Carl Pelleck, a legendary reporter for The New York Post who covered the police beat with flair and distinction for decades, has died. He was 84.
Pelleck died Wednesday morning at his Woodmere, LI, home.
The cause was esophageal cancer, according to his wife of 56 years, Rochelle.
Pelleck, who was raised on the Lower East Side as one of four children, began at The Post as a teen copyboy in the early 1950s.
As a reporter, he became one of the city’s leading police reporters in a career spanning four decades.
In his heyday, Pelleck was the embodiment of a swaggering, tough-talking reporter of a bygone era — a fedora-wearing, cigar-smoking, Scotch-drinking newshound with fierce competitive zeal.
He regularly called younger reporters “kid,” and his extensive sources throughout the NYPD made him the envy of much of the city’s press corps.
Like most top reporters, he was innovative and quick-thinking when faced with a challenge.
Once, following a plane crash in Dallas in the early 1980s, an editor asked him to try to get interviews with survivors of the mishap — a tall order given that he was then sitting at his desk in front of his typewriter at The Post, then located on South Street in Lower Manhattan.
Undeterred, Pelleck ingeniously called a Hertz rental office at the Dallas airport, and asked an employee who answered the phone if anyone who had survived the air disaster might be renting a car.
Sure enough, she put a couple on the phone, who began describing their brush with death in great detail to Pelleck, his widow recalled.
“I thought that was brilliant,” she said.
In addition to being a longtime member and one-time president of the Inner Circle — a group of reporters that performs an annual musical skit for charity lampooning the mayor — Pelleck wrote a home improvement column for The Post called “Mr. Fix It.”
But it was his police reporting where his talents shone brightest.
Pelleck once conducted a celebrated prison interview with Mafia czar Carmine Galante in the late 1970s, after the mobster had been imprisoned on a parole violation.
He also won accolades for a detailed front-page story in The Post, written on deadline following the August 1977 evening arrest of “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz.
When John Lennon was shot on the night Dec. 8, 1980, Pelleck was hanging out at the Bridge Cafe near The Post.
Desperate to confirm that the shot was fatal, an editor reached out to Pelleck with minutes to deadline.
He made one phone call to a police source, confirmed Lennon had been declared dead and made the deadline.
In addition to his widow, Pelleck is survived by a daughter, Robin, a son, Marc, and a sister, Paula.
A graveside funeral will be held at the New Montefiore Cemetery at 1180 Wellwood Ave. in Farmingdale, LI, at 11:30 a.m. Sunday.
Shiva will follow at the Pelleck residence in Woodmere.