America's Last Great Newspaper War: The Death of Print in a Two-Tabloid Town

332 Pages·164.972 MB·English

by  Mike Jaccarino

America’s Last Great Newspaper War

AMERICA’S
LAST GREAT
NEWSPAPER WAR
The Death of Print in a Two- Tabloid Town
Mike Jaccarino
AN IMPRINT OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK 2020
Funding for this book was provided by: 
Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
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Library of Congress Control Number:2019956126
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
For all the runners and shooters who fought the war—
and believed with abandon in the holiness of the get

CONTENTS
Prologue: “Shell Shock for News Nuts” 1
1 “Serb Thug to New York . . . Kiss My Ash” 5
2 “All Play, No Pay for Page Fix” 16
3 “Ford to City: Drop Dead” 39
4 “Cops Shoot Groom Dead” 51
5 “N.J. Miss in a Fix Over Her Pics!” 62
6 “2 Cops Shot During Traffic Stop” 92
7 “Tracked Down and Busted in Pa. Woods” 113
8 “Sports’ Worst Nightmare” 123
9 “‘Mayday’ Last Call from Doomed Bravest at Ground Zero” 143
10 “The Juice Is on the Loose: O.J. Simpson Leaves Jail after Posting
$125,000 Bail” 162
11 “Preppie Killer Robert Chambers Acts Like a ‘Dumb’ Doper” 191
12 “Legend of Jim Leyritz’s Swing against Braves Spoiled by
His Swigs” 198
viii · CONTENTS
13 “If Spitzer Really Wore Socks in Bed, May Mean Fear of Intimacy:
Sex Experts” 234
14 “Ma Goes to Bat for Derek Jeter” 253
15 “What to Tell Kids When Daddy Has Two Families” 262
16 “Temple of Doom . . . Madoff Fleeced Fifth Avenue Synagogue” 283
Glossary 291
Notes 293
Index 299
Photographs follow page 152
PROLOGUE
“Shell Shock for News Nuts”
New York Post headline, March 24, 2005
On March 23, 2005, a New York Post delivery truck stopped in front of the
New York Daily News’ midtown Manhattan headquarters at 33rd Street
and Tenth Avenue. Its driver exited the banana- yellow- colored vehicle and
opened its rear doors to behold five 100- pound sacks filled with—if you
believe the following day’s account in the Post—a total of 1 million pea-
nuts. The sacks came addressed to their intended recipients: Mort “Zero
for Readers” Zuckerman, the News’ owner; Les “For Them, More for Us”
Goodstein, its president; Martin “The Dunce” Dunn, the paper’s editorial
director; and Michael “Our Goose Is Cooked” Cooke, its editor- in- chief.
The deliveryman then hefted some portion of his cargo toward the News’
front doors, although he was intercepted at the curb.
“There’s no deliveries in this building for something as ridiculous as
this!” cried a security guard who stopped him there. “I’m responsible for
the safety of this building.”1
Here, a Post reporter who had accompanied the deliveryman asked the
guard what he thought so suspicious about the sacks. “You think peanuts
are unsafe?” the scribe asked, to which the guard, or “News shill,” as he
was so branded in the Post’s next- day account, cried, “That’s right!”
Temporarily deterred, the deliveryman lugged the bags back to the
truck and motored around the corner to yet another entrance. Here, two
days earlier, an angry mob had laid siege to the News’ building, chanting,
“Show us the money!” and “Buy the Post!” Now, the area along Tenth Ave-
nue had returned to something more like its default quiescence, but while
1
2 · PROLOGUE
the crowds had mostly dispersed, the deliveryman and reporter discovered
more “goons” dispatched by “nervous News execs”—there to resist their
“good- natured gift” of “tasty legumes,” as the Post later put it. “This is
viewed as a threat to me,” one “factotum” informed the driver. “There
could be a bomb in there. No peanuts!”
And so continued the peculiar events surrounding the Great Scratch ’N’
Match Scandal of 2005.
The scandal had begun five days earlier, on a Saturday, when scores of
Daily News readers had been misinformed that they’d won prizes rang-
ing from $1,000 to $100,000 as contestants in the paper’s weekly lottery-
like game, Scratch ’N’ Match. The game worked like this: Every Sunday,
the News came with a Scratch ’N’ Match game card consisting of eight
scratch- off areas containing fifteen numbered spaces apiece. Each “area”
corresponded to one of the seven days of the week, with two allotted for
Sunday. The News then published a number each day indicating which
space contestants should scratch off on the game card “area” correspond-
ing to that day of the week. If the News published a “5” on Monday, con-
testants scratched off the space marked “5” on Monday’s game card area.
If it published a “12” on Tuesday, they scratched off the space for “12” in
that area. Once the spaces were scratched, the numbers revealed a sum.
If by Saturday the game card revealed three like- amounts of money, the
contestant won the indicated sum.
But it didn’t work correctly on March 19. The outfit that managed Scratch
’N’ Match on behalf of the News—a D. L. Blair out of Long Island—
transmitted an incorrect number to the paper on Friday night. The News
published this wrong number in Saturday’s paper, leading thousands of
its readers to mistakenly believe they had won prizes when they had not.
Some held numerous “winning” game cards. Alfred Lenquan had five for
$100,000 each.
The News responded with an apology, fiery rhetoric about D. L. Blair,
and the promise of another, special drawing to be held among the would- be
winners to conclude with five $100,000 winners, five $10,000 winners, and
12,790 winners of an undisclosed amount. The reaction to this make- good
offer, as one might expect, was outrage among the “winners.”
“It’s peanuts!” Lenquan told the Post as he protested outside the News on
March 21, lending the paper’s editors the quote they would use to underp in
this headline the following day: “un’matched’ ineptness—‘winners’:
news offer peanuts.” But Lenquan unw ittingly gave the Post more
than just headline fodder. From the scandal’s start, the tabloid had been
searching for novel ways to shame its arch- rival, although until that point