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Frank Serpico

 
Who2 Biography: Frank Serpico, Law Officer / Speaker
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Frank Serpico
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  • Born: 14 April 1936
  • Birthplace: New York (?)
  • Best Known As: Whistleblowing New York cop who inspired a 1973 movie

Former New York City cop Frank Serpico is famous for his 1971 Knapp Commission testimony which called attention to widespread corruption within the city's police department. Serpico had been a cop since 1960, but had operated outside the widespread system of bribery and kickbacks. His complaints of corruption went unheeded by superiors for years until 1970, when a special commission was formed to investigate the problem. Serpico testified before the Knapp Commission in 1971, earning national headlines and the enmity of his fellow officers. (During an arrest after he testified, Serpico was shot in the face and fellow officers did not come to his assistance.) Serpico retired from the police department and lived abroad for many years, returning to New York in the 1980s. His story was turned into a best-selling book by Peter Maas, which in turn became the hit movie Serpico (1973), starring Al Pacino.

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Francesco Vincent Serpico

New York City Police Department (NYPD)
Born April 14, 1936 (1936-04-14) (age 73)
Nickname Paco
Serpico
Badge Number 19076[1]
Place of birth Brooklyn, New York, USA
Years of service September 11, 1959 - June 15, 1972
Rank 1960 - Commissioned as a Patrolman
1971 - Promoted to Detective
Awards NYPD Medal of Honor.jpg - NYPD Medal of Honor
Other work Lecturer on occasion to students at universities and police academies

Francesco Vincent Serpico (born April 14, 1936) is a retired New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer who is most famous for testifying against police corruption in 1971.[2] The majority of Serpico's fame came after the release of the 1973 film, Serpico, which starred Al Pacino in the lead role.

Contents

Early years

Serpico was born in Proctorville as the youngest child of Italian immigrants from Marigliano, in the province of Naples, Campania. His parents were Vincenzo and Maria Giovanna Serpico. At age 18, he enlisted in the United States Army and spent two years in Korea. Later, he worked as a part-time private investigator and as a youth counselor while attending Brooklyn College.[3]

NYPD career

In 1959, Frank Serpico joined the NYPD, where he was sworn in as a probationary patrolman on September 11 of that year. Serpico was commissioned as a patrolman for the New York City Police Department on March 5, 1960, a job he would have for twelve years. He was first assigned to patrol in the 81st precinct. He then worked for the Bureau of Criminal Identification (BCI) for two years doing jobs such as filing fingerprints.[4] Serpico was later assigned to work plainclothes where he encountered widespread corruption.[3]

Serpico's career as a plainclothes police officer working in Brooklyn and the Bronx to expose vice racketeering was short-lived, however, because he consistently avoided taking part in the corruption. To expose those who did, Serpico risked his own safety. [3] In 1967, he reported "credible evidence of widespread, systematic police corruption".[citation needed] However, bureaucracy slowed down his efforts,[5] until he connected with another cop, David Durk, who helped him in his anti-corruption efforts. Serpico believed that his fellow partners knew about secret meetings that took place with police investigators and with no place left to go Serpico contributed to an April 25, 1970, New York Times front-page story on widespread corruption in the New York City Police Department.[5] This forced Mayor John V. Lindsay to take action by appointing a five-member panel to investigate police corruption. This panel ultimately became the Knapp Commission, named for its chairman, Whitman Knapp.

Questionable shooting and public interest

Serpico was shot during a drug bust on February 3, 1971, at 10:42 p.m., during a stakeout at 778 Driggs Avenue, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Four cops from Brooklyn North had received a tip that a drug deal was going down. It seemed like a routine heroin bust.

The two officers Gary Roteman and Arthur Cesare stayed in a car out front; the third Paul Halley was standing in front of the apartment building. Serpico got out of the car, climbed up the fire escape, watched from the roof, went out the fire escape door, walked down the steps, watched the heroin buy, listened to the password and then followed the two kids out.[6]

The police jumped out at the two kids, one of whom had two bags of heroin. Halley stayed in the car with the two kids with the heroin when Roteman told Serpico to make a fake drug buy to get the door open for the rest of them, because he spoke Spanish. Three officers went up the steps to the third-floor landing. Serpico knocked on the door with his other hand inside his jacket on his 9mm Browning Hi-Power. The door opened a few inches, the chain still on. Serpico pushed and the chain snapped. It was enough for him to wedge part of his body in but the dealers on the other side were trying to close it. Serpico called out to his partners who did not come to help him.[6]

Serpico was shot in the face at point blank range with a .22 LR handgun. The bullet penetrated his cheek just below the eye and lodged at the top of his jaw; he lost balance, fell to the floor, and began to bleed profusely. Serpico's colleagues failed to place a "10-13," a dispatch to police headquarters indicating that an officer has been shot.[6] Instead, Serpico was saved by an elderly Hispanic man who lived in an apartment adjacent to the one being used by the suspects; the man called emergency services and reported that a man had been shot, and then stayed with Serpico to help keep him alive until an ambulance arrived.[6] A police squad car arrived prior to the ambulance, however, and the officers, unaware of the bloodied Serpico's identity, took him to Greenpoint Hospital.

Greenpoint Hospital

Serpico was deafened in his left ear by the gunshot, which severed an auditory nerve, and has suffered chronic pain from fragments lodged in his brain. Although he was visited the day after the shooting by Mayor John V. Lindsay and Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy, while he lay recovering in bed from his wounds, the police department harassed him with hourly bed checks. He survived, and ultimately testified in front of the Knapp Commission.

The circumstances surrounding Serpico's shooting quickly came into question. Serpico, who was armed during the drug raid, had only been shot after briefly turning away from the suspect when he realized that the two officers who had accompanied him to the scene were not following him into the apartment, bringing into question if Serpico had actually been brought to the apartment by his colleagues to be executed.

On May 3, 1971, New York Metro Magazine published an article about Serpico titled "Portrait Of An Honest Cop." On May 10, 1971, Serpico testified at the departmental trial of an NYPD lieutenant who was accused of taking bribes from gamblers. On May 14, 1971, Serpico was given a gold shield by the police commissioner and promoted to detective.

Testimony in front of the Knapp Commission

Wiki letter w.svg This section requires expansion.

In October, and again in December 1971, Serpico testified before the Knapp Commission:[6]

“ Through my appearance here today... I hope that police officers in the future will not experience the same frustration and anxiety that I was subjected to for the past five years at the hands of my superiors because of my attempt to report corruption... We create an atmosphere in which the honest officer fears the dishonest officer, and not the other way around... The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which honest police officers can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers. ”

Frank Serpico was the first police officer in the history of the New York Police Department to step forward to report and subsequently testify openly about widespread, systemic corruption payoffs amounting to millions of dollars.[7]

Retirement

One month after receiving the New York City Police Department's highest honor, the Medal of Honor, Frank Serpico retired on June 15, 1972. He went to Switzerland to recuperate and spent almost a decade there, living, traveling and studying. When it was decided to make the movie about his life called Serpico, Al Pacino invited Serpico to stay with him at a house that Pacino had rented in Montauk, New York. When Pacino asked why he did it, Serpico replied:[8]

“ Well, Al, I don't know. I guess I would have to say it would be because ... if I didn't, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music? ”

He returned to New York City quietly in 1980. He currently resides in the mountains of New York State, studying and lecturing on occasion to students at universities and police academies and sharing experiences with police officers who are currently in similar situations. While living in upstate New York, Serpico was introduced to Officer Joseph Trimboli by New York Post reporter Mike Mcalary. Trimboli himself was a police officer who had a very hard time after he witnessed and tried to stop widespread police corruption in the late eighties and early nineties.

Serpico still speaks out against police corruption and brutality. He continues to speak out against both the weakening of civil liberties and corrupt practices in law enforcement, such as the alleged cover-up following the Amadou Diallo shooting in 1999.[9]

He provides support for "individuals who seek truth and justice even in the face of great personal risk." He calls them "lamp lighters," a term he prefers to the more common "whistleblowers," because it evokes memories of the historic ride in which Paul Revere made a great deal of noise and caused the lanterns to be lit.

Marriages

Serpico was married four times. In 1957, he married Mary Ann Wheeler, but divorced her in 1962. In 1963, he married Leslie Lane, a fellow college student, and they divorced in 1965. In 1966, he married Laurie Young, but they divorced in 1969. On June 15, 1972, Frank left the police department to move to Europe. In 1973, he married a woman named Marianne, who would be his final wife, but she died from cancer in 1980. He decided to return to the United States afterward.[6] His only son, Alexander was born March 15, 1980.

Serpico in media

Serpico, a biography by Peter Maas, sold over 3 million copies. It was adapted for the screenplay of the 1973 film titled Serpico, which was directed by Sidney Lumet and starred Al Pacino in the title role. In 1976 David Birney starred as Serpico in a TV-movie called Serpico: The Deadly Game (aka The Deadly Game), broadcast on NBC. This led to a short-lived Serpico TV series the following fall on the same network. Also, in the book Torpedo Juice by Tim Dorsey there is a character with the nickname Serpico. In the movie Se7en, the character (a police officer) played by Brad Pitt asks his wife to wish him well, and calls himself Serpico.

Biography

  • Maas, Peter; Serpico, Frank (2005). Serpico: The Classic Story of the Cop Who Couldn't Be Bought. New York: Perennial. ISBN 978-006073818-1. 

Filmography

  • A&E Biography: Frank Serpico (2000) (TV) .... Himself
  • American Justice: Cops on Trial (2000) (TV) .... Himself

References

  1. ^ Peter Maas, Serpico, The cop who defied the system, published by The Viking Press, New York, 1973, pages 49 and 268.
  2. ^ Clyde Haberman (September 24, 1997). "Serpico Steps Out of the Shadows to Testify". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501E5DC103BF937A1575AC0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1. Retrieved 2007-10-25. 
  3. ^ a b c "Frank Serpico biography". frankserpico.com. 2007. http://www.frankserpico.com/bio.html. Retrieved 2007-10-24. 
  4. ^ "Cops have their say". intergate.com. 2007. http://www.intergate.com/~letterle/copssay.html. Retrieved 2007-10-25. 
  5. ^ a b "Serpico Testifies". New York Magazine. 2007. http://nymag.com/news/articles/03/03/35th/crazedcity/crimes/1.htm. Retrieved 2007-10-25. 
  6. ^ a b c d e f Kathleen F. Phalen (January/February 2001). "Frank Serpico: The fate that gnaws at him". Gadfly. http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/JanFeb01/archive-serpico.html. Retrieved 2007-10-25. 
  7. ^ David Burnham (April 25, 1970). "Graft Paid to Police Here Said to Run Into Millions". The New York Times. 
  8. ^ Kathir Vel (November 06, 2005). "Bringing the lamplighter to the limelight". kathirvel.com. http://www.kathirvel.com/frank-serpico-bringing-the-lamplighter-to-the-limelight/. Retrieved 2009-05-06. 
  9. ^ Peg Tyre (September 23, 1997). "Serpico resurrects his decades—old criticism of NYPD". CNN. http://www.cnn.com/US/9709/23/serpico.brutality/. Retrieved 2007-10-25. 

Further reading

External links


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