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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jimmy Breslin dies at 88

Jimmy Breslin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who chronicled life in New York City for more than five decades and became known as the champion of the common man, died Sunday. He was 88.

Breslin, who may be best remembered for interviewing John F. Kennedy’s gravedigger, passed away at his Manhattan home after suffering from a number of “problems stemming from pneumonia,” said his wife, Ronnie Eldridge.

“He had a great life … he died just like that,” Eldridge, 86, a former city councilwoman, told The Post, snapping her fingers for emphasis.

“I’m going to miss him terribly.”

The Queens-born Breslin — who authored the books “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” about the hapless 1962 Mets, and “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” about the Mafia — was known for his work on several New York daily newspapers, including Newsday, the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Post.

Longtime Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, who competed against Breslin for decades, called him “the last of the hand-made articles.”

Jimmy Breslin speaks to reporters after winning the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1986.AP

With a style that was once described as “equal parts Dickens and Yogi Berra,” Breslin covered presidents and mayors, wiseguys and cops, the downtrodden and the victimized.

“Jimmy had this great empathy for people . . . He didn’t like pretentious people,” said Eldridge, who married Breslin in 1982.

He was considered a pioneer of the narrative-driven, detail-laden “New Journalism,” alongside masters such as author Gay Talese.

Pete Hamill, the former columnist and editor of the Post and Daily News, said Breslin changed the way reporters approached the news.

“The thing to remember about him is he revolutionized the city-side column by taking the techniques of sports writing and applying it to the city-side,” Hamill said.

Instead of just writing about a news event, Hamill said, Breslin used his talents to transport his readers to the scene.

“If the reader didn’t make it to the game, the reader would feel what it was like to be at the ballfield,” Hamill said of a good sports scribe. But with Breslin, “He was able to make it to the scene of the murder.”

Michael Daly, a newspaper columnist who’s known Breslin since childhood, said many writers tried to copy his street-smarts reporting style and his hard-boiled attitude — without success.

“He was uncommonly bright and actually went to the scene and he had a good ear,” Daly said of Breslin’s use of shoe-leather journalism and attention to detail to nail a story. “All the bluster. . . that’s not who he was and what he was.”

Breslin once agreed that he could be copied but never duplicated.

Jimmy Breslin’s son James holds a photo of his father at his West 57th Street apartment.John Roca

“I’m the best person ever to have a column in this business,” he crowed. “There’s never been anybody in my league.”

Asked once why he wrote, he said: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

Breslin’s ability to tell a monumental story from the perspective of the common man was the topic of his most noteworthy column, which featured Clifton Pollard, who dug John F. Kennedy’s grave following the president’s 1963 assassination.

“Clifton Pollard wasn’t at the funeral. He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn’t know who the graves were for. He was just digging them and then covering them with boards,” Breslin wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, where he’d moved from sports to news columnist.

In an interview in 2013, Breslin told NBC News he bypassed the gathering of world leaders and the assembled press to concentrate on the gravedigger. “I could go to the funeral. There were a thousand reporters. I didn’t want to go. I went to the guy’s [Pollard’s] house,” Breslin said.

He began his report with Pollard having a breakfast of bacon and eggs at his apartment on the Sunday following JFK’s assassination.

“Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living,” Breslin wrote.

“’Polly, could you please be here by eleven o’clock this morning?’ Kawalchik asked. ‘I guess you know what it’s for.’ Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

Five years later, Breslin was standing just feet away when Sirhan Sirhan opened fire at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, killing then-presidential candidate Robert Kennedy.

Jimmy Breslin’s work station at his West 57th Street apartmentJohn Roca

In a whimsical turn, he ran for city council president in 1969 on a ticket that included fellow writer Norman Mailer for mayor.

In the 1970s, David Berkowitz, who terrorized the city with his random killings as the “Son of Sam,” sent him several letters and impressed the columnist enough for him to observe: “He’s the only killer I ever knew who knew how to use a semicolon.” Breslin eventually co-wrote a book about the case.

His coverage of mobsters led one Mafia kingpin to threaten to kidnap his children. Another mobster assaulted Breslin outside a Manhattan bar. In 2008, he wrote a nonfiction book about the mob called “The Good Rat.”

During the Crown Heights riots in 1991, the then-61-year-old columnist commandeered a cab and ordered the driver to head directly into the action. About 50 rioters yanked Breslin from the taxi, robbed and beat him. He was left with only his underwear and his press card.

Three years later, he underwent successful surgery for a brain aneurysm — an episode that led to his memoir, “I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me.”

Breslin’s columns presented an array of recurring characters — Klein the Lawyer, Shelly the Bail Bondsman, Un Occhio the mob boss. They seemed to blur the line between fact and fiction, until the first pair became key figures in Breslin’s 1986 exclusive on the multimillion-dollar Parking Violations Bureau scandal.

Donald Manes, the Queens borough president, was implicated in the kickback scheme and committed suicide. Breslin taunted then-Mayor Ed Koch, writing that “Koch worked incessantly at knowing nothing.”

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his columns “which consistently champion ordinary citizens.”

James Earle Breslin was born in Richmond Hills, Queens, on Oct. 17, 1928, to James Breslin Sr. and his wife, Frances. His alcoholic father abandoned the family when he was 6.

Breslin got his first newspaper job as a copy boy at the Long Island Press in 1948.

Breslin had two daughters and four sons with his first wife, Rosemary, who died of cancer in 1981. He married Eldridge the next year.

His elder daughter, Rosemary Breslin, died in 2004 at age 47 from a rare blood disease. His other daughter, Kelly Breslin, collapsed at a New York restaurant in April 2009 and died a few days later. She was 44.

Additional reporting by Joe Marino and Post wires