This guy died a couple weeks ago and no one noticed. That's a shame. [View all]
Genuine hero from my youth in NYC. Manning and Ellsberg had/have guts to take on the US military. But frankly, going up against the corruption of the entire NYPD ... plus the NYC political establishment ... was probably even more hazardous to one's health.
He did it anyway.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/nyregion/david-durk-detective-who-exposed-police-corruption-dies-at-77.html?_r=0
David Durk, a New York police detective who with Officer Frank Serpico shattered the infamous blue wall of silence to expose widespread corruption in the city’s Police Department in the 1960s and ’70s, died on Tuesday at his home in Putnam County, N.Y. He was 77.
The cause was cardiac arrest, his wife, Arlene, said. He had been treated for mesothelioma for the past two years, she said.
An Amherst College graduate who studied law at Columbia University, Mr. Durk joined the Police Department in 1963. He imagined a life of public service, as he put it rosily years later, to help “an old lady walk the streets safely” and “a storekeeper make a living without keeping a shotgun under his cash register.”
But what he found was a culture of corruption: of officers and superiors taking payoffs from gamblers, drug dealers, merchants and mobsters for protection and information, like the names of informers they wanted to kill; of officers stealing and dealing drugs, riding shotgun for pushers and intimidating witnesses.
In precinct after precinct, Mr. Durk found cash “pads” — lists of payoffs from gamblers — with shares for officers, sergeants and higher-ups. And behind the corruption, he discovered, was a litany of unwritten rules amounting to a pervasive acceptance of the wrongdoing, even among those not on the take — a code of silence, called the blue wall, which was corroding morale.
(more at link)
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