It exposed corruption

By his desk at The Voice, Wayne Barrett kept a photograph of himself being attacked by Ramon S. Velez, a beefy city councilman from the Bronx whose self-enrichment though running anti-poverty programs was just the sort of story that triggered monthslong investigations by Barrett and The Voice. The fight was lopsided, but Barrett didn’t need to win: he just needed to survive another day. Another day, another fight, another scandal, another pile of documents that only he had. In the last days before his death in 2016, as many as 60 reporters trooped to his Brooklyn home to tap his expertise or see his files on Donald Trump, which dated back to a two-part 1977 expose of the then-little-examined developer — “Fred Trump’s twerp kid,” Mr. Robbins called the future president.

But Barrett’s fiercest and longest-running battles were with New York’s mayors and their administrations, especially those of Koch and Rudolph W. Giuliani. Koch had been a friend of The Voice’s founders; Barrett had admired Mr. Giuliani for his work as a federal prosecutor. No matter. As soon as Barrett caught a whiff of corruption, he was relentless and unforgiving.

“He and Jack Newfield were obsessed with the minutia of who donated money and what they got in return,” said William Bastone, who started at The Voice in 1985 as an intern to Barrett and now runs thesmokinggun.com. “They would go to all the fund-raising dinners to get that night’s program, and using the seating chart, they’d create index cards: here’s who was sitting at Table 1. It took so much time to gather and combine it all, it was just mind-boggling. You could never do that today. The paper was about trying to track the impact of money on policy and government.”

Scandals at the Parking Violations Bureau, reported by Barrett and others, crippled Koch’s third term and kept him from a fourth. Brevity was not a consideration. “You’d learn more than you ever anticipated or wanted about a scandal,” said Mitchell L. Moss, professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. “They had a way of engaging the reader, and politicians had to respond. That’s gone now. People are writing much shorter. It’s much harder to hit a home run. The press is in City Hall, but they’re not in the city agencies and police precincts, where the scandals start.”

Barrett and The Voice were less successful in derailing Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Trump. Sometimes the public just doesn’t respond or agree. But as Barrett used to say, the struggle was its own reward.