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Steve Bassett was born, raised and educated in New Jersey, and, although far removed during a career as a multiple award-winning journalist, he has always been proud of the sobriquet Jersey Guy. He has been legally blind for more than a decade but hasn’t let this slow him down. Polish on his mother’s side and Montenegrin on his father’s, with grandparents who spoke little or no English, his early outlook was ethnic and suspicious.
As a natural iconoclast, he joined the dwindling number of itinerant newsmen roaming the countryside in search of, well just about everything. Sadly, their breed has vanished into the digital ether. Bassett’s targets were not selected simply by sticking pins in a map. There had to be a sense of the bizarre.
After bidding farewell to Rutgers, his first stop was The Long Branch Daily Record on the New Jersey shore. Mobsters loved the place. It was one of their favorite watering holes. A mafia soldier was gunned down not far from the paper. Great fun for a cub reporter. Curiosity got the better of him with his next choice the Pekin Daily Times located in central Illinois. Now a respected newspaper, it had once been the official voice of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920’s. Pekin had saved its bacon during the Depression by tacitly approving two time-honored money makers, prostitution and gambling, earning an eight-page spread in Life.
Next it was the Salt Lake Tribune. The Pulitzer Prize winner was then, and still is, considered one of the best daily newspapers west of the Rockies. Bassett’s coverage of the invective laden contract talks between the United Mine Workers and the three copper mining giants led to his recruitment by the Associated Press.
Bassett’s series for the AP in Phoenix uncovered the widespread abuses inherent in the Government’s Barcero program for Mexican contract workers. The series exposed working and housing conditions that transformed workers into virtual slave laborers forced to buy at company stores, live in squalid housing and pay illegally collected unemployment taxes that went into the pocket of their bosses.
The series led to Bassett’s promotion and transfer to the San Francisco bureau where as an Urban Affairs investigative reporter he covered the Black Panthers, anti-war protests, the radical takeover and closure of San Francisco State University, the deadly “People’s Park” demonstrations at U.C. Berkeley, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Bassett’s five-part series on the Wah Ching gained national attention by exposing the Chinese youth gang as the violent instrument of Chinatown’s criminal bosses.
Then came CBS television news in Los Angeles, where he rose through the ranks to become producer of KNXT’s Evening News, the highest rated late-night news program in the nation’s second-largest media market. After a four-year stint with KFMB-TV, the CBS station in San Diego, he returned to Los Angeles as the Executive Producer of Metromedia’s KNXT’s award winning news program, Metro News.
One of his Emmy-winning documentaries, The Abused Woman, caught the eye of Ashley Books, leading to his first non-fiction book, The Battered Rich, exposing seldom discussed but widespread marital abuse among the affluent.
His book, Golden Ghetto: How the Americans and French Fell In and Out of Love During the Cold War, published in 2013 by Red Hen Press under its Xeno imprint, traces the sixteen-year history of what was then the largest U.S. Air Force base in Europe. It pieces together a love affair that defines trust, hope, renewal, prosperity, and finally the discovery that it was all a Cold War delusion.
His first book of the Passaic River Trilogy, Father Divine’s Bikes, has is a Finalist 2020 Book Excellence Award Book in a Series; Solo Medalist Winner in the E-Book General Fiction category of New Apple Fifth Annual Indie Book Awards; Finalist International Book Awards (American Book Fest) in Genre Fiction; Finalist Best Book Awards (American Book Fest) in General Fiction. It is a historical, noir crime novel set in 1945 Newark. A gangster war, three murders, a gun-toting paperboy, and the numbers racket punctuate a tragic story.
His second book of the Trilogy, Payback – Tales of Love, Hate and Revenge, is the winner of 2020 Reader Views Literary Award, First Place Mystery/Thriller. Adultery, three murders, a revenge driven madman, rogue cops and politicians intertwine in this noir thriller that defines urban corruption in 1946 Newark.
The third book of the trilogy, currently a work in progress, is set in 1947 Newark. As with the first two books of the series, it is an historical noir crime thriller in which as what can only be described as “muscular feminism” arises in the wake of WWII.
Bassett currently resides in Placitas, New Mexico with his wife Darlene Chandler Bassett.
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