Word: cop
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Phillips was ambitious to climb the corruption ladder-almost a parallel career within the department. After once booking a man who had got into a fight, Phillips said that another cop asked him to forget the whole thing for $300. Phillips obliged. When he was promoted to plainclothesman, after three years on the force, he was given a $1,000 payoff on his first day on the job. His partners gave him some fatherly advice: "You're new here and it would look good for you if you gave the boss a piece of the action." So Phillips handed...
...When a new man joined the unit, he was quickly scrutinized to see if he would fit in. "You can make a phone call and find out in five minutes who the individual is, what his habits are and whether or not he takes money," Phillips said. When a cop was transferred to a new post, the pad from his old station kept up for another two months. "Severance pay?" asked the investigating commission's aggressive chief counsel, Michael Armstrong. "Yes," Phillips laughed. "Two months' severance...
...talk so freely was a major undertaking. The Knapp Commission, headed by Whitman Knapp, a prestigious Wall Street lawyer, was formed last May after public pressure forced Mayor John Lindsay to take action. At that time it had little more to go on than the testimony of an honest cop named Frank Serpico. To try to get some corroboration of Serpico's tales of graft, the commission employed the services of a shadowy electronics buff, Teddy Ratnoff, who is famed for his sophisticated bugging techniques...
...Hilton. Phillips' revelations caused predictable outrage among New York cops. Even Commissioner Patrick Murphy, who has been vigorously shaking up the department and coming down hard on corrupt cops, thought that the Knapp Commission had gone too far. One "rogue cop," he objected, was smearing the entire force-and indeed Phillips had nothing to lose by telling a lurid story. But Murphy took the matter seriously enough to suspend temporarily his newly appointed chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, who had been given an $83 dinner for four on the house at the New York Hilton last March. After...
Edward Kiernan, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, branded Phillips a "greedy thief." Most cops, while not denying much of what Phillips said, felt that he had given them all a bad name at a time when they need public respect more than ever. "If I made as much money as Phillips said," scoffed one detective, "I'd be living in a palatial estate in Westchester." Complained a subway cop: "Down here in the hole, how the hell can you take any graft? There's no freebies underground. But as far as the public is concerned...