Beginning in the late 1970s, headlines came to define the New York Post—and still do—particularly the front page, or wood, which roared, brawled, and punned its way into the fabric of a city on the rebound after its near bankruptcy. The period in which the Post began to dominate newsstands, with eight editions, six days a week, was a golden age for Rupert Murdoch’s Post. Like it or not, the paper demanded attention. Below, Post staffers take us inside the making of the tabloid’s unforgettable, in-your-face headlines.
CHARLIE CARILLO, reporter, columnist, 1978–1993: Wayne Darwen was a chain-smoking Australian who looked like he could have been in the band Spinal Tap. He had this shaggy blond hair and a growly voice. To give you an example of what Wayne was like, the Hasidic Jews in, I think it was Williamsburg, were complaining that their roads were not well paved. The New York City Marathon was coming up, and they were going to block the marathon—stand in the street and keep 20,000 runners from going through. We had a picture of a bunch of guys, with the hats and the tallit and the whole shebang. Wayne wrote a headline, “The Dukes of Hasid,” which got kicked back. Then he writes, “Yidlock.” Which gets kicked back. But I applauded.
WAYNE DARWEN, assistant managing editor, 1983–1987: Ah fuck! I don’t remember that, and it’s probably best I don’t. Yeah, I was supposed to be good at writing headlines. But all the guys down there were good at that. It was like a game. We threw them around. “What do you think of this?” It became headline by committee a lot of times.
JOHN WATERS, filmmaker: No matter what its politics were, I always think of [the Post] as a paper that I read for the entertainment news and great headlines.
HARRY SHEARER, humorist, actor, co-star of This Is Spinal Tap: The art of the tabloid front cover headline was, and still is, mastered by the Post. You can’t take that away from them.
JAMI BERNARD, chief movie critic, 1978–1993: When I was put on the rim, I didn’t know what was expected of me. No one interviewed me or [determined] whether I could do it. They simply dropped me there and gave me a short to do. The story was about how they had to stop construction on a kids’ baseball field because of an endangered bird species. My headline was “Bird Keeps Diamond in the Rough.”
MILTON GOLDSTEIN, copy editor, 1974–current: Fans started throwing rocks at a Rolling Stones concert in Cincinnati or something. It was a one-paragraph, one-column brief hed. “Real Rock Fans.” It’s bread-and-butter of what a tabloid hed is. Not every hed is a page-one screamer.
JAMI BERNARD: It’s not exactly about making a pun. A pun is good and alliteration is good, but the perfect headline comes out of left field a little bit. I’m not saying “Bird Keeps Diamond in the Rough” is perfect. It’s not exactly a pun. It’s wordplay. It also has to break at the right place. The right word has to come over to the next line so that it isn’t misread. The pressure was intense, and there was an unspoken competition.
DREW MACKENZIE, day news editor, 1979–1991: If you do a double entendre, it has to work twice. Sometimes it works three times.
PAT SMITH, night city editor, 1977–1989: It’s like haiku. You have a very limited amount of space. Our goal was to make a big bold impact on a newsstand in New York City during the rush hour, when everyone’s moving fast. People came to rely on that—the Post page one.
JOHN WATERS: The best headline ever was tiny, and it was inside. It was when Ike Turner died. The headline was “Ike Beats Tina to Death.”
CLYDE HABERMAN, reporter, 1966–1977: An asteroid was heading uncomfortably close to Earth. Then astronomers realized there was no way it was going to come within worrisome distance of New York. The Post headline was “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye.” That made me laugh even though normally I don’t like this tendency to go for the cheap, winking play on body parts.
FRANK DiGIACOMO, Page Six co-editor, 1989–1993: The only time I ever made Hal Davis laugh was when he gave me a story for Page Six about a trial or proceeding being interrupted, and the case had some sort of sexual element. I used “courtus interruptus” in my lede.
Mike Pearl, who covered criminal court for the Post, loved nothing more than seeing his byline under a spectacular wood. He papered the courthouse press room with them.
DAVID NG, associate managing editor, 1980–1993: [Mike Pearl’s] nickname was The King. He owned the courthouse. Everyone looked at Mike with a mix of bewilderment, curiosity, and fright. He was a very quiet guy with this little short crop of gray hair. He could pass for an economics professor somewhere.
MIKE PEARL, reporter, Manhattan Criminal Court, 1967–1998: I was really lucky because the trials that came through the Criminal Court were some of the biggest in the country. I didn’t start the Wall of Shame until after Murdoch had taken over the paper and the headlines became really racy. It became the Wall of Shame because of Columbia Journalism [School] students. Every year or two the Columbia instructors would bring students to the press rooms at City Hall and Criminal Court to show them what it was like to be a beat reporter, and the students were sure that the Daily News reporter had put up these headlines to shame the Post reporter. So they started calling it the Wall of Shame. But I had put them up. You were always looking for a story that was big enough to be on page one. I was getting so many of them. My all-time favorite was from a trial of a guy who killed a violinist and threw her off the roof of the Metropolitan Opera House. “She was nice to me, then I kicked her off the roof.” We wanted to do “Fiddler off the roof.” They thought that was in bad taste.
CHARLIE CARILLO: I think the wall still exists. They should laminate it.
In October 1978, Rupert Murdoch stands in the Manhattan newsroom of The New York Post, speaking with day managing editor Alan Whitney.
WAYNE DARWEN: If the story didn’t fit the headline, we made sure it did. With a little deft rewriting we’d line it up—put in probably what they left out. There was always that. No matter which paper, no matter which genre or media, you’ve always got that friendly friction between writers and editors, where writers very rarely know what editors do to their work.
MICHAEL SHAIN, television editor, 1978–1993, 1996–2013: They wanted something. Your job was simply to fill in behind it. You made the story. I had never been taught that a reporter makes a story. In my seven or eight years before the Post, I’d always thought that the people you talked to were the ones who made the story. But at the Post I learned quickly that it was your job to get what the boss wanted.
CHARLIE CARILLO: I remember you’d be told, “We want a story on this, the headline is going to be this.” Which is backwards, but it’s very much tabloid and it saves time, you know, if you have a destination, instead of this New York Times kind of thing—go out there like a wet piece of clay and absorb whatever it is—as opposed to, here’s the hero, here’s the villain, fill in the blanks.
Another headline master, Vincent A. Musetto, was the Post’s resident beatnik. Erratic, confrontational, and sometimes violent, Musetto was a polarizing figure in the newsroom and beyond.
JIM MONES, drama editor, 1980–1987: Vinnie saw a movie every day, not on TV or something. He actually went to the movies. His headlines were often inspired by films. He liked to test them out by singing them in an operatic voice. He always said the best headlines could be sung. You could hear him singing something like, “Tiny Tot Turns Cannibal”—one of our joke headlines. He’s singing headlines while walking along on top of desks.
DAN AQUILANTE, chief music critic, 1980–2012: Vinnie was a volatile person. He was a phone thrower; a garbage-can kicker. One day I had to get him ice in the cafeteria because he broke his toe kicking a metal trash can full throttle.
DICK BELSKY, metropolitan editor, 1970–1989: He had a trumpet he would blow in the newsroom. He’d throw trash cans at doors. You’d come in and there would be dents in the door, and he’d say, “I don’t know how that happened.” When he was really exasperated, he would scream, “I’m surrounded by idiots!” at the top of his lungs. He was the day managing editor; I was the city editor so I sat right next to him. After he screamed this, he’d turn to me and say, “Not you, Dick.”
MARCY SOLTIS, copy editor, 1976–2014: [Vinnie] once attacked—or maybe just threatened—a copy editor with a spike. Do you remember those? That’s where the term “spiking” a story came from. Back in the day, stories that were killed were literally skewered on metal spikes.
DAN AQUILANTE: One time, I was paginating something, and Vinnie wanted me to do something else. I’m sorry that this ever happened, but he started yelling at me, and I started yelling back. He picked up a Manhattan phone book. He had it lifted over his head and was about to pummel me with it. I yelled back at him, “Go ahead, motherfucker! Do it, do it! You’re my retirement plan.” He put the phone book down, and suddenly, we were called into an editor’s office together. It was a Friday, a day when I did a lot of interviews, so when I walked into the office, I put my tape recorder down and turned it on. Vinnie went berserk and ran out of the office. Vinnie was a good guy. I wish we didn’t fight at the end. I wish I was closer to him when he passed on.
Vinnie’s most famous headline—and the Post’s—almost didn’t get into the paper.
WAYNE DARWEN: “Headless body” was just before I got there, and there was always a dispute as to who wrote it—whether it was Vinnie Musetto or Drew MacKenzie. Probably the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I think they hated each other. I was friends with both of them, and you didn’t want to get in the middle.
DREW MACKENZIE: We didn’t get along, Vinnie and me. I found him batshit crazy. He was angry, a manic guy. I was working days when the story came in and I wrote, “Headless Body Found in Topless Bar.” Vinnie took out the “found” and took credit for the headline.
RICHARD GOODING, metropolitan editor, 1976–1993: The thing about reporting a story is that they always change during the day. You’d hear the first flush of a story, and it would be one thing. By the end of the day, when you reported it out, it would be something else and often less exciting. But once the news desk got their teeth into it, that was it. They didn’t want to hear later on that the story had changed. They’d spent the day thinking of headlines and how they were going to play a story, and that’s the way it was with “headless body.” Belsky put a whole team on the story. It was not a topless dancing bar. It was a bar in Queens. But we had a dozen reporters making calls to anybody you could possibly think of who had ever been to this bar to try to back up that it was a topless bar. That was the daily problem. If you had something that looked like it would be good, you’d try to keep them from finding out about it until you knew more. Once they found out about it, they weren’t going to let your facts get in the way.
DAVID NG: I was working at police headquarters [in the press room], a.k.a. the Shack. Belsky was the city editor. The beeper went off and he said, “We got this murder we’re chasing down in Queens. We need to find out whether it was a strip club.” I said, “Anything else?” He said, “No, we have everything else.” I went upstairs to public information. I asked the question. I think they contacted someone in the local precinct. They called back: “It definitely was a strip club.” I called Belsky. He said, “Thank you.” Click. I had no idea why they needed to know that until I saw the headline.
CHARLIE CARILLO: When Vinnie tapped out “headless body in topless bar,” we were all surrounding his VDT. It’s like pictures of the Declaration of Independence with everybody gathered around John Adams and Thomas Jefferson because they know it’s something big. By that afternoon, it was legend. Dick Belsky worked the desk that day, and he yelled over, “Vinnie, hang on, we’re checking. We’re not sure it’s a topless bar.” Vinnie jumped on the desk and said, “It’s gotta be a topless bar. This is the greatest fucking headline of my life.”
The events that inspired the headline took place at Herbie’s bar in Jamaica, Queens, on the night of April 13, 1983, and into the next morning. The headline may have been amusing. The crimes involved were not.
PETER DUNNE, former Queens assistant district attorney: No one was prepared for the level of violence that occurred in the city in the ’80s. We were inundated with hundreds of homicides. In five years as an ADA, I was responsible for trying fifty homicides. Now, it’s one or two a year, if that. Herbie Cummings was the owner of this topless bar. Charlie Dingle comes into the bar, tells Herbie he wants to be a partner in the bar. Herbie was a big guy, very muscular. He tells Charlie to go to hell. Charlie shoots him right between the eyes. Then he throws all the customers out and locks the door. All that’s left is the corpse, Herbie’s wife, and a topless dancer. There may have been another woman there. That I don’t recall.
Charlie robs everybody and rapes the dancer. There’s a knock on the door. It’s Herbie’s niece, who turns out to be a mortician. Charlie tells the niece to get the bullet out of the head. A couple of hours go by. Imagine that: trying to get a bullet out of the skull of your uncle. With a steak knife. Charlie finally tells her, “Cut it off, I’ll take it with me.” She saws off her uncle’s head. With a steak knife. There’s a box of decorations left from New Year’s. He puts the head in the box. He decides he’s going to throw it in the East River. He calls a car service, locks the driver up, and lets the dancer go. He takes the wife and mortician with him. The women are in the front seat. One is driving. He’s in the back with the box. He falls asleep. They stop the car near 168th and Broadway. The wife and the mortician go to the subway and tell the token booth clerks what happened. Nobody believes them. They tell them to go to Columbus Circle, the transit police. They are referred to Fred Mack, a detective. The women tell Mack this bizarre story.
FRED MACK, retired NYC Transit Police detective: I thought I would have a quiet day. About a quarter to eight, the desk sergeant says, you better talk to these ladies. Couple of well-dressed Black ladies. One was hysterical. She drank the coffee like it was iced tea. The other one said, “I witnessed a rape, a robbery, and a homicide.” Most people don’t use that word “homicide.” They say a killing. That was the mortician. The other one was his wife. Later they told me [the murderer] drank two bottles of rum, he did three lines of cocaine, and smoked four joints.
PETER DUNNE: Mack doesn’t believe them. He calls the police precinct in Queens [where Herbie’s Bar is located]. The guys in Queens say, “Do you have the head?” The cops had gone to the bar [after the cabdriver escaped and called them] and found the headless body. Now Fred believes the women.
FRED MACK: I say, “Do you know where he is?” “He’s in a car up near Columbia Presbyterian [Hospital].” I don’t know how they ended up at [the transit police district office] at Columbus Circle. I would have gone into the hospital building. It was right there, and it was safe. I only took the mortician up there with me. The wife was too upset. We get up there, and I see an old beat-up Lincoln and two police cars. I had called ahead to the local precinct. The police have got someone on the ground. But it’s not the guy. The mortician says, “That’s not the car. It’s on the other side.” Exact same [white Lincoln] on the other side of the street. [Dingle] was sleeping when I opened the door, which stirred him. He reached for his gun, I reached for mine, but I left it at the office. I still managed to get his gun and used it to hold him. The head was in an Almaden wine box filled with party decorations. Somebody forgot to ID the body in the morgue. They had only IDed the head. So I had to go to the funeral home. The funeral director put the body back together. He used a piece of wood, either a two-by- four or a two-by-three, drove it down the spine, attached the head to the wood, sealed up the neck, and pulled up a turtleneck. It was an open casket.
PETER DUNNE: The case was thrown on my desk. I did not ask for it. I knew about it because of the headline. Charlie Dingle waived a jury. His case was decided by a judge. This was totally out of the ordinary. Most defendants want a jury because they think they can fool people. He had a psychiatrist testify that he was insane. One of the cornerstones of the insanity defense is you don’t recognize that what you have done is wrong. I cross-examined the psychiatrist and got him to admit that, if Dingle wanted to take the head with him as a way of getting rid of the bullet [which would tie him to the crime], then he knew what he was doing. That was the end of the insanity defense. The judge determined Dingle was guilty. I don’t remember any press people being there.
DAVID PATERSON, former governor of New York, 2008–2010: I have one connection with the Post that has nothing to do with when I was governor. I had just started working in the Queens DA’s office and was part of the arraignment for a person who went to a bar, shot its owner, and had a woman there cut his head off. I saw a picture of the owner’s head. I thought I was going to jump out the window. Because of the crazy things he did, we thought it was a mental health issue, and I was working in the forensic bureau, which was for mental health cases. In 1990 or ’91, when I was a state senator, I asked the Post ’s editorial board for a meeting. My staff member and I were sitting in the lobby, and he says, “Hey, look at this headline, headless body in topless bar.” I said, “I was there!” I went into the editorial board meeting, and we talked more about that incident than the things I wanted to discuss with them.
DICK BELSKY: Vinnie had a lot of the great ones. There was “Khadafy goes daffy” and “I slept with a trumpet.” His favorite was “Granny executed in her pink pajamas.”
CHARLIE CARILLO: “Headless body” was the perfect perfect tabloid headline. It was on Saturday Night Live. Vinnie was on Letterman.
When the Post found a story worthy of its headlines, usually involving murder, sex, scandal, or another high-profile crime, it ran updates for days, creating a narrative that was the equivalent of a tabloid telenovela, with heroes, villains, and victims, who sometimes earned clever nicknames that stuck. When the paper discovered that a woman with a classy pedigree was running a high-end Manhattan escort service, it christened her, “The Mayflower Madam.”
PAUL THARP, reporter, columnist, 1982–2014: It was a two-day-old story of an escort ring on the Upper West Side. We were trying to do a follow on it. The best lead came from Phil Messing. He was a street reporter. He went up to the building and the super told him there’s a guy named Sidney Barrows who you call if there’s a water leak or something. Then Mike Pearl calls and says, her name is Sydney Biddle Barrows. I said, “Biddle? She’s a Biddle?” We used to have the Social Register then, the little black book. And there it is.
SYDNEY BIDDLE BARROWS, former owner, Cachet escort service: None of my friends knew my middle name was Biddle. I never used it.
The New York Post newsroom in September 1965.
PHILIP MESSING, reporter, 1978–1991, 1994–2016: I can’t lay claim to the discovery that Ms. Barrows was a blue blood whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. I think this tidbit was discovered by Paul Tharp or Peter Fearon. But it was a New York Post revelation. We were even more jazzed when we learned that the young service providers came from the ranks of the patricians they hoped to serve—supposedly they all went to elite schools.
PETER FEARON, reporter, 1980–1987: You know how when you write a story, you have to write a slug at the top? [The slug identifies the article as it’s in production.] I used to try to write meaningful or catchy slugs so that I could get back to them. After I’d written “Mayflower Madam” for the slug, I thought, “Oh my god, that’s it.” That also became the first paragraph. And the headline.
SYDNEY BIDDLE BARROWS: For two weeks [in 1984], I was the cover story every day. Although they didn’t publish on Sunday. It was also the cover story on the Daily News, except for the day Indira Gandhi got shot. That was the only thing that kicked me off the front page. I ended up being extremely fortunate in that there was that newspaper war going on between the Post and the Daily News. And fortunately, both papers figured out that what made the story interesting was the dichotomy between my background and the business I was in. They played that up to my benefit. Instead of making it a sordid story, which they usually do with people who did what I did. Instead of making me out to be a low-life villain, they made me out to be some glamorous socialite-type person, which I wasn’t.
In the afternoon of December 22, 1984, Bernie Goetz shot four Black teens on the number 2 subway train after, he alleged, they attempted to rob him. One of the men, Darrell Cabey, was left paraplegic and brain damaged. The case became national news, sparking a national debate about whether the shooting was justifiable in a city notorious for crime. When he turned himself in, the Post’s wood declared “I Am Death Wish Vigilante,” a reference to a 1974 movie starring Charles Bronson.
RICHARD ESPOSITO, reporter, 1982–1985: I was supposed to stake out Bernie Goetz in his apartment on 14th Street. This was right after [the shooting] happened. No one knew where he was. No one had a photo. The photographer had almost no involvement and was terrified to even be a part of getting the photo, which involved sneaking past the detectives in the lobby and getting into his apartment. Bernie was not there. I flipped the lock with a credit card and got the photo from his passport. I had to take it out of the apartment for the photographer to take a picture and then put it back. After a while, the cops called up on the intercom and said, “You had enough fun. You need to get out of there now.” They figured out I was up there. I did not tell anyone for a very long time because even though I only removed the passport for a little while, and then put it back, technically, it could be considered stealing a passport.
RONALD L. KUBY, attorney for Darrell Cabey, former partner of activist lawyer William Kunstler: In the forty years that I’ve been practicing law in New York, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the Post. Look, the lurid headlines are interesting. People like them and comment on their cleverness, and I’m among them. Back when I had more friends at the Post, I used to do sample headline writing for stories they were working on, just for fun, because it’s kind of a brainteaser. The race-baiting though, the insistent demonization of Black youths, many who turned out to be innocent, excusing police brutality—year after year, generation after generation—and the paper’s contribution to sentiment in favor of mass incarceration doesn’t get washed away by cute and clever headlines. That is the most enduring legacy of the New York Post in those forty years. The first one [in my experience] was the vigilante shooting of four Black youths by Bernhard Goetz, none of whom threatened Goetz, none of whom displayed any weapon. Goetz just opened fire on all four of them. Every day the Post championed him as the hero of the white man: Mr. Charles Bronson, Mr. Average Citizen who’s had enough.
I’ve got to tell you they weren’t alone. It’s true the New York Post did things more luridly, more colorfully, and more viciously than the other newspapers, but it’s not like the other papers or the citizenry were in a different place. The New York Post has always tried to reflect the most ugly part of their readers and give that full voice. The other papers nod and wink to it. Goetz, of course, got acquitted of all serious charges, but ultimately, I held him accountable in civil court for $43 million [in 1996]. We never collected, but the idea wasn’t to collect. The idea was to dethrone him from his hero status. That’s when the New York Post made one of its sort of rare personal attacks on me in the form of a cartoon by the great Sean Delonas. He had me in court—a big fat version of Ron Kuby—representing some horrible person; the headlines making some sick excuse. To this day, Sean remains a friend of mine. I’m not a jihadist in France. I don’t hate people for their cartoons.
CHARLIE CARILLO: One Memorial Day weekend, there was nothing going on in the city. Nothing. A toy company was doing a publicity stunt about some action figure, and at the 30th Street helipad, they had a guy coming down from a helicopter on a rope with this toy. He was going to land and he was in a uniform. There were three print guys there: me, a guy from United Press International, and a guy from the New Yorker magazine. It hit me: the guy from the New Yorker is here because it’s quaint Talk of the Town stuff. The guy from UPI is there because they cover everything. And I’m here in case the rope snaps.
Copyright © 2024 by Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo. Adapted from PAPER OF WRECKAGE: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media by Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
