General
Tom Robbins, Versatile Muckraker for The Village Voice, Dies at 76
He exposed corrupt officials and greedy landlords, and his reporting on prison violence was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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 in around 1980 in the office of the nonprofit news organization City Limits.Credit…Marc Jahr
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.”
