Wayne Barrett, 71, tenacious NYC reporter of Trump
NEW YORK — Investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, a scourge of New York City power brokers from Rudolph Giuliani to Michael Bloomberg during a decades-long career with the Village Voice and an early and tenacious chronicler of President-elect Donald Trump, died Thursday at age 71.
Mr. Barrett, who had been battling interstitial lung disease, died at NYU Langone Medical Center, his family said.
Starting in the 1970s, there was no more dedicated muckraker than the gruff, relentless Mr. Barrett, a self-described ‘‘country boy from Lynchburg, Virginia’’ and graduate of Columbia University’s journalism school who evolved from founding a teen Republican group to becoming an impassioned leftist.
‘‘I tell the young people still drawn to this duty that it is the most honorable one in America, and that I have never met a corrupt journalist,’’ Mr. Barrett wrote in his farewell column for the Voice, which laid him off in 2010 after more than 30 years.
Bloomberg, the city’s mayor from 2002-2013, said in a statement that while no elected official always ‘‘saw eye-to-eye’’ with Barrett, he ‘‘respected his deep sense of moral purpose and encyclopedic knowledge of politics.’’
‘‘I had the chance to break bread with him on occasion, and behind the scathing pen he wielded was a good guy with a big heart who loved New York City,’’ Bloomberg said.
Mr. Barrett’s many scoops ranged from the criminal past of Giuliani’s father to the many votes missed by then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato, who had accused the man who would defeat him for reelection in 1998, Democrat Charles Schumer, of similar lapses. D’Amato would call Mr. Barrett a ‘‘viper.’’
‘‘Mr. Barrett has become…
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