Columnist Jimmy Breslin recalled in ‘Daily News’

NEW YORK — Late Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, who was sent letters from Son of Sam in 1976, is remembered in “Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth.”

The book published this month is by Richard Esposito, who was at New York’s hometown paper from his copyboy days to metro editor and then editor of the Sunday News.

It’s an intimate portrait of a complicated man that captures the power of Breslin’s writing, and also his occasionally outrageous, larger than life newsroom persona.

When serial killer David Berkowitz sent his first Son of Sam letter to The News, Esposito recalls Breslin remarked on the murderer’s grasp of the semicolon. He then made a point of telling whoever would listen “he writes better than most of the reporters in the city,” Esposito recalls. That wasn’t enough.

Esposito then remembers him walking through the newsroom, muttering and bellowing that if Berkowitz were on staff they could get rid of a bunch of the less-talented hacks sitting there. Breslin’s gifts won him a Pulitzer.

Telling the truth was Breslin’s gift, and the book captures that across five decades of American history, when Breslin was often at the center of events.