Chapter One
When Frank was a kid, his nighttime ritual involved turning on his bedside radio at nine o’clock sharp to listen to his favorite show. “And now,” the announcer would intone, the room pitch-black except for the glow coming from the radio dial, “another thrilling episode of Gang Busters!”
The show branded itself “the only national program that brings you authentic police case histories.” The stories were thrilling. “The Broadway Bandits.” “The Alcatraz Prison Riot.” “The Death Mask Killer.” For Frank, tuning in was like going to detective school. Even better, the episodes came complete with squealing tires, wailing sirens, popping gunshots, and satisfying endings—because every week the good guys won.
Those were the days of Fiorello La Guardia. Elected New York City mayor during the Great Depression, in 1934, La Guardia was a determined reformer. It was easy to admire him; he was a five-foot-tall dynamo. Everything he did, he did with fervor. And he refused to abide by the dictates of the Republican Party, which had helped get him elected. He got rid of the old-time, double-dealing politicians and their bosses who were running the city. He reorganized city government, unified the subway system, created public housing for the poor, and built playgrounds and public parks across the city. He cracked down on the mobsters who were running illegal gambling outfits, and he launched a public crusade to clean up a corrupt police force.
During a newspaper strike that affected thirteen million readers, La Guardia went on the radio and read comic strips out loud to the children of the city. He chose Dick Tracy, about the popular police detective who battled gangsters, bank robbers, and crooked politicians. When the mayor finished reading, he said to his listeners, “Say, children, what does it all mean? It means that dirty money never brings any luck … No, dirty money always brings sorrow and sadness and misery and disgrace.”
Born two years after La Guardia’s election, Francesco Serpico was raised by his parents, Vincenzo and Maria, who had met in Italy and come to America shortly after getting married. Young Francesco, called Frank, played marbles, hide-and-seek, and stickball on the streets of Brooklyn, New York. His neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, was a melting pot of immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe, as well as Black Americans, all of whom struggled to earn respect in a city that could be cold, uncaring, and cruel.
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia addresses New York City in a radio broadcast.
Brooklyn, circa 1947
One story has young Frank working in his father’s cobbler shop after school. His jobs were menial—dragging a magnetic shoe horn across the floor to gather the nails that had fallen from the cobbler’s benches—but he loved watching his father at work. A master of his trade, Vincenzo had apprenticed to a shoemaker in Italy at the age of nine and still repaired every shoe by hand with painstaking precision. Standing by his bench, gripping a row of nails between his lips, he would pick up a shoe with a broken heel and lay it face down on the bench. Then with one hand he’d pull a nail from his mouth and with his other hand grab his hammer. Wham! Wham! Wham! In went the nails, a bull’s-eye every time. Frank admired his father’s work ethic. By spending endless hours in that shop—on many nights he never made it home at all—Vincenzo had earned enough money to buy a house in which he and Maria could raise their four children: Pasquale, Tina, Salvatore, and Frank.
One day, when working at the shop, Frank buffed the oxfords of a uniformed police officer. Frank was as proud as could be—he was shining the shoes of the law! He polished the leather until it looked like new, then watched, stunned, as the cop stood up and walked out the door without paying. Frank never forgot the guy’s arrogance. Nor did he forget the cop coming back a week later for another shine.
“Ten cents,” Vincenzo said, holding out his hand. “Up front.”
The cop grunted, left, and never returned.
Another time, an inspector from the labor department came by the shop and asked Vincenzo for Frank’s working papers.
“What papers?” Vincenzo asked. “He’s my son.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the man said. “He’s underage; he needs working papers.”
Vincenzo’s eyes narrowed. “You want my boy out in the street with the other bums? My boy will stay here where I can keep my eye on him. Here I teach him a trade.”
With that, Vincenzo picked up a hammer and ordered the man out of the shop.
Throughout his life, Frank carried these memories of his father with him. Vincenzo might not have been a powerful man, but he had his own sense of morality, and it was an honorable one.
When Frank was thirteen, fate stepped in again, this time reinforcing his romantic vision of police work. His mother took him to visit his grandfather in Italy, where Frank met his uncle Nicolo. Nicolo was a member of the carabinieri, the specialized Italian military police who investigate Mafia groups and other criminal enterprises. Their uniforms alone commanded respect: double-breasted, brass-buttoned jackets and pants with a bold red stripe running along the outside of the leg. Italians took notice. They looked up to them.
Nicolo had the swagger of somebody important, the air of a man with confidence. Why wouldn’t he? He was respected. He carried a Beretta rifle. He was somebody. He was, in the eyes of young Frank, an honest-to-goodness crime fighter.
By the time he was in high school, Frank found ways to play the part of a policeman, including making his own zip gun out of rubber bands and a car antenna. When working properly, the gun could discharge a .22-caliber bullet forcefully enough to hurt somebody standing a few feet away. Unfortunately, Frank was better at making zip guns than using them—he wound up in the hospital one day after shooting himself in the arm.
As he sat wearing a fresh bandage, two policemen came by to ask him some questions.
“Where’s the gun?” they said.
“I don’t have a gun,” Frank told them. “I found a bullet, took off its tip, and it exploded.”
The officers looked at each other. The story was obviously a lie.
“Where do you go to school?” one of them said.
“St. Francis Prep. And I want to be a cop, just like you guys.”
“Well,” the other said, “if you don’t smarten up, you’ll never make it that far.”
They let Frank go with a warning, but he got the message, loud and clear. From that point forward, he would play by the rules.
Frank graduates St. Francis Prep, 1954.
So after high school Frank joined the army, spending two years as an infantryman in South Korea. But he was still angling to jump on to the police force. When he came home, he took a job as a part-time security guard and studied police science at night. He went so far as to show up for class in navy-blue trousers and a tan trench coat, just like the cops on the TV show Dragnet.
In 1956, when Frank turned twenty, he was eligible to take the entrance exam at the New York City Police Academy—and that’s just what he did. While waiting for his appointment to come through, he went to work for the Youth Board, a division of the Mayor’s Office, helping calm tensions among juvenile gangs.
In 1959, he was finally accepted into the academy and found himself standing in front of the old red-brick building in lower Manhattan. At the entrance, a sign greeted him and all police cadets: “A clear conscience is the softest pillow.” Frank took courses in ethics, police conduct, investigation, arrest, and the handling of prisoners. He trained in the use of firearms and was tested on physical strength and agility. He learned how to deliver a baby in the event that an ambulance was delayed. He took a crash course in municipal and criminal law. And he attended lectures on psychology, race relations, civil defense, city government, and juvenile delinquency.
Copyright © 2024 by John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro
