The problem is not so much that there are a lot of corrupt people, but rather that there are so many
    that the honest are scared of the corrupt.
        -Frank Serpico

AMC has been showing the Godfather movies lately, and like any red-blooded male, I watch at least a part of them every time they are on.  The films are undeniably great, the culture they portray fascinating, but they raise a really curious question : how did the ethos of organized crime become an accepted part of the broader American culture ?  It is obviously beneficial to the participants in a criminal conspiracy to maintain a code of silence and to reserve their most vicious levels of opprobrium and contempt for whistleblowers, but why would the rest of us, who are presumably not generally involved in illicit activity, adopt this attitude too ?

Mind you now, I'm not suggesting making a hero out of John Dean, or someone truly craven like that, someone who's actively involved in the crimes, but turns coat when they get caught; them we should accept information from and, if necessary, reward with reduced sentences, but certainly not glamorize.  On the other hand, to take just a couple of particularly well-known and controversial examples, why are Whittaker Chambers and Linda Tripp not national heroes ?  Each of them exposed clandestine criminal activities which reached right to the very core of American government.  Neither sought personal gain.  Each took a considerable risk, both to their livelihoods and even to their own personal safety.  The matters about which they testified, though vigorously denied by the accused at the outset, were subsequently proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.  And how were they rewarded ?  It is difficult to think of two American citizens, who were not convicted of some kind of heinous crimes, who have been more vilified than these two.

It's possible to identify several reasons that the practice of informing on others is so frowned upon in general.  The most infamous informant of all time is, of course, Judas Iscariot.  Basically, the first great act of whistle blowing in history got the Messiah crucified, not an auspicious debut.  Then there are the two great immigrant groups of the late 19th and early 20th Century : the Irish and the Italians.  The Irish, many of them fleeing from British oppression, brought with them a certain generosity of feeling for, if not outright support of, the Irish Republican Army.  One need look no further than Liam O'Flaherty's great novel The Informer, or the equally good film version by John Ford--to see how poorly such folk took to the idea of co-operating with law enforcement authorities.  Though others might take a less charitable view of the IRA, for those who consider them freedom fighters this is an understandable attitude.  Meanwhile, many Italians brought with them ingrained notions of Omerta, or "the code of silence."  The Godfather films suggest that the Mafia offered poor citizens a form of justice that they could not extract from a corrupt officialdom.  Again, this point's debatable, but it helps explain why informing was not popular among even the honest members of this culture.  So you've got two sizable segments of the population that are predisposed to be hostile towards informants.

Meanwhile, since whistle blowing is most frequently directed against powerful institutions, we'd expect the countercultural Left to be supportive of informants.  But the Chambers and Tripp cases illustrate why this has not been the case.  For in these two most important instances the conspiracies exposed were actually conspiracies of the Left.  When Chambers revealed that he and Alger Hiss had been members of an espionage cell, run by the Soviet Union, it seemed to confirm the worst allegations from the Right that the New Deal was riddled with Communists and Fellow Travelers.  It was therefore necessary to demonize Chambers, which they proceeded to do rather effectively, to the point where it is only within the last few years that it has become possible to talk admiringly of Chambers or to acknowledge the legitimacy of his accusations.  Similarly, when Linda Tripp revealed that a Democratic President of the United States was trying to suborn perjury and obstruct justice the full fury of the organized Left and their allies in the media was turned upon her.  By the end of the Impeachment process, Ms Tripp was more reviled than any of the criminals whose actions she exposed.

There are though a few, very rare, exceptions to this general prejudice, a couple of whistleblowers who have even been given glowing big screen treatment of their heroic stories.  Most recently there was Jeffrey Wigand, lionized in Michael Mann's The Insider for taking on the tobacco industry.  And several years ago there was Silkwood, in which the heroine revealed the misdeeds of the nuclear power industry.  (You'll have noted that the difference in how these individuals were treated seems to be directly related to the animus that intellectuals hold toward their employers, right ?)  But over the course of the past thirty-plus years, one author has produced a series of unusually good portraits of both informants and whistleblowers : Peter Maas.

In his first book, The Valachi Papers, and one of his more recent, Underboss, he has dealt with two of the most significant Mob informants : Joe Valachi and Sammy "The Bull" Gravano.  These books concern men who were implicated in the very criminal activity that they exposed, so though their stories are interesting, they are not heroes.  But in Serpico and in the unjustly little known Marie, Maas has given compelling portraits of honest, decent people who refused to participate in criminal activities and then had the remarkable courage to reveal the existence of the conspiracies that almost all of those around them were involved in.

Frank Serpico graduated from the New York City Police Academy on March 5, 1960 and was assigned to Brooklyn's 81st Precinct.  There he witnessed the low level acts of bribery and corruption which he would see as he moved from precinct to precinct.  Serpico's refusal to participate in such activities, as well as his hippie life-style, made his fellow policemen suspicious of him, but he took no official action against them.  But when he was finally handed an envelope containing $300, while working Brooklyn's 90th Precinct, he approached David Durk, an officer assigned to the mayor's office to ask what he should do about it.  Durk put him in touch with the Department of Investigation where the Captain in charge merely told him to report it to his sergeant, who just pocketed the money and took no further action.

When, several months later, Serpico was transferred to the Bronx he was partnered with Carmello (Gil) Zumatto, who was one of the precinct bagmen and would take Serpico with him on his round of collections.  Durk now took Serpico to see Jay Kriegel, an aide to Mayor John V. Lindsey, but later had to tell him that the Mayor was not interested.  After years of trying to tell his story within the department and getting little or no reaction, Serpico finally met with another of Durk's contact, David Burnham of The New York Times.  On April 25, 1970, the Times ran a story detailing some of Serpico's charges and suggesting that graft paid to police officers in New York City ran into the millions of dollars.  The proverbial stuff hit the fan.

In the storm of publicity that this unleashed, arrests were finally made and some convictions secured and the Knapp Commission was created to look into the problem of corruption in the New York City Police Department.  But at the same time, many of the same men in the Department and in the Mayor's office, to whom Serpico had brought his allegations, and who had done nothing about them, were being promoted to positions of greater responsibility.  In October 1971, Serpico testified before the Commission that :

    The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act
    without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers.

    We create an atmosphere in which the honest officer fears the dishonest officer, and not the other
    way around.

He knew whereof he spoke, because in February of that year, during a drug raid. he was shot in the face while pinned in the doorway of an apartment.  It has always been his contention that his fellow officers were slow to come to his assistance and that no one called in an "Officer Down".  Instead, one of the residents of the building called in the shooting.  Serpico spent the next year on sick leave, wondering whether he could continue to do his job.  As Maas relates it, he decisive moment came :

    ...in the spring of 1972, when the Police Department announced that he would be given its highest
    award, the Medal of Honor--not for his courage in reporting corruption, but because, as he put it,
    he 'was stupid enough to have been shot in the face.'

Thoroughly disillusioned, and by now justifiably fearful for his life, Serpico quit the force.

Though Frank Serpico paid a terrible price for his honesty, this book and the Sidney Lumet movie based on it did portray him as a hero, which he undeniably is.  But Serpico was fortunate in that the target of his revelations was a Police Department, an organization which it was then and is now politically correct to distrust.  But as is so often the case, the exception draws our attention to the rule : what kind of society is this, in which we tend to vilify people who reveal such endemic corruption, while we make martyrs out of the malefactors whose deeds they expose (Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton) ?

There comes a key moment when Serpico arrests a mobster named Rudolph Santobello and takes him to the precinct house where he frisks him quite roughly and shoves him into a detention cell with several addicts.  The other detectives protest this treatment, one of them saying :

    Hey, take it easy.  Rudy's a friend of some of the boys.

Later, at the Bureau of Criminal Identification, where he's taken Santobello to be fingerprinted, Serpico looks up his record.  Furious, he calls the detective who had admonished him and informs him that their "friend" is a convicted cop killer :

    There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment.  'well, gee,' came the injured, ox-like
    reply, 'how were we supposed to know?'

This calls to mind the scene in The Godfather II where Senator Geary (G. D. Spradlin) is shaking down Michael Corleone for a casino license and expresses immense distaste for "you people", to which Michael responds :

    Senator, we're both part of the same hypocrisy...

This is the danger, that when we accept the values of the criminal class, we lower ourselves to their level.   A society that does not defend and honor the people who come forward--almost always to their own personal and professional detriment--and expose criminality, will find that fewer and fewer people are willing to take such risks.  Then we will turn to each other and ask how it came to pass that a President was consorting with drug dealers and fugitive financiers, and somewhere in our collective soul we will know the answer : because either the honest have become scared of the corrupt or because we have all become part of the same hypocrisy�

(Reviewed:12-Aug-01)

Grade: (A) Orrin C. Judd

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