Daily News from New York, New York • 7

10 9d1 0973:2 2903 WITH THE MOB 5 IT'S YOUR CITE CITIBANCO Nine fork a Marlboro Yanks' No. 5, Joe DiMaggio, stands alone on Old Timers' Day in 1985 at Yankee Stadium. Writer Richard Ben Cramer says the baseball legend's last years were sad and disturbing, as he was supposedly exploited by his lawyer and confidant Morris Engelberg (photo lower left). Shown below, some of DiMaggio's memorabilia such as a signed baseball, family portrait and a copy of his birth certificate. DAN FARRELL DAILY NEWS AP advance conducting his exhaustive winner by his teammates.

research. He made numerous attempts to interview DiMaggio himself but, like all previous DiMaggio biographers, was rebuffed. "Joe didn't want to help anybody to see his life," Cramer said. "Now you know why. You could read a decade of sports clips and never know anything about this man." It is Cramer's opinion that DiMaggio was the greatest all-around player ever and that despite his aloofness was regarded as the ultimate DAILY Engelberg flaunted the ring at DiMag- than five years to complete the DiMaggio gio's March 1999 funeral in San Francisco book, which will be published Tuesday by and at his memorial service at St.

Patrick's Simon Shuster. Cathedral. At the time, he told the Daily He interviewed hundreds of DiMagNews, "He gave me that ring on his gio's associates and every living former deathbed. I'm never taking it off my finger." teammate, including an obscure outfieldCramer said a DiMaggio family member er named Hank Workman, whose major confronted Engelberg about the ring at the league career spanned all of two games funeral and was told by the lawyer, "Joe with the 1950 Yankees. said I could have the ring for one year" and "Workman told me how he had to light then it was to go back to the family.

a Chesterfield, take one puff of it and Cramer, who won a Pulitzer Prize for have it waiting for Joe when he came in his coverage of the Middle East with the from center field," Cramer said. Philadelphia Inquirer in 1979, took more Cramer said he spent all of his six-fignont 1 aeol, 21 bulrusy He marvels at how DiMaggio was able to move about in "so many worlds" from his adolescence as the son of an Italian immigrant fisherman in San Francisco's North Beach; to the mob and the nightclub and saloon culture of the '50s in New York; to Monroe, Sinatra and the Kennedys in the '60s; and finally to Presidents and dignitaries like Henry Kissinger who wanted to be his friend. "The upshot is we gave this guy a hero's life," Cramer said, "and he never had a happy day.".