Frank Serpico
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Frank Serpico is the figure John Kiriakou uses as the measure of police whistleblowing, and one of the few people he describes in unreservedly heroic terms.

The benchmark

Kiriakou introduces later NYPD whistleblowers by reference to him. Presenting the former sergeant Steven Lee on his programme, he described him as "one of the most important NYPD whistleblowers to come out of that organization, at least since Frank Serpico", a formulation that treats Serpico as the last unambiguous case.

The assessment

Kiriakou's own view of him is stated without qualification, and he begins by declaring the connection. "I Like you, I'm friendly with Frank Serpico. Frank Serpico is one of the giants of the 20th century."

The company he places him in is drawn from a different field entirely. "I I put Frank up there with with, you know, the greatest whistleblowers of the 20th century, Daniel Ellsberg, for example."

The shooting

The detail Kiriakou returns to is not the corruption Serpico exposed but what his colleagues did afterwards. "Frank was actually shot in the face... and his and his police colleagues didn't even call an ambulance. They wanted him to die in this drug operation."

He uses that fact as a question rather than an anecdote, putting it to another whistleblower who had gone undercover against corrupt officers: "Did you fear for your safety when you realized that this deck was secretly stacked against you? Did you fear for your safety out there on the street?"

The continuity

Kiriakou's larger point about Serpico is that nothing has changed since. He notes on the same programme that New York's police department was paralysed by corruption investigations in the 1970s, and endorses the observation that the mechanisms used against whistleblowers today are the same ones used then: "they use the same playbook... And they didn't just invent it. I mean, look at Serpico."

Serpico therefore functions in Kiriakou's account both as a hero and as evidence, proof that the treatment he himself received from the CIA was not a departure but a norm with a fifty-year pedigree in another institution entirely.

See also

- The legal definition of whistleblowing
- There Is Almost No Upside
- Whistleblower psychology
- Edward Snowden
