The Man Who Robbed the Pierre by Ira Berkow

In 2006, he was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, 'For thoughtful commentary on the sports scene.'

The novelist Scott Turow wrote, 'Ira Berkow is one of the great American writers, without limitation to the field of sports.'

His work has been reprinted or cited over six decades in the annual anthologies Best Sports Stories and its successor Best American Sports Writing, and a column of his was included in Best American Sports Writing of the Century (1999). He shared the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his article 'The Minority Quarterback' in The New York Times series How Race Is Lived in America. He was a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune, a syndicated features writer, sports and general columnist, and sports editor for the Newspaper Enterprise Association.įrom 1981 to 2007 he was a sports reporter and columnist for The New York Times and has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Art News, Seventeen, Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Tribune Magazine, National Strategic Forum Review, Readers' Digest, and Sports Illustrated, among others. In this blend of insightful biography and true crime, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ira Berkow chronicles the story, using first-hand accounts to weave together a fascinating portrait of a criminal and 'a corking good cops-and-robbers tale' ( Library Journal).Berkow earned his BA in English Literature at Miami University, and his MA from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. Sort of like Robin Hood-except for the part where he kept the loot himself-Comfort masterminded what was, at the time, the most lucrative heist in history, while appearing to his neighbors like an ordinary suburban family man. Eventually, taking money from the rich was where he excelled. He had taken to crime from a young age with card sharping and petty theft. The answer lay in the leader of the thieves, a man by the name of Bobby Comfort. The police were baffled by how such a large-scale operation could go off so smoothly. In January 1972, men in tuxedos robbed the Pierre, the luxurious Manhattan hotel, and got away with eleven million dollars' worth of cash and jewelry. It just so happened that he was great at being a criminal. Growing up in Rochester, New York, Bobby Comfort wanted to be a good something. This Pulitzer Prize–winning author's true account of the thief behind the famed 1972 heist is 'an engrossing crime biography.

The Man Who Robbed the Pierre by Ira Berkow