NY Post, Friday, November 6, 1987
PATRICK Doyle, a longtime police reporter whose colorful escapades made him one of the nation's legendary reporters, died of injuries yesterday in an automobile crash on the FDR Drive.
Doyle, 62, dubbed “Inspector Doyle” for his skill in passing himself off as a police official at crime scenes, was driving southbound when he apparently had a seizure.
His car skipped over a cement divider near 120th Street, careened 200 feet along a service road and crashed into a parked bus.
After starting his career at the Daily New in 1945, Doyle became a flamboyant Damon Runyonesque figure who invariably wore his fedora hats — or summer straws — at a rakish tilt.
He retired from the News in 1983 and became a stringer for WNBC-TV at police headquarters.
Ironically, Doyle — who played the part of “Inspector Doyle” 24 hours a day, as if he were a character in “The Front Page” — died just as his career was to end.
Because of budget cutbacks, today was to be his last day at WNBC-TV.
Doyle, who always worked out of the press room at police headquarters, once called police at a crime scene and got a captain on the phone.
“This is Doyle at headquarters,” he said.
The captain, who had been refusing to speak to reporters, assumed Doyle was a cop. He soon grew suspicious and demanded to know who Doyle was.
“Inspector Doyle,” the reporter blurted out, pulling rank.
The bluff worked. Doyle got his story — and his nickname.
Doyle rarely used his phony rank.
Instead, looking and sounding like a top cop, he would breezily walk through police lines, saying “Doyle from downtown.”
Using that ploy, he once walked past a young cop barring the press from a Central Park West apartment house that was the scene of a murder.
On his way in, he warned the rookie:
“See those reporters out there? If one of them gets upstairs, you'll be walking the beat so far out in Staten Island that they'll have to airmail your paycheck to you.”
Later, following his own code of honor, Doyle shared his scoop with rival reporters.
Doyle scored an even more outrageous coup in the aftermath of a barroom shootout in Times Square.
While police dept other reporters a block away from the bar, Doyle was inside interviewing witnesses who thought he was a cop.
Discovered at last, Doyle was tossed out of the bar by cops — feet first. But he had his story.
Yesterday, even in death, Doyle enhanced his legend.
Reporters were barred by the Medical Examiner's guards as the body of little Elizabeth Steinberg was brought into the morgue.
A moment after the van left, an ambulance brought Doyle in. Doyle had once more bypassed rival reporters to enter the scene of a top police story.