(upbeat music) - We're now joined by Eileen Markey, who is the editor of a compelling, important book called, "Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the American Epidemic of Corruption" all about Wayne Barrett, an extraordinary journalist.

How you doing, Eileen?

- Great.

Great to see you.

- We're gonna go to a clip in just a little bit, an interview I did with Wayne Barrett back in 2007.

Tell everyone who Wayne Barrett was and why he mattered and still matters so much.

- Wayne Barrett was this fantastic, really legendary investigative reporter at "The Village Voice."

He wrote about New York City corruption matters, large and small, for 40 years.

Almost all of that time, a weekly column in "The Village Voice."

Early in his career, he covered Donald Trump.

A little bit later in his career, he covered Rudy Giuliani.

He came back to those characters again and again.

And so the book includes some of his early reporting and some of his later reporting on both of those two giant, giant New York City national figures, Rudy and Trump.

But week in and week out, Wayne Barrett covered the people who were stealing from the public till, the public officials who were not doing what they should do.

He was really, in this really classic, old-fashioned investigative journalism way, shedding the light of truth on the machinations of power.

And he did it with gusto and with joy in a really fantastic way, and he trained a bunch of young journalists so- - Including you.

- Yeah, including me.

Including me and like 100 other lucky, you know, college kids and post-college kids who got to work for him, you know, early in our careers.

And it set us up to really understand the value of serious investigative journalism.

- So I remember back in 2007 when I sat down with Wayne, the late great Wayne Barrett, and again, we've had other interviews where we talked about Donald Trump early on, but this is an interview from 2007 in which Wayne Barrett talks a little bit about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 from a perspective that you don't hear very often.

Here's that interview.

What's the issue with the command center?

- The command center is this $61 million operation that Giuliani created that was for these kinds of emergencies, but also for hurricanes, West Nile virus.

They had every conceivable telecommunications video.

It was the most high-powered command center in the United States, built by Giuliani.

- [Steve] So what's wrong with putting it-- - He puts it in 7 World Trade in the complex that's already been attacked, attacked in '93.

His own, the highest-ranking police officer in the police department, Lou Anemone, told us for the book that he did a vulnerability study of various buildings and locations in the city of New York that were the most vulnerable to terrorist attack.

This was number one.

- What do you think when you see that, Eileen?

- It's great to see our old friend in his glory again.

And I remember when Wayne was working on the Rudy 9/11 book and when he was uncovering that information, like, I remember going out to lunch with him.

Like, one of the things that was amazing and excellent about Barrett and really made him be the person he was and the powerful investigative journalist he was is that he was angry every time he discovered something that wasn't right.

He was angry for 40 years.

It kept him going.

And like, when he learned what he just said in that clip, he was like, "Can you believe it?"

There was never actually any cynicism, right?

Grizzly old reporter, but no cynicism.

Just like, "Can you believe it?

This is crazy!

He put it in the worst place to put a command center!"

And of course, you know, if you were to keep running that clip, what Barrett would say next is, Rudy put the bunker, the, you know, a high in the sky bunker where he did because he wanted to be able to walk there from City Hall because he wanted there to be cameras on him in the sense, in the case of an emergency.

And of course, I think most people in the US when they think about political response to 9/11 on the day of, first of all, obviously you think of the tragedy and the horror, but then when you think of government response, you think of Rudy Giuliani, and you think of Rudy Giuliani- - America's Mayor.

- With the baseball cap covered in the dust.

- Yes.

- And that's because he put his command center in the most stupid place to put it because he wanted to make sure that there were gonna be those pictures in the case of whatever it was, hurricane or flood or, yeah.

So I remember when Barrett was discovering that and just the outrage, but it's also like the level of reporting that gets you to talk to the guy who was Rudy's advisor on that and look at the plans.

And Barrett, you know, in that book there's really exhaustive analysis of all the things that were wrong with 7 World Trade because it was rushed, because it was improperly built.

- So what's interesting is that even though Rudy Giuliani gets a lot of credit for many of the things he did in connection with 9/11 with family members and being there and first responders, Wayne Barrett's argument was, okay, now let's talk about some other leadership decisions.

And ironically, you know, the book that Giuliani wrote about leadership, Wayne Barrett questions that.

Shift gears, Donald Trump.

One of the things about Wayne Barrett, and I have his Trump book in my library right next room over, he was obsessed in a good, healthy way in trying to understand Donald Trump.

He was writing about Trump early on in Trump's career.

Trump was constantly trying to co-opt Wayne Barrett, was he not?

- Yeah, yeah.

So Wayne wrote a series of three articles, like a three-piece profile of Donald Trump in the winter and spring of 1979.

Really, really early on, right?

It was really early in Barrett's career as actually finally a staff writer at "The Voice."

And they were, you know, several thousand word pieces.

We have several of them in the book.

Really tremendous, exhaustive investigation of, who is this brash, young real estate developer who's getting a lot of Page Six mentions, who's getting a lot of kind of celebrity coverage?

New York glitzy media was happy to cover the glamour of this young upstart real estate developer, and Barrett had no interest in fashion.

He had no interest in- - He wasn't impressed.

- Architecture, he wasn't impressed by the glitz.

But he said, "This guy's getting a lot of public subsidies.

This guy's getting a lot of deals bent in his direction."

And he comes straight out of the, his father comes straight out of the Brooklyn Queens clubhouses.

This is old-fashioned political corruption with this shiny, it's '79, but you think of it as like very '80s glitzy Manhattan sheen on it.

And so Barrett did what he does, is look really closely and read all the receipts.

And those pieces, those three pieces from the winter and spring of '79 are just, everything you needed to know about Donald Trump was written down there.

The court-documented racism, the inside deals, the corruption, everything that a lot of people somehow didn't really understand until 2016 or 2018.

It was all there.

Barrett had it dead to rights early on.

But when he was reporting that story, which you know, took like months and months and months to report those pieces, Trump knew that this young reporter was sniffing around and kind of talking to his business associates and working his way in to eventually interview Trump.

And Trump called him up one day and said, "I noticed that you and your wife live in like, a kind of rough and tumble neighborhood.

I can get you an apartment."

- In Brooklyn.

He was in Brooklyn.

- In Brooklyn.

Like, of out of political commitment, they lived in Ocean Hill-Brownsville because they'd both been involved in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school strike as young radicals aligned with Black radicals.

And they lived there 'cause they loved that neighborhood.

But Trump, like, how could he ever understand such an idea, such a political commitment.

So Trump was, "You guys live in a rough neighborhood.

I could get you an apartment in one of my new developments."

Yeah, which of course was a non-starter right?

Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah.

Wayne Barrett wrote about Donald Trump and understood Trump way before Trump was Trump now.

And it's not that much different.

It's so interesting.

Let me ask you this.

In the book, "Without Compromise" is a series of essays, articles, you know, features that were written by Wayne Barrett, important.

And search Wayne Barrett, you'll find out the whole range of important things about him.

Real quick on this, if you could, Eileen, what do you believe Wayne Barrett would think of those of us, most of us in the media today as it relates to the way we cover or don't cover corruption?

- I hate prognosticating, you know, people who are no longer with us, but what Wayne did in his work was, you know, it was always, can I find the paper?

Can I do the original interview?

Can I find the document?

Can I read the lawsuit?

Can I read the deposition?

Finding real facts.

So much of journalism today is opinion, is prognosticating, is just kind of hot air.

And I know with the rise of that kind of journalism, you know, going back 20, 30 years at this point, Wayne found that really frustrating.

One of Wayne's last like, kind of public events was he won an honor from "City Limits" in the fall of 2016.

And he was already very ill at that point, and he gave this fantastic kind of old lion speech really handing it, like really castigating the TV media and how it was covering that election.

It's so hard to remember back to the fall of 2016.

It seems like a couple lifetimes ago now with all the country's been through.

But he was so frustrated by the horse race coverage.

He was so frustrated by the, like, the lazy coverage, right?

And the willing- - Lazy.

- To like, jump on soundbites instead of doing the work of really chasing down facts.

Another famous thing Wayne always said is, "Readers come to you not for dissertation, but for discovery.

They come to you for facts, not for you to like, you know, bloviate.

It's, what are the facts that you've found?

How can you deliver those to me?

And how are the facts that the reporter finds able to strengthen democracy?"

Was really, he thought of himself as a detective for the people.

- That's right.

The book is "Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the American Epidemic of Corruption."

Wayne Barrett, edited by Eileen Markey.

Eileen, thank you so much.

We appreciate it.

- Great to be with you.

Thanks.

- And by the way, folks, get this book and read about the great late Wayne Barrett.

I'm Steve Adubato, that's Eileen Markey.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Seton Hall University.

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And by Atlantic Health System.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey Globe.

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