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Aids Patient: York Columnist

aids patient: Breslin, who died Sunday at 88, was a fixture in New York journalism, notably with the New York Daily News, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for pieces that, among others, exposed police torture in Queens and took a sympathetic look at the life of an AIDS patient, according to Brandon Sun. His was the triumph of the local, and to get the local right, you have to get how people made a living, how they got paid, how they didn't get paid, and to be able to bring it to life, said Pete Hamill, another famed New York columnist who in the 1970s shared an office with Breslin at the Daily News. In a writing career that spanned six decades, the columnist and author became the brash embodiment of the street-smart New Yorker, chronicling wise guys and big-city power brokers but always coming back to the toils of ordinary working people. Jimmy really admired people whose favourite four-letter word was work, said Hamill, speaking from New Orleans. It was the rumpled Breslin who mounted a quixotic political campaign for citywide office in the 1960s; who became the Son of Sam's regular correspondent in the 1970s; who exposed the city's worst corruption scandal in decades in the 1980s; who was pulled from a car and nearly stripped naked by Brooklyn rioters in the 1990s. Breslin died at his Manhattan home of complications from pneumonia, according to his stepdaughter, Emily Eldridge. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.