Real-life "Kojak" Selwyn Raab, 90, died on March 4. Raab worked his way up through jobs at The Star-Ledger in Newark, The New York World-Telegram and Sun (too many mergers!), and The New York Times, also holding TV jobs at NBC News and WNET. Raab was one of the top crime-investigation reporters, uncovering that a Brooklyn doctor was injecting patients with cancer cells (he was convicted of “unprofessional conduct” (which, yeah), and freeing the wrongly convicted “Career Girls killer” (awful case, Google it!), as well as boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. Raab wrote such popular true-crime books as Justice in the Back Room, Mob Lawyer, and Five Families. Universal bought Justice in the Back Room, changed Raab’s name to Theo Kojak (played by Telly Savalas), and the game was on. Raab worked on the Kojak TV movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders (which will always be The Neiman-Marcus Murders to me), the Kojak TV series, and seven Kojak TV-movies. He told Philip Angell that “I started as a reporter in New York in the 1960s on the education beat. I was working for a year when there was a big scandal: schools were falling apart. There were secret Mafia partners to all these construction firms that were allowing ceilings to collapse, and building shoddy buildings. So I started asking around: ‘Why don't you do anything about the Mafia?’ ‘It's too hard,’ I was told. But the real reason was that the Mafia was paying off the politicians and the judges. Every stone you turned up in this town had to do with the Mafia. Garbage, the fish market, you name it.”
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