New Jersey Department of Corrections
From the Editors:As regular readers know, we don’t usually run entire stories from other publications, but this item from the Newhouse News Service deserves it. Stories like this make us hope there is some divine well of mercy in the universe, and we hope that this lost brother finds his sins washed.
We actually read his book, in 1996, after a friend from New Jersey lent it to us. It is as good as it sounds.
We urge all Howlin’ Leroy Eenk readers to finish this wonderfully-written account in its entirety, and to read
Brother Porambo's book.
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Fearless reporter became a killer and an outcast
By BRAD PARKS
The Star-Ledger of Newark
NEWARK, N.J. -- That no one was around to save Ron Porambo when he began choking was at least partly his fault.
Even the few people who liked Porambo admitted he had a special talent for annoyance. And after enough years in the medical ward at New Jersey State Prison, he had annoyed enough people that everyone involved decided it would be better if he ate his meals alone in his cell.
Which is what he was doing when he took his final, gasping breaths.
Authorities couldn't figure out what killed him at first, not until the Mercer County Medical Examiner's Office opened him up and found bits of orange in his throat. That's how they ascertained Ron Porambo _ the fearless reporter turned murderer, the self-styled renegade author, the man who once survived three gunshot wounds to the head _ choked to death on a piece of fruit.
``You can find 2,000 stories right here in this building,'' said Rasheed Mujahid, an inmate at New Jersey State Prison who was Porambo's caretaker. ``But none of them are quite like Ron's.''
It will never be confused with a happy story. At the time of his passing on Oct. 22, Porambo, 67, had just one friend in the outside world.
A bullet lodged in his brain years earlier so impaired his functioning, he struggled to control his bowels, drooled, and could barely wipe his nose. And while his mind remained sharp, it was imprisoned behind a speech impediment that made him unintelligible.
He had been estranged from his wife and children for so long, officials at New Jersey State Prison looking to notify next of kin were unable to find them.
His few worldly possessions fit inside two plastic bins. The only reason he didn't end up in a pauper's grave is because a brother he hadn't spoken to in 20 years decided to claim the remains in a fit of last-minute fraternal guilt.
Before the series of wrong turns that led him to that end, Porambo was the kind of journalist who took pains to tell the truth, no matter how ugly. And Ron Porambo the journalist would likely conclude that, by nearly any measure of a well-led life, his was a waste. Except for one thing. And now it's all that's left of him.
There was a time in Newark when everyone knew the book: Ron Porambo's ``No Cause for Indictment,'' a stinging condemnation of the corruption, racism, poverty and police brutality that fomented the city's 1967 riots.
``It was a reference point,'' said Amiri Baraka, then as now a leader in Newark's black community. ``One had to be able to say, `Yes, I know that book' whether you had read it or not.''
At the heart of its 398 pages is a section in which Porambo took eyewitness accounts of 22 riot-related civilian deaths, which he called ``homicides,'' and juxtaposed them with the grand jury's findings, that there was ``no cause for indictment'' for any of the police officers or National Guardsmen involved, meaning they would spend no time in jail. He called those findings ``a calculated, disgraceful travesty.''
What he couldn't have known when he wrote those words is that he would spend his final 23 years in jail _ or that the book would help cause his downfall.
Porambo thought ``No Cause'' would win the Pulitzer Prize and give him the professional acceptance he always craved. Instead, the book's lukewarm reception made him so bitter and disillusioned with the journalism establishment, he turned to crime.
Which leads to the final irony of his life. After all these years, Melville House has decided to reissue the book in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the riots this July. In addition to celebrating the author's contribution to Newark history, the publisher plans to market the book to journalism schools as a foremost example of old-fashioned street reporting.
In other words, the business that long spurned Ron Porambo may someday hold up his work as a model for future generations.
And he died before he ever got to see it happen.
``In some ways, Ron's life really depicts the tragic trajectory of the city of Newark. It had so much wasted promise,'' Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson said. ``But you know what? His life also had this one great piece of work. And, by God, if you accomplish one great thing like that in your life, is it really a wasted life?''
It's a life that, for simplicity's sake, can be divided into two parts: the time when he wrote about the thugs, pushers and pimps who populated society's underbelly; and the time when he joined them.
The graying set of journalists and activists who remember Porambo like to say he became one of the characters he wrote about. But that isn't quite right. Because, more than anything, Porambo wrote about the disadvantaged and disenfranchised. Which is exactly what he never was.
As his brother, Carl Porambo, tells it, Ron was raised in a middle-class home in Union County with a mother who doted on him and a father whose patented invention _ the world's first (and only) double-twist cruller machine _ made the family comfortable.
But Ron wasn't wired to join the country club set. He loved to box, becoming a New Jersey Golden Gloves champion as a teenager. He was drawn to journalism, hardly a get-rich-quick business. And although he was white, he was fascinated by the long struggle of blacks.
As a young reporter who fashioned himself after Jimmy Breslin and considered himself part of Tom Wolfe's ``New Journalism,'' Porambo gravitated toward the black section of whatever town he covered. And he married Carol Scott, a black woman. Porambo's family still talks about when Ron ``went black.''
``He just wanted to be different,'' Carl Porambo said. ``The kid drove a Javelin, smoked a pipe, drank tea, wore suspenders with a belt and corduroy pants. And he married a black girl.''
Fred Bruning was the best man at the wedding. He and Porambo met in the early 1960s as cub reporters at the now-defunct Knickerbocker News.
``He was a fearless, resourceful reporter,'' said Bruning, who chronicled Porambo's life for Newsday Magazine in 1989 and was his only outside friend by the end. ``And he felt the history of black Americans and the grave injustices committed against them made black people as a group more interesting than white people as a group.''
Porambo's talent made him an intriguing job applicant, and he was hired by more than a dozen papers during a rambling journalism career that included three stops in New Jersey _ the Atlantic City Press, the Elizabeth Daily Journal and The Star-Ledger of Newark.
``He wrote some wonderful stories. They were delightful, irreverent,'' said Bill Roesgen, Porambo's editor at the Kingsport (Tenn.) Times-News. ``He stepped on a lot of toes.''
That was also true inside the newsroom. Former colleagues described him as stubborn, quarrelsome and inflexible _ whether it was about the length of his stories (he always insisted on more space than editors wanted to give him) or his desire to carry a gun (he felt he needed one for protection).
His tenure at The Star-Ledger was typical. As he did elsewhere, he set up an electric teapot at his desk. Mort Pye, the paper's longtime editor, wasn't keen on having a fire hazard in the newsroom and asked him to unplug it. Porambo refused and either left or was fired.
And while those kind of moves made him something of a hero in journalistic circles _ he was the reporter with the temerity to tell off his editors and the conviction to walk out if they didn't like it _ his brother just saw him as a guy who couldn't keep a job, who stormed out of newsrooms then came crawling home with his hand out.
``My parents were always there to catch him when he fell. They gave him so much money,'' Carl Porambo said. ``I had a lot of animosity toward my brother. I just felt like my parents were rewarding him for messing up.''
So Ron Porambo had his parents' backing when he decided, not long after the Newark riots, to quit his job at the Elizabeth Daily Journal and write the definitive book about the uprising.
He moved his wife and three children into his parents' home in Short Hills. He was 28, and this was to be his opus. He spent three years reporting and writing it.
The resulting work was bleak but powerful. Shortly after its release in 1971, the New Yorker deemed it ``probably the most moving and instructive book yet written on any of the bloody civil disturbances of the sixties.'' Its first printing of 7,500 sold out and its second printing also did well.
But its success was never more than modest, and it did not propel Porambo to the big time.
``Anybody who writes a first book thinks it's the book that's going to change America. The reality is, that rarely happens,'' said Warren Sloat, who helped Porambo write the final draft. ``He expected to be on the cover of Time magazine and for the royalties to put his family in good stead. But it never really went anywhere.''
His conclusion _ that the white power structure was to blame for the riot and then conspired to cover up crimes committed by overzealous white cops _ was not a popular one. The Star-Ledger and Newark Evening News ignored the book. Then again, it probably didn't help that the book accused the papers of protecting the corrupt city fathers, saying ``the two local papers assume their rightful positions alongside Newark's businessmen as the whorehouse's blushing counterfeit virgins.''
The New York papers didn't pay much attention, either.
``He felt the business betrayed him,'' Bruning said. ``He felt like he had done unique work and it should have given him access to the top tier of journalism, but that never happened.''
Instead, he got a job in local television.
``As a reporter, he was totally fearless,'' said Bob Curvin, a longtime Newark community leader. ``He would take on anyone. He was on that `if you don't like what I'm doing, shoot me' kind of track.''
And, of course, it wasn't long before someone did. Twice, actually. Both were drive-by jobs. The first missed. The second time, he was hit in the leg.
Porambo told the New York Times ``the Italian people who run this town'' wanted him silenced in retaliation for the book. The police hinted Porambo may have shot himself and dismissed it as a publicity stunt.
Either way, it wasn't long before Porambo was in other trouble. He was charged with giving a police officer a $50 bribe to obtain coroner's photos of riot victims. He served three months in jail.
It was the beginning of his path from journalist to outlaw.
The transformation is one that is still, in many ways, inexplicable.
``I've told Ron's story hundreds of times,'' Bruning said. ``And it's almost scripted: When you get to that point in the story, people always say, `What? How could anyone go from reporter to armed robber?' To me, it remains an open question.''
To others who knew Porambo, it made sense, even if the logic he used was twisted.
``He just never understood that when black people defied the law, it had a point to it. There were material goals and things we wanted to accomplish,'' Baraka said. ``With Ron, defiance was the goal. It was struggle for the sake of struggle.''
Porambo told friends he had found ways to take what the world owed him: by robbing drug dealers.
``He felt like he was doing the public a service, relieving these miscreants of their ill-gotten gains,'' said Knox Berger, his former agent. ``He really romanticized what he was doing.''
The authorities were less enthralled. Porambo served nearly three years in prison for robbing and pistol-whipping a couple outside a Scotch Plains restaurant. He briefly tried journalism again when he got out, but was soon back to creating stories, not writing them.
He started impersonating public officials during his robberies. Union County authorities were in the midst of investigating him for posing as a state trooper to gain entrance to a home in Westfield when he finally committed the crime that defined the rest of his life.
Disguised as a bearded fire inspector, he broke into the home of Sidney Davis, an Irvington drug dealer, on the night of April 10, 1983. The robbery went bad when an accomplice raped Davis' girlfriend. During the ensuing struggle, Porambo shot and killed Davis.
Porambo made his getaway, but police found him a month later _ slumped in a car in Newark, near death, with three bullet wounds to the head, unable to say who shot him or why. Police also found a fake beard and a fire inspector's uniform in his car.
``I don't recall him expressing any remorse for robbing (Davis) or shooting him,'' said Al Constants, who prosecuted the case. ``He thought he was on some kind of high road.''
Porambo was sentenced to life, and prison did not suit him well. A year into his incarceration, he threatened to starve himself to death if he did not receive speech or occupational therapy for the disabilities that resulted from his shooting. He wrote a letter to prison officials detailing his ``suicide schedule,'' warning them, ``My death will be on your conscience.''
It was an empty threat, but he was no less demanding or threatening to friends and family.
His sister-in-law, Nancy Porambo, tried mailing him food and books. But he became enraged if she didn't select the right brand or the right author. Finally, when she sent him a typewriter he didn't like, Nancy said Ron threatened to kill her and her children. She stopped talking to him after that.
As other family members and friends also cut off contact, Porambo's world became increasingly small, confined to the medical wing at New Jersey State Prison.
That was where, five years ago, he met Mujahid, the fellow inmate who was his caretaker. Mujahid, who also was serving a life sentence for murder, was a native of Newark's South Ward and admired ``No Cause'' _ and its author.
``He was a good dude,'' Mujahid said. ``He had a genuine heart. It's like what they say about pets. He gave people unconditional love.''
Of course, Porambo had needs. He could still walk, spending his two hours of daily recreation time pacing in circles around the prison yard, but was hopeless at small motor activities, like tying his shoes or typing a letter. Mujahid became Porambo's secretary.
Which is why he read the letter Porambo received late last spring: After all these years, someone wanted to republish his book.
The letter had a story of its own, of course. Johnson, the Melville House publisher, had decided to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Newark riots and tasked editor Becky Kraemer with finding something suitable.
She came back with Porambo's book and a quandary: Did they want to publish a book written by a murderer?
``It was kind of a tricky decision,'' Johnson said. ``But the first time I read the book, I just couldn't put it down.''
It was the quality of reporting that hooked Johnson, a former journalism professor. Plus, history has been kind to some of Porambo's once-controversial ideas.
``A lot of my friends hated Ron for what he wrote and at times I did, too,'' Carl Porambo said. ``But now, after all these years, you realize: He was right.''
Melville House corresponded with Ron Porambo and, with Mujahid's help, worked out a contract. Because of his speech problems, Porambo was unable to articulate what the republishing meant to him. But Mujahid often had to apologize for smudge marks on the letters. Ron kept crying on them.
``I'd like to think we're one of the good things that has happened to Ron in the dark final decades of his life,'' Johnson said. ``I take some comfort that he died knowing his great work was not going to be forgotten forever.''
Melville House is still planning a July release. Bruning is writing the foreword. He visited his old friend in July to interview him and take one last shot at asking the question that always perplexed him: Why? Why turn in a typewriter for a gun? Why throw it all away?
``The other times I asked him about it, he always went on about how he needed to feed his family and how the business had betrayed him and how he was justified in doing what he did,'' Bruning said. ``This time, he just said one word:
```Mistake.'''
(Brad Parks is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at bparks@starledger.com.)
