Frank Serpico: 'I call it rats jumping off a sinking ship'

In a wide-ranging interview, the cop portrayed by Al Pacino in the eponymous movie discusses being shot 50 years ago, racism in the US following the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict, and his long career in and out of the blue uniform

Frank Serpico, right, testifies before a police corruption hearing in 1971.

Serpico is bleeding. He is in the back of a patrol car, eyes wide open, a man on the precipice of mortality. He has been shot in the face. A siren wails, windscreen wipers beat against a dirty New York night. He is being rushed to hospital. The rain buckets down, on the city, on Serpico’s life, on a career that began so brightly, on the tarnished reputation of the New York Police Department which he exposed as being riddled with corruption. So goes the opening scene of Serpico, the eponymous movie of Frank Serpico’s life in which Al Pacino played the whistleblower cop.

Serpico was shot on the night of February 3, 1971. Over 50 years later, the bullet is still lodged in his head. He lives today in a log cabin in upstate New York, out in the wild, communing with nature but still railing against injustice.