Mike McAlary; Writer Won Pulitzer for Brutality Story

Mike McAlary, the street-smart New York Daily News columnist who broke a shocking story of alleged police brutality and won a Pulitzer Prize for it, died of colon cancer Friday at 41.

During the 1980s and ‘90s, the Brooklyn-born writer employed his two-fisted style at all three of New York’s tabloids--the Post, the Daily News and Newsday--and bounced around so much that the News obtained an injunction to block him from working for the Post in 1993.

McAlary was getting chemotherapy in August 1997 when he received an anonymous tip that Abner Louima, a black Haitian immigrant, had been sodomized and beaten by white officers at a station house. The columnist went to Louima’s hospital bedside and was the first reporter to talk to him.

“This is a tale straight from the police dungeon, an allegation of brutality at the hands of cops from Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct that seems so impossible, so crudely medieval,” he wrote in the Daily News.

That column and interviews with police officers who were later charged in the attack won him the Pulitzer for commentary.

“He was a hell of a journalist and even a better friend,” said Village Voice editor Don Forst, who hired McAlary at the Boston Herald-American and New York Newsday. “He had great passion. He was on to Clinton early on. I believe the first column he wrote for the Post after Clinton was elected began: ‘Impeach him now.’ ”

Jim Dwyer, McAlary’s friend and colleague at Newsday and the Daily News, said his fellow columnist “had more impact on things in the city than pretty much any other journalist in the last 10 or 12 years. When he slowed down as a columnist, he won a Pulitzer Prize.”

At Syracuse University, McAlary had boasted to classmates that he would be the next Jimmy Breslin. Their styles were similar: blunt, snappy columns with a close-to-the-streets feel for life in New York.

Even Breslin was fair game for the combative McAlary. In 1991, at the height of New York’s tabloid wars, McAlary wrote in the Post that Breslin, 20 years his senior, was “the third-largest self-important blowhard in the city,” after Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and former Mayor Ed Koch.

Breslin said with typical bluster that he never read McAlary’s column.

McAlary grew up in Goffstown, N.H., and at 14 was writing for a weekly there and for the Manchester Union Leader. After college he worked briefly for the Boston Globe and the Herald-American. But within a year, in 1980, he was back in his native New York, as a sportswriter at the Daily News.

Despite his elation upon winning the Pulitzer, McAlary lamented that he really wasn’t a writer since he had not written a novel--only three nonfiction books on New York cops (“Buddy Boys,” “Cop Shot” and “Good Cop, Bad Cop”) and a novelization of the movie “Copland.”

But this past fall, his novel, “Sore Loser,” was published.

He was sued for libel in 1996 by a rape victim after he wrote a series of columns questioning whether she really had been attacked or had made up the story to promote a feminist agenda. The lawsuit was thrown out in 1997.

McAlary is survived by his wife, Alice, four children, his parents, and several brothers and sisters.