![]() ![]() Pileggi, who answered yes, was sent on his first assignment on January 6, 1956, covering a teamsters’ convention at the former Tammany Hall. “Do you wanna be a reporter?” asked Nicholson. “I guess I’ll go for my MA and teach English,” said Pileggi. Pileggi improved with each shift and by the time he received his college degree, AP’s city editor Joseph Nicholson asked him what he intended to do with his life. ![]() Moriarity’s saloon after work and talk shop, teaching me the craft of journalism.” They’d edit it, showing me how to make it better, how to sharpen the language and to move important details up higher in the story. “Soon some the guys saw what I was doing and they’d wave me over and ask to see what I’d written. “When I wasn’t running for copy or coffee, I started listening to the details the legmen reported to the rewritemen and I’d sit down and type out my own versions of the stories to see how they compared when they went out on the AP wire,” Pileggi said. ![]() Thus began one of the best journalism stories ever to cross the Brooklyn Bridge.įor the next two years, Pileggi attended college by day and worked from 4 PM to midnight at the AP in the mail room, then a copy boy watching gritty “legmen” reporters who roamed the vast city phoning in stories to talented “rewritemen” who spun the details and quotes into solid stories picked up by the seven daily newspapers that then competed in New York City. ![]()
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