Paul Sann (1914-1986) was one of the great newspapermen of his generation. He liked to describe himself as a summa cum laude graduate of the school of hard knocks. A lifelong observer of organized crime, he wrote about outlaws and frontier desperados in "Pictorial History of the Wild West" (with James D. Horan) and about gangsters in "The Lawless Decade," his lively account of the Roaring Twenties (reprinted by Dover in 2010). An authority on New York City crime and politics--"those Gold Dust Twins of Manhattan civilization"--Sann quit high school in 1931 to become a copyboy and, in turn, a reporter covering all the beats (courts, police, housing): then a rewrite man, Washington correspondent, night city editor, managing editor, city editor and, in 1949, executive editor, running the day-to-day operations of the "New York Post" for almost 29 years. In addition to writing front page headlines and putting out the first edition, Sann never stopped being a reporter. In 1951 he broke the story of Joe DiMaggio's retirement. In 1955 his explosive interview with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. In 1964 he covered the Beatles' first invasion of the U.S. In 1968 he took to the blood-drenched streets of Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention. In 1973 when the Yom Kippur War broke out, Sann, then 59, flew to Israel to report on the war firsthand. "KILL THE DUTCHMAN! The Story of Dutch Schultz" was the fifth of Sann's seven works of nonfiction. "In general," he said, "the hoodlum always interested me if he worked at it. If you leave out the guns, I like a guy who works at his profession."