on the big crime stories.

                One of the big newsmagazine shows had done a segment on her just a few weeks ago. Shot a bunch of stuff of her working at her desk in the newsroom, sitting in on editorial meetings and even asking a question at one of her father’s press conferences. There was an interview with her father too. He seemed very proud of her.

                She was attractive but never really flaunted it. Didn’t wear sexy clothes or flirt with guys in the office or any of that kind of thing. She had a boyfriend for a while, but I’d heard they broken up. I didn’t know her very well—we’d probably exchanged only a handful of words during the time she’d been here—but she seemed to be one of those people who have their whole lives figured out an early age. She was pretty, smart, fun, popular—she seemed to have it all.

                Except now she was dead and we were going to be writing a front-page story about her.

                My name is Gil Malloy, and I’m a reporter at the Daily News too. My future here was once as bright as Dani Keegan’s seemed to be. But I took a few wrong turns along the way—including screwing up big time on a front-page profile/interview I did with an infamous New York City hooker named Houston that won me acclaim when I first did it. The problem was I had never actually talked to Houston. I made up the quotes, which is about as bad a thing as you can do in this business.

                I almost got fired over that. Then I did get fired for another story that went bad. A front-page exclusive linking a series of murders in New York to a man obsessed with the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The story turned out not to be true, but this time it wasn’t my fault. The real killer—a deputy NYPD commissioner—had fed me false information in an attempt to deter suspicion away from him in the New York murders. I eventually tracked down the true story and got my job back at the Daily News.

                But I am still damaged goods as a reporter. And I know that will never go away. My career—no matter what else I accomplish—will always have an asterisk next to it. Oh yeah, Malloy, he’s the guy that made up that story about the hooker, right?


                The afternoon editorial meeting had already started when I walked into the newsroom.

                Marilyn Staley, the city editor, was running down what we knew about Dani’s murder.

                “Dani Keegan’s body was found in the lobby of an abandoned building on the Lower East Side just off  the Bowery,” Staley said. “She’d been shot to death. A single bullet to the chest.”

                “What was she doing there?” someone asked.

                “No one knows. People have speculated she was working on some kind of story, maybe meeting a source she wanted to interview. And that somehow the meeting went bad. Or else she got there early and was mugged or robbed or killed by a drug addict or someone like that. The neighborhood is supposed to be a high drug-trafficking area.”

                “Or maybe she was buying drugs,” another reporter said.

                Staley sighed. But it was a good reporter’s question. Reporters always have to look at all of the possibilities in a story, whether they like considering some of them or not. <BEGIN>

                “Was she working on any story that might have taken her to that area of the city?” was another question.

                “Not that we—that is myself or any of her editors—know,” Staley replied.

                “What was she working on?”

                “A piece about the influx of bike riders in the city and the dangers—as well as the advantages—that it presented to pedestrians and drivers on already crowded Manhattan streets. Nothing about it would seem relevant to what happened to her.”

                The cops had already gone through what they could find of Dani’s stuff in the office and her home, looking for clues, Staley said at one point. Phone records, credit cards—that sort of thing. They found nothing unusual. The only recent substantial expenditure she made was a trip to Ohio.

                “What’s in Ohio?” I asked.

                “Who knows?” Staley shrugged. “She took a few vacation days. Flew to Columbus on the fifteenth of the month, rented a car there, and then was back here on the eighteenth. I guess she must have known somebody in Ohio.”

                Then Staley started handing out assignments. Reporters to work on the main story for tomorrow’s paper. Others to post and keep updating the story on the Daily News website. Someone to pull together a profile on Dani. Another to collect quotes and reactions from people who knew her. People to work the police angle, the scene and so on. By the time she was finished, pretty much everyone was working on some aspect of the Dani Keegan story.

                Except my name was never called.

                “Just keep working on that fortune teller feature you were doing,” she said when I asked her about an assignment

                “I could help with the Dani coverage too . . .”

                But Staley was already walking back to her office.

                I stood there for a second or two feeling foolish. I tried to pretend it didn’t bother me. I forced a smile and started back toward my desk. But on the way I changed direction and went into the men’s room. I went inside a stall, pulled the door shut, and tried to take deep breaths. For a few seconds, I felt weak and thought I might pass out. After the Houston debacle, I’d suffered a series of anxiety attacks. Shortness of breath, a feeling of light-headedness as if I was going to pass out—and, at times, a terrible foreboding I was about to die. I’d wound up going to see a psychiatrist and took medicine for it, too. I’d been good for a while. The problem only flared up when I was under a lot of stress or anxiety, or experiencing insecurity about myself and my life. Like now.

                But this time, after a few minutes, I was okay. I came out of the stall, walked over to a sink to splash cold water on my face and felt better.

                When I came back into the newsroom, the place was nearly empty. All the reporters had been dispatched and were out working the Dani Keegan story. The big story. The front-page story.

                Except for me.

                Gil Malloy, the forgotten man.

                All stressed up with nowhere to go.



    Buy The Midnight Hour - only $2.99!

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    Excerpt: Gil Malloy....on being a journalist

    8/7/2014

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    The most important thing a journalist has is his integrity.

    An old newspaperman taught me that once. He said it was the one constant, inviolate truth to remember about this business. More important than all of the scoops, the bylines or the number of press awards you won. “If you ever compromise your integrity, Malloy,” he told me, “you are lost.” I believed that then, and I believe it now.

    There’s something else that I have learned too. Integrity is an absolute value. You can’t lose a little bit of your integrity any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. You’re either all in or all out on the integrity issue. And, once you’ve crossed over that irrevocable moral line, you can never go back. No matter how hard you try.

    I think about all of this a lot these days. Mostly late at night when I lay awake, replaying all of the events that got me to where I am.

    And trying to make some sort of sense out of the incongruity of it all.

    The most important thing a journalist has is his integrity.

    I lost my integrity somewhere along the way.

    And yet I am still a journalist.

                                                                       So what does that say about me? 


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    The Kennedy Connection: Read an Excerpt...

    7/25/2014

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                                                                                                 Part One

                                                                                         THE MAGIC BULLET  

                We’ve come to know it as the "magic bullet" theory.   

                The magic bullet enters the President’s back, headed downward.at an angle of 17 degrees. 
     

               It then moves upwards to leave Kennedy's body from the front of his neck – wound number two - where it waits 1.6 seconds, presumably in midair, where it turns right, then left, right, then left .and continues into Connally's body at the rear of his right armpit – wound number three.  


              The bullet then heads downward at an angle of 27 degrees, shattering Connally’s fifth rib and exiting from the right side of his chest – wound number four.

              The bullet then turns right and reenters Connally's body at his right wrist – wound number five.

               Shattering the radius bone, the bullet then exits Connally’s wrist – wound number six - .makes a dramatic U-turn and buries itself into Connally's left thigh – wound number seven -from which it later falls out and is found in almost pristine condition on a stretcher in a corridor of Parkland Hospital. .


              That’s some bullet.

                                                                                              --- From the movie JFK

          
          I met Nikki Reynolds for lunch on a summer afternoon in New York City.

          We were sitting at an outdoor table of a restaurant called Gotham City, on Park Avenue South in the East 20s. The pasta she ordered cost $33. My hamburger was $26.50. The prices weren’t on the menu though. It was the kind of place where if you had to ask the price, you didn’t belong there. Me, I didn’t care how much the lunch cost. Nikki Reynolds was paying.

          Reynolds was a New York literary agent. In another lifetime, when I’d needed a literary agent, she’d been mine. But I hadn’t heard from her in a long time. So I was surprised when she called me up out of the blue and invited me to this lunch.

          “I suppose you’re wondering why I wanted to talk to you today,” she said.

          “Why?” I asked.

          I always like to ask the tough questions first.

          “I have an author with a new book – a nonfiction blockbuster about the John F. Kennedy assassination – that’s going to make big news,” she told me. “It’s very timely too, coming right after all the attention everyone paid to the 50th anniversary of the JFK killing.”

          “Timely,” I said.

          “The basic concept of the book is that more than a half century later, we still haven’t solved the greatest crime in our history. It’s called The Kennedy Connection. Catchy title, huh?

          “Catchy,” I agreed.

          “The book will reveal shocking new information about what really happened that day in Dallas and afterward.”

          “Wait a minute, let me guess,” I said. “Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t really do it, JFK really isn’t dead and both of them are living secretly somewhere right now with Jim Morrison and Elvis.”

          Reynolds sighed. “You know, everyone told me – ‘don’t take this to Gil Malloy. He’s a smart ass, he’s an arrogant, sarcastic son of a bitch - hell, he’s pretty much of an all-around-pain in the ass.’ I keep trying to defend you, Gil. But that’s getting harder and harder to do.”

          “Some days I guess I just wake up kind of cranky,” I shrugged.

          Nikki Reynolds was somewhere in her 50s, but plastic surgery and botox had taken about 10 years of that off of her face. Blonde, pixyish hair and a tight, trim body from lots of workouts at the health club. She was wearing a navy blue pinstriped pants suit; a pink silk blouse open at the collar; and a pair of oversized sunglasses that probably cost even more than the meal we were eating. The Manhattan power broker look. She looked like she belonged at Gotham City.

          I had on a pair of blue jeans, a white T-shirt that I’d washed specially for the occasion and a New York Mets baseball cap. No one else in the restaurant was wearing blue jeans. Or a T-shirt or a baseball cap. When I’d walked in, someone at one of the tables had mistaken me for a busboy. I had a feeling – call it a crazy hunch – that I might be a tad underdressed for this place.

          “Who’s the author?” I asked.

          “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

          I smiled.

          “Right.”

          “No, I’m serious.”

          “Lee Harvey Oswald is alive and a client of yours?”

          “Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.”

          “He had a son?”

          “Yes.”

          I thought about that for a second.

          “I don’t remember anything about Lee Harvey Oswald having a son. Didn’t he have a baby daughter or something with that Russian woman he married?”

          “Oswald had two daughters with Marina, who he married while he was living in the Soviet Union. One of them there before he returned to the U.S. Another baby girl that Marina gave birth to just a few weeks before the assassination in Dallas. There’s never been any mention of a son. Until now.”

          “I don’t understand…”

          “Lee Harvey Oswald had an affair. In New Orleans where he lived in the months before he went to Dallas.”

          “So you’re saying ol’ Lee Harvey was as much of a horndog as JFK, huh?” I laughed.

         
    Read more....buy The Kennedy Connection here.....
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      R.G. Belsky is the author of the Gil Malloy series - including Shooting for the Stars (August, 2015), The Midnight Hour (Feb. 2015) and The Kennedy Connection (2014)

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