NEW YORK (AP) — Jimmy Breslin scored one of his best-remembered interviews with President John F. Kennedy’s grave-digger and once drove straight into a riot where he was beaten to his underwear.

In a writing career that spanned six decades, the columnist and author became the brash embodiment of the street-smart New Yorker, chronicling wise guys and big-city power brokers but always coming back to the toils of ordinary working people.

Breslin, who died Sunday at 88, was a fixture in New York journalism, notably with the New York Daily News, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for pieces that, among others, exposed police torture in Queens and took a sympathetic look at the life of an AIDS patient.