Crusader: The Hell-Raising Police Career of Detective David Durk.

• Author: Graham, Donald E.

Does this break the record for conflicts of interest in a single book review? I know and admire both the subject of this biography and its author. So you're not getting an objective review, but you are getting an honest opinion: This book is a thoroughly deserved vindication of a surpassingly brave and honest man. It's also a hell of a fme book.

David Durk had two micro-seconds of national fame around 1970. An Amherst graduate serving as a New York City police officer, he traveled to bitterly anti-war, anti-police college campuses trying to recruit students to become police officers. He had some success, perhaps because students sensed the presence of someone with even more wild-eyed idealism than they had. Soon thereafter, Durk and his (then) friend and colleague Frank Serpico were the culminating witnesses in the Knapp Commission hearings into police corruption in New York City:

"The average cop, he testified, longed to be honest, but was convinced that 'he lives in the middle of a corrupt society.' The police department had become 'a home for the drug dealers and thieves', in which men who could have been good officers, men of decent impulse ... were told in a hundred ways every day: go along, forget about the law, don't make waves....

`But being a cop also means to be engaged with life ... Being a cop is a vocation, of it is nothing at all, and that's what I saw being destroyed by the corruption of the New York City police department, destroyed for me and for thousands of others like me.'"

This is the story of an unusually honest man who joined an unusually dishonest police department. David Durk is a worldly Don Quixote, a man who knew exactly what he was up against but made the charge anyway. Without important, permanent allies, a single police officer took on the systematic corruption of the nation's largest police department and, later, of New York itself.

The result was inevitable: The city chewed him up and spat him out. He never held an "important" job certainly never a high-paying one). He had prolonged conversations with three mayors about the extent of corruption. Each was intrigued; each thought of giving him some kind of responsibility; none did. When the department retired him, no one would even lift a finger to see that he received a normal pension. His was cut to $17,000 a year by a bureaucratic quirk. And yet, you could argue that in Durk's battles against the city, Durk won as many as he lost. One almost wackily...