Paul DeRienzo
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Paul DeRienzo is a writer, contributor to many newspapers and magazines, including Penthouse, In These Times, New York Press and radical journals such as the Yippie newspaper Overthrow and the Lower East Side's Shadow. DeRienzo, who was born and raised in the New York metro area went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he received his BA in Political Science.
He moved to the Lower East Side in 1983 where he became a reporter for WBAI. DeRienzo was on the scene with his tape recorder and microphone during the infamous August 1988 Tompkins Square Park Police Riot. His radio documentary is called The Battle of Tompkins Square Park. In the 1990s DeRienzo covered the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and conducted a jailhouse interview with Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. He broke the story of how FBI informant Emad Salem had wiretapped his own government handlers and DeRienzo played excerpts from the tapes on his radio show.
Paul DeRienzo founded and hosted the WBAI radio program Let Them Talk for nearly 15 years. He had several co-hosts, including Dana Beal, Fly and his current partner, actress Joan Marie Moossy. During a major internal controversy at Pacifica Radio in 2001, which was the subject of several lawsuits, DeRienzo orchestrated the representation of WBAI's workers by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). He became WBAI's first AFTRA shop steward.
DeRienzo was hosting a live radio show from WBAI, several blocks away from the twin towers on September 11, 2001 as the World Trade Center disaster unfolded and anchored live radio coverage of events throughout that day.
DeRienzo became Executive Producer of the Gary Null Show in 2002. DeRienzo is also the author of "The Ibogaine Story," about the African plant touted as a potential cure for addiction. DeRienzo has written over 100 published articles and hundreds of radio productions. He has been both a writer and television news anchor for the INN World Report since 2005.
Paul DeRienzo likes to make his voice heard. He has shouted his opinions at community board meetings, marched for causes he believes in, attended a fair number of demonstrations. And sometimes he has suffered for his involvement: In 1982 DeRienzo was covering a demonstration on St. Mark's Place and was struck from behind on the head by a policeman. He promptly sued and collected a small check from the city. The money allowed him to pursue freelance writing projects and travel to Central America, where, among other things, he took a picture of Manuel Noriega shaking hands with Daniel Ortega. Then he followed "Rock Against Reagan," a national tour of music groups that ended up participating in a flag-burning demonstration at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, which got him two days in jail for disturbing the peace, he said.
Back in New York, DeRienzo joined an anti-apartheid group, and his coverage in 1986 of a demonstration against South Africa Airways at LaGuardia Airport led to his first news report for WBAI. He began to cover the squatter movement for the station when land speculation and rising rents drove more low-income citizens to take over abandoned buildings. In 1987, between apartments, DeRienzo became a squatter himself for six weeks and helped a group on Eighth Street fix walls and put up joists.
That same year WBAI hired DeRienzo to engineer Contragate, a syndicated radio program that covered the congressional investigation of the Iran-contra scandal. After the hearings, the show became Undercurrents, a half-hour review of national and international events that won its producer, Robert Knight, a "Polk journalism award" in 1990 for coverage of the Panama invasion, including an interview with Noriega, which DeRienzo helped set up.
As a news reporter and host, DeRienzo fits in comfortably at WBAI, a listener supported station that features a wide variety of alternative viewpoints. "He gets things that are happening before they hit the mainstream," said Amy Goodman, the station's news editor.
One recent morning found him at WBAI's nineteenth-floor office near Penn Station, setting up the tape machines and turntables for City Politics, a show he occasionally hosts. Hanging on one wall was a 1960s election poster for Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin (who ran for mayor and city councilman, respectively.) A shock of brown hair drooped over DeRienzo's eyebrows as he searched around for an album. At air time, he returned to the soundboard, adjusted his headphones,, pushed his glasses up the ridge of his nose and went on the air with "Inner City Blues" by Gil Scott-Heron: ". . . Crime is increasing. Trigger-happy policing. Panic is spreading. God knows where we're heading."
"We're going to talk about the crime in the South Bronx, the eviction of squatters," DeRienzo announced after the music ended. He then turned things over to Reverend Frank Morales, a street minister on the Lower East Side and former squatter, who had witnessed the eviction of a group of Central American immigrants. "So tell us what you saw on Tuesday . . "
Morales recounted what he termed an "attack" by "Mayor Dinkins' military assault squad" on a building in the South Bronx. He said the squad had placed "snipers on all the rooftops nearby" and brought in an exotic-looking, high-tech telecommunications vehicle to watch over the police as they evicted the tenants. DeRienzo broke in to say the truck had been present at a prior eviction. "That was what they call the FEMA truck," he said, which stands for Federal Emergency Management Agency, a bureau that DeRienzo said was coordinating activities with the city's Anti-Terrorism Task Force office at One Police Plaza.
The truck's presence made sense to Morales. "The squatters, the homesteaders, are viewed as terrorists," he said.
After a couple of minutes of banter, DeRienzo stopped. "Let's open the phones," he said. The phone bank lit up. "You're on the air. . ."
DeRienzo covered many important stories in the 1990s and interviewed political figures such as then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, who DeRienzo asked about mysterious events surroundung an airstrip in Mena, Arkansas.
In February 1993 a massive bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The bombing killed 6 and injured more than 1000 people. Soon afterwards an alleged plot by a group of Muslim's associated with blind Sheik Dr.Omar Abdel Rahman was arrested an accused of a plot to blow-up bridges, tunnels and landmarks throughout New York City. In 1994 Paul DeRIenzo conducted an interview with Rahman while the Egyptian cleric was awaiting trial in a New York Federal prison. Later that year DeRienzo uncovered copies of secret tapes made by Emad Salem, the government's chief informant in the Rahman case. In the tapes Salem makes several staments implicating himself in the World Trade Center bombing plot.
In 1996 DeRienzo traveled to Chicago to cover the 1996 Democratic National Convention for the Pacifica Network News and for Amy Goodman's fledgling version of Democracy Now! After the convention the Chicago police arrested seven organizers of protests at the convention, some associated with the Yippies who had stormed Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the last time the Democrats had met in the Windy City. Possibly concerned that the arrest of yet another Chicago 7 in 1996 might hurt their case, the authorities released two of the protest organizers and charged the remaining five with advocating violence against the police. As a reporter DeRienzo had taped the protest and was called as a witness by defense lawyer Leonard Weinglass. During his testimony DeRienzo was asked if protesters had chanted "no justice no peace, fuck the police." DeRienzo was able to show that not only had protesters not chanted the offending slogan, but had chanted the less confrontational slogan, "bad cops, no donut." The resulting courtroom hilarity was credited with defense attorneys with the next day's acquittal of all five defendants.
A year later DeRienzo was offered the job of Editor-in-Chief of High Times, the venerable pro-marijuana monthly. While at High Times DeRIenzo covered the conflict between the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club and Federal and state authorities in the fall of 1998. During this time DeRIenzo began working on an article about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA. The article, written with Joan Moossy centered on the espionage case against two radicals from Washington, DC who had been charged with spying for the former East Germany, Eventually, "America's Secret Court" was published as a feature in the June 1999 issue of Penthouse magazine. The article was one of the first in a major publication to chart the history and effect of a law that allows the government to suspend the civil rights of United States citizens.
DeRienzo and partner Joan Moossy also wrote an article written in the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson that was featured on the cover of In These Times called "Gene Cops; The Police Want Your DNA," about DNA fingerprinting. DeRienzo and Moossy won a grant from the Stewart Mott Foundation to attend the Las Vegas convention of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors, where they rubbed elbows with the cops responsible for investigating crime scene evidence.
In the spring of 2001 DeRienzo accepted a job as co-host of the Morning Show on New York City based radio station WBAI. It was during a difficult transitional period for the faction plagued radio station and its parent organization, the Berkeley, California based Pacifica Foundation.
