The Redemption of Wayne Barrett

Earlier this year, Pete Hamill died. Unless you were/are a journalist of a certain age, the name might escape you or send you to Google or Wikipedia to find out about him.

Pete Hamill was a reporter. Along with Jimmy Breslin and Wayne Barrett, those three covered sports, politics and corruption in New York City for over 50 years. It also means they covered you-know-who.

Hamill and Breslin were linked together. In 2019, HBO made a documentary, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, detailing their friendship and competition over a 45-year period.

But this is about Barrett, who wrote for the late, lamented Village Voice for 35 years. Barrett, has been noted here and elsewhere, first exposed the venal and petty ministrations of Donald Trump. In 1979, long before the USFL, the casinos, airlines, fraud and lies, ‘John Barron’ long before The Apprentice, “You’re fired,” the fixation on Obama and birtherism, Trump University and ultimately this, Barrett wrote about a brash upstart from Queens, who, by sheer bluster and bullshit, was making his mark in both New York and Philadelphia.

In the end, in 1979, Barrett called Trump “a user of other users. Their ideas are small, never transcending profit. In it, however, are the men elected to lead us and those who buy them. And in it, unhappily, are the processes and decisions that shape our city and our lives.”

Trump tried to bribe Barrett with a new apartment, a brownstone, ‘rent free,’ then threatened to sue him…