| Francesco Vincent Serpico | |
|---|---|
| New York City Police Department (NYPD) | |
| Born April 14, 1936 | |
| 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 |
| Other work | Lecturer on occasion to students at universities and police academies |
Francesco Vincent Serpico (born April 14, 1936) is a retired American 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.
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Serpico was born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest child of Vincenzo and Maria Giovanna Serpico, Italian immigrants from Marigliano, in the province of Naples, Campania. 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]
In 1959, Frank Serpico joined the NYPD. 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 because he consistently avoided taking part in the corruption. To expose those who did, Serpico risked his own life and safety.[3] In 1967 he reported credible evidence of widespread systematic police corruption. However, bureaucracy slowed down his efforts,[5] until he connected with another officer, 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. 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.
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 officers from Brooklyn North had received a tip that a drug deal was going down.
Two of the 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 in the fire escape door, walked down the steps, watched the heroin sale, listened to the password and then followed the two youths out.[6]
The police jumped out at the two youths, one of whom had two bags of heroin. Halley stayed in the car with the two kids with the heroin after Roteman told Serpico, because he spoke Spanish, to make a fake drug buy to get the door open for the rest of them. The three officers went up the steps to the third-floor landing. Serpico knocked on the door, keeping 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 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.
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, raising the question whether 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 awarded a gold shield by the police commissioner and promoted to detective.
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]
Frank Serpico retired on June 15, 1972, one month after receiving the New York City Police Department's highest honor, the Medal of Honor. He went to Switzerland to recuperate and spent almost a decade living there and on a farm in Holland, as well as travelling 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 had stepped forward, 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 and now resides in the mountains of Upstate New York, 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 1980s and early 1990s.
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-ups following Abner Louima's torture in 1997 and 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", which refers to alerting the public to danger, just as Paul Revere was responsible for having lamps lit in the Old North Church to warn the public in Charlestown, Massachusetts, of the British Regulars' movements during the American Revolutionary War.
Serpico has been 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 from Holland, who was his final wife; she died from cancer in 1980. He decided to return to the United States afterwards.[6] His only child, son Alexander, was born March 15, 1980.[10]
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" (also known as "The Deadly Game"), broadcast on NBC. This led to a short-lived Serpico TV series the following fall on the same network.