Cars would stop and park illegally, double or triple, while drivers did their business with men who glided over the side walk, packages in hand, or simply leaned into open windows to talk to their customers.Ī police surveillance image catches the activity one summer afternoon. Except, so much of it was not the usual traffic flow you would expect to see. In the tradition of so many Mafia legends, Morello will die by the gun, shot in an office in August 1930, only a few hundred yards from the corner.īy the end of 1968, it’s as busy a junction as will be found in a borough of 200,000. The smell of organized crime carried in the wind across the Harlem River as though its very odor was a part of the community it was infesting. The alleged boss of all Mafia bosses, Giuseppe Morello, had lived for a time on East 138 Street, barely a mile from the avenue. Mafia had been infiltrating this part of the city since before the turn of the twentieth-century. Generations of them had honed their skills on the avenue, and surrounding streets, which sat in the original Little Italy of New York, long before Mulberry Street assumed that mantle.īy the 1920s, there were over 100,000 Italians living in an area of fifty square blocks that made up Harlem. It was a neighborhood long tainted with the stench of Mafia criminals. They had met each other in 1966, and stayed friends, before becoming allies in a war on police corruption.īetween midnight and dawn there was an endless train of gangsters, hoodlums, thieves and drug-traffickers passing through and hanging out on the comer of 117th Street and Pleasant Avenue. In the months ahead, he would become not only familiar with drugs, drug dealers, street criminals and Mafiosi, but would also find himself caught up in a vortex of scandal, graft and media frenzy as he triggered his own investigation into deception and the worst level of malfeasance among his fellow New York police officers.Īlthough everyone knows of Frank Serpico and his epic struggle to end the cycle of police misconduct in The Big Apple, it was in fact Durk who began the crusade, and then Serpico joined him to carry on the fight. READ: One Mafia murder and everyone ends up in prison – Lucchese crime family bosses and hitmen found guilty.He could well have been a stranger in a foreign land trying to understand a social grouping as divorced from his life as a visitor from Mars. Durk, who had never been involved in police activities that operated to detect and arrest drug-dealers, was astonished at what was going on. In early February, Durk and the old man drove to the avenue, and sat in the car as snow fell softly while the printer described what was happening around them. He was being offered $1,000 a week or more, to peddle heroin from someone called “Ernie Boy.” He would be Oreste Abbamonte (left), an up and coming young hoodlum attached to the Gambino crime family, who operated his business from a store-front on 1st Avenue, one block west of Pleasant Avenue. He asked Durk to help him try to save his son, Vinnie, who was being dragged into the underworld’s drug trafficking, in and around East Harlem on Manhattan’s upper east-side. The man had approached him as Durk left a shop in Greenwich village, and said, “You look like an honest cop”, and so it began. Sometime towards the end of 1968, he met an old man who worked as a printer for one of the city’s many newspapers. An endless job in a city with more than its fair share of crime, fraud and graft. Their job was to examine and investigate corruption and other failings within the local government’s many divisions. David Durk, who was born in 1935, joined the New York Police in 1963, and by the closing of the 1960s, was a detective attached to the city’s Department of Investigation, which served as an independent and non-partisan watchdog for New York City government.
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