Sidney Zion

Sidney Zion was born in Passaic, N.J., on Nov. 14, 1933, a son of Nathan and Anne Zion. His father was a dentist in Passaic, where the boy grew up. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1958 from the Yale Law School. In 1963, Mr. Zion married the former Elsa Ruth Heister. She died in 2005. Mr. Zion is survived by his sons, Adam, of Brooklyn, and Jed, of Los Angeles, and two grandchildren. Mr. Zion practiced criminal law in northern New Jersey in the late 1950s and in the early 1960s was a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. In 1962, Victor Navasky, a colleague who later became editor and publisher of The Nation, asked him to write a parody of the journalist Murray Kempton for his satirical magazine Monocle’s newspaper-strike parody of The New York Post, called The New York Pest. It was his springboard to journalism. In a roller-coaster career, Mr. Zion was a reporter for The New York Post, a legal affairs correspondent for The Times, co-founder of the short-lived magazine Scanlan’s Monthly and at various times a columnist for The SoHo Weekly News, New York magazine, The Daily News and The New York Post. He also wrote for The New York Observer, The Nation and the Op-Ed page of The Times. Mr. Zion completed and published “The Autobiography of Roy Cohn” (1988) two years after Mr. Cohn’s death. Mr. Cohn, a friend of Mr. Zion’s, had incurred the enmity of the left by prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage, and acting as chief counsel for Senator Joseph R. McCarthy during his Communist witch-hunt years. In the early 1980s, Mr. Zion owned Broadway Joe, a steakhouse and hangout for theater people on West 46th Street. With his free-flowing celebrity chatter, political gossip, media scuttlebutt and Mafia stories, he was often likened to Damon Runyon, the newspaperman and short-story writer of the 1930s and ’40s, whose Broadway characters included wiseguys and dolls, mouthpieces and scribes: Sidney Zion’s kind of people.