Word: serpico
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...Lindsay administration was slow to react. Four years ago, Sergeant David Durk and Patrolman Frank Serpico went to city hall with names and dates on how cops were being paid off. Lindsay would not see them for fear of undermining his police commissioner, Howard Leary. An aide explained that the mayor was worried about the approaching hot summer and did not want to do anything to antagonize the police...
...desperation, Serpico, Durk and a group of other officers went to the New York Times last year to tell their story. The editors were impressed and decided to publish it. Once public pressure began to build up, the mayor appointed the Knapp Commission, which got its initial information from the men Lindsay refused to meet. The commission rapped Lindsay for being partly to blame for the corruption and charged that Leary, who resigned as commissioner last September, has a "lot to answer for in failing to provide leadership in the field...
Disillusioned, fearful for his life but still determined, Serpico and three other policemen, including an inspector, went to the New York Times more than a year ago and talked into a tape recorder for eight hours. After learning of the upcoming story, Mayor Lindsay quickly announced the formation of an investigation team that ultimately became the Knapp Commission. With some of Serpico's information and volumes of its own, the commission has since compiled a picture of department-wide police corruption. In one reported scandal, two commission investigators came upon a group of officers in uniform brazenly stealing cartons...
Real Disguise. Serpico says he is unhappy as an informer. Born to Italian immigrant parents in the tough Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, he grew up in awe of the policeman on the beat. "There was something about those shiny buttons, the white gloves, even the gun, that we all admired," he says. After two years of college and a year as a social worker, he joined the force in 1959. But Serpico never joined the club. He rarely spent off-duty time with coworkers, would not enter the "us and them" clannishness that leads many police to view...
Though the impact of the commission's upcoming report has yet to be felt, Serpico has little hope that anything will really change. He was given a long-overdue and much-desired promotion to detective two weeks ago, but he is nonetheless thinking of quitting the force. Of the policemen charged as a result of his work, two have pleaded guilty to criminal offenses, and only one-a former partner-has been convicted so far. Few cops will speak to him any more, except for some of "the young guys, the hopefuls." Still recuperating, he cannot forget that while...