Tom Robbins, a journalistic bulldog who spent more than four decades exposing crooked politicians, ruthless landlords and violence in New York prisons for The Village Voice, The New York Times and other publications, died on Tuesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 76.
The cause was prostate cancer, his wife, Susan Mastrangelo, said.
Mr. Robbins worked with his fellow journalists Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz, in a collaboration between the Marshall Project and The Times, on a series of articles about the abuse of prison inmates in New York State and the state’s failure to hold guards accountable. The project won the Hillman Prize for Newspaper Journalism in 2016 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist the same year.
Mr. Robbins also wrote for the nonprofit news organization City Limits, which covers urban issues; The New Yorker, where his articles included profiles of the street-smart columnist Jimmy Breslin and the virtuoso publicist Mortimer Matz; New York magazine; The New York Observer; and The Atlantic.
He worked for The Village Voice in the 1980s and returned in 2000, following a stint at The Daily News of New York. He was also recently the host of “Deadline NYC,” an interview program on the New York FM station WBAI.
In the 1970s, Mr. Robbins was organizing tenants on the Lower East Side to contest substandard housing and soaring rents when he realized, he recalled in a recent interview, that “there were incredible stories going on around me and I wanted to write about them.”
He had never aspired to be a journalist, and he had no formal training. But he began writing freelance pieces at The Voice and was tutored on the job by the muckraking journalists Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett and by Martin Gottlieb, the alternative weekly’s editor.
He later became a mentor himself. He taught at Hunter College, where he was the Jack Newfield visiting professor of journalism in 2007, and at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, starting in 2011. He also served as a writer and mentor to younger journalists at The City, the nonprofit website devoted to New York, beginning in 2023.
Asked what advice he had for fledgling journalists, Mr. Robbins replied, “Not to be cynical, but to be skeptical.”
He added: “Cynicism is a form of ignorance.”
Mr. Robbins had a well-deserved reputation as a generous colleague. He walked out the door of The Voice’s offices (and stayed out) in protest when Mr. Barrett was laid off in 2011. More recently, when The City was cutting reporters during a budget crunch, he left voluntarily so a younger reporter could keep working.
“Tom was a generous mentor and friend, as well as a whip-smart, rigorous, thoughtful journalist,” Joe Conason, a former columnist for The Voice and later the executive editor of The Observer, said in an interview. “Yet despite all the achievements, awards and scalps taken, he was also strikingly modest and soft-spoken in a profession where those traits are rare.”
Mr. Robbins identified himself simply as a reporter, but he acknowledged that “if you take longer than 30 minutes on a story, you’re tagged as an investigative reporter.”
“I look at my reporter’s credentials as a passport to talk to anyone, from the governor on down, and shine a light on corners that don’t usually get looked at,” he told the Newmark School’s staff in 2023. “Showing up, listening closely and finding the people burning with intensity to tell their story, those are the three most important qualities of the job.”
In 1990, he reported in The Daily News that Donald J. Trump, then a New York real estate developer, had hired mostly undocumented laborers from Poland to raze the Bonwit Teller building so he could build Trump Tower.
Among Mr. Robbins’s other scoops were revelations that Russell Harding, the president of the New York City Housing Development Corporation during the Rudolph Giuliani administration and the son of the Liberal Party leader Raymond B. Harding, had billed tens of thousands of dollars in personal expenses to his agency’s budget. In 2005, Mr. Harding was sentenced to more than five years in prison for embezzling $400,000 from the agency.
In 2007, Brooklyn prosecutors dropped murder charges against a retired F.B.I. supervisor after Mr. Robbins produced evidence in taped interviews with the chief witness, a gangster’s mistress, that conflicted with her original account and damaged her credibility.
Thomas Jhan Robbins was born on April 10, 1949, in Manhattan. His parents, Jhan and June (Stumpe) Robbins, were magazine writers and the authors of biographies and other nonfiction books. He attended the Putney School in Vermont. He did not attend college.
Mr. Robbins’s marriage to Estyn Williams, in 1970, ended in divorce; he married Ms. Mastrangelo, a visual artist and teacher, in 2021. In addition to her, he is survived by a son, Maro, from his first marriage, and a granddaughter.
Graham A. Rayman, a fellow journalist at The Daily News, recalled encountering Mr. Robbins at ground zero when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 2001. After a frantic stranger approached them and said his father was trapped on an upper floor of a nearby building, Mr. Robbins raced up a dozen flights of stairs, accompanied by a photographer and several firefighters, and carried the man to safety.
Mr. Rayman said that Mr. Robbins, who later qualified for health benefits from the 9/11 victims’ fund, “got an illness that ultimately caused his passing because he was covering the city he loved.”
“Tom kept that story to himself,” Mr. Rayman said. “He was meticulous about that separation between his role as a journalist and his role as a person in the world, and he didn’t really believe in tooting his own horn.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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