GQ Magazine, Whateve, 19something

STEVE DUNLEAVY IS IN HIS ELEMENTS, A DANK, hot squad room, Metro-Dade Police, a broiling day like every other in the crime center of the nation, Miami. A bunch of lumpy detectives in cruddy polys are holding up the walls, trying to look like they’re not in awe.

The man has come to their robbery unit to hear their war stories. Steve Dunleavy, the Australian guy from The Reporters - you know, the one on Saturday night, after Cops, the maddog Mike Wallace who gets death-row dirt balls to cry, the one who leans into the face of the bad guy and calls him a bastard right there on Fox, on national TV. Here he is, in Miami, wanting to know about home-invasion robberies.

And, boy, do the cops ever talk. The folks at Fox call Dunleavy the Prince of Darkness, but the cops are wide-eyed as he charms them with the one about this “defiant little 13-year-old-they arrested him in L.A., and first words out of his mouth are ‘Fuck the police.’” The grateful detectives have one for Dunleavy. They show him a photo of a 16-year-old they picked up, a kid who had the very same words shaved into his haircut, rolling around the back of his smart-ass skull.

Dunleavy’s in town on a story cops everywhere will love. It’s about fake police badges, available through the mail and perfect for use in the latest crime craze, home invasions, in which “police” flash their IDs, get invited in, and then rip off the place.

So the red carpet is out for Dunleavy, the dapper Aussie who has made a career out of siding with victims, men in blue and the little guy. Sensationalism with a heart. Dunleavy - ex-writer of a column named “The Man They Call Mr. Blood & Guts,” freewheeling spender of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s money, no-qualms defender of checkbook journalism, genius behind the screaming madness of the New York Post in its yellow heyday - is on TV now.

Dunleavy is the tabloid terror often accused of pouring the first buckets in the torrent of sewage that was the New York City newspaper war of the Seventies and Eighties. Turning his talents to the tube, he has found a new home on a network where his often-criticized tactics have become standard procedure, even as they spill over into the mainstream press, both print and television. Playing up crime and gore? Have you checked out the glossies recently? Paying for stories? TV does it all the time (and have you picked up People lately?. Faking reality in “dramatizations”? It’s a trademark of Murdoch’s Fox TV and now part of the routine on CBS’s Connie Chung show.

Dunleavy, TV’s grandfather of questionable ethics, recently played himself in an ABC movie of the Robert Chambers preppy-murder case (“I was on that one like a cheap suit,” Dunleavy says). And Hollywood’s taken an option on his life - The Steve Dunleavy Story, a Columbia Pictures production, complete with tales from the Son of Sam era, hell, maybe even back to the beginning, in Australia, where he once slashed the tires on his father’s car to get a story.

Not everyone is celebrating Dunleavy’s rising fortunes. “He really turns my stomach,” says Tom Shales, Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic of The Washington Post. “Dunleavy makes Geraldo look like Eric Sevareid. I suppose he should get some credit for helping to popularize some pretty atrocious techniques. But he is no ‘Crocodile’ Dundee. If there’s an Australian anti-defamation league, they might want to look into the situation. This guy is a sleaze, and unfortunately that’s no longer a problem on TV.”

But the Miami cops see Dunleavy a bit differently. They bend all the rules for the visiting celeb. They take him out to the scene of the latest home invasion. They join him at Miami’s seedy Marine Bar, a filthy joint frequented by cops, prosecutors and killers. They let him buy a few dozen drinks for them. “Got to help increase police corruption,” he says, and they all laugh together as he plunks down $88 of Fox’s cash for a few rounds for the boys.

In exchange, Dunleavy spins stories. He tells about spending fifty hours as an inmate, sleeping in a death-row cell, to do a story on American prisons. He tells condom jokes. He tells Puerto Rican jokes. He tells “fag” jokes, like the time he joined a gym to try to quit drinking but the gym turned out to be “a fag joint, and the fags followed me into my bar, Costello’s., and I got nervous and asked a mate for a cigarette. Six weeks later, I bought my first pack, and here I am,” chain-smoking.

Dunleavy talks about his plans for this phony-police story. He’ll go into a Miami police-equipment store, wired for sound, his cameraman carrying a Spy-Cam inside a briefcase. “Steve Ackers is the name,” he’ll say, showing his own phone ID. “Global Ventures, from the Sydney Stock Exchange. I collect police equipment, in town on holiday, what have you got?”

“It’s entrapment,” says Dunleavy’s producer, Mike Brennan, “but so what, you’re not a cop.”

“Yeah, fuck ‘im if they can’t take a joke,” Dunleavy says.

Dunleavy keeps up an impressive patter, hanging on to the bar, sucking down four Bud an hour. But he’s also listening. A prosecutor boasts about getting a judge to set bail at $100 billion for a gang of home invaders; Dunleavy sees a possible story. A Cuban guy gives him a lead on a bunch of anti-Castro crazies who are training with major-league weapons out in the Everglades. And he picks up some stuff on a budding police scandal up the road in Fort Lauderdale - material good enough for Dunleavy to turn it around into a quick TV-news story a few days later.

On the way out, Dunleavy kisses a couple of female prosecutors on the hand, then turns to the night-shift detectives. “Anything goes tonight, give us a ring; we’ll be there like a rat up a drainpipe.”

The guy actually talks like that.

Dunleavy is a 52-year-old dandy with a jutting jaw that shouts tenacity and a two-inch-high graying pompadour that is a marvel of modern architecture. He chain-smokes Marlboro Lights, squinting with delight at every puff. He wears tinted bifocals and a gold bracelet dangles from his left wrist. He bursts into the Racing Club on East 67th Street in Manhattan moments after it opens for the morning, throws his arms open and bellows “Hey love!” The barmaid spots the gent in the charcoal Savile Row number and completes the daily ritual with a shout of “Hey, sexy!” She snaps out a Beck’s puts it in front of Dunleavy’s corner seat on the horseshoe.

The Racing Club is a dark room filled with the laughter of guys secure in the knowledge that everyone else here is also supposed to be in the office. There’s always a saloon like this a few steps from wherever Dunleavy works.

Eleven o’clock in the morning and Dunleavy already needs a cold one. Just to get into the cramped, cluttered newsroom at Fox’s New York studios he’s got to make it through a social gauntlet. Limo drivers on the street, TV technicians, security guards, execs, cops - everybody gives a big “Hey, Steve” and gets a punch in the arm and an “aaay, ate” in return.

This is the persona Dunleavy has spent a lifetime cultivating. “He wants this image as a drinker and a character, someone around whom legends are built,” says Yvonne Dunleavy, his ex-wife and the co-author of The Happy Hooker and books about such sex-scandal figures as Fanne Fox and Elizabeth Ray. “It’s astonishing that Steve is still vertical.

Random entries from the legendary Dunleavy Green Book, his enviable list of home phone numbers: Sydney Biddle Barrows, Lauren Bacall, the “Amityville Horror” killer, Paul Laxalt, Peter Byrne (the guy who searches for Bigfoot), Dino De Laurentis, a couple of big-time hoods, Dr. Michael DeBakey, a slew of big-time lawyers, Lyndon LaRouche, parents of the victims of Son of Sam. It’s a tabloid reporter’s dream book.

In Dunleavy’s list of contacts, one name need never be spelled out. The Boss’s, Murdoch. Dunleavy made the switch from newspapers to television because the Australian press baron - his employer for twenty-four years now - suggested it.

Whenever Murdoch gets into a new journalism venture in this country, Dunleavy is on the start-up team. When Murdoch made his American-supermarket debut with the Star, Dunleavy became the reactionary voice of the masses, star of a column dubbed “This I Believe.” When Murdoch bought the New York Post, he put Dunleavy on the hottest story in town, the Son of Sam murders.

So when Murdoch began his campaign to make Fox into America’s tabloid network, it was inevitable that he would turn to the Post’s circulation-crazed city editor, the hellion responsible for such headline wonders as “Headless Body in Topless Bar.”

“Dunleavy is the man Murdoch always wanted to be - the hard-drinking, down-in-the-gutter journalist ... a man’s man,” says Steve McPartlin, who worked with Dunleavy at Fox’s A Current Affair and who now reports for the syndicated Inside Edition. “And Dunleavy would like to have the sophistication and affluence that Murdoch has.”

Dunleavy is melodrama. Standing before the Beverly Hills mansion where the Manson gang murdered Sharon Tato: “In less than one hour, the Love House would become the Death House.” The purple prose gushes. In a single story, he speaks of “sickening slaughter,” “bloody carnage,” “a senseless rampage,” “blackhearted evilry,” “a bloody epithet” and a “mad-dog massacre.”

Dunleavy is energy. Confronting Brent Musburger over the all-important question of whether Jimmy the Greek ever laid him out: “Did he slug you? Did he slug you? Did he slug you?”

Dunleavy delivers. Exclusives with Joel Steinberg, Elvis’s bodyguards, the Chappaquiddick girls, alleged Mafia boss John Gotti, Fidel Castro (they got stinking drunk on mojitas after Castro kept Dunleavy waiting till 3 A.M. “I just couldn’t keep up,” Dunleavy says. “We had five in double-quick order”).

Dunleavy is devious. McPartlijn: “Steve heard me on the phone, arranging an interview, and he pulled me over and said ‘Never tell the truth. Do whatever you can to get the story.’”

Dunleavy does. And proudly. He’ll trick people. He’ll lie. He took credit for writing his ex-wife’s books. “He was not a bit happy that I got famous before he did,” Yvonne Dunleavy says. He’ll pay for stories. He forked over $12,000 to interview the Manson family, $50,000 for the exclusive story of Elvis’ bodyguards, $500 to a nurse’s aide to sneak a photo of comatose Sunny von Bulow.

As Peter Brennan, executive producer of A Current Affai9r, puts it: “I don’t think he’ll do anything, but I just haven’t heard of anything he wouldn’t do.”

Even New York’s favorite crabby columnist, Jimmy Breslin, offers this in praise of his onetime nemesis: “At least Dunleavy’s no goddamn TV clone. I can’t watch one more Asian woman who talks like she’s from Nebraska. He’s got that ‘fuck you’ attitude, and I love it.”

But if friends call him “the last swashbuckling newsman in American” the guy who would do anything to get a story, enemies say, well, exactly the same things.

Geoffrey Stokes, former press critic at the Village Voice, does credit Dunleavy with energizing New York journalism when he was metro editor of the Post, from 1980 to 1986. But Stokes says Dunleavy’s diet of crime, sensationalism and populist fervor destroyed the credibility of the city’s oldest newspaper. “He poisoned the well that we all drink from with the constant drumbeat of fear, fear, fear,” says Stokes. “Sure, he goosed the energy level at the Post, and people worked awfully hard. But there are a lot of editors in the city who know how to get people to go after a story without making one up.”

“I am just that - sensational.” Dunleavy is holding court at the Racing Club. It’s still before noon and he’s on Beck’s number three. This is known as lunch. “’Sensational’ is a word, and there’s no reason why peons like me and you should turn our backs on that. Murrow is the icon of the gray-tweed stet. He was tabloid. Mike Wallace is tabloid. I’m not sensitive about it.

“Yes, I buy stories. Why not? Let’s say a person is shipwrecked - on a raft for six months at sea, starving and thirsting. His shipmates die. What would Simon and Schuster do with that story? What would Hollywood do? Would they say, ‘We want your story, but we won’t pay you’? I’ll buy up people to get them away from Hollywood or other reporters. Hoodlums, sure. Anyone. Jimmy ‘the Weasel’ Frattiano. He’s a sleazeball. I paid him his expenses and a per diem - $00. It was a good interview too.

“We made the Daily News and The Times much more aggressive,” he continues. “The Times would probably rather open their veins than admit it, but they had to look at the Post’s circulation numbers [as high as 963,000 in 1984, compared with 508,000 now]. They’d end up with their dicks in their hands on story after story. Now they’ll put a crime story on page 1, they’ll put a life-style story out there.”

You could say that blood and guts are in Dunleavy’s blood and guts. His father was a photographer on The Sydney Sun. Steve started as a Sun copyboy at 14 and left school soon thereafter. He didn’t want anyone to think he was getting special treatment because of his father, so he moved over to the rival Daily Mirror, where he was on the night police beat by the time he was 16.

One night, preparing to scoot over to a crime scene, Steve saw a car from The Sun and decided he didn’t need any competition following him to a good story. So he slashed the rival car’s tires. “I didn’t know it was my father’s” he protests meekly.

Sometime later, when Steve and his father were on the trail of a mad slasher, the tables were turned. Both Dunleavy’s got a tip on a sighting. Once there, Steve scurried into a little shed behind a house, hoping to catch the perpetrator himself. “I heard a dead bolt behind me, and then all the cars racing away. Then I heard my father shouting ‘Remember?’”

Dunleavy sat in the shed for more than two hours.

He went into the business not to right wrongs or to dazzle readers with his prose (some years ago, when Dunleavy broke his foot, rival New York columnist Pete Harmill quipped, “I hope it’s his writing foot”) but because it was one hell of a life. Hard work, but what fun. He flitted around the world, working for papers in Manila, Hong Kong and Tokyo, writing about crime, boxing, even politics. He arrived in New York in 1966 and found work with the wires and as a correspondent for his old paper, the Syndey Daily Mirror, by then a Murdoch property. He had made the connection of a lifetime.

The two men - mad dog and mogul - shared a vision: They were populist conservatives who hated criminals and Kennedys. They were brash Aussies who quickly learned that in New York it didn’t matter who you were or where you came from because there were spectacular stories to be had if you tossed ethics out the window.

Three Decades of Dunleavy. Part One: Chappaquiddick. Dunleavy, who would later write a book called Those Wild, Wild Kennedy Boys, wanted the story of the women who were there the night Ted Kennedy drove off the bridge. On the day in 1969 when a court was to decide whether to exhume the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, Dunleavy went to Washington and found out where Kopechne’s nervous friend Rosemary Keough was working.

“I waited all day and didn’t call her,” he remembers. “I knew the court would rule at five o’clock. When they denied permission to exhume the body, I called her and said ‘Rosemary, it’s all over.’” Dunleavy told her he was a reporter but said that the court’s decision meant he wouldn’t be writing a story. “So let’s just have a drink.” She fell for it.

Dunleavy too Keough to a bar on M Street. He had arranged for a photographer to shoot them with a telephoto lens from across the street - proof of the exclusive interview. But “this moron comes right up to me with the camera. I had to pretend to rough up the photographer to keep my cover. I told her I’d just been through a messy divorce, and this guy was someone from a private detective.” Keough bought that one too. Dunleavy got his story.

Par Two: Son of Sam. Mass hysteria, a loose gunman, a pattern of murders with tantalizing clues and no solid leads - New York’s Son of Sam murders made 1977 the pinnacle of tabloid competition. The Post’s Dunleavy went head-to-head with the New’s Breslin. Circulation soared. Breslin got letters from the killer. Dunleavy needed an exclusive.

He was downing a few at a friend’s place when a police source called to tell Dunleavy to respond to a double shooting. From the location, Dunleavy knew the nearest hospital was Coney Island. But he also heard that the victims had been shot in the head. He knew Kings County Hospital was better at treating head wounds. So he went there while the rest of the press pack bolted for the wrong emergency room.

Dunleavy arrived just as Jerry and Neysa Moskowitz, parents of Stacy, one of the victims, came in. “I followed them straight in. No one stopped me because I was in jeans - didn’t look like a reported. I took them around the hospital, consoled them, listened to them. I protected them from the reporters. They thought I just worked for the hospital. By the time they knew I was a newsman, we were very, very close.” Dunleavy, the Moskowitzes and the parents of Robert Violante, who had been shot while sitting in a car with Stacy, sat around through the night. Dunleavy and Jerry Moskowitz finished off most of a bottle of scotch.

“He spent every minute with me,” Moskowitz recalls today. “We sat on the floor and talked about everything. I just needed somebody, and he was there. We talked about baseball and where he came from. He never let the others near me. He made sure I had the police at the house when it was chaos, with all the people running in and stealing the ashtrays and pictures of Stacy. I didn’t even know he was a reporter. He was like a brother. I don’t know if he did the right thing, but whatever Steve does is great with me.”

Dunleavy raced back to the office and wrote a front-page story: “For 13-1/2 hours a Post reported stood at the side of four courageous people in a painful and often stirring vigil - praying, talking about God and swearing at an unknown madman who has launched a guerrilla war against the young and beautiful of this city.”

Part Three: Jessica Hahn. At the apex of the journalistic frenzy over Jim Bakker’s story, “the Dog” - Dunleavy’s nickname - was on the trail of the woman who had helped topple the evangelist’s PTL empire. Day after day, Dunleavy camped outside the Long Island house where Hahn had holed up with her hush money.

Dunleavy got word from A Current Affair’s office that ABC had run a promo on the 6:30 p.m. news trumpeting its coup: Jessica Hahn would be on that evening’s Nightline with Ted Koppel.

Dunleavy hightailed it from his office back to Jessica’s place and stared banging on the door. Hahn wouldn’t open up. “I’m screaming through the door. She’s screaming through the door. I just didn’t want this to happen. For two hours, I screamed and banged on that door. I was determined.”

The ABC limo showed up to take Hahn to the city. Dunleavy told the driver that Hahn was sick, couldn’t make it. The driver had heard that one before. He knocked on the door of Hahn’s two-family house. The downstairs neighbor backed up Dunleavy’s story. Asked how he managed that one, Dunleavy only smiles. The driver left. “I apologized profoundly to Mr. Koppel,” says Dunleavy, laughing. “Jessica Hahn fell ill. I was lucky enough to be there.” Three days later, Fox TV got its exclusive.

“Steve does tap dances around Mel Gibson,” a newsroom aide at The Reporters coos. She’s positively dizzy about Dunleavy. Another aide throws her arms around him and rubs his neck. To the cynical youth of tabloid TV, Dunleavy is star quality. A producer rushes over to announce that “Steve jogged on the beach with Sugar Ray Leonard! Isn’t that amazing?” They just can’t get over the fact that Steve writes his scripts on a typewriter.

Dunleavy is a rarity here: a middle-aged man surrounded by women in their twenties and thirties, a guy who commutes into the city on the Long Island Rail Road, a relic of the hot-type era working among kids who got their inspiration from the puffed-hair Ken and Barbie dolls of the nation’s Eyewitness News teams. Now it is Dunleavy who has his producers carry his hair spray on the road.

“I used to absolutely sneer at television,” Dunleavy says. “Bunch of pretty boys picking up on the hard work of newspapers. I’ve had to eat my damn words. It’s one thing to amble up to somebody with your hands in your pockets. It’s another to get them to sit down in front of a camera.” Actually, most of Dunleavy’s TV stories have come the old-fashioned way - from his Green Book, from his regular rounds of priests, police precincts, pubs, parties and powerhouse lawyers.

Among his TV highlights: interviews with Noriega, Tyson, the prostitute who ensnared Sarah Ferfuson’s father. Extensive reports on the Medellin drug cartel and its leaders. “Escobar has a contract out on my life,” he boasts.

On his first day in TV, Dunleavy needed to show he could make the switch. It was late in the day at Fox’s Channel 5 in New York, where Dunleavy was training as a local reporter. Suddenly, a call comes in from Barry Slotnick lawyer for John Gotti and other high-ranking mobsters, offering a top Mafioso for an exclusive interview - but only if the reporter is Steve Dunleavy. At least, that’s how it looked to a roomful of jealous reporters.

In fact, that morning, before he came to work, Dunleavy had arranged for Slotnick to call in with the offer. Slotnick was happy to oblige his longtime friend.

“We were all raised in Australia with those values,” says ex-wife Yvonne. “That’s Australian-British journalism. But most of us grew out of it. Steve is totally unreconstructed.”

Except that Dunleavy is really a lot less tough than he’d like the world to think. Sure, he’s aggressive with death-row inmates; he’s even bummed a cigarette off a guy who had eighteen hours to live. But Dunleavy’s questions to authority figures are softer than a senior-league change-up. Grilling Miami’s chief of detectives on the phony-badges story, Dunleavy unleashed such powder puffs as “Chief, I imagine these fake badges could be a problem as far as your cops’ safety goes” and “These badges have been used by psychotic rapists and killers to make their way to unassuming victims, right?”

Some of Dunleavy’s colleagues at the Post say he saved his most aggressive manner for the women in the newsroom. His rep as a hard-drinking Lothario has followed Dunleavy for decades.

“Steve went after half the newsroom,” says Maris Perlow, a former city-desk assistant at the Post. “He always had an item on the side. He put the moves on everybody. No woman was exempt.”

“He had various girlfriends he would sack out with in the city,” says a former Post editor. “Plenty of one-night stands and a long-running affair too.”

Dunleavy denies it - sort of. “Well,” he says, “I suppose it’s true to some degree. But I get terrified by these stories of sexual harassment. To that, I plead no, no, no.” He concedes he did his share of skirt chasing “in my younger days.” He even boasts that “I never had to hit on anyone. It’s amazing how few dates I’ve been on, ever. I’d meet them in bars, and that would be it.”

But all that is in the past now, he says. “I haven’t been to dinner with a woman other than my wife in decades.” (He’s currently married to Gloria Holl, a Long Island real-estate agent.)

Dunleavy still drinks almost constantly. “I’d come in at six o’clock in the morning, and he’d be at the desk, stoned out of his mind, rambling,” says Vincent Musetto, a Post movie critic. “He’d start work at one in the afternoon, go out and drink all night, come in and nap on the couch for twenty minutes, go upstairs to the gym and take a sauna and get right into the newsroom.”

“Steve was in a really bad state once when Governor Cuomo called him,” says Perlow. “Steve just barely straightened out enough to manage to get through the conversation.”

Dunleavy says he’s had to cut way back on his all-night binge3s, though. “I can’t do that anymore. It’s television - you can’t show up on camera with bloodshot eyes.”

Still, his hours remain insane. One producer says she has seen him go five days without eating. He’ll still move into the newsroom during a major story, occasionally napping on a cot or couch, taking time out only to stop at the Racing Club for “a few gargles.”

In one of the few periods he took off from the daily-news grind, Dunleavy churned out a novel, The Very First Lady, about the first female president of the United States. She was not your average politician. She murdered her father, her brother and her husband’s best friend. Then she ordered her teenage son to take out his father - her husband.

The novel, as with nearly everything else Dunleavy has done, was panned. The Establishment press loves to kick Dunleavy and his ilk: “Nothing short of vile,” The New York Times sneered recently about A Current Affair. “What kind of people do we want to be?”

More, Dunleavy says, harder. Build my ratings, sell my papers. Some years back, a bunch of Princeton professors, perturbed about sensationalism in journalism, decided to take action. They held a seminar. They invited eminent journalists from important newspapers. They wheeled in a Murrow-era relic from CBC. And to spice up the recipe, they gave Dunleavy a call.

Dunleavy accepted immediately. He arrived - half an hour late - with a blonde on either arm. (“One of them was my wife,” he says.)

“It was a setup, and I loved it. That seminar reeked with wall-to-wall journalistic evangelists, who absolutely send me nuts. That kind of arrogance ... the only bosses are the public. That’s who runs my life, next to Rupert Murdoch. Those over-indulged students left there firmly convinced they had stared into the eye of a journalistic Satan.”

The clackety-clack of an old Royal manual typewriter, embellished by the driving bass rhythm of The Reporters’; theme, fades away, and Dunleavy’s gritty Australian baritone punches out the intro: “This story might shock you. If it doesn’t shock you, it will certainly break your heart.”

The story is that of the Comeback Kid, the tragic tale of David Rothenberg, a 13-year-old boy set aflame by his father when he was 6. The story is years old but has never been told Dunleavy-style: close-ups of the boy’s face, still mangled and masked after more than fifty operations. Tearful interview with the aggrieved mother. Tough jailhouse confrontation with the father.

First, Dunleavy builds sympathy for the boy. “If guts were made of gold, David would be a billionaire,” Dunleavy says.

Then the Fox trademark: the inevitable reenactment, in shadowy black and white, suffused with creepy music. Dunleavy splashes onto the screen, in double-breasted pinstripes, touched up with bright-red tie and snazzy pocket square.

A Dunleavy report has no patience for the detached tone of the observer. He jumps right in as the voice of the masses. The father says he wanted to give David everything. “Dunleavy: “Charles Rothenberg gave his son everything, all right - everything that pain, suffering and a life sentence in a body mutilated beyond description could provide.”

Now the two men face off in the prison visiting room. Rothenberg is to be freed soon and Dunleavy is incredulous. “Truth is,” he tells the father, “people out there right now think you are the biggest son of a bitch on two legs.”

Rothenberg bursts into tears, squeaking pathetically. The TV picture fades to a slow-motion close-up of David’s scarred face.

And just when you think the situation has been milked of every possible emotion, there’s more. We see Dunleavy helping David with his skateboard, drinking shakes with David and his friends, and finally, sitting with David’s mother. She describes her son’s far that he might someday pass on to his children his own disfigured face.

Suddenly, there is Dunleavy, eyes welling. Mother weeps softly, saying, “You’re the first person who’s made me cry over this. You’re getting deep inside here.”

And now Dunleavy cries too, pulling out his hankie. “Reporters aren’t supposed to show emotions,” he says, and they cry together.

Dunleavy, tough-talking, hard-drinking street reporter, signs off his report, voice shaking, “God bless you, David.”

When Dunleavy emerged from the editing room in New York with that gem wrapped up, a single thought swept the Fox newsroom like a four-bell bulletin. Again and again, people came up to Steve and gingerly asked the Broadcast News question: “Steve, was it a one-camera interview?”

Had Dunleavy, like William Hurt in the movie, faked the crying scene? No, Dunleavy proudly announced, “I got it covered - two cameras.” Months later, you can still feel the relief at Fox. Upstairs, Peter Brennan, Dunleavy’s longtime boss and pal, beams as he recalls the story: “Steve is a great bullshit artist. He has an incredible ability to identify with people. The crying scene - he wasn’t faking that, but at the same time, he knew the camera was rolling.”

“He got me to cry,” recalls Marie Hafdahl, the boy’s mother. “He brought up some touchy situations, and the tears came. Then he cried. He had tears in his eyes. Steve genuinely cares about David.”

David’s mother has fond memories of Dunleavy, better than of any other reporter who did a story on her son. She remembers how he spent the day with David, how he even sent David a skateboard a few weeks later. And she remembers one other thing: Dunleavy came to her California home with a producer, a camera crew - and one camera.