In Rural Oasis, Serpico Finds New Adversaries
...
Mr. Serpico became one of the most famous police officers in the history of New York after he helped uncover one of the Police Department’s most infamous corruption scandals. But speaking out carried a price — he became a pariah inside the force, and his career ended soon after he was shot in the face in 1971 during a drug raid gone bad and fellow officers delayed calling an ambulance.
His convalescence here, a two-hour drive north of New York City, has been Mr. Serpico’s second act. He wandered Europe and North America for a decade and then, in the early 1980s, built a rustic one-room cabin with no furnace overlooking the Hudson and began living a monastic life in nature.
But now Mr. Serpico’s serenity has been broken and he finds himself battling a new nemesis. This time, it is not an entire agency, but a local developer and town officials who Mr. Serpico says have ignored his complaints; this time, it is not over issues like taking cash payments from drug dealers, but over the fate of some trees and the desecration of pristine woodland.
“It’s like fighting the system again,” Mr. Serpico said. “Here I’m trying to enjoy my tranquillity and I’m being dragged back into a world of corruption.”
Read the rest: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/nyregion/for-serpico-who-fought-police-corruption-a-new-conflict-over-woodland.html?pagewanted=all&_r=5&