Crusader: The Hell-Raising Police Career of Detective David Durk. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1996 by Donald E. Graham

Does this break the record for conflicts of interest in a single book review? I know and admire both the subject of this biography and its author. So you're not getting an objective review, but you are getting an honest opinion: This book is a thoroughly deserved vindication of a surpassingly brave and honest man. It's also a hell of a fme book.

David Durk had two micro-seconds of national fame around 1970. An Amherst graduate serving as a New York City police officer, he traveled to bitterly anti-war, anti-police college campuses trying to recruit students to become police officers. He had some success, perhaps because students sensed the presence of someone with even more wild-eyed idealism than they had. Soon thereafter, Durk and his (then) friend and colleague Frank Serpico were the culminating witnesses in the Knapp Commission hearings into police corruption in New York City:

"The average cop, he testified, longed to be honest, but was convinced that 'he lives in the middle of a corrupt society.' The police department had become 'a home for the drug dealers and thieves', in which men who could have been good officers, men of decent impulse ... were told in a hundred ways every day: go along, forget about the law, don't make waves....

`But being a cop also means to be engaged with life ... Being a cop is a vocation, of it is nothing at all, and that's what I saw being destroyed by the corruption of the New York City police department, destroyed for me and for thousands of others like me.'"

This is the story of an unusually honest man who joined an unusually dishonest police department. David Durk is a worldly Don Quixote, a man who knew exactly what he was up against but made the charge anyway. Without important, permanent allies, a single police officer took on the systematic corruption of the nation's largest police department and, later, of New York itself.

The result was inevitable: The city chewed him up and spat him out. He never held an "important" job certainly never a high-paying one). He had prolonged conversations with three mayors about the extent of corruption. Each was intrigued; each thought of giving him some kind of responsibility; none did. When the department retired him, no one would even lift a finger to see that he received a normal pension. His was cut to $17,000 a year by a bureaucratic quirk. And yet, you could argue that in Durk's battles against the city, Durk won as many as he lost. One almost wackily incorruptible man really did create some lasting change.

The New York City Police Department in the 1960s didn't just contain some dishonest cops: It was grossly and systematically corrupt, from top to bottom. The newly arrived Officer Durk was assigned horrible jobs despite excellent work. He asked why and was told to pay off the officer making assignments. On his first day on the job he gave a parking ticket to Toots Shor, the restaurant owner, and found himself warning a foot beat under the West Side Highway. He was offered food, liquor, and money as part of the regular arrangement. The stores, bars, restaurants, and illegal establishments paid off everyone in the precinct--sergeants, lieutenants, and captains took their shares. Durk refused.

After years of this, Durk met another cop, Frank Serpico, who was equally honest. The two of them, Durk taking the lead, revealed the extent of police corruption to the highest officials of John Lindsay's administration; no action. So Durk organized a flanking move: He and Serpico went to The New York Times. After a remarkable Durk-arranged meeting, in which half a dozen police, including an inspector, a captain, Durk, and Serpico, briefed top editors on police corruption, David Burnham of the Times k,rote the story. The Knapp C-ommission conducted an investigation, and a reforming commissioner was appointed. Business as usual changed--at least somewhat, at least for a while.

Then, the usual pattern of Durk's life took over. Redford and Newman were going to do a Butch-and-Sundance movie about him and Serpico. It didn't happen. The two hero-cops fell out. A movie made a hero out of Serpico (he was, and deserved it) and an unattractive minor figure out of Durk (to me, a horrible injustice--read Lardner's account and draw your own conclusions).

So Durk remained a cop, widely loathed, detailed to a progression of departments, and a pain in the ass to a succession of bosses. Mayors and department heads kept looking for a quiet place to put him. He was sent to look into the payment of cigarette taxes and found millions of dollars being lost to the city through cor-ruption and payoffs. He looked into famous city stores helping c:ustomers evade sales taxes on purchases of jewehy, furs, and art--and found that 90 percent of such purchases were mailed out of town to avoid tax (what was mailed was often an empty box). Finally, no one would give him another job, and he retired. Suspicious, competitive, and inflexible, he had lost his last department-head friends. His solace is the publication of this book--and what a book it is. James Lardner may not be Cervantes, but in some respects he may be as good a biographer as the expiring century could have produced for Durk. Lardner is an ex-police officer. He worked as a reporter for The Washington Post and for many years as a New Yorker staff writer. And in Crusader he puns off the difficult job of remaining completely true to the reader while presenting Durk in his own terrns. The author is honest; but, oh rare biographer, he has not lost the capacity for admiration.