‘HOMICIDE” star Yaphet Kotto has traded his Baltimore detective badge for a reporter’s notebook.
Kotto, who played Lt. Al Giardello on the critically acclaimed cop show, wants to be a media mogul and he’s started with a Web site called http://www.3rdworldnews.com to provide news from Africa, Asia and South America.
“I think I’m a newsman at heart,” Kotto told The Post.
The site provides news, issues and views from scores of Third World countries such as India, Colombia and Zimbabwe.
“Our motto is all the news you want to know anywhere in the world,” said Kotto who is descended from a Cameroonian crown prince but was raised in Harlem as a Jew.
Kotto joins a growing list of celebrities – Leonardo DiCaprio (who interviewed the President for ABC News) and “NYPD Blue” star Andrea Thompson (Albuquerque, N.M.’s newest local news anchor) – who’ve jumped from acting to news reporting.
“We are attempting to put all the Third World nations together on one Web site, so that if you’re from Malaysia or Panama or whatever you can go to our site and see, hear or read your news from your country whenever you want to,” Kotto said.
Kotto, 63, hatched the idea for a Web site about two years ago and launched a less comprehensive version shortly afterward.
“It started when I was trying to see some news from the Philippines on CNN and couldn’t find [that] news,” he said. “I said: ‘This is outrageous that I can’t get anything about what’s going on outside of what CNN wants to show me on the weekend,'” Kotto says.
“Instead of complaining,” Kotto explains, “I said, I should do something about it.”
Now, with bureaus in Canada and the Philippines, a home office in Baltimore and help from his wife, Tessie, the site offers hundreds of news stories from around the world. Kotto added that a new office/bureau will soon be opened in Brazil by his son, Robert.
He was further motivated when the death of a high-ranking government official in Cameroon, his family’s ancestral African home, was not reported by U.S. television.
However until NBC cancelled “Homicide” last year, Kotto had little time to devote to the project.
“I’m full-time into this now,” Kotto said. “I’m slowly becoming a full-time newsman and journalist.”
With the help of his wife, Tessie, and son Robert and a dedicated Web master in the company’s home office in Baltimore, Kotto said he wants to grow 3rdworldnews.com into a global news gatherer.
“One day, with the help of God, we’ll have bureau reporters,” he said.