No one thinks Mr. Barrett is easy to deal with, least of all Mr. Barrett, which may be one reason he rarely went into the Voice newsroom in Manhattan. Instead, over the phone, he fought bitterly with editors who wanted to make even the slightest changes to his articles, each of which he viewed as a tightly woven pattern of facts that would unravel if one thread were pulled.

“Battling with Wayne Barrett has been one of the best experiences of my career,” said Mr. Ortega, the current editor of The Voice. “You work with the guy, you’re going to get into fights. I’ve found in my career that the people who are doing the best journalism are a challenge to work with.”

Back in the days when Mr. Barrett spent more time at the office, “he would critique us on the way we did interviews on the phone,” recalled LynNell Hancock, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, who worked at The Voice in the 1980s.

“He taught me everything I know about investigative reporting,” she said. “But everything with him turns into a debate, and you can’t debate him. He’s better at it, he’s more relentless, and he’s bigger and louder.”

That mix of exasperation and affection, intimidation and loyalty, creeps into every conversation with former colleagues. “He’s the scariest, sweetest man alive, and I know that sounds like a contradiction,” said Jessica Bennett, one of a legion of his former interns, who now writes for Newsweek. “He was kind of a dad to all of us, took an interest in our personal lives. But you also had to write down his instructions verbatim, because if anything was slightly different, there would be a public berating of the intern.”

Interning for Mr. Barrett became, over the years, a coveted boot camp for aspiring investigative reporters. Veterans have endless tales of the lists of things he wanted them to pursue without explanation, and woe to the youngster who interrupted to ask who Vander Beatty or Ramon Velez was.

“For years I was his de facto intern wrangler, interpreting him to them,” said William Bastone, a Barrett intern in the 1980s, who became a staff writer for The Voice and then an editor of the Smoking Gun, the investigative journalism Web site that is probably best known for revealing that parts of a best-selling book billed as a memoir, James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” were fabrications. The site’s bread and butter is making public legal documents and government records, often involving famous people.