Denny Walsh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who was a consummate nuisance to mobsters, corrupt politicians and his editors — particularly at The New York Instances, which fired him — died on March 29 at his dwelling in Antelope, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento. He was 88.
His daughter, Colleen Bartow, confirmed the dying. She mentioned Mr. Walsh had been affected by a number of respiratory illnesses.
Mr. Walsh started his profession in 1961 at The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the place he hot-dogged across the newsroom smoking cigars and used the ground as his ashtray.
“Walsh had the tenacity of a pit bull and gave the impression to be growing among the facial options of the breed,” Pat Buchanan, the conservative commentator who was then an editorial author on the paper, wrote in his autobiography, “Proper From the Starting” (1988). “His snicker was loud and uncontrolled and bordered on the malicious.”
Mr. Buchanan added, “When Walsh sank his tooth right into a politician, he normally did critical injury, and he was at all times reluctant to let go.”
Investigative reporters are an idiosyncratic breed of journalist. Usually fearless, they’re usually a supply of angina to their editors. Mr. Walsh was no exception. He preferred to boast that he was sued a number of occasions for libel however had by no means misplaced a case. He was usually at loggerheads along with his bosses.
In 1969, Mr. Walsh and Albert L. Delugach gained the Pulitzer Prize for native investigative reporting for a sequence of articles exposing fraud and corruption inside the St. Louis Steamfitters Union, Native 562.
The subsequent yr, Mr. Walsh wrote an article claiming that Alfonso J. Cervantes, the mayor of St. Louis, had ties to native underworld figures. G. Duncan Bauman, the newspaper’s writer, killed the article, later explaining that he had known as his personal sources, who he mentioned didn’t assume the article was correct.
Incensed, Mr. Walsh later publicly accused the writer of getting his personal unsavory group connections. He stop and joined Life journal, which had just lately fashioned an investigative reporting unit. He expanded his reporting on Mayor Cervantes in a narrative that relied closely on unnamed federal regulation enforcement sources.
Mr. Cervantes sued Life and Mr. Walsh in federal court docket for libel, arguing that the reporter had acted with malice and must be ordered to disclose his sources. A district decide dominated in favor of Life and Mr. Walsh.
The case finally landed in america Court docket of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, which upheld the decrease court docket ruling in opposition to the mayor. Mr. Walsh had not acted with malice, the court docket mentioned, and the mayor had not “produced a scintilla of proof supportive of a discovering that both defendant actually entertained critical doubts in regards to the reality of a single sentence within the article.” The U.S. Supreme Court docket declined to listen to the case.
Mr. Walsh joined the Washington bureau of The Instances in 1973, on the peak of the Watergate scandal — a narrative that the Washington Put up reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had been dominating. The Instances assigned Seymour Hersh, a reporter within the bureau who had gained a Pulitzer for exposing the My Lai bloodbath through the Vietnam Warfare, to assist the paper catch up.
“I’m scrambling round writing odds and ends, however Woodward and Bernstein had been to date forward, and I didn’t actually know anybody within the White Home,” Mr. Hersh mentioned in an interview. “After which Denny reveals up, this huge husky man, at all times chewing on a cigar.” (Newsroom smoking was by then a no-no.)
Mr. Walsh wasn’t fascinated by Watergate; he wished to proceed reporting on the nexus between politicians and the felony underworld. He supplied to attach Mr. Hersh to a supply who is likely to be of help on Watergate. “It was anyone in the midst of all the things,” Mr. Hersh mentioned. “And I all of the sudden had what you want — anyone inside.”
Mr. Walsh turned his consideration to Joseph Alioto, the mayor of San Francisco. Look journal had just lately printed a canopy article that accused him of getting a number of Mafia connections. Mr. Alioto sued the journal for libel and gained. Mr. Walsh’s sources, nonetheless, advised him one other model of occasions — that the mayor had lied throughout his testimony within the case.
After holing up in a San Francisco resort for 3 months to research, Mr. Walsh filed a prolonged story on the matter. A hullabaloo adopted.
A.M. Rosenthal, the highest editor of The Instances, refused to publish the article. In response to letters and memos in a group of his papers on the New York Public Library, he didn’t assume the piece materially superior what Look journal had printed.
Mr. Walsh was apoplectic. So was Mr. Hersh. “After some dialogue in regards to the high quality of the piece and its publishability,” Mr. Walsh wrote in a letter to Mr. Rosenthal, “I requested Hersh if he had any options as to who is likely to be fascinated by it.”
Mr. Hersh steered Rolling Stone, and Mr. Walsh offered a duplicate of the article to its editors. Not lengthy after, Mr. Rosenthal discovered that one other copy had been leaked to Extra, {a magazine} that lined the media.
Now Mr. Rosenthal was apoplectic. In response to Extra, he ordered an investigation into how the journal received the article, which to this present day is unclear. (It by no means appeared in print wherever however is included with Mr. Rosenthal’s papers.)
He additionally fired Mr. Walsh.
“The hurt to The Instances and journalism is that you simply intentionally despatched this story to a different publication,” Mr. Rosenthal wrote in 1974 in his termination letter.
Brit Hume, the Fox Information political analyst who was then the Washington editor of Extra, printed an extended article in regards to the palace intrigue. He speculated that Mr. Rosenthal’s choice to not publish Mr. Walsh’s article had been influenced by executives from Cowles Communications, which owned Look and was a significant shareholder in The Instances.
Mr. Rosenthal made no point out of Cowles in his letter to Mr. Walsh or in a memo to The Instances’s writer, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.
“I’ve determined to not print the piece,” he wrote to Mr. Sulzberger, “just because because it stands I don’t assume it’s a story that carries the Alioto affair additional sufficient journalistically.” He added, “By the way, I’m completely happy as to the accuracy of the statements within the story.”
Denny Jay Walsh was born on Nov. 23, 1935, in Omaha. His father, Gerald Walsh, was an auto mechanic. His mom, Muriel (Morton) Walsh, was a beautician.
Rising up in Kansas, Denny labored at a movie show operating the projector. One movie he confirmed was “The Turning Level” (1952), starring William Holden as a reporter who took on corrupt public officers. Denny noticed a future model of himself in that character.
He enrolled on the College of Missouri in 1954 however dropped out to hitch the Marines. He returned to highschool in 1958, majoring in journalism, and graduated in 1962.
After The Instances fired him, Mr. Walsh ran an investigative reporting workforce for the McClatchy newspaper chain. In 1983, at The Sacramento Bee, one of many firm’s papers, his investigation of a on line casino co-owned by Paul Laxalt, a former U.S. senator from Nevada, resulted in one other libel swimsuit. Mr. Laxalt later dropped the case.
Mr. Walsh married Angela Sharp in 1960. They divorced in 1964. He married Peggy Moore in 1966; she died in 2023. Along with his daughter, he’s survived by a son, Sean, and 7 grandchildren.
Mr. Walsh wore down his editors in Sacramento, too.
“There I used to be in early 1991,” he mentioned at his retirement in 2016. “Fifty‐5 years previous, unable to afford retirement, and not wished at The Bee.”
He mentioned he had been deemed a “disruptive presence.” His editors assigned him to cowl the federal court docket. He stayed on the beat for 25 years. He was a beloved determine across the court docket, particularly amongst judges.
Chief U.S. District Choose Kimberly J. Mueller advised The Bee, “I’d have lunch with Denny periodically to seek out out what was actually taking place right here.”
