Mike Mcalary, Pulitzer Winner, Dies At 41

NEW YORK - Mike McAlary, the pugnacious tabloid reporter and columnist who won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for the Daily News, died yesterday. He was 41.

He died of colon cancer at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, according to Ed Fay, a vice president of the Daily News.

A month after winning the Pulitzer in April, Mr. McAlary wrote of his illness: "The Cancer Life, of which I am a member, is an impatient society. . . . It seems to me that graceful living, and dying, demands such patience. You can't take someone else's place in the lifeboat."

Mr. McAlary was getting chemotherapy in 1997 when he received an anonymous tip that Abner Louima, a black Haitian immigrant, had been sodomized and beaten by white police officers in a stationhouse. The columnist went to Louima's hospital bedside and was the first reporter to talk with him.

"This is a tale straight from the police dungeon, an allegation of brutality at the hands of cops from Brooklyn's 70th Precinct that seems so impossible, so crudely medieval," he wrote in the Daily News.

That column and interviews with police officers who were later charged in the attack won him the Pulitzer.

As a student at Syracuse University, Mr. McAlary had boasted to classmates that he would be the next Jimmy Breslin, the tabloid columnist of the working man.

Their styles were similar: blunt, snappy columns that reflected their no-nonsense personalities and drew from the bottomless well of New York City foibles and politics.

Even Breslin was fair game for McAlary. In 1991, at the height of the New York City tabloid wars, Mr. McAlary wrote in the New York Post that Breslin, 20 years his senior, was "the third-largest self-important blowhard in the city," after Yankee owner George Steinbrenner and former Mayor Ed Koch.

Mr. McAlary was often boastful, telling an interviewer in 1993: "I don't think anybody has the combination of writing skills and reporting skills that I have today. That's why I'm successful."

And he got into scrapes. He was sued for libel in 1996 by a rape victim after he wrote a series of columns questioning whether she made up the story to promote a feminist agenda. The lawsuit was thrown out. He wrote four books: "Buddy Boys," "Cop Shot," "Good Cop, Bad Cop," a novelization of the movie "Copland," and "Sore Loser."

McAlary is survived by his wife, Alice; four children and his parents.