DUNLEAVY SPEAKS.(The Talk of the Town)(Steve Dunleavy)(Interview)

It was Friday afternoon, and Steve Dunleavy, the Post columnist, was in his usual spot at Langan's, an Irish joint on West Forty-seventh Street, his vodka-and-tonic untouched for now. Jesus Christ, he couldn't remember a week like this one. What was happening to New York? First came news that Yankee Stadium, the home of Ruth and Gehrig and Mantle and Stengel, had booked a date with the wrecking ball. Then, on Thursday, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, two former New York City detectives, were convicted of murdering for the Mob--eight times, over a five-year period. (Dunleavy is an inveterate defender of cops, even ones who get into trouble.) That had been yesterday. And today this: a story in the News, on the front page, in two-hundredand-thirty-point type: "PAGE SIX SCANDAL: N.Y. Post Writer Tries to Shake Down Billionaire for $220G." "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" Dunleavy whispered, shaking his gray pompadour from side to side. When he first saw the story, at 6 a.m., he was standing on the doorstep of his house, out in Lido Beach, Long Island, and he thought it was a gag: somebody at the News, perhaps his old friend Martin Dunn, the editor, had mocked up a fake copy of the paper and sent it to him as a joke. "I said to myself, 'I bet I'm in here somewhere, on page 5, falling-down drunk,' " Dunleavy said. But, as he read on, he realized that it was for real. F.B.I. investigators had videotaped Jared Paul Stern, a longtime Page Six contributor, asking Ron Burkle, a California businessman, for a hundred thousand dollars up front, plus another ten thousand dollars a month, in order to keep his name out of the famous gossip column.

"It's the most incredible thing," Dunleavy, who began his career in journalism in Sydney in 1952, said. "Thirty or forty years ago, maybe there was stuff like this going on. Somebody would say, 'Put this story in and I'll do something nice for you.' And somebody would end up with a fur coat. But nothing ...