Who will punish the corrupt? Contemplations on Plato at this late date

 And an NYPD cop I once knew. He worked with the real Serpico

JON RAPPOPORT

14 DEC 2023

∙ PAID

As forces move in to try to kill America by turning every decent value on its head, inverting good and evil, trading one for the other, I have some things to say.

I’m going to start with David Durk, who attended Amherst College while I was there. David, as I recall, studied Latin. Several years after he graduated, I ran across him walking in Central Park in NY.

I asked him what he was doing. He said he was an NYPD cop. I found that hard to believe. He assured me it was true.

He told me he thought more college educated people should join the police. That it was honorable work—and a person who knew Latin walking a beat shouldn’t be thought of as bizarre at all. I probably laughed.

David died in 2012, at age 77.

Here are two articles about him. They are the beginning what I have to say about law-enforcement, corruption, and, yes, PLATO.

Conscience of the Police, by Katherine Jamieson, Amherst College Magazine, 2011:

David Durk was a police academy student in the early 1960s, he says, when an instructor advised, during a formal lecture, that he carry a self-addressed stamped envelope at all times. This way, if offered a bribe, he could drop the money in a mailbox without fear that it would be discovered later. As the public would eventually learn, the New York City police force that Durk joined was rife with corruption at every level. “Being a cop, you see a whole different part of New York City,” he says. “It’s real and scary.”

Durk and Detective Frank Serpico broke the story of widespread graft to The New York Times, which reported in April 1970 that “narcotics dealers, gamblers and businessmen make illicit payments of millions of dollars a year to the policemen of New York.” The efforts of Durk and Serpico, dramatized in the 1973 film Serpico, led New York City Mayor John Lindsay to create the Knapp Commission, which exposed extortion operations being run out of most precinct houses. Amherst magazine published Durk’s testimony to the commission in 1970. “That was the price of going along, the real price of police corruption,” he told the commission: “broken dreams and dying neighborhoods and a whole generation of children being lost. That was what I had joined the department to stop.”

Serpico left the force in 1972 after sustaining a critical gunshot wound, but Durk stuck with it, and though “transferred umpteen times,” he says, he continued to ferret out institutional vice. As commander of detectives in East Harlem, he challenged orders from a superior not to make arrests—even for robberies with guns, he says. As assistant commissioner for tax enforcement under Mayor Ed Koch, Durk doggedly pursued tax evasion cases, recovering millions of dollars. He contends that a variety of supervisors and political figures discouraged him from reporting corruption at the highest levels of corporate and political life in the city. Told by the department that he “would not be welcomed back” for additional police assignments, he says, he retired in 1985 with a yearly pension of around $17,000. “I was defrocked and defenestrated,” he says.

Durk believes that a better-educated police force would think more critically about its role in society. Over the years, he’s lectured at Harvard, served as an adjunct instructor at Yale, taught night courses to New York City civil servants and consulted with several police departments. He says he’s been sought out many times by police officers who want to expose corruption on the force. But when Durk tells them his story, they think twice. “They say, ‘Why should I do this? Look what happened to you.’ I don’t have a rebuttal. That part is very sad.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Durk has fond memories of his time on the force. “I loved being a cop—it’s like your last chance to be a knight-errant in our society,” he says. And, for all he’s seen, he still believes that police work can be a powerful way to serve humanity and actualize equality and justice. Forty years later, he stands behind his testimony to the Knapp Commission: “Being a cop is a vocation or it is nothing at all.”

Here is the NY Times obituary for David:

David Durk, Serpico’s Ally Against Graft, Dies at 77, by Robert D. McFadden, Nov. 13, 2012:

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.

Mr. Durk refused to join in, and became a pariah. While he made many arrests and was promoted to detective sergeant, he was shuttled among assignments, often just to get rid of him.

In 1966, while attending classes for new plainclothes investigators, he met Officer Serpico. He too had refused to take payoffs, and had been shunned—and threatened—by fellow officers.

Beyond hating graft, they had little in common. Mr. Durk was a clean-cut collegian with friends in government and the news media, wore conservative suits and lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife and two daughters. Officer Serpico was a shaggy, bearded loner who grew up in Brooklyn, served in the Korean War, joined the police in 1959 and lived in Greenwich Village, a serape-clad bohemian called Paco.

But in 1967 they became allies, and over the next few years they complained to high-ranking police and City Hall officials, including Jay Kriegel, Mayor John V. Lindsay’s police liaison, and Arnold G. Fraiman, the commissioner of investigations.

They provided names, dates, places and other information, but were told that nothing could be done. Mr. Fraiman later said the information was not specific enough. Mr. Kriegel said City Hall was worried about alienating the police in a period of civil disturbances.

As Mr. Durk recalled, “The fact is that almost wherever we turned in the Police Department, wherever we turned in the city administration, and almost wherever we went in the rest of the city, we were met not with cooperation, not with appreciation, not with an eagerness to seek out the truth, but with suspicion and hostility and laziness and inattention, and with our fear that at any moment our efforts might be betrayed.”

Frustrated, they went to The New York Times. In a series of articles based on a six-month inquiry, David Burnham reported in 1970 that drug dealers, gamblers and merchants were making “illicit payments of millions of dollars a year to the policemen of New York.”

Mayor Lindsay created a commission, with the lawyer Whitman Knapp as chairman, to investigate. After testimony in 1971 from Detective Durk, Officer Serpico and others, the commission found corruption was endemic. It said the mayor and the former police commissioner Howard R. Leary had failed to act.

But the fallout was minimal. Dozens of officers were prosecuted, but no senior police or city officials were charged. Politically, however, the hearings virtually ended Mayor Lindsay’s presidential aspirations. Officer Serpico, promoted to detective, was shot in the face in a drug raid in 1971, and retired in 1972. But Detective Durk, promoted to lieutenant, remained in the department for more than a decade, at times in elite investigative units but often in lesser posts.

The 1973 Sidney Lumet film “Serpico,” based on the Peter Maas book “Serpico: The Cop Who Defied the System,” minimized Mr. Durk’s role in the exposés. The film lionized Mr. Serpico, played by Al Pacino, but gave Mr. Durk short shrift. (A minor character based on Mr. Durk was given a fictional name.)

In a book review for The Times, Mary Perot Nichols, who headed radio and television stations operated by New York City, called Mr. Serpico “honest and brave,” but said it was Mr. Durk who had sustained their campaign with his persistence and contacts. “It would be fair to say that without Durk, there would have been no police corruption exposé in The New York Times, no Knapp Commission investigations into the matter,” she wrote.

A 1996 biography by James Lardner, “Crusader: The Hell-Raising Police Career of Detective David Durk,” offered a sympathetic treatment of its subject, who received a share of the book’s earnings.

Books and films aside, Mr. Durk had been his own most eloquent spokesman.

“Corruption is not about money at all,” he told the Knapp Commission, “because there is no amount of money that you can pay a cop to risk his life 365 days a year. Being a cop is a vocation or it is nothing at all, and that’s what I saw destroyed by the corruption of the New York City Police Department, destroyed for me and for thousands of others like me.”

David Burton Durk was born in Manhattan on June 10, 1935, one of two sons of a Manhattan doctor. He attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Amherst with a degree in political science in 1958.

He married Arlene Lepow in 1959. In addition to her, he is survived by their two daughters, Joan and Julie Durk.

After a year at Columbia, Mr. Durk sold East African carvings for a time, then joined the Police Department. He patrolled in Harlem and Midtown Manhattan for several years, arresting muggers and pickpockets.

College-educated officers were rare, and he moved up to jobs in the Chief of Detectives office, the city’s Department of Investigation and the Internal Affairs Division. In 1969, on a federal grant, he spent a year recruiting officers on college campuses.

After the Knapp hearings, he continued pressing corruption reforms, but he found himself largely persona non grata in the department, in other agencies he worked for and even among some reporters, who regarded him as obsessively overzealous.

In 1973 and 1974 he worked with a federal investigation of underworld influence in the garment center, but it was called off after 18 months. He was banished to a small police office in Queens, then took a year’s leave at the United Nations to study crime issues. He and his wife and Ira J. Silverman, an NBC producer, wrote a book on heroin traffic, “The Pleasant Avenue Connection.”

In 1979, he took another leave to work on enforcement in the city’s Finance Department. He pounced on tobacco companies that failed to pay taxes on cigarettes given away in promotional campaigns. In 1985, he retired on a police pension of $17,000 a year, and in later years was a professed whistle-blowers’ consultant.

—So there you have 2 articles about David. A man committed to justice.

And he believed the people of law-enforcement should pursue The Good. They should be knight-errants on behalf of society.

The more education they had—proper education—the better.

And now to Plato: