Remembering Tom Robbins, Journalist Who Crusaded for New Yorkers in Need

Journalist Tom Robbins died at home in Brooklyn Heights on Tuesday, May 27. He was 76 and left behind a powerful legacy as a journalist and activist—including through his work for THE CITY.

When Robbins walked into this newsroom two years ago to join our new investigative unit, he brought a lot with him: a storied career spanning half a century in which he took down corrupt politicians, dirty union leaders, and slumlords; a collection of contacts that was unmatched and unmatchably diverse—mobsters and prosecutors, community organizers and business leaders and people who defied categorization nestled in the nooks of every borough, some of whom would share their sensitive information only with Robbins.

He had a profound love for New York City and a deep humanity—menschy, indignant, sometimes sad and often bemused—that touched his interactions and reporting. He seemed to know everyone in government, the courts, neighborhood service groups, and journalism. That included half THE CITY’s newsroom, which was filled with old students and colleagues from many of the publications where he had distinguished himself—including City Limits, the Village Voice, and the Daily News.

His reporting was never short of thorough, with visits to the scene a prerequisite in a day when digital journalism often has reporters working remotely. His writing was polished and elegant, all the more so as the years went on.

He was at THE CITY a bit short of a year, deciding to leave when economic headwinds threatened layoffs and he did not want to risk keeping a job when someone younger with a family might be let go. He continued with other work to which he was deeply committed, as investigative reporter in residence at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, where he mentored a generation of reporters.

But his presence has lingered, in tips that continue to bear fruit, advice that reporters still take to heart, a persona that still brings a smile, and work that helped yield some of our greatest scoops, including evidence of illegal donations to Mayor Eric Adams’s campaigns.

Robbins’s leads opened up a window into an underworld involving a hotel developer, now indicted on bribery-related charges, who fundraised for Adams and deployed two of the mayor’s associates as fixers.

“When a small cadre of editors ‘interviewed’ Tom for a reporting job at THE CITY, we all knew what was really going on. Tom was interviewing us. He wasn’t going to come back to just any newsroom, and when we finally prevailed, he simply said: ‘I’m in. THE CITY has heart,’ ” recollected Editor in Chief Richard Kim. “It was a blessing to share a newsroom with him.”

City Hall reporter Katie Honan recalled being with Robbins on an August 2023 mission to Sunset Park to knock on the front door of former State Assembly Member Felix Ortiz, who shared with Adams a history of trips to meet with Chinese government officials. (Honan recalled they interrupted the Brooklyn politician having dinner: “He did not invite us in for a plate.”)

“As we walked up and down Fourth Avenue, I asked Tom about his younger years, what drew him to New York City, and to journalism,” Honan said, before they decided to take a Lyft to another destination. She was struck by the conversation her fellow reporter struck up during the ride: “Tom spent the ride talking to the driver about his past life as a cab driver, listening intently as the driver talked about how hard it was to make any money.”

Robbins had indeed worked as a taxi driver—and manual laborer, and Vietnam-era antiwar and antidraft activist.

Michael Powell, a longtime New York City journalist now writing for The Atlantic, recalled first meeting Robbins during his days working as a cab driver in the mid-1970s. Robbins was heavily involved in the Taxi Rank and File Coalition, which opposed the Central Labor Council, a group coalition members deemed corrupt.

Robbins was the shop chair at the Dover Garage on Hudson Street in the West Village, the inspiration for the long-running TV series Taxi. “He was a radical labor troublemaker at that point,” Powell recalled.

He took that commitment to represent working people to his journalism, for community newspapers in Brooklyn and then as editor of a tiny magazine for and about grassroots community organizers called City Limits—focused on the work of helping city neighborhoods power through rampant disinvestment.

“Writing for City Limits allowed me to be a witness to the battles everyday New Yorkers were waging in neighborhoods throughout the city,” Robbins said in 2018 when he was honored by the publication for his life’s work. “There were no better stories to be recorded than those told by the folks who were at work in the trenches back then trying to do what government had refused to do—to stop abandonment, to rescue buildings from lousy landlords, to push banks and politicians to reinvest, to create new affordable homes.”

Powell went on to be a tenant organizer in those trenches but was striving to plunge into the gritty world of New York City journalism. He recounted submitting a story that Robbins significantly reworked.

”He, like, translated me into English,” Powell said. “I was discouraged by it. I wanted to work at City Limits. He invited me to dinner. He was very clear on why that piece didn’t work but in a way that left me inspired.”

Powell added: “If Tom got annoyed at you, you immediately felt like you’d blown something.”

A Powerful Voice

Robbins went on to become a writer at the Village Voice at the 1980s height of its influence, where he collaborated and co-starred with other fierce and impassioned investigative reporters, including Jack Newfield, Wayne Barrett, and William Bastone.

Said Voice colleague Joe Conason: “Tom was really interested in and concerned about and dedicated his life to improving the lives of people at the very bottom, that was what he cared about the most, and he wasn’t really that interested in politicians or getting to know people who were powerful or things that lots of reporters concerned themselves with.”

In his 1980s stint at the Voice and again in the 2000s, Robbins wrote with acid flourish about the depravities of those who took advantage of New York’s working class, in coverage that took on the city’s worst landlords, exposed labor-union gangsters, and toppled a corrupt housing development chief under Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“Gus Bevona died on Tuesday, and if most people don’t recognize the name maybe that’s just as well,” began a 2010 farewell to the former president of the building workers Local 32BJ. “Before a reform push from the national headquarters of the Service Employees union forced him out the door back in 1999, Bevona was one of labor’s biggest local embarrassments.”

He quit the Village Voice in solidarity after new owners of the alternative weekly fired Barrett. He found a new home at CUNY, which became a springboard for ambitious investigative reporting.

Robbins turned to the provocative case of Judith Clark, a member of the radical Weather Underground sentenced to 75-years-to-life for her role as the getaway driver in a 1981 Rockland County Brink’s armored truck robbery, which resulted in the shooting deaths of two cops and a security guard.

Robbins knew Clark from his days as a union organizer and anti-draft activist, and during one of his stints at the Voice he arranged through mutual friends to visit Clark in prison.

Speaking with THE CITY Wednesday, Clark recalled how both parties were skeptical: Robbins, like many of his left-leaning compatriots, was outraged by the Brink’s robbery, and Clark—although interested in obtaining an early release for good behavior—was deliberately avoiding the media.

”He was skeptical because he was skeptical about what my politics were before,” she said. “But he ultimately decided to come see for himself, which is a very Tom way to be. When he first came, it was not to do an article.”

Over the years Robbins paid several visits, interviewed family members of the police officers who were killed, spoke with Clark’s daughter, and spent time in Rockland County. Ultimately he came to conclude that Clark had truly undergone a dramatic transformation in prison, rejecting her former radical tendencies and helping other prisoners learn life skills and turn themselves around.

”He could see the humanity, but also he would look at all different sides of the story,” Clark said. “He didn’t believe that stories are about good guys and bad guys. He believed that terrible things needed to be exposed.”

Robbins’s 2012 cover story in the New York Times magazine became the turning point for Clark, but not right away. Then-Governor David Paterson rejected the idea of commuting her sentence, stating that feelings about the fatal robbery were still “raw.”

Robbins soon had an encounter with another governor, Andrew Cuomo, at the retirement party for Daily News crusading columnist Juan Gonzalez. Cuomo showed up to praise Gonzalez, and as Gonzalez recalls it, as Robbins was approaching the governor, Cuomo stated, “I know what you want. You want me to commute Judith Clark’s sentence.”

Robbins, Gonzalez said, shook his head and said, “No. I just ask one thing: Go and visit with her and see for yourself.”

Cuomo did as Robbins suggested and commuted Clark’s sentence that December, making her eligible for parole. The parole board, which is controlled by gubernatorial appointees, granted her request for early release in April 2019.

Clark sees Robbins’s ability to understand and convey the complexities of narratives others see as black and white as the key characteristic for his remarkable track record as a New York City journalist.

”He’s the last of the long line of those kind of hard-hitting muckraking journalists,” Clark said. “Several were grumpy old men. As the years went on, he was the opposite of a grumpy old man. He was incredibly kind. He had a sense of humor.”

Robbins continued to report on New York’s prisons, and a series of articles with the Marshall Project and New York Times on abuse of incarcerated people by corrections officers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

‘Everybody Respected Him’

Gonzalez noted that Robbins’s reputation for unfailing integrity played a part in the Daily News strike of 1990, when some reporters began contemplating crossing the picket line and returning to work.

Robbins had just started at the Daily News but had been a major player in the city press corps for years at the Voice, so he became the press spokesperson for the Newspaper Guild during the strike.

”Everyone in the news business knew him from the Voice,” Gonzalez said. “He was not only the voice of the strike. He was the guy who kept the wishy-washy Guild members in the strike. You know Tom. He was a very convincing guy. To me, he was the heart and soul of investigative journalism in New York City for years. He had integrity. Everybody respected him. He was able to convince folks to rethink what was reality.”

During his 12 years as both a labor columnist and investigative reporter at the News, Robbins often focused on the outrageous activities of New York’s five mob families, at one point becoming part of the story.

In the middle of the trial, the Brooklyn DA was forced to drop charges against an FBI agent charged with feeding secrets about cooperators to a Mafia hitman: Tapes made by Robbins and another Daily News veteran, Jerry Capeci, surfaced revealing the DA’s star witness, the hitman’s mistress, had insisted the agent had provided no information to her gangster boyfriend. End of case.

Even some of the subjects of Robbins’s hard-hitting articles would find themselves upset at what he’d written but ultimately walk away believing he’d play fair in his effort to tell a story that they didn’t particularly agree with.

Case in point is attorney Frank Carone, a longtime fixer in Brooklyn politics who served for years as the lawyer for the Kings County Democratic Committee and ultimately won a slot as Mayor Eric Adams’s chief of staff.

Robbins penned a March 2023 story for THE CITY on how a landlord struggling to fill a vacant Brooklyn building hired Carone and won a $3.5-million-a-year lease for a city-funded homeless shelter.

After the story was published, Carone reached out to Robbins through intermediaries to arrange a lunch at Casa Cipriani in Lower Manhattan.

Carone said the meeting between journalist and subject started with him expressing his belief that the coverage exaggerated the problems with the building and didn’t merit a story.

In response, Carone said, Robbins listened politely, then began talking about his many years of living in New York City.

”We discussed it and then we got into our backgrounds,” he said. “And that was where the rest of the lunch went. And I think we developed a mutual respect.”

Carone said he admired Robbins for agreeing to speak with him and hear his concerns, where other reporters would simply deflect his complaints.

”That’s what true professionalism is about,” he said. “You get a lot more than, ‘Talk to my editor.’ ”

Younger colleagues at THE CITY witnessed firsthand the drama and dynamics of how Robbins worked his sources to get the stories no one else did.

“I used to be surprised at how soft and sing-songy his voice sounded on the phone, like an Irish balladeer, talking to sources. But then when someone crossed a line, he’d raise his voice, say ‘Wait a minute’ and erupt,” recalls George Joseph, a former CITY reporter who collaborated with Robbins on the Adams fundraising investigation and now works at The Guardian.

CITY investigative reporter Rosalind Adams remembered: “I listened to him pinning down a source for a story right before publication. As the call went on, his tone grew more insistent until eventually, he told the source that he was giving him a chance to be on the right side of the story. After a long pause, I watched Tom start scrawling what he needed in his note pad with his phone pressed against his ear. He seemed to unlock the source as easily as one might untie a bow.

“I waited until he hung up the phone and then pointed out the success. Tom was characteristically modest, offering a mild, ‘Oh you know,’ chuckling, and shrugging it off.”