As any TV addict knows, Kojak is a dapper detective who exudes animal charm and a street-wise sixth sense. The man whose investigative exploits led to the series, however, is no cop, and he is no well-tailored charmer. He is Reporter Selwyn Raab, 40, who looks more like rumpled Peter Falk than Telly Savalas. His tenacious reporting has brought him a dozen awards and the pleasure of seeing two victims of law-enforcement abuses walk out of prison.
He hopes to see two more men freed soon. Last week, because of stories by Raab, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Samuel Larner was considering reopening the murder convictions of Boxer Rubin ("Hurricane") Carter and Grocery Clerk John Artis after a 1966 shoot-out in Paterson, N.J. Raab was instrumental in getting two witnesses to admit that they had lied about seeing Carter and Artis at the murder scene.
Bogus Clinic. "I'm not a detective," protests Raab, peering through thick glasses at mounds of letters that arrive each week pleading for his services. "I just look for the most reasonable approach to a story." While working for three years as a reporter at WNET, New York's public TV station, Raab dug up enough evidence of illegal practices to close two bogus methadone clinics. He also unearthed the case of Carl De Flumer, sentenced to life for murder in 1946 at the age of 14 and forgotten when state laws concerning juveniles were later changed. As a result of Raab's work, De Flumer was eventually paroled.
Raab's biggest story came to him almost accidentally. In 1964, when he was working at the New York World-Telegram and Sun, he was leafing through newsclips in the morgue and noticed that George Whitmore Jr., who had allegedly confessed to killing two young women in 1963, was in Bellevue Hospital for "observation." Out of curiosity, Raab looked into the case—and ended up dogging it for eight years. He proved that Whitmore was somewhere else the day of the killings and helped to clear him. It took seven years to find a witness (in Puerto Rico) whose testimony exonerated Whitmore from an unrelated rape conviction. Raab wrote a book about the case (Justice in the Back Room), and CBS later bought the screen rights, transforming Raab into the fictional Kojak.
The reporter resembles the TV cop only in his knowledge of New York's streets. As a teen-ager on the Lower East Side, where he still lives with his wife and their four-year-old daughter, Raab remembers being "surrounded by the kind of legendary criminals you read about—bookmakers, con artists, Jewish and Italian gangsters. I grew up with guys I later covered." The son of Polish and Austrian immigrants, Raab boxed in the 60-lb. class for the city parks department (17 wins) and later attended City College. Afterward he worked on Connecticut and New Jersey newspapers before returning to New York. Along the way, he dropped out of sight several times to bum around South America. But he always went back to some city room.