Sid Cassese, longtime Newsday reporter, dies 

Sid Cassese rose from hardscrabble beginnings in Harlem to a 42-year career as a Newsday reporter, earning a Harvard fellowship along the way.

To those he wrote about, Cassese was a reporter bent on getting the full story, somebody with an easy charm, hard-earned street smarts and a knack for spotting malarkey.

Those he worked beside say he was the consummate reporter, a mentor to many, with his gruff, low voice and gravelly laugh. He was, they said, a man with stories that stretched from his troubled days in Harlem to studying with the top minds at Harvard University.

"He lived an extraordinary life. As a person he was so interesting," said Ann Givens, a former Newsday reporter who worked with him at the Mineola courthouse. "He was funny, unpretentious, he didn't put on airs. He was truly himself."

Sidney Cassese, 83, of Lehigh Acres, Florida, died Friday of an undetermined cause at the Gulf Coast Medical Center in Fort Myers, Florida, according to his granddaughter, Latisha Johnson. 

Cassese was born in Harlem and grew up there and other places in New York, said friends and family. After difficult times growing up, he turned his life around and was hired in 1971 by the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch, where he worked until 1974. A lover of jazz, he served as editor of Jazz Magazine from 1976 to 1978, according to his LinkedIn page.

Cassese was hired as a staff writer by Newsday in 1974. He provided spot-on reporting on the governments of Nassau County and the Town of Hempstead. In 1978, he received a prestigious Lucius W. Nieman Fellowship to Harvard, where he spent a year studying the workings of government. His time at Harvard was pretty heady stuff for a man "of my background," Cassese told Black Enterprise magazine in 1981. "But I came back more than ever wanting to be a producer of top notch material."

Lasting friendships

Givens said that when she started working with Cassese at the courthouse bureau in 2006, they could not have come from more different backgrounds. He had been a poor Black kid from the inner city who did a stint in prison as a young man for armed robbery before turning to journalism. She was a white middle-class suburban woman from the Boston area and 30 years his junior, she said.

Cassese retired from Newsday in 2016. But the two stayed friends through the years. Givens said she was on a plane to visit him Friday, and when she landed in Florida, she learned he had died.

William Murphy, another former Newsday reporter who worked with Cassese, said he had planned to fly to Florida to visit Cassese before he learned of his death. He said he heard the news while driving, and it took effort to keep from being distracted by his emotions and memories. 

"There are maybe a dozen people in my life who I'm really glad I met," said Murphy, 74, of Athens, Georgia. "I'd be a lesser person if I didn't meet him."

Cassese had a short-lived marriage in his 30s, said Johnson, 41, of Blythewood, South Carolina. He lived with his great love, Ruby Boykins, for about 30 years until her death in 2021, Johnson said.

Cassese was a loving grandfather and they often visited one another, Johnson said.

"He was very proud of me. He doted on me from birth," she said. "We would attend family reunions. I remember summers where he would take me to Newsday and to Newsday events. As a kid, on Saturdays we'd go to the movies and he would take me shopping."

'A very thorough reporter'

While Cassese built relationships with those in Long Island's political world, he understood that reporters work a separate part of the street, said Mike Deery, a former spokesman in Hempstead offices who interacted with Cassese several times a week for about 15 years.

"He could definitely parse what was fact and what was fiction," said Deery, 60, who now serves as the executive director of the Nassau County Republican Committee. "He had the discipline of many old-school reporters. He was a very thorough reporter, contentious, and he had a big heart." 

Time and again, those who knew Cassese spoke of his great stories, the personal ones he shared over lunch or across newsroom desks.

For Murphy, it was Cassese's story about when he found out that his pacemaker really worked. Cassese had been stopped by a police officer for speeding, and when he was ordered out of the car, he immediately fell to the ground groaning, Murphy recalled.

"The cop kept saying, 'I didn't touch him. I didn't touch him,' " Murphy said. But the pacemaker kicked in and Cassese survived the health scare, he said.

For Monte Young, who rose from a Newsday reporter to his current post as an assistant managing editor, it was two pieces of advice. One was, "Newsday tells stories." 

The other was Cassese's advice on reporting, which Young keeps pinned up at his desk to this day: "A good reporter will let you talk as long as it takes to say something stupid."

Young, in an email on Cassese's death, called him "Our dearly beloved Sid."

Other than Johnson, Cassese is survived by two great-grandsons, Josiah and Jordan Johnson, both of South Carolina.

Cassese's funeral will be Saturday, Feb. 25 at J.F. Goode Funeral Home, 545 Albany Avenue in Amityville. There will be a viewing at 10 a.m., followed by the funeral service at 11 a.m. and interment at Pinelawn Memorial Park in Farmingdale at 1:30 p.m.

By Craig Schneider

craig.schneider@newsday.com@Scraigo

Craig Schneider is a Long Island native and Stony Brook University alumnus. He joined Newsday as a general assignment reporter in January 2018 after 20 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.