Frank Serpico in the upper valley of the Hudson River, where the river water that will wet then Manhattan is still clear, he lives by the old hermit that brought down the " Blue Wall, "the blue wall dell'omertà and police corruption in New York: Serpico. In the skull still bears the fragments of the bullets that were fired at him. In the heart of the bitterness at having been forgotten and expelled from the "brothers" in uniform as a hazardous waste. In the name sums up the shame and scandal that changed the police in blue and that made him a book sold three million copies, an official inquiry into a devastating and film legend.
He discovered, in a pioneer log cabin which he built himself and where he lives with his "girlfriend" as he calls the lady of fifty years ago that the company, the New York Times, this half-century after 1959 in which became a patrolman Frank Serpico, cops, district police officer in Brooklyn. Frank, who increasingly resembles an old man, his beard a little 'shaggy, rumpled in the face from 73 years of hard life in the bandana that still surrounds his head pierced by the pain of the lead fragments, the character that Al Pacino brought to the screen , is not even in the quiet deep woods, a man at peace. Serpico is still at war with the world as it was at war with the gangsters, the pushers, the pimps, mobsters in Brooklyn, but especially with his fellow "NYPD Blue", the Police Department, which of those offenders were in the pay . "I still have nightmares - he says - every time a door opens, I see the barrel of the gun that shot me in the face".
see, especially after what happened, and he fell on the landing of the house in Brooklyn where he was entered to stop the exchange of 10 kilos of heroin, his face covered in blood. Remember the fellow in blue and middle class, people like him, under cover detectives were present at his probable agony without invoking the walkie-talkie and radio in the "Code 10-13", "agent hit the ground" that would call for ambulances. He sees the old illegal immigrant, a Mexican, who has an apartment close to call for help before un'autopattuglia finally throws him in the back seat, leading him to a hospital. Frank Serpico, the "Neapolitan", the son of an Italian arrived from Marigliano, now one of the most polluted satellite towns of Naples, had to die, because everyone knew that he had decided to shake up the greasy pole, the police collected the money from the underworld.
"I do not know what has changed, maybe something, maybe nothing," he says, by far, in the solitude of his log cabin, the log cabin, "Paco," as he had known where he is writing the memory before it's too late. " So much seemed to change, and the shotgun in his face that he took going into the nest of drug dealers met with indifference from colleagues, he finally shook the "Blue Wall". It was established a commission of inquiry headed by Judge Knapp that the covering for the first time, the pot. Dozens of officers, detectives, inspectors, managers were arrested or deleted, allowing others to step down in silence, save what remained of the "face".
The Knapp Commission sought to distinguish between the great and the petty corruption, daily. He drew two categories of policemen "on the take", as they say in the jargon, paid by criminals. Vegetarians, the "grass eaters", those who were content to browse the notes put in the handshake, to shop and dine for free in shops and restaurants not to see what was going on in the back room. And the meat-eaters, the "meat eaters", the greedy accomplices of large organizations, the gangster, the "famigghie", which was the protection and coverage. He spoke of "hundreds of millions of dollars each year from ruminants or eaten by vegetarians as meat eaters.
The son of immigrants from Naples that "there was" was held outside, and loathed in: "I broke the silence." He was promoted to detective, decorated with a medal that now takes thrown in a drawer, which was hailed before the cameras by the trombones of power as a hero. And then, just five years after the great "pokazuka," the writer of the reorganization, removed. Disappeared. He emigrated to Europe, Switzerland, as far removed from his New York could be found, living with the share of royalties on the book that Peter Mass wrote about him and with him, and the film directed by Sidney Lumet with a sensational Al Pacino. But even
Switzerland made him a mild middle-class integrated. When he resigned to return home, he returned to New York, yes, but in the state, in the wild north. Resumed the role of the hippie who used to be an investigator and the restlessness the rebel who had always been, even with the "badge" with the police badge, and his famous browing 9mm, in a tramp's rags. And the sylvan solitude, he would not quit bothering. Today in his blog snarling, yesterday in letters to day, would continue to irritate the police station where, by Italian boy he had dreamed of entering. "Perhaps they are less corrupt, but are even more brutal and even more outside the law should be enforced," he says, and recalls Amadou Diallo, the unarmed 23 year old Ghanaian who shot down four policemen in the Bronx in 1999 by shooting 41 shots in body for "misunderstanding", leaving all acquitted.
There is no peace for him, even among the larches and the fir trees of the north, where his partner to follow him up traces of blood in the snow to reach the animals, deer, bears, raccoons, martens and find out why they bled. crazy, a maniac, like all those who insist on believing in justice.
reserved © Reproduction (January 25, 2010
0 comments:
Post a Comment