Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [248]
Maybe it was in the cards the moment members of the mob started to write about their world. Maybe it had always depended on silence and secrecy. Maybe Bonanno himself, in his attempt to justify the world he lived in and set the record straight from his point of view, had helped to bring about the end of it by raising the curtain on what went on behind the stage.
The mob, it turned out, had been better served by omertà than by best-sellers, and in the end all that was left of it was a collection of recipes for people with hearty appetites who liked Italian food.
IT WENT largely unnoticed by those who criticized S&S for publicizing or enriching Mafia figures that we published even more books by cops and FBI agents—so much so that at one time when I was visiting One Police Plaza (headquarters of the NYPD), I remarked that everyone in the building seemed to be spending his time at a typewriter writing an outline or looking for an agent.
I began, as it were, at the top, by publishing the autobiography of Patrick Murphy, Mayor John Lindsay’s controversial NYPD commissioner. Murphy was controversial, in fact, only within the ranks of the NYPD—elsewhere he was universally admired. His view that it was not sufficient for an officer merely to refuse graft and bribes, that he must actually report on fellow officers who were corrupt, was regarded as revolutionary in the 1960s and still is. Murphy always seemed to me to be a man who would have been more comfortable as a Jesuit than as a police officer, but we worked well together and produced a very good book, Commissioner, which dealt in detail with most of the problems that still haunt the NYPD today. This was no small achievement. Before Murphy (and for the most part after him), it was unthinkable for a police commissioner to actually admit in print that there might be anything wrong with the NYPD, and the reaction to Commissioner within the NYPD was pretty similar to that of Bonanno’s among the bosses of organized crime—a combination of shock and outrage.
Murphy was good-natured about the fuss. In his own quiet way, he was a pretty tough cookie, and being a cop himself, cops didn’t scare him—nor mayors either, for he proved to be famously resistant to Mayor Lindsay, who had been under the impression that his police commissioner would take his orders from City Hall. Perhaps because we both enjoyed target shooting, Murphy and I became friendly, and I developed a certain interest in policing. At the time, Murphy had stirred up a lot of bad feelings in the NYPD by opening up more command positions to officers who weren’t of old Irish police stock, and had even suggested that a black and a white officer might share the same police car, a notion so radical that mass resignations were threatened. Once, when I visited Murphy on the top floor of police headquarters, I pointed out to him jokingly that while big changes were being made at the precinct level, practically everybody on his floor, right down to the sergeants, was of Irish descent. It might well be Grabowski and Vitigliano in a prowl car, but on the way to the commissioner’s office the signs on the doors announced an endless succession of sons of Erin among the chiefs, deputy chiefs, and their staff. Murphy was not amused. It had apparently never struck him as strange.
IT WAS because of my friendship with Murphy that I went out to Detroit to meet with an even more radical police commissioner. Ray Girardin was a reporter who had been criticizing the Detroit police department for years, until a reform mayor, in a move that surprised everyone, put Girardin in command of Detroit’s police, with instructions to shake things up. In addition to the usual problems of a big-city police department—corruption, cronyism, antiquated equipment and methods—Detroit was saddled with a