This section is an insider's view of police corruption and misconduct as told by police
officers. Unfortunately, some of the police officers penned these stories from behind bars.
Daniel J. Shanahan’s book “Badges,
Bullets and Bars” tells the story of his career on the Baltimore Police Department.
The book is billed as a “first hand account of police loyalty and disloyalty.” Moreover, according to Shanahan he wrote the book, “for all the excellent Law Enforcement officers
who shortened their careers by crossing the thin blue line and venturing into the wrong territory; sometimes into criminal
territory. Therefore permanently tarnishing their badge, reputation, family,
and all the good that badge stands for. This book is for the police officers that could not find their way back, wanted to
make a difference, and unfortunately, could have.”
Samuel Clark’s book, “Total Misconduct”,
presents a detailed account of corruption and official misconduct within the Newark Police D. To some, the shocking events
described in this book may appear to be exaggerated. Unfortunately, they are not. Clark worked with a handful of brave police
officers to expose the existence of wide spread police corruption in the Newark Police Department. These officers presented
documentary evidence of serious police corruption to local and state politicians, a county prosecutor, the State Attorney
General, the U.S. Attorney General, and the FBI.
“Brotherhood of Corruption: A Cop Breaks the Silence on Police Abuse,
Brutality, and Racial Profiling,” “offers a harrowing inside look at the corrupt practices used by police in enforcing
drug laws and the blue wall of silence that insulates them. No angel as a youth, Juarez jumped at the chance to become a cop,
like his father, and the opportunity for stability, job security, and maybe a chance to correct some social ills. As a member
of an elite narcotics unit, what he found instead were glaring inequities--repeated busts of street-corner dealers but a blind
eye toward the dealing and use of drugs in more rarefied circles. He witnessed police abuse of power, beatings of suspects,
sexual abuse of female suspects, and repeated use of racial profiling in arrests and prosecutions in the war on drugs. He
succumbed to temptation and joined his colleagues in abuse and corruption. Disillusionment and his own personal demons eventually
led to his downfall. This is a starkly revealing look at how urban policing oversteps the bounds of the law in the so-called
war on drugs.”
Kevin LaChapelle was a police officer with El
Cajon Police Department (California). LaChapell’s book, “Please God,
Don’t Let My Badge Tarnish.” is the story of his discovery of corruption within the El Cajon Police Department
and his struggle to work within the department. Rather than turn his back on the scandal and save his career, LaChapelle begins
a courageous fight to expose the corruption. At the same time, he earns awards for his work in helping young people turn away
from gangs and violence.
In 1965, Michael Corbitt joined the William Springs Police Department (Illinois). As he rose through the ranks of the department and ultimately became the chief of
police (1973-1981), he would also rise through the ranks of the mob. Corbitt
left Willow Springs in 1981 to work as an investigator for the Cook County Sheriff’s Department. While a sheriff’s investigator he was also acted as a bodyguard, courier and driver mob crime boss,
Sam “Momo” Giancana. In 1989, Corbitt, along with two others, was
convicted of murdering the wife of a “mob” attorney. While in prison,
a hit directed toward Corbitt motivated him to become an FBI attorney. Once paroled
in 1998, he teamed up with his former mob boss’s nephew Sam Giancana and wrote "Double Deal: The Inside Story of Murder,
Unbridled Corruption and the Cop Who Was a Mobster."
Randy Jurgensen was born and raised in New York
City. He served in the U.S. Army as a Paratrooper and Green Beret. Randy received numerous medals for his military duty, including
three Bronze Stars; and the Purple Heart. After returning from his military service in Korea, he joined the New York Police
Department. During his tenure with the NYPD, Randy worked as an undercover Narcotics Detective and a homicide detective in
Harlem. During his Harlem years, the murder of Police Officer Philip Cardillo became the catalyst for one of the largest scandals
in the history of the NYPD.
Randy
Jurgensen, along with his co-author Robert Cea (retired NYPD), give an account of the scandal in “Circle of Six: The
True Story of New York's Most Notorious Cop-Killer and the Cop Who Risked Everything to Catch Him.” According to the book, ‘On Friday, April 14, 1972, the police were summoned to Mosque Number 7 in
Harlem, led at the time by the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan, for a ten-thirteen: officer in need of help. The turn of
events after this police officer distress call has become perhaps the most legendary story in NYPD history. Police entered
the Mosque and a conflict occurred, leaving Office Cardillo dead; and, the city on the brink of a full-scale riot. Sensing
a potential crisis and conflict with the Nation of Islam and the Black Liberation Army, New York City Mayor John Lindsay,
Commissioner Benjamin Ward, and Congressman Charles Rangel acquiesced to the city's black leaders and ordered the police out
of the Mosque.
Subsequently, the details of Officer Cardillo's
murder and the events of what happened at the Mosque were covered up and an investigation was never truly launched until NYPD
detective Randy Jurgensen began his own investigation. For four years, he would not rest, taking on the Mayor, his superiors
in the NYPD, the Nation of Islam, and seemingly at times, the entire city of New York, before he could affect an arrest. His
investigation revealed the tragic and shameful story of the political scandal and cover-up that rocked the NYPD and the Nation
of Islam.
Robert Cea, Randy Jurgensen's co-author, is also a former NYPD detective. As
a new recruit Cea learned of Jurgensen's heroism, and the tales of this case are told to this day to each and every recruit
at the Police Academy. When Robert Cea retired from the NYPD, he was the fifth-most-decorated officer in the department's
history. And he was still only in his early thirties. David Pitt of the American Library Association asks, “So why would
an ambitious, aggressive, highly respected detective end his career so early? Because, like others before him, Cea had fought
bitter battles with his own conscience over the way he did his job. The book explores one of a police officer's toughest dilemmas:
When and how much is it necessary to bend the rules in order to catch the bad guys? This isn't a story of police corruption
in the manner of Serpico or Prince of the City. This one is about moral corruption, about one man's personal descent into
dishonesty.” “No Lights, No Sirens : The Corruption and Redemption
of an Inner City Cop” is Robert Cea’s “sometimes shocking memoir, which is written in honest, gritty prose.”
Raymond Schaffer believed the new sheriff when
he said there would be no retribution against those who had supported his opponent. However, days after the sheriff took office,
Schaffer discovered he was wrong. “Surviving: Drunk Drivers-Gutter Politics
and Police,” is Raymond Schaffer’s autobiographical account of employee persecution in law enforcement.
In 1991, Sergeant Bill Hubbard was a member of
the Lubbock Police Department, assigned to the identification section. What begins
as a routine task sends Hubbard on a collision course with a corrupt forensic pathologist and “power-hungry district
attorney.” As one reader said, “Well written, quick paced and quite
a ride. It's easy to get lost in this book, until it sends a shiver down your spine when you remember this is a true story.”
Stephen Peach emigrated from England to the United
States in 1986. In 1991, after becoming a U.S. Citizen, he joined the San Bernardino Police Department. According to Peach himself, “This book exposes the dirty underside of Law Enforcement politics. I
was a highly regarded gang and SWAT officer that was the victim of 2 accidental shootings within 2 weeks of each other by
other officers.” Stephen Peach further comments about his book, “My
book exposes the corruption that City Governments allow to occur to protect their civil liability. Many other corrupt activities
that I have exposed in my book have never been exposed before. This is a true story of many different crimes that administrators
and their corrupt subordinates have committed that they would rather not have exposed.”
Former Los Angeles Police Department police officer Charles Stoker blasted
1940s corruption in the LAPD. In 1951, Charles Stoker published “Thicker’n
Thieves.” According to the book cover, “where corrupt police officers,
venal politicians and office-holders claimed to have been fighting the underworld, Stocker fought it personally, furiously
and with everything at his command to the point where he was framed and fired for “CONDUCT UNBECOMING A POLICE OFFICER”
because he testified to the fact before the 1949 Los Angeles Grand Jury. Aside
from being a cold steel account of what transpired during his tenure as an officer, this is the highly human story of young
Texan, Stoker.” Stoker’s 1951 bombshell is now a 2006 collectable,
selling for as much as $500.
Shades of Grey is the
autobiography of Gary Lee Bordelon who was a Louisiana State Trooper and a Louisiana State Narcotic Agent. His book depicts the corruption Gary Bordelon witnessed by other fellow city and state Louisiana police
officers, until his dismissal as a state Louisiana police officer and state narcotic agent in April of 1979. His personal tale of corruption details drug dealing, lying and stealing done by other fellow officers. It breaks down dates and times of several shake downs and meetings that resulted in
many arrests.
Lines Crossed is the true story of Alex Richardson,
a Lake County Sheriff’s Department (Indiana) a narcotics detective who was ultimately sentenced to federal prison for
taking a bribe from a drug dealer. His book, Lines
Crossed: The True Story Of An Undercover Cop, describes the activities of the County drug task force; and, “he
also reveals his gambling habit, and the corruption that takes place while working narcotics.”
Alex Richardson grew up in Gary, Indiana. He left at the age of 18, joining the Army where he was a military policeman. He graduated Airborne School becoming a paratrooper, then finished his enlistment
by serving in a special operations unit at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. After his
military duties he served as a patrolman on the Lake County, Indiana, Sheriff’s Department before serving over two years
as an undercover detective on the Lake County Drug Task Force.
Larry Nevers became a police officer for the Detroit
Police Department at the age of twenty-eight. During his 24 year career, he spent
four years in patrol and the next twenty years in a variety of undercover assignments.
During his career, he made more than 5,000 felony arrests, received over 100 Detroit Police Department honors. Moreover, he was awarded the Michigan Police Chiefs Association Medal.
According to the book description, Good Cops, Bad Verdict “is Detroit police officer Larry Nevers’s own account of how
a good arrest turned into a nightmare that left a stubbornly resisting cocaine user dead and two respected veteran policeman
on trial for murder. Nevers, at the time only a few months from retirement as one of the city’s most decorated cops,
was convicted in a racially charged trial broadcast on national television. Nevers explains in compelling detail the reasons
he believes it was the criminal justice system, not he and his partner, that ran amok in the matter of Malice Green’s
death.”
James
Lardner is a senior fellow at Demos was a police officer for the Metropolitan Police Department (Washington, DC) for two and
half years during the early 1970s. Today, he is a well-regard researcher and
writer. As a journalist, he has written for the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Nation,
among other publications. He is the author of Crusader: The Hell-Raising Police
Career of Detective David Durk; and, the co-author of NYPD: A
City and Its Police and the editor of Inequality Matters: The
Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences.
According
to the book description of Crusader: The Hell-Raising Police Career of Detective
David Durk, “When David Durk joined the New York City Police Department in 1963, he found an organization
with its own set of rules, where bribery and payoffs were routine and no one wanted to be disturbed. Durk set out to fix the
whole mess. For 22 years, until he was forced to retire at age 51, he was a thorn in the side of mayors, police commissioners,
commanders, sergeants, and beat cops alike. His crusading led to an investigation into police corruption in the 1970s by the
Knapp Commission (credit for which usually goes to Frank Serpico) and more recently, the Mollen Commission.”
