Ron Porambo, 67: Writer dabbled on dark side
 
New Yorker magazine hailed ex-Star reporter
 
Convicted killer, 67, died in jail in New Jersey
 
Nov. 8, 2006
 
By Bill Taylor, Feature Writer
 
Ron Porambo was better at writing than at living.
 
A journalist and author whose work was hailed by the New Yorker magazine, he was wedded to life on the wrong side of the tracks. After flirting for years with the underworld, he finally moved there for good and became a career criminal.
 
Porambo, 67, died Oct. 22 in New Jersey State Prison. He was serving 30 years to life for the 1983 murder of a drug dealer during a robbery. Porambo reportedly choked to death while eating an orange.
 
During his legitimate days as a reporter (though he “moonlighted” off and on as an armed robber), he wrote for the Toronto Star. This reporter worked with him briefly in 1979/80 on the tabloid Philadelphia Journal, where an editor once called him “a junkyard dog.” It wasn’t meant as an insult, nor did Porambo take it that way.
 
Perhaps it was because he saw himself as an underdog that Porambo could so readily identify with the downtrodden and fleetingly become their champion.
 
When No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark, his best-selling book on the 1967 race riots in Newark, N.J., came out in 1971, the New Yorker called it “probably the most moving and instructive book yet written on any of the bloody civil disturbances of the ’60s.” The book is to be reissued next year, the 40th anniversary of the riots. In it, Porambo probed civic corruption and the whitewashing of the 26 riot deaths. The official inquiry was, he wrote, “a calculated, disgraceful tragedy.”
 
The same might be said of the life Porambo chose to live. He never stayed long in one job, moving during the 1960s and ’70s from newspaper to newspaper between Tennessee and Toronto, good enough and plausible enough to find work almost wherever he chose.

In Toronto in the ’70s, he worked for the Star and the Globe and Mail, and as Global TV producer. But never long enough to be much remembered.

He lasted less than six months at the Philadelphia Journal. Skinny, with thick-rimmed glasses, a moustache and unkempt hair, he usually looked in need of a shower and it was said that he lived mostly in homeless shelters. He didn’t take kindly to editorial direction and would disappear for days. Sometimes he’d show up with a hard-hitting story from the parts of Philadelphia where most reporters tended, for safety, to go in pairs. Sometimes he’d be empty-handed, with neither an explanation nor apology.

“Don’t cross him,” Journal staffers warned each other. “He could be packing a gun.” How right we were.

Porambo didn’t so much quit as simply wandered off, again without explanation. Not long after, he was jailed for two years for pistol-whipping an elderly couple during a robbery. Casual crime, it turned out, had provided a second income, though his targets of choice were drug dealers who, he reasoned, were less likely to go to the police.

Ironically, he first went to jail because of his book. He was imprisoned for three months in 1973 for bribing a cop to give him photos of the Newark riot victims. His jail term didn’t hurt sales, nor did the two attempts on his life shortly after it was published.

The second one left him with two bullets in his legs.

He survived another shooting in 1983, which put three bullets in his head, affected his speech and made walking difficult. Police said he refused to co-operate in the search for the shooter. Born in Newark, the son of a baker who invented the “twister cruller,” a kind of doughnut, Porambo in the 1950s was a Golden Gloves champion boxer in New Jersey.

He was good enough to have fought a couple of times in supporting bouts at New York’s Madison Square Garden. He married a black woman, Carol Scott, such an unusual thing then that the New York Times put it in the headline of a profile of him when his book came out.

The couple had a daughter, who reportedly died in the 1990s, and a son. There’s no word on the family’s whereabouts.

One of his few enduring friends and a former colleague, Fred Bruning, told the Newark Star-Ledger: “Ron was a remarkable reporter, courageous and resourceful, but … flawed in a tragic way that no one, including Ron, understood.”

One story he freelanced to the Star in the ’70s was penned from behind bars at the Metro West Detention Centre. He was awaiting sentence after trying to hold up a parking lot attendant at Pearson airport with a toy gun. He was jailed for two years and deported to the United States.

“Each day is precisely like the one before it,” Porambo wrote. “A constant, unvarying succession of sights and sounds, punctuated by the guards who count their prisoners over and over and over again.”

He had no way of knowing that this would become his epitaph.