By Samuel Rubenfeld

Robert W. Greene, the famed investigative reporter who helped found the School of Communication in 1995, and an area coordinator for the print journalism program, died last Thursday after a long battle with illness. He was 78.

During his 37-year career at Newsday, where he worked both as a reporter and as an editor, Greene helped the paper win two Pulitzer Prizes for public service. Greene’s pioneering work in the field of investigative journalism brought about a whole new way for reporters dig up story ideas.

“His doggedness in pursuit of hidden information inspires reporters here at Newsday, and across the country, to this day,” said John Mancini, the current editor of Newsday, in their obituary which ran on April 11. “Bob was a reporter, a teacher and a skilled tactician whose investigative zeal changed laws, exposed wrongs and improved the lives of millions of Long Islanders.”

Greene began his career as a staff researcher for the New York City Anti-Crime Committee, and then joined Newsday in 1955. Two years later, he took a year off to work for the U.S. Senate Rackets Committee at the personal request of then-chief counsel Robert Kennedy, which led to a lifelong interest in stories with a link to organized crime.

Greene was known, both, as a person who truly believed in journalism as a dutiful service for the public good, and for having an outsized personality that rivaled his successes.

“His size, his bravado, his high-impact journalism, his flaunting of expense-account living, all combined to create a persona that seemed to be drawn in equal parts from The Front Page, The Sting, and All The President’s Men,” wrote Anthony Marro, a former Newsday editor who worked with Greene in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2002. “He could sometimes become so obsessed with a subject-particularly if he smelled a tie to organized crime-that he would be dictatorial and unbending in his pursuit of it.”

Greene’s presence in the newsroom led to perks one would think unimaginable. He was given almost total control of his writers, who were kept separate from the rest of the newsroom, and they were not permitted to speak with anyone about their work, even other editors.

Greene would treat his writers to his own tastes in fine wine and food with an almost endless expense account. “The result was close to four decades of lobster dinners and two-inch-thick steaks, double Tanqueray martinis, and endless bottles of Pouilly-Fuisse and Chateauneuf-du-Pape,” Marro wrote. “He once stopped a reporter new to the team from ordering a salisbury steak in a restaurant, saying: ‘When you eat with the team, you don’t eat chopped meat.’

“The stories were legendary and many-Greene pounding on a wall so hard during an argument with editors that he sent pictures crashing off the wall of the publisher’s office next door…Greene protesting a ban against reporters flying first class by measuring the size of a coach seat and the size of his behind, and then announcing to his bosses that he would continue to fly in the front of the plane…Greene falling asleep at his desk with a cigarette in his hand and setting his own pants on fire,” Marro wrote.

Greene’s work earned him and Newsday many awards, including the George Polk award in 1956, only one year into his journalism career. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service: first, in 1970 for exposing political corruption on Long Island, and then in 1974 for a series of stories following the smuggling of heroin from Turkey to Long Island neighborhoods.

He received the Society of Professional Journalists national award for public service three times; the National Deadline Club award twice, the New York State Publishers award for public service five times, the James Peter Zenger Freedom of Information award in 1978 and the University of Missouri medal for distinguished service to American journalism.

Greene worked on major stories including both Kennedy assassinations, the civil rights movement, a 10-part series on Richard Nixon, the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne and the FBI sting ABSCAM.

But none of that compared to his satisfaction for what became known as “The Arizona Project.” After Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was murdered in Arizona in 1976, Greene took reporters from all over the country to Phoenix for a six-month project investigating corruption in the state, which resulted in a 23-part series that ran in multiple newspapers, including Newsday. “It was the proudest moment in my career,” he said to Marro.

Greene was extremely demanding of his reporters when he worked as an editor. “He mandated that reporters keep ‘beat books,’ loose-leaf binders that were meant for phone numbers-work, home, summer home, mother’s home, whatever it took to reach anybody, anytime, day or night,” Newsday columnist Joye Brown wrote in her tribute on April 11. “Greene collected the books, and graded them, and woe to any reporter who had not penciled in enough sources or telephone numbers.

“If a badger burped in Brookhaven, it was Newsday’s job to know.”

“He was a tough guy to work for-demanding, exacting, and very very direct in expressing his displeasure-but the rewards of toughing it out were huge,” said Lawrence Levy, who is now the executive director for the University’s Center for Suburban Studies, but he worked for Greene in the last several years before Greene’s retirement from Newsday in 1992. “You learned from a man who not only knew his craft but cared very deeply about it and, if you produced for him and were loyal to him, he cared very deeply about you.”

After Greene retired, he first joined the faculty at Stony Brook, but left there to be the Lawrence Stessin Distinguished Professor of Journalism at the University, contributing to the founding of the School of Communication and organizing the print journalism program. “As the area coordinator for print journalism and later as department chair, Bob skillfully helped build a department that was accredited in 2003 by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC),” said a statement issued by the University after Greene’s death. “Bob’s passion for his craft made him a lifelong and well-loved teacher in the newsroom and in the classroom.”

His love for teaching students impressed Sybil DelGaudio, the current dean of the School of Communication. “He loved teaching and he had an incredible amount of energy,” she said in an e-mail message. “Always had that investigative reporter’s tenacity-a trait that often ruffled feathers around here (mine included), but next day, he’d be laughing and joking or writing a note or email that was so beautifully written-those feathers just couldn’t stay ruffled for long.”

Students voted him “Teacher of the Year” in 2000, and he received a Presidential Medal in 2001. He left the University for Stony Brook a few years ago, but he continued to teach, even while his health declined.

“Bob Greene was one of the greatest reporters in the history of journalism,” said James Klurfeld, Newsday’s former editorial editor and a current professor of journalism at Stony Brook. “His dedication to ‘getting the story’ was second to none, and he conveyed the spirit that the pursuit of the truth always came first. In addition to being deadly serious about journalism, he was a great lover of life, who enjoyed whatever he was doing.

“He combined incredible attention to detail with a savvy understanding of human nature and human frailty that make him unique among newspaper people.”

Robert Greene, an investigative reporter who won two Pulitzer prizes and founded the School of Communication, died at 78 in Smithtown. (Newsday.com)