Wayne Barrett

Wayne Barrett, the muckraking Village Voice columnist who carved out a four-decade career tilting at developers, landlords and politicians, among them Donald J. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71.

His wife, Fran Barrett, said the cause was complications of interstitial lung disease. Mr. Barrett himself had called his condition ironic, noting that he had never been a drinker or a smoker.

A self-proclaimed country boy from Virginia and a lapsed seminarian, Mr. Barrett spent 37 years at The Voice, the alternative newsweekly started in Greenwich Village.

There he exposed the misdeeds that ensnared appointees and supporters of Mayor Edward I. Koch — a trail of serial corruption that he recapitulated in 1988 in “City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York,” a much-praised book written with his mentor and fellow Voice mainstay Jack Newfield.

A 1992 book, “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” was, as Mr. Barrett acknowledged, a flop at first. Thanks to his subject’s improbable political ascent 25 years later, it was successfully republished and expanded in 2016 as “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention.”

Mr. Barrett’s voluminous background files from the Trump biography, and his professional courtesy, made his Brooklyn home a mecca for investigative reporters during the recent presidential campaign.

“There may be no journalist in the nation who knows more about Trump than Barrett,” Jennifer Gonnerman wrote in The New Yorker just after the election.

Timothy O’Brien, who was research assistant on the Trump book and who then wrote “TrumpNation,” called Mr. Barrett’s work on Mr. Trump “foundational.”

“He took Trump seriously long before anyone else did,” Mr. O’Brien, now the executive editor of Bloomberg View, said, “and most of the work that followed Wayne’s was built upon his insights.”

Mr. Barrett wrote two books about Mr. Giuliani. The first, “Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani,” written with the assistance of Adam Fifield, was published in 2000. It broke the provocative story that Mr. Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and a law-and-order mayor, was the son of a man who had been imprisoned for robbing a milkman at gunpoint during the Depression.

Mr. Barrett’s second book on the subject, written with Dan Collins, was “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11” (2006).

Mr. Barrett started writing for The Voice in 1973 and, five years later, inherited the already battle-scarred and politically irreverent Runnin’ Scared column just as Mr. Koch became mayor.

Mr. Barrett’s career at The Voice ended in 2010, when, with the paper struggling financially, he was laid off. Tom Robbins, a longtime colleague and fellow investigative reporter, resigned in solidarity. (Another renowned former Voice colleague, Nat Hentoff, died on Jan. 7.)

“I have written, by my own inexact calculation, more column inches than anyone in the history of The Voice,” Mr. Barrett wrote in his final column.

He added, “I am 65 and a half now, and it is time for something new. If I didn’t see that, others did.”

On his and Mr. Robbins’ departure from The Voice, an article in The New York Times, often the butt of the paper’s barbs, inquired, “What becomes of New York’s most formidable muckraking paper when two of its greatest muckrakers are gone?”

In the same article, Donald H. Forst, a former Voice editor who died in 2014, lamented, “With the loss of Wayne and Tom, they lost Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle.”

Mr. Barrett was once asked to explain to students at his son’s elementary school just what raking muck actually meant in terms of a day-to-day job. To appear in character, he put on a trench coat, pulled up the collar, withdrew a pad from his pocket and defined that special breed of investigative journalist this way: “We are detectives for the people.”

He added, “There is also no other job where you get paid to tell the truth.”

But as an argumentative muckraker in the spirit of Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, Mr. Barrett never pretended to be just a dispassionate, impartial journalist. He wielded the power of his pen to lobby for causes and candidates he pronounced deserving and to topple those he vilified.

“We thought a deadline meant we have to kill somebody by closing time,” he once wrote.

Still, when he left The Voice, he was stunned to see that despite all the battering they had endured, Mr. Koch characterized his reporting as “superb” and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called to say his “voice will be missed.”

Not by everyone, of course. He was once choked by the leader of a South Bronx poverty program. Another time, after crashing one of Mr. Trump’s birthday parties to see who had been invited, he was arrested by the Atlantic City police and charged with trespassing.

“It depresses you,” Mr. Barrett told Buzzfeed last year of his brief time in custody. “It’s almost this instant, very down feeling, because somebody else controls your movement. And I think it really does teach you how important our freedoms are, because when you don’t have it even for just a short period of time, it’s very sobering.”

Mr. Barrett was born on July 11, 1945, in New Britain, Conn., the son of Lawrence Barrett, a nuclear physicist, and Helen Letitia Barrett, who became a librarian.

He grew up in racially segregated Lynchburg, Va., where he founded the Teenage Republicans. For a time he aspired to become a Roman Catholic priest, but he dropped out of a seminary after just a few weeks, deciding he was unwilling to forgo a sexual life.

He enrolled at the Jesuit-run St. Joseph’s College (now St. Joseph’s University) in Philadelphia on a debate scholarship and received his bachelor’s degree there. His politics as an undergraduate leaned to the right: He identified himself as a Goldwater Republican, and he belittled the University of California, Berkeley, a hotbed of radicalism, as “an ugly and sick haven for those with nothing to offer.”

But by the time he had graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1968, at the height of the antiwar movement, his politics had veered to the left. To avoid the draft, he became a public-school teacher in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he moved with his wife, the former Frances Marie McGettigan, whom he married in 1969.

In addition to her, he is survived by their son, Mac; three brothers, Lawrence, Christopher and Tim; and two sisters, Tia Barrett Bisignano and Loretta Barrett Evans.

In Brooklyn, Mr. Barrett started a neighborhood newspaper that railed against irresponsible landlords and rampant drug dealing, which he maintained was being ignored by the police.

As a teacher, he became embroiled in a racially charged debate in the largely black Ocean Hill-Brownsville district over what should take precedence in the tumultuous transition to school decentralization: community control over hiring, or the seniority rights of unionized teachers.

Mr. Barrett sided with nonunion teachers on the hiring issue, but he also documented malfeasance by the local school board and reported it to prosecutors and in The Voice, revelations that led to federal corruption charges.

Among his Voice exposés, he wrote, with Andrew Cooper, an indictment titled “Ed Koch’s War on the Poor,” deconstructed the record of Andrew M. Cuomo, now the governor of New York, when he was secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration, and identified patronage jobs doled out to Liberal Party loyalists during the Giuliani administration. (Mr. Barrett’s wife now works for Mr. Cuomo.)

“Wayne was the conscience of New York,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement on Thursday. “Wayne was never afraid to speak truth to power, and those who listened were the better for it.”

Mr. Barrett was, by example, a tutor to a covey of ambitious interns and journalism students, despite a hair-trigger temper. He was also a contrarian — a Boston Red Sox fan in New York who shunned cellphones, cash machines and conventional social graces. His wife once described herself as “Wayne’s liaison to the planet Earth.”

Mr. Barrett was not a dreamer, though. When he embraced liberalism, he said, he modeled himself on the student antiwar leader Tom Hayden rather than on the radical activist Abbie Hoffman. He wanted to work within the system rather than merely mock it, he said.

While he viewed life largely in black-and-white terms, he would sometimes acknowledge tinges of gray.

He said, for example, that his greatest professional regret was “that I didn’t write more positive pieces about the things Koch did well,” particularly the mayor’s investment of billions of dollars to build and renovate housing.

But some targets were to him beyond redemption. He took a dim view of the Rev. Al Sharpton, for one. (“I said he was a hustler then, he’s a hustler now,” Mr. Barrett said in 2011.)

Alfonse M. D’Amato, the former Republican New York senator, was another bête noir. Mr. Barrett had bashed him in 1998 for, among other things, missing floor votes in Congress — the identical charge Mr. D’Amato had been leveling against his ultimately successful Democratic challenger at the time, Chuck Schumer.

Referring to Mr. D’Amato, Mr. Barrett once said: “My greatest journalistic prize was when he called me a ‘viper’ in his memoir. I want it on my tombstone.”