Where is frank serpico living today
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Josh Bell,
Former Senior Communications Strategist, Center for Democracy,
ACLU
In the 1970s, whistleblower Frank Serpico exposed rampant bribery in the New York Police Department. Serpico, a cop himself, ended up getting shot in the face when fellow officers wouldn’t come to his aid when confronting a suspect. He eventually testified before a special commission set up to investigate corruption in the NYPD, and Al Pacino played him in the Hollywood classic “Serpico.”
A new documentary out this week, “Frank Serpico,” presents the full story of what happened, as told by Serpico himself and some of the others who lived through it. We talked to the director, Antonino D'Ambrosio, about his film and Serpico’s historic significance.
What drove Serpico to blow the whistle?
On a basic level, Serpico just wanted to do his job, which was to uphold the law and protect the public. He loved being a cop and he loved public service, which made it hard for him to witness and accept corruption and abuse of power.
Due in part to the Sydney Lumet film “Serpico,” s
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Frank Serpico was born on April 14, 1936, but believes his real birth date was February 3, 1971, when a bullet pierced his head and changed his life forever. Betrayal is a theme that runs underneath most stories that Serpico tells. Betrayal, and a deep sense of loss of the dream he had since childhood, that he would become a police officer and make that his career.
Whistleblowers know betrayal, and they know the deep loss of their career. Serpico does not like the term “whistleblower” because he feels it brings a negative connotation. He is much more comfortable with “lamplighter. ” Serpico cringed the first time he heard himself referred to as a whistleblower, and years later, he still does not like the term. It sounds demeaning for such a noble cause. Serpico feels Lamplighter is a term that sheds light on corruption, injustice, ineptitude, and abuse of power. Paul Revere was a lamplighter, and Serpico prefers that term.
But the bottom line is that Serpico did not even know the term whistleblower in 1971, and he was not aware of any avenue to blow the whistle, because there we
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Frank Serpico
MILITARY PERSONNEL
1936 - Today
Frank Serpico
Francesco Vincent "Frank" Serpico ( SUR-pik-oh; born April 14, 1936) is an American retired New York Police Department detective, best known for whistleblowing on police corruption. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a plainclothes police officer working in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan to expose vice racketeering. In 1967, he reported credible evidence of widespread police corruption, to no effect. Read more on Wikipedia
Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Frank Serpico has received more than 3,619,356 page views. His biography is available in 22 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 20 in 2019). Frank Serpico is the 1,424th most popular military personnel (down from 1,252nd in 2019), the 4,194th most popular biography from United States (up from 4,230th in 2019) and the 65th most popular American Military Personnel.
Memorability Metrics
3.6M
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58.64
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
22
Languages Editions (L)
2.76
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