900 South Crouse Ave. Syracuse, NY 13244, United States
Michael McAlary attended Syracuse University.
Connections
Son: Ryan McAlary
2013
235 W 44th St, New York, NY 10036, United States
Michael McAlary's wife Alice McAlary, and their children Ryan McAlary, Carla McAlary, and Quinn McAlary attend the opening night of Broadway's "Lucky Guy" at The Broadhurst Theatre on April 1, 2013.
Daughter: Carla McAlary
2013
Michael McAlary's wife Alice McAlary, their daughter Carla McAlary, and Marie Untener.
Son: Quinn McAlary
2013
1356 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, United States
Michael McAlary's wife Alice McAlary, their son Quinn McAlary, Tom Hanks, and Maura Tierney attend the opening night party for Broadway's "Lucky Guy" at Gotham Hall on April 1, 2013.
Wife: Alice McAlary
Michael McAlary's wife Alice McAlary.
Friend: John Francis Timoney
Michael McAlary's friend John Francis Timoney, policeman, police officer.
Friend: George Edward Kimball III
Michael McAlary's friend George Edward Kimball III, journalist, author, sportswriter.
friend, colleague: Jim Dwyer
Michael McAlary's friend Jim Dwyer columnist, reporter, author.
Friend: Donald Forst
Michael McAlary's friend Donald Forst, editor, journalist.
(In Buddy Boys, Mike McAlary blows the doors of one of the...)
In Buddy Boys, Mike McAlary blows the doors of one of the worst scandals ever to taint New York's uniformed guardians, the men and women sworn to protect and serve the populace. Blistering, shocking, and powerful, it's a frightening look inside the NYPD and an eye-opening exploration of the daily temptations that can seduce a good cop over to the dark side.
(The book describes the murder of rookie NYPD officer Edwa...)
The book describes the murder of rookie NYPD officer Edward Byrne by crack dealers while he guarded the home of a witness, the manhunt that followed, and the devastating impact of drugs on the urban United States.
(Michael Dowd was every law-abiding citizen's worst nightm...)
Michael Dowd was every law-abiding citizen's worst nightmare, a cop intoxicated by the power his badge conferred. His fascination with drugs brought him wealth; at his first major bust, he stole stacks of $100 bills. By 1987, in Brooklyn's crime-ridden East New York, Dowd's elaborate system of bribery and extortion was providing shelter to local Dominican drug lords, and netting him upwards of $15,000 per week.
(Sherriff Freddy Heflin of Garrison, New Jersey, faces a d...)
Sherriff Freddy Heflin of Garrison, New Jersey, faces a difficult decision when a criminal investigation leads to his town and the New York City police officers that make up its most influential citizens.
(For tennis star Ginny Glade, life just got a little worse...)
For tennis star Ginny Glade, life just got a little worse - her baseball-playing ex-husband clinched the World Series and a bratty fifteen-year-old beat her in a tiebreaker. But Ginny's problems are only beginning because one of her biggest fans is fast becoming a notorious murderer by taking the cry of "Kill the ump!" to a deadly new level.
Michael McAlary was a United States columnist, journalist, author, and sportswriter, who worked for several famous editions. He was best known for his columns and books on police matters.
Background
Michael James McAlary was born on December 15, 1957, in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States. He was a son of Jack McAlary and Ellen Snedden, the third of their eight children. After Jack's Navy service, the family moved back to Flatbush when Michael was 3 years old. When he was 10, the family moved to New Hampshire; first Bedford, then Goffstown. Although he lived in Brooklyn only a few years as a child, he loved the Daily News newspaper and reporters like Jimmy Breslin in particular. He would read his column when the family came back to Brooklyn to visit his grandparents.
Education
Michael McAlary went to Goffstown High School, where he belonged to the tennis team and was a reporter for the school newspaper. He was also a sports stringer (freelance writer-not under contract) for the weekly Goffstown News at the age of 14. In 1973, he hitched a ride to Bretton Woods where the inaugural Volvo Tennis tournament was being held. He happened to get a lift from one of the tournament organizers who got him a press pass and an interview with tennis great Rod Laver. That interview was published in the Manchester Union Leader newspaper.
There he also befriended George Kimball, who would later write the weekly "America At Large" column for The Irish Times. The teenaged McAlary covered the Volvo tennis tournament by day and hung out at pubs at night with Kimball, Bud Collins, and Mike Lupica; all great sportswriters. Lupica remembered: "He was skinny as an exclamation point, with a head that seemed about three sizes too big and ambitions about being a newspaperman that were so much bigger than that." He graduated from Goffstown High School in 1975.
Michael McAlary attended Syracuse University. He majored in journalism. At Syracuse, he was the sports editor on The Daily Orange, the campus newspaper. Even when young, he possessed a charm that got him far. One night in the spring of 1977, he and several classmates were arrested after a bar brawl. McAlary told the arresting Officer his name was Gary Gilmore, the name of a famous murderer who had recently been executed and whose name had been much the news. McAlary told the judge: "Last night I was so intoxicated, I thought I was Gary Gilmore. But I'm not and I apologize." The normally tough Judge Richard Sardino laughed and let him go.
After graduating, Michael McAlary worked at the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald American. Don Forst, the editor of the Herald American became his friend. The paper was failing and he was working as a sportswriter for the Boston Herald and ABC Sports. In July 1980, he came to New York to work on an afternoon edition of The Daily News. Eighteen months later, after the Daily News dropped its afternoon edition, he lost his job. Then McAlary became a reporter for the New York Newsday in 1985 before leaving for the Daily News to become a columnist in 1988. He also wrote columns for the Post, jumping frequently between it and the Daily News.
In November 1990, McAlary left the Daily News during a bitter strike and went to work for The Post. In November 1991, he signed a 3-year contract. In February 1993, when The Post was having financial trouble, he left the Post to go back to the Daily News. He was hired there by Mort Zuckerman, despite previously having called Zuckerman a "power-mad Stalin wannabe." In March 1993, The Post filed a lawsuit to retain him. The Post settled the case, but then hired McAlary on September 1, 1993. On September 13, the Daily News was granted a preliminary injunction to stop McAlary from working for The Post. A reason he liked The Post was that he more often made the front page. In February 1994, Zuckerman and The Daily News hired him back for a similar contract for 3 years. In March 1994, The Post sued him along with Zuckerman and The Daily News for breach of contract.
Michael McAlary's book, Buddy Boys: When Good Cops Turn Bad, is an account of the 1986 scandal in the seventy-seventh precinct, referred to as the Alamo, in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights neighborhoods. McAlary first broke the story in Newsday. Although the precinct commander suspected corruption as early as 1982, the guilty were protected, and no action was taken until the internal affairs unit came down on Officer Henry Winter. Winter's history before joining the force was soiled. He had stolen from the cash register at his first job, collected unemployment while working, and cheated at the police academy. Winter and Officer Anthony Magno were the first to be caught. McAlary wrote of the beginning of their corrupt practices. They started by taking bribes and stealing from the dead. When they went to crime scenes, they pocketed valuables burglars had missed. Banding together with other officers, they committed burglaries, drug deals, and armed robberies. The officers carried burglary tools and other equipment in their squad cars. Winter and Magno escaped prosecution by becoming informants. They wore wires as they continued committing crimes and exposing fellow officers, including one who shot himself in the head as a result. Thirteen officers were charged. As of April 1998, two of the officers had been convicted, one acquitted, and four had their charges dismissed. Two had entered guilty pleas, one had committed suicide, and three cases were pending.
Cop Shot: The Murder of Edward Byrne is McAlary's account of the killing of a young police officer while he was guarding the home of a witness in a Queens drug case. The four crack dealers who executed Byrne were caught, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to long prison terms. McAlary is critical of former mayor Edward Koch and former police commissioner Benjamin Ward.
In Good Cop, Bad Cop: Detective Joe Trimboli's Heroic Pursuit of New York Police Department (NYPD) Officer Michael Dowd. McAlary recounts the events that led to Dowd's conviction in 1992. McAlary broke the story in the New York Post. McAlary wrote that for many years prior to Dowd's arrest he and other officers were dealing with drugs and involved in a variety of criminal activities. McAlary said Dowd was linked to drug lords in the Dominican Republic and cocaine dealers in New York City, and that Dowd was well compensated. He owned a Corvette, four houses on Long Island, and was purported to be pulling in eight thousand dollars a week over and above his police salary. Joseph Trimboli worked in internal affairs, on a promise that he would get his longed-for detective's shield after a couple of years. He hadn't planned on making waves for the short time he would be with the unit. Trimboli began his investigation of Dowd in 1986, but in spite of the mounting evidence, his attempts to have more men assigned to the case and his requests for telephone taps and Dowd's financial records were rejected. McAlary wrote that "the department was in no hurry for another police scandal." Dowd was caught when he and his cohorts expanded into Suffolk County. The police there began an investigation that led to fifty arrests. Dowd was arrested and convicted on federal racketeering charges. McAlary said Milton Mollen, head of Mayor David Dinkins's police corruption commission made a deal with Dowd. Dowd was not required to name names. When Trimboli testified, he was not asked to name the officials who had failed to take action. In a plea bargain, Dowd was sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
On April 26, 1994, Michael McAlary wrote a controversial story about a rape victim headlined "Rape Hoax, The Real Crime." The anonymous victim claimed to have been raped in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. McAlary's police sources tipped him that there were inconsistencies in her story and a lack of physical evidence leading them to the conclusion that her story was false. A few years earlier in 1987, there was a racially polarising rape case in the New York area involving an African-American young woman named Tawana Brawley, who falsely claimed to be the victim of a racist rape attack. The case was a media circus that led to false charges against several people and the disbarment of her lawyers. McAlary referred to that case in his column. McAlary said his source was "rock solid." His police source believed the victim's motive to be to promote a rally about violence against lesbians. Despite what McAlary had been told, there actually was DNA evidence. The victim's story was true. The anonymous victim sued McAlary for $12 million for libel. The case was eventually dismissed against McAlary two years later because it was ruled that he had accurately reported information that was inaccurate. McAlary never named his source but there has been much speculation as to who it was, generally believed to have been high-ranking in the NYPD. McAlary had gotten burned by placing too much faith in his sources, which had served him well in the past and would again afterward. The case hurt McAlary's career and credibility, though the Daily News did not fire him. McAlary described this time of his life like Hell. During this time he complained of sleeplessness and digestive trouble, which he attributed to stress.
Also in 1994, Michael McAlary and Pete Hamill made cameo appearances in the movie "The Paper" directed by Ron Howard. The movie involved a day in the life of a New York tabloid newspaper. One of the characters was a reporter named Michael McDougal who was supposedly based on McAlary, played by Randy Quaid. The story involves an editor of one paper being wooed by the rival paper. This typified why McAlary defended his own job-hopping by saying the newspaper business is based on "stealing," stories and reporters.
In August 1997, McAlary got a call tipping him about another very different rape victim in a horrific case of racist police brutality. Wanting to focus on novel-writing rather than journalism, he consulted with his wife Alice who told him: "If this happened and you ignore the tip, you will never be able to look at yourself again." He left in the middle of a chemotherapy session for his colon cancer in a hospital to go to another hospital in Coney Island, Brooklyn to secure the first interview with a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima. He later said: "It is what I do. If you are a doctor or a lawyer, you take the case. If you're a reporter, you write the story. I didn't think about being sick." Louima's family had previously been trying unsuccessfully to interest other media outlets in his story. McAlary was able to get himself and a photographer past a police guard. In the first of his columns in Louima, he wrote: "After hearing a story that I wanted to be untrue, I was shaking. This is not about the police force, this is about a group of cops who are sadistic racists. Be afraid, be very afraid if this story is true, and I am afraid it is." McAlary wrote six columns on this story over nine days beginning August 13, 1997. His columns also included an exclusive interview with Officer Justin Volpe, who was involved in the attack. New Yorkers read with stunned disbelief, anger, and disgust. He called it "a story to stop the city." Louima was an innocent bystander at a fight between two girls at a club in Brooklyn crowded with Haitian immigrants. Officers Volpe and Schwarz were struck in the course of breaking up the fight by someone and angrily seized Louima, who had not struck anyone, to teach blacks to "respect the law." They beat him on the way to the station house where they sodomized Louima with a toilet plunger. Louima had to have three surgeries to repair damage to his colon and bladder. Later Volpe got 30 years in prison without parole. Another officer Charles Schwarz, who assisted Volpe; had his conviction overturned, but served 5 years for perjury. Former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said of McAlary: "He went way out on a limb in the rape case, and that limb got sawed off. That's why the Louima case was so important to him. It was in some respects vindication for one of the worst moments of his life."
In 1998, Michael McAlary published his first and only novel, Sore Loser: a Mickey Donovan Mystery. The character of Deputy Inspector Mickey Donovan was said to closely resemble his friend John Timoney. The plot involved the murders of a baseball umpire, a tennis judge, and a basketball referee. The peripheral characters were a mix of actual sports celebrities and fictionalized representations of people he knew, showing his old sports background. He always said he never really felt like a writer until he wrote a novel. He also said he actually preferred writing fiction, "making up stuff" to writing factually.
(Michael Dowd was every law-abiding citizen's worst nightm...)
1996
Views
Michael McAlary's articles often reflected the heroism of the police, but he also exposed the failures within the system. Much of his writing centered around the New York Police Department (NYPD). He developed a rapport with street policemen, detectives, and high-ranking officials.
Personality
Michael McAlary was not afraid to make enemies as well as friends, and his aggressive journalistic style made him both.
Physical Characteristics:
Michael McAlary had short curly brown hair, blue eyes, and trademark thick mustache. For his last two years, since learning he had cancer, McAlary had undergone surgery and chemotherapy and had cut back his columns in The Daily News from three a week to one. He had hoped to give up writing about the police, but after getting a tip about the Louima case, in which four officers were later charged with brutalizing the Haitian immigrant, he told friends he had one last police story to tell. He seemed to focus energy often described as manic, leaving a chemotherapy session in August 1997 to get the first interview with Abner Louima, writing a first novel, Sore Loser, and spending more time with his large family.
Quotes from others about the person
Michael McAlary's close friend, New York Deputy Police Commissioner John Timoney remembered: "Most cops look down on newspaper reporters, but they didn't look down on him. I think it was the toughness. He was a tough guy physically and mentally and wasn't afraid to go into bad neighborhoods or call somebody a dog. He looked like a cop himself."
New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer, who worked with Michael McAlary at Newsday and the News and was his friend, recalled: "He made coming to work fun. No matter what was happening in the world, he'd say, "Wait a minute this works for us. Let's figure out how we can make this work for us."
Richard Sheridan, a former Daily News rewrite man who is now the senior writer for Brooklyn College's Office of Communications and Marketing, said: "He was a spark plug. I mean he charged up everything. He was always on the go, always looking for stories, always looking for excitement."
Interests
Writers
Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, Pete Hamill
Sport & Clubs
tennis
Connections
Michael McAlary was married to Alice McAlary, maiden name Argento. They met at Syracuse University. He had four children: Ryan, Carla, Michael, and Quinn.