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In 1995 the Reader introduced Bobwatch, an ongoing assault on the columns of the Tribune's Bob Greene. The pitiless author, Ed Gold, was no more unfair to Greene than the canons of ridicule allowed him to be, and his occasional pieces became one of the most popular running features in the Reader. My job when Bobwatch was launched was to edit it. It quickly became clear that it was going to be around for a while, and I had a problem. "Ed Gold" was a pseudonym. If Greene, someone I'd been on decent terms with for a long time, was going to be assailed in our pages, shouldn't it be by someone writing under his own name? Despite centuries of satirical precedent to the contrary, I thought so. Under ordinary circumstances my job would be to penetrate the deception, not enable it. The Reader could have its fun, but I turned the editing over to somebody else. Not that "Ed Gold" was top secret. The actual writer even showed up at a Reader party wearing an "Ed Gold" name tag. Neil Steinberg's problem was that he worked for the Sun-Times and merely freelanced Bobwatch. What his bosses didn't know, or could pretend they didn't know, wouldn't hurt him. It now turns out that years before my paltry troubles with "Ed Gold," Steinberg weathered a far graver crisis of conscience of his own. Today he's a Sun-Times editorial writer and Sunday columnist who has a way of finding columns in his brooding. A month ago he was brooding about the death of his paper's colorful old mob reporter, Art Petacque. Steinberg had written a heartwarming obituary, which the rabbi read large sections of at Petacque's June 8 funeral. But Steinberg realized he had more to say. So his June 10 column told stories that didn't fit the obituary. He called Petacque his "Dutch uncle," the veteran who'd taught him how to smoke cigars a decade earlier when they'd collaborated on a crime column -- Petacque doing the reporting, Steinberg the unattributed writing. He remembered the time he'd said, "Artie, I need a judge to marry my brother," and Petacque had said, "I'll get you a judge," then produced the most famous judge in the city, federal judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz. Steinberg made it clear he had plenty of affection for Petacque. But that affection brought him to his point. In language much more roundabout than any he'd assailed Greene with, he went on: "Art went by a different code....Perhaps his driven, no-matter-what approach to the news is something I and my namby-pamby college boy pals will never understand. I don't want to judge. Yet how Art went about reporting seemed, at times, like a kind of mania, primal, like a salmon struggling up river to spawn. He, in a way, represented something outmoded and embarrassing about journalism. He was like those prehistoric fish occasionally discovered in the depths of the ocean, armored and beaked. Art would lie and cheat and steal to get a story, and while that might sound romantic and dashing, in the abstract, it could be shocking to be a young reporter and watch him do it, close up." Steinberg then got a little more specific, though not much. "The last time I wrote one of his columns was such a time. I sat at the keyboard and gaped with drop-mouthed shock -- let's just say that he was generating the content of his column in a manner not taught in journalism school, and leave it at that. When I finished copying what he wanted me to put down, I went into the city room and told the night editor a single, entirely true sentence about Art's column. Then I went to the Goat to get drunk. The whole thing turned into a crisis. I never wrote Art's column again. He retired shortly thereafter." Though Steinberg was artfully vague, Petacque's next of kin could be forgiven for wadding up their newspapers and flinging them against the wall. There's no way they could have appreciated the note of sensitive ambivalence Steinberg concluded with: "I always felt bad and good about this incident. Bad because Art was my Dutch uncle and I betrayed him. And good because I stuck up for an ideal that I thought, then and now, was important. We spoke again, eventually, though never about that last column -- I like to think he would have waved the matter away with a chuckle. He was an open, generous man, and now that I am growing older myself, and see the grinning new crop of youngsters arriving daily, it scares me how much less I have to offer them than Art Petacque, flaws and all, had to offer me." The event -- which Steinberg calls a betrayal but presents as a principled stand -- happened back in 1989 or 1990 (Steinberg's not sure of the date). Dennis Britton, who was the paper's editor then, lives in Chicago and read the column. He told me, "I wondered what the hell he was writing about." But though Britton didn't remember the incident -- and was certain Steinberg had nothing to do with Petacque's retirement a year or so later -- he did acknowledge that Petacque retired at the pleasure of the company. "I had problems with some of the ways Art pursued his job," he said. Steinberg believes the duty of an obit writer is to speak truth to death. He doesn't understand why a public figure can be excoriated long after he dies -- yet at death is entitled to benevolent amnesia. "I don't think that being dead in and of itself makes one into a saint," he told me, "and I think it's a disservice to the reader to suddenly become the Beijing Daily because somebody has passed on. "I did one of the Greylord judges' obits. I was talking about what he went to jail for, and I used a phrase like `He took cash bribes to let drunk drivers go free.' And the copy desk changed it to quote judicial corruption unquote. And then after it ran, his sister called to complain that we had treated him shabbily by focusing on this Greylord business. I went in to Nigel Wade [the editor then] and I said, `Look what you do. By editing the story for the family you cheat the million other readers of a strong description of his crime -- and the family's still pissed off. You please nobody.' I would rather cheese off the few members of the family who are unredeemably biased than write some sort of pabulum they can put in their scrapbooks and is a trivialization of the truth." Steinberg's column left some of us wondering what it was Petacque had done that Steinberg abhorred. "I did it in a subtle way because I wanted to talk about the unease I felt on this," Steinberg explained. "There's not necessarily a value in setting this out in black and white." But there is. Even though Steinberg's actual subject wasn't Petacque's behavior but his own unease, he said enough about how Petacque behaved to entitle us to the rest. You don't let just some of the chips fall where they may. So I asked Steinberg what happened, and he told me. "It was something having to do with some sort of pot bust. He dictated a couple of lines of a lead and gave me a big Tribune story that had run months before and said, `Take it out of here.' I did, and then I went to the desk and said, `You guys should know this isn't right.' Maybe I should have said, `Oh Art, I can't do it like that.' But I didn't." It wasn't the first time. "I think that plagiarism is wrong. I think it's like an ethical wrong, and I hated the fact that when I was working his column I became a de facto plagiarist. I was under orders. I was a nothing night-shift reporter who didn't realize I shouldn't do it until I'd done it for a while. It was a painful memory for me, and I saw this as an opportunity to expunge it -- perhaps. I had no desire to hurt his family, no desire to taint his name. The man won a Pulitzer Prize. I say that in the column." But Petacque's name did get tainted, and his family did get hurt. Their letters were "vindictive and mean and personal," Steinberg told me. "The brother felt I had betrayed Art's faith in me, that I should have taken this to my grave, and that being allowed to type out Art's column was some type of sacred trust I had betrayed. The daughter quoted from his Who's Who statement as to his moral uprightness and said the guilt of having impugned Art's name would go with me to my grave." He didn't answer the letters. "I threw them away. I figured they were grieving and they had a right to castigate me if they had a need to."
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