Before podcasters and citizen journalists became household terms, there was Clay Tiffany. He didn’t have a press badge, a network deal, or a polished studio. What he had was a cable access channel, a very loud voice, and a tolerance for making enemies that most sane people simply don’t possess.
Tiffany ran a show called “Dirge for the Charlatans” out of an Ossining studio in the late 1990s, and if you were a Briarcliff Manor resident tuning in, you were either entertained or infuriated. Sometimes both.
Who Was Clay Tiffany?
Tiffany was a Briarcliff resident with a gift for confrontation. His weekly broadcasts targeted local politicians, school district officials, and anyone else he believed was abusing the public trust. He named names. He made accusations.He wasn’t always right.
But this is the thing about being a gadfly: you don’t have to be right all the time. You have to be right enough to make a difference. And Clay Tiffany? That proved to be a somewhat larger qualification than anyone in his immediate orbit cared to admit.
The Cop He Couldn’t Stop Talking About
Tiffany’s enemy du jour: a Briarcliff Manor cop named Nick Tartaglione, a large man Tiffany called a “rogue cop on the take” who ended up booked on murder charges. Week in and week out, he made those accusations on his program.
Tartaglione didn’t t ake it quietly. In 1999, he approached and attacked Tiffany as the latter was swimming alone in the Hudson River. A savage beating—unsolicited according to the statutes of the law—and just the sort of thing to make it plain Tiffany had struck a chord.
Rather than stay quiet, Tiffany sued the Briarcliff Police Department and Tartaglione and kept going public. The answer was a second, much more severe beating that put Tiffany in the hospital and altered her life forever. The FBI got involved. Tiffany eventually won a $200,000 settlement from the village and the officer. Tartaglione was fired.
Then, bizarrely, he was rehired.
When the “Rogue Cop” Became a Convicted Killer
Tartaglione ultimately left law enforcement to head north. What came next is more like a crime thriller. He turned drug dealer and, by the accounts that surfaced at trial, killed four of his partners in crime. He was found guilty and received a life sentence in federal prison.
Tartaglione spent time at the Manhattan Correctional Center waiting for his trial, sharing a cell with a very well-known inmate: Jeffrey Epstein. The pair were cellmates for weeks in early 2019 prior to Epstein being found dead in his cell that August in an event that was ruled by authorities to be a suicide, but has sparked years of questions, suspicion, and investigation from the public and officials alike._
Clay Tiffany, a Westchester public access host with a potty mouth, had been raging about this guy years before any of this went down. He was inconvenient, he was loud, and he was largely ignored. He was also basically right.
A Documentary in the Works
The convergence of three figures (Tiffany, Tartaglione, and Epstein) has drawn the attention of Emmy Award-winning producer Gary Cohen, who has produced multiple episodes of the ESPN-lauded 30 for 30 documentary series. Cohen does not see the Tiffany story as merely a local curiosity but rather something that has real national significance.
For Cohen, the story is ultimately about saying what you want to say, and what it costs to do that. Tiffany was doing something chaotic, complicated, and arguably essential the system does need: he was exerting public pressure on public servants, even before the institutions they were meant to provide it had responded. In the words of its host, he was an inconvenient truth for the system, yelling about a rogue cop before that cop became a drug dealer and a murderer.
Cohen is now in pursuit of “Dirge for the Charlatans,” archival footage. A few survive on YouTube, but the majority of the series’ approximately 200 episodes lie, if they exist at all, on VHS tapes in some rural Westchester basement. Holders of copies can get in touch with the production team; this tale could be headed for an audience far beyond a post-midnight cable-access slot.
The Man Himself
Clay Tiffany was not a very likable character. Westchester County journalist Phil Reisman, regarded as one of the keenest regional minds of the time, called him ‘an iconoclastic gadfly with noble aspirations, even as he tripped over the bounds of elementary civility.’ That’s a diplomatic way of saying Tiffany was a huge pain.
He turned up uninvited to harass politicians and reporters he opposed. During public appearances, he heckled then-DA Jeanine Pirro, making comments regarding her husband’s legal troubles and, at a book tour, about her looks. He was the sort of person that most sane people avoid by crossing to the other side of the street.
John C. Reilly would later create a character for the humour series Check It Out with Dr. Steve Brule who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tiffany’s public access character, which is indicative of just how uniquely (and parodisable) the man really was.
What Clay Tiffany Actually Means
Tiffany passed away in 2015. His later years, it seems, were spent in the physical and mental anguish induced by those beatings, and in a dying-level obscurity that he may have welcomed, after all the attention his work had brought so many years before.
But the narrative was incomplete. The brutal cop he raved about daily had — wait for it — killed four people. So the same cop was in the most-watched prison cell of late modern American history. And now Emmy-winning documentarian will tell the whole story from the very beginning.
The inequality isn’t that every insecure armchair pundit is secretly right. Most of them aren’t. The point is that even a community form of accountability, when it comes festooned in oddity and extravagance, does something that the polished and silk suits of our society don’t do. Tiffany was a citizen journalist to the truest, most Naked-Brotherhood kind of citizen journalist urge. He made people uncomfortable. He went on when discretion would have been far wiser.
