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. 

Al Pacino played the whistleblower cop.

He is 85 now, but, over a call from his home, he sounds ready for road, fit to take on anything that has the smell of corruption off it.

“I’m getting on very well, thank you Mike,” he says of his day. “I love all things Irish, especially a little Jameson. The first thing I learned as a young man was ‘Erin go brach’. 

"Listen, growing up, I hung out with a bunch of Irish kids.”

Chipping away

He also encountered plenty of Irishmen in the NYPD and not all of them were dirty.

“My first police partner was a man called John O’Connor and he was a righteous, God-fearing man and an excellent detective. But every time I complained about the corruption that was going on he would say, ‘Frank, you can’t keep chipping away at the foundation with nothing to replace it’ and I would say, ‘John, until the whole structure falls down and we start from the beginning, nothing is going to change’.” 

Before winding the clock all the way back, what about the big policing issue today in the US? On  April 21, former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The verdict represented the first conviction for murder by a police officer of a black person, despite a whole raft of cases across the country in which African-Americans have been shot dead by cops in suspicious circumstances. 

Serpico didn’t fit the prototype cop of the era, with his hippie sensibilities and a fondness for classical music and opera. He lived down in the Village, where he didn’t let on he was a cop

Serpico welcomes the verdict, but isn’t confident that it signifies change.

“I think it’s a drop in the bucket,” he says. “People will say we’re turning a corner now because his own buddies testified against him. 

But I call it rats jumping off a sinking ship. They knew he would get convicted because this wasn’t just national news but international news

“Nobody can take another man’s life and not be accountable. And yet this is what we have had (before now). Unless you are black you cannot imagine what they have been going through their whole lives. This is what has to change.” 

Racism among police has always been a sore on the American landscape, but at different periods of history it has taken different forms. Were cops as quick to use lethal action against minorities back in Serpico’s day?

“The racism was different then,” he says. “They had what they called the goon squad to rough up people. We (the NYPD) didn’t shoot people the way they do today but it was there in different ways.

“I was once on my way to work when I rescued two families and their dog during a fire. I climbed onto the second-floor landing and got them out. Nobody was really injured except me. I had smoke inhalation. And then my lieutenant comes along and I tell him, ‘Sir I just did this’. And he said go and put your uniform on. I never got the slightest recognition for it and you know why? Because the families were black. If they had been white the mayor would have given me a medal.” 

Loved the local cops

Serpico began life in Brooklyn, the youngest son of Italian immigrants. Growing up, he loved the local cops and the stories on the radio about detectives. Wearing the uniform was what it was about for him. At the age of 17 he enlisted in the US army and served in South Korea for two years, and travelled a bit, including to the land of his parents. 

When he returned he enrolled in college and worked as a youth counsellor and other jobs before signing up for the NYPD.

He started work with the force in September 1959, assigned as a patrolman. From there he moved into plainclothes undercover work and did so throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and The Bronx. He didn’t fit the prototype cop of the era, with his hippie sensibilities and a fondness for classical music and opera. He lived down in the Village, where he didn’t let on he was a cop. 

In the neighbourhood, they knew him as Paco. On the street, Serpico could police with the best of them. His zealousness for the job saw him make arrests even when he was off-duty, or had spotted a crime outside his own precinct district.

Corruption

Pretty soon, he came across the corruption. It was organised and widespread and, to a large extent, amounted to a protection racket.

“They went around to the underworld and collected for police protection,” he says. “It was called the pad.” 

Everybody got a cut but straight away Serpico said he’d no interest in taking the money. That set him apart, made some of his fellow cops uncomfortable.

Serpico the movie skillfully portrays how he came upon the racket and how he became increasingly frustrated as it superseded the basic business of policing, the job that he loved doing.

“In the movie, my partner and I are chasing this big Black hulk of a man into a house and then he’s hiding under a stairwell. We find him on his knees and my partner takes out his gun and starts hassling him,” Serpico remembers.

“My partner was complaining because the man was late on his pay-off. And he says to him, ‘You son of a bitch, if you’re late again …and he’s poking the man on his mouth with a gun. And the man says, ‘Please give me time’ and my partner says, ‘I’ll give you all the time you want with life in prison’.” 

Serpico was observing this criminality close up and it was interfering with his capacity to do the job. More than that though, it was wrong. 

And for this Italian American there was no grey area between right and wrong when it came to cops shaking down criminals.

Honest cops and brick walls

By 1967, he was moving to do something about it. 

Assisted by a colleague, David Dunk, whom he’d known from his earliest days in the force, he tried to get the top brass to tackle the problem. Repeatedly, the honest cops hit brick walls. They went to a contact of Durk’s in the mayor’s office but, despite assurances, nothing came of it. 

This went on four years, during which time Serpico was growing increasingly disillusioned, trying to continue with frontline policing, looking away when his colleagues were taking cash, struggling with the idea that the cops were the good guys.

Eventually, he and Durk took the decision to go outside the force. 

In 1971, the New York Times published a series of articles after the pair went to reporter David Burnham. The news reports were sensational, charging that “policemen in the city are receiving millions of dollars in graft and that top police officials and members of mayor John V Lindsay’s staff ignored specific allegations of grafting.” 

Lindsay appointed a veteran Irish-American, Patrick V Murphy, as commissioner to tackle the corruption. Murphy’s parents, both natives of Cork, had met and married at home before crossing the Atlantic and settling in Brooklyn. 

He got to work cleaning up the force. Many regard him as the man who did get to the bottom of the grafting, but Serpico doesn’t remember him in such fond terms.

“He tried to belittle me,” Serpico says. 

He tried to undermine my credibility and yet he is heralded as the reforming police commissioner. How is the truth to get out when you have that? 

Pretty soon, word spread through the NYPD that Serpico was the man behind the press headlines. He was transferred to narcotics, which he enjoyed because it allowed him to expand his experience. Meanwhile, Lindsay set up the Knapp Commission to examine the corruption allegations and Murphy got cracking on a cleanout.

Dirty night in Brooklyn

Then we come to the dirty night in Brooklyn when Serpico is one of a group of cops acting on a tip-off to hunt down a drug dealer. They had an address in an apartment block and they approached the door. Somebody suggested that Serpico knock on the door as he spoke Spanish and the suspect was Hispanic. Serpico rapped on the door, it opened and he barged towards it but there was an attempt to shut it. He was jammed now, pushing against the door. He took out his weapon. His fellow cops stood back and let him at it.

What happened was they never backed me up and I made the mistake of turning away from the perpetrator with my arm in the door and I was so enraged and then bang! 

His colleague radioed for medical assistance, but even this was done in a way that was careless at best, intent on delaying medical assistance at worst.

“There was no 10.13 call, which is highest priority, it means a man is down. The call was 10.10 which means shots fired and so they never called for a backup. They thought I was going to die. They expected me to die.” 

Bullet in the head

He spent a month in hospital recovering and was left with some wounds, including deafness in his left ear.

I have a bullet in my head. I skip down my driveway every morning and say, ‘Thank you Lord’. I’ve survived and I’ve no regrets. I have exposed the cancer and now it’s up to the physicians to remove it 

They gave him his detective’s shield, which he has to this day. 

Later, he testified before the Knapp Commission, telling the members that “the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear or ridicule or reprisal from his fellow officers". 

The commission eventually reported that major corruption did exist and structures were put in place to keep the cops honest. For Serpico’s career, that all came too late. 

When he came out of hospital, he retired on a disability pension due to his wounds. 

The movie ends with him leaving his home in the Village bound for Switzerland. In real life, that’s what he did. He stayed there and travelled throughout Europe for the best part of 10 years.

He also co-operated on his biography with Peter Haas. The book sold three million copies and was adapted for the movie. The royalties ensured that Serpico wouldn’t have to work again.

Return to New York

In 1974, he returned to New York briefly to endorse for US attorney general Ramsey Clark in a run for the senate. Serpico placed great faith in Clark as a man of integrity and they became firm friends. 

In 2003, Clark came to Ireland to give evidence at the trial in Ennis, Co Clare, of activist Mary Kelly, who had damaged US planes in Shannon. The retired politician testified that the US had been engaged in a war in Iraq and Kelly’s action were justified. Kelly was convicted nonetheless, but the conviction was overturned on appeal.

Serpico didn’t know about Clark’s intervention in the Irish trial.

“It’s good to hear that,” he says. “Ramsey passed away recently. He was one of my best friends, a man of the highest integrity. I even produced a documentary a few years back called Citizen Clark... A Life of Principle.” 

And what did he think of the movie? “I took issue with the director Sidney Lumet so I walked out in frustration,” he says. 

The problem occurred in the shooting of a scene in which a racist cop chases a black man and shoves his head down a toilet. Serpico, on set, shouted “cut”. He said that never happened. The director didn’t want him on the set after that. 

Pacino's problem? He overacted

And what about himself and Pacino?

Serpico actor Al Pacino.

“I got on well with Al (Pacino). The problem was he overacted. I don’t know if he was doing it or whether he was following the direction of Lumet.” 

Down through the years, Serpico has continued to stand with those fighting injustice. He left policing at a young age, but the sense of right and wrong that prompted him to enter the force in the first place has never left him. Whistleblowers seek him out. Groups intent on police reform use him as a sounding board. He has got involved in protecting the environment from rampant development. 

The fire still burns.

“I’ve been blessed,” he says. 

I couldn’t ask for anything more. I have everything I need. I don’t want for anything. I live in the woods in a cabin and right now I look out and all I see are the birds and trees and flowers 

He talks with some passion about the dandelion, the flower that some dismiss as a weed, its beauty, its power in a world where nature is so often dismissed and abused. 

And then, finally, he gets back to his other passion, the one that defined his life. They were at it back when he was a young cop, those who will abuse power, prey on the weak, smother light with their dark motives. They are still at it today as far as Frank Serpico is concerned.

“They won’t leave me alone,” he says. “That’s why we have to keep fighting.”  

Al Pacino on Frank Serpico

“One time we were out at my rented beach house in Montauk. We were sitting there looking at the water. And I thought, Well, I might as well be like everybody else and ask a silly question, which was, "Why, Frank? Why did you do it?" 

He said, "Well, Al, I don't know. I guess I have to say it would be because...if I didn't, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music?" I mean, what a way of putting it! That's the kind of guy he was. I enjoyed being with him. There was mischief in his eyes.” 

Frank Serpico is the guest on this week’s Mick Clifford Podcast with the Irish Examiner.