Obit Watch: Robert Greene

Larry is on obit duty again. He catches the last paragraph in the NYT account of the death of Robert Greene, sometimes reporter and editor at Newsday (link):

Mr. Greene thought no expense should be spared in investigative journalism. As Anthony Marro, a former editor of Newsday, wrote in a 2002 Columbia Journalism Review profile of Mr. Greene: “The result was close to four decades of lobster dinners and two-inch-thick steaks, double Tanqueray martinis, and endless bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He once stopped a reporter new to the team from ordering a Salisbury steak in a restaurant, saying: ‘When you eat with the team, you don’t eat chopped meat.’ ”

And actually, quite aside from the lobster dinners, Green was a figure of consequence, who has a reasonable claim to having invented modern investigative journalism.