Confessions of an Investigative Reporter

Matthew Schwartz

• Publisher: Matthew Schwartz
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781646630721
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Journalistische Biographien

"A fascinating look behind the media mirror that reflects celebrity and power... incredible." —Bob Dotson, New York Times bestselling author, former national correspondent, the Today show

Award-winning investigative reporter Matthew Schwartz was ordered to lie on TV in the name of sensationalism. He was arrested for trespassing on the property of a business he exposed for committing fraud. A target of one of his investigations swung a baseball bat at his head. He’s been shoved, sued, and cursed out. He caught a car dealership rolling back odometers and selling used cars as new. In Confessions of an Investigative Reporter, this veteran journalist reveals his inner thoughts and the inside stories viewers never saw. Confessions of an Investigative Reporter is funny, fast-moving, and dishy. It provides a rare look inside the world of local news from someone who spent four decades in it. It’s not only for news viewers. It’s for anyone who cares about justice and their community. And about that time he was ordered to lie? His answers lie within.

CHAPTER ONE

The Son of Sam and Fake News

SOUND BITE

“If I’m at a wedding and they play ‘Daddy’s Little Girl,’ I get up and walk out of the hall.”

—MIKE LAURIA, whose daughter was murdered by David Berkowitz

One of the most notorious killers in history was sitting three feet from me. David Berkowitz, the self-proclaimed “Son of Sam,” the “.44 Caliber Killer,” had murdered six people and wounded seven others in a shooting spree that terrorized New Yorkers over thirteen months in 1976 and 1977. Berkowitz targeted attractive young women, most with long brown hair. Many who fit those descriptions had dyed their hair blonde and cut it short to avoid being noticed by the target of the biggest police manhunt in the city’s history.

Decades later, the serial killer and I became pen pals.

In the spring of 2002, I was an investigative reporter at WWOR-TV, Channel 9. The station moved in 1986 from Times Square, where it had different owners and the call letters WOR-TV, to Secaucus, New Jersey. The town was six miles from midtown Manhattan and known for decades as the home of pig farms and the odors they emitted. But I loved working there and had wonderful, talented colleagues. WOR-TV was also a superstation, meaning it was on cable systems nationwide, which made my mother in Florida happy. Despite the move to New Jersey, the station remained in the New York City market.

Berkowitz’s home was seventy miles north, in the Shawangunk Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York’s Sullivan County.

Berkowitz had a parole hearing approaching, and I thought he might want to talk about it. The hearing was a legality, a requirement for inmates having served twenty-five years. There was no chance of him being paroled; he had been sentenced to six consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life.

Berkowitz became my pen pal after my producer, Ethan Dreilinger, went to the prison without a camera and visited him. The killer requested the meeting before agreeing to the interview. Ethan did a great job laying the groundwork, assuring Berkowitz that our piece would not be sensational. Little did I know about one sentence that would be added to the story. But without Ethan’s help I doubt Berkowitz would have done the interview.

Berkowitz and I then exchanged letters for about six weeks. The former letter sorter with the United States Postal Service wrote that he agreed to talk to me before the parole hearing in July 2002. He wanted the public, especially the victims’ loved ones, to know that he realized he deserved to stay in prison. Like so many inmates, Berkowitz claimed he found religion behind bars and was a Jew for Jesus. He wanted to tell the world he had changed. He had sent a letter to New York governor George Pataki, saying, “In all honesty, I believe that I deserve to be in prison for the rest of my life. I have, with God’s help, long ago come to terms with my situation and I have accepted my punishment.”

This interview was a great get, as it’s called in the news business.

His birth name was Richard Falco. He was given up for adoption because his father was a married man who threatened to end his affair with Berkowitz’s mother if she kept the baby. Berkowitz was adopted by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz. He was traumatized by Pearl’s death in 1967, and became a loner.

Berkowitz was arrested, ironically, due to a run-of-the-mill parking ticket. A woman was walking her dog in Brooklyn shortly after 2 a.m. on July 31, 1977, near the scene of one of his shootings. She told police she saw cops giving out tickets nearby. Investigators then reviewed all the tickets handed out in that area during the time of the murder. One of the tickets was issued to a David Berkowitz of Yonkers, New York. New York City cops called Yonkers police and spoke to an officer who knew Berkowitz as a local “cuckoo, a nut.” Berkowitz had no police record, but as detectives interviewed his neighbors, they became strongly suspicious.

Cops staked out Berkowitz’s apartment building. He was arrested as he sat at the wheel of his car on August 10. He has been quoted as telling police, “I guess this is the end of the trail,” and “How come it took you so long?” and “You got me.” Later that night, when police paraded him from a precinct station to court with dozens of cameras and reporters present, he smiled. He was twenty-four years old and getting attention for the first time in his life. He appeared to like it.

Twenty-five years later I was in a prison interview room waiting for Berkowitz. I had two photographers with me for one of the few times in my career, in case of technical problems and for cutaways (reverse shots of me). There would be no second chance.

I wasn’t nervous. I felt some pressure to ask every question I thought he needed to answer. Although I had several pages of questions, as I routinely did for major interviews, I would deviate from them if he said anything that needed a follow-up question.

Berkowitz smiled as he entered the room. I stood to greet him and extended my hand. People have asked me how it felt to shake hands with a serial killer. Weird. I thought about what he did when he held a gun in his hands. I didn’t want to shake his but felt I had to. Refusing to do so would not get the interview off to a good start.

Berkowitz said in a soft, high-pitched voice with a New York accent, “OK, nice to meet you.” He was forty-eight years old but could have passed for sixty. Prison can do that. He was pudgy, graying, balding, and wore glasses. I could find dozens of guys on the outside who resembled him, except for the three-inch scar on the left side of his neck. He was stabbed by an inmate trying to make a name for himself at Attica State Prison in 1979.

I started the interview by asking, “When you lie in bed at night, what do you think about?”

He said, “It’s not easy sometimes, when the lights go out and the door slams shut every evening, to reconcile things and come to terms with things. But I think I’ve come a long way.”

I brought old newspapers with articles about the murders. I started to hand them to him, but he didn’t take them and barely looked at them. He said he hadn’t read a newspaper since he’d been behind bars. It was clear he was uncomfortable seeing those headlines.

Berkowitz said he was teaching inmates about God and the Bible. He was in a video recorded in prison, calling himself not the “Son of Sam” but the “Son of Hope.” He would have talked about that the entire time if I let him; he gave longer answers about religion than anything else.

He apologized to his victims’ families and friends, but did not want to talk specifically about the murders or why he committed them. Even so, I asked repeatedly.

Berkowitz had done very few interviews over the years, and I thought viewers would want to know his motivations. His initial confession to cops was that he was commanded to kill by voices he heard from a black Labrador retriever owned by his neighbor Sam Carr. Hence his self-given nickname. Berkowitz told me, “It was a time of torment for me, a time of chaos when these things happened. My feelings on parole are that I’ve accepted responsibility for what has happened. I’m doing my time in prison and I’m not trying to get out of prison.”

Berkowitz claimed he was in a drug-induced haze when he committed the murders, and he said he didn’t remember clearly why he killed. “I’m sorry for what happened,” he said. “I’d do anything if I could go back and change it.”

I had no intention of making the piece a pity party for Berkowitz, so I interviewed the parents of two women he killed. Donna Lauria was his first victim. The pretty eighteen-year-old student and her girlfriend Jody Valenti had been at a disco on July 28, 1976. As Jody told police, shortly after 1 a.m. the women were in Jody’s car discussing their night out. They were in front of the Bronx apartment building where Donna lived with her parents. Berkowitz walked up and fired four gunshots through the passenger window. Donna was shot in the neck and died instantly. Jody survived.

I asked Mike Lauria what he would do if he ever was face-to-face with his daughter’s killer. In his thick New Y...