I didn’t think anything could surprise me. But this one threw me out the window. The New York Times has a blacklist. A blacklist is a collection of names of people they overtly discriminate against as some kind of form of revenge and vengeance. I do not know why. I do not want to know why. All this time, I have known that something fundamental was going on because so many NYT writers look like deer in headlights. Someone spilled the beans. A while back, I was doing an investigation of Roy Cohn for a paper on Long Island. The issue of what sources do is a fragile one. My own thing with it is to bribe office staff with pizza, Radio City Music Hall. Yankee’s tickets, Broadway, Sardi’s, the Rainbow Room. Saturday Night Live. Lincoln Center. MOMA. The Met. Fashion shows. Political events. With a whole paper behind you, what the fuck. Tickets to the Today Show. A party at the Guggenheim. Nightclubs galore. I can get you in. I can get you out. What I did was create pathways around the people who refused to talk to me.

I did not give people money. I gave them gifts to talk to me.

What fascinates me is that the criminal rich know it’s not a good idea to abuse the people who work for you and they can talk. Even with an NDA, they will still talk to you as long as there is a rage burning somewhere in the source.

When I go up against sons-of-bitches, I make sure there’s someone who has been hurt and who hates them.  Let’s have lunch.

Often, there is a lot of bad feelings going on because most of the people who can afford a staff with assistants galore, will abuse you as soon as look at you. The rich are stuffed to the gills with sociopaths who lash out, harass and humiliate the people who work for them. It’s entertainment. It’s stupid.

My source was an assistant who had been burned with a verbal thunderstorm that shook the building. Cohn had veins that pulsated against his head. I could not look at his eyes, but I could see those veins crawling around under his thin skin. Everyone knew that Cohn was a criminal. If you go through a maze of municipal record-keeping, what you often find is that the rich typically hide what they do behind dummy corporations registered in the Cayman Islands. Cohn had these by dozen. You hit a brick wall. You need a source. Then, you need another source. To confirm. If you were someone like me, and everyone in the village hated you and punched holes in the tires of your rental car, you can either fuck these people with what you write in the way you portray them, or you can dig deeper and see why they are the way they are. This is your job. Cohn’s goons were looking for me, and I had to sleep in a different hotel every night. I had to play subway charade games like hop on, hop off. This is ordinary. No credit cards. Just plain old cash. I would meet with my editor on the subway, he he would slip me the cash. Cohn had AIDS. He was more abusive than ever. Now, there was a whole crowd of people who wanted to talk to me. But I had what I needed and I do not do well in crowds, and I do not do well in the fleabag hotels of Times Square. There were times I got really scared. Cohn was organized crime.

I am so glad he is fucking dead.

Without two independent sources (who do not know each other) you don’t have anything an editor wants to know. This is tough work. Suddenly, you are informed by the Scum Bag Patrol (these guys would sell their mothers to the devil) that some bad people had had their hands slapped with a ruler. The bodies had yet to pile up. I hate bed bugs in hotels. I wanted to stay at the Plaza but it would have been too high a profile. Keep my head down. A different colored hoodie every few hours. I finished the work at the New York Public Library Microfiche. Microfiche is old tech. But it knows where the bodies are buried.

We nailed Cohn to the wall. I had to take take a long vacation. Cohn had long lizard arms. He always got what he wanted but not this time. It took a while before I could stop looking my shoulder.

No publication I knew of had a blacklist. Journalism was journalism. I had been nominated for a National Magazine Award, but traveling back to NYC was dangerous. I use burners. As a journalist, you worked with a lot of people who you did not like. I have interviewed convicted murderers and I did not like them one bit. But they had stories, and I wanted them.

I want the story of this blacklist. I have been beating the bushes to get it. I have made a lot of noise to get it. Even if I had it, why would I tell you.

I usually get what I want, too.