Joseph Michael Sharkey (October 15, 1946 – November 6, 2023) was an American author and columnist. His columns focused mostly on business travel, while his non-fiction books focused on criminality; he also co-authored a novel. He wrote for The New York Times from 1996 to 2015. Before then, he was an Assistant National Editor for The Wall Street Journal, the City Editor for the Albany Times-Union, and a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Personal life
Joseph Michael Sharkey was born in Philadelphia on October 15, 1946. He enrolled at Pennsylvania State University, but did not graduate, and instead joined the U.S. Navy. While there, he wrote for the Navy News Service during the Vietnam War.
<blockquote>And it had been a nice ride. Minutes before we were hit, I had wandered up to the cockpit to chat with the pilots, who said the plane was flying beautifully. I saw the readout that showed our altitude: 37,000 feet. I returned to my seat. Minutes later came the strike (it sheared off part of the plane’s tail, too, we later learned).</blockquote>
During an interview with NBC's Today Show on October 5, 2006, Sharkey said he was relaxing in his cabin seat with the window shade down when he was jolted by a bang. "It was more like a car that hits a pothole rather than 'boom!'" he said. The plane steadied itself and it became serenely silent again. It was only when Sharkey opened the shade and looked out his window that he noticed something was dreadfully amiss. "My heart just sank because I looked at the wing tip and I saw that it was shorn off," he told Today host Matt Lauer. "Basically four feet of the wingtip, the part that curves up, the winglet, gone... I’ve flown a lot, and I’m thinking, 'This is definitely, definitely not good.'"
The pilots, Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino, were composed and focused, like "infantrymen who were well trained." Still, Sharkey and the other passengers, despite an uneasy calm, grew concerned. "It was very serene," Sharkey said. "At first it was just quiet and grimly concern." An engineer on board noticed the damaged wing was starting to peel, and Sharkey said it was then that everyone on board started to think about dying. "That’s the point in which it was clear that one way or another we were going down in unpleasant circumstances, and probably, since we couldn’t find a runway, we were going to ditch."
Sharkey scribbled a quick note to his wife, "I expressed my love, my appreciation and the fact that I accepted death." He put the note in his wallet, thinking it might eventually be found.</blockquote>
Pires was later fired for his handling of the 2006–2007 Brazilian aviation crisis.
In 2008, Sharkey was sued before a Brazilian court for an article in The New York Times. The widow of one of the victims claimed the article (in which Sharkey blamed the crash on incapable air operators) defamed the Brazilian people and consequently her personal dignity.
Books
- 1990 (reprint date) Death Sentence: The Inside Story of the John List Murders
- 1991 Deadly Greed: The Riveting True Story of the Stuart Murder Case that Rocked Boston and Shocked the Nation
- 1993 Above Suspicion
- 1994 Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy
- 1998 Lady Gold (with Angela Amato)