Tom Robbins, Versatile Muckraker for The Village Voice, Dies at 76

[mahatmakanejeeves]

No, not that Tom Robbins.

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 in 2012. “I look at my reporter’s credentials as a passport to talk to anyone, from the governor on down,” he said, “and shine a light on corners that don’t usually get looked at.” John Smock, via the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY

By Sam Roberts
May 28, 2025

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. 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. {snip} 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.

{snip}

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.