Andrew Adler
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Judge Whitman Knapp
The New York Times, June 15, 2004, p. C17
Whitman Knapp, Judge Who Exposed Police Corruption, Dies at 95
By Richard Severo
Whitman Knapp, a federal judge with a prosecutor's tenacity and a Wall Street pedigree who led New York City
through a tumultuous two-year investigation into widespread police corruption in the early 1970's, died yesterday at
Cabrini Hospice in Manhattan. He was 95 and lived in Manhattan.
As the commission's inquiry concluded, in 1972, Mr. Knapp was named to the Southern District bench by President
Richard M. Nixon and remained on the court until his death, most recently in senior status. He presided at many major
trials, including the corruption case of the Bronx Democratic leader, Stanley M. Friedman, who was convicted in 1986
in a racketeering conspiracy that involved bribery and fraud in connection with a multimillion-dollar city contract.
But it was a phone call from Mayor John V. Lindsay in the spring of 1970 that led to Judge Knapp's most visible role:
chairman of a five-member commission that would reveal, over many months, a pattern of corruption familiar in
precinct houses throughout the five boroughs. From organized shakedowns at bars and construction sites, to payoffs
from gamblers and drug dealers to ignore their growing influence, no officer seemed to be immune from the scourge
of a department found to be riddled with graft and unable to police itself.
The principal catalyst for the inquiry came from a series of articles in The New York Times by David Burnham, a
reporter who had earlier shed light on a widespread police habit called "cooping," in which officers drove their patrol
cars to out-of-the-way places to nap.
The articles that helped lead to the Knapp inquiry came about after The Times was approached by two disgruntled
police detectives, Frank Serpico and David Durk, who had voiced their concerns and disgust to various officials in the
Lindsay administration, including Jay Kriegel, a top aide to the mayor, and Arnold G. Fraiman, the head of the city's
Commission of Investigations. Mr. Serpico later complained publicly that neither man seemed interested in what he
had to say.
The commission report, based on the work of a 30-person staff, including about a dozen investigators, asserted that
the Lindsay administration had failed to promptly investigate reports on specific corrupt acts, despite evidence that
the corruption was widespread.
It faulted the mayor and the police commissioner, Howard R. Leary, for having "failed to exercise leadership in the
field of corruption." Mr. Lindsay said that over his then five years in office, he had asked the police many times to
take "vigorous and firm action" to correct their own abuses. Mr. Leary quit before the commission filed its report.
On the basis of the commission's work, several dozen indictments were issued and there were some convictions,
although not many, given the scope of the report. If some wrongdoers managed to evade punishment because of lack
of evidence, they saw their careers compromised or downgraded because of the inquiry.
The report has been credited, however, with ridding the department of the kind of pervasive corruption that Judge
Knapp's commission uncovered and, among other things, led to the establishment of an undercover anticorruption
force within the department.
But for Mr. Lindsay, it was a political blow from which he did not fully recover. The mayor had worked hard at trying
to calm the racial and economic tensions of 1960's New York, but the report faulted him, saying he "cannot escape
responsibility" for what happened.
Percy Whitman Knapp was born on Feb. 24, 1909, the son of Wallace Percy Knapp, a New York lawyer, and the
former Caroline Morgan Miller. He dropped the Percy before he went to college.
His mother died when he was 3 years old and, five years later, Percy and two older sisters were sent to live with their
maternal grandmother, Mary Miller. The Knapps were in the Social Register, and Whitman was groomed to carry on
family traditions of success and influence. He went to private schools in New York City, prepped at Choate, then was
admitted to Yale, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1931. His college career gave no hint of his
interest in law or in writing.
He wasn't sure what he wanted to do - he gave no indication that he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps - but
before his senior year was over, he ventured to Cambridge, Mass., and sat in some classes at Harvard Law School.
"It was enough to make me decide that was where I wanted to go," he said.
At Harvard Law, he became editor of the Harvard Law Review, graduated in 1934 and got a job almost immediately
with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in Manhattan. He remained there until 1938, when he left to become an assistant
district attorney in Manhattan under the racket-busting Thomas E. Dewey, for whom he had campaigned in 1937.
By 1941, Mr. Knapp began to think it was time to return to private life, and so he joined the law firm of Donovan,
Leisure, Newton & Lumbard. But within a year, Frank S. Hogan became Manhattan's district attorney. He thought
highly of Mr. Knapp, with whom he had worked in Mr. Dewey's office, and persuaded him to return to the fold. Mr.
Knapp worked well under Mr. Hogan and at one point was chief of three bureaus - appeals, indictments and fraud.
One of his most memorable, and briefest, court appearances grew out of a 1947 decision to ban Edmund Wilson's
"Memoirs of Hecate County" from sale on the grounds that it was obscene and might have "a bad effect" on "the
immature or depraved."
It did not matter to New York that virtually every other major city and state in the union permitted the book to be
sold, which was not surprising, since Mr. Wilson had long been known as a distinguished critic, author and dramatist.
But the naysayers said some of his descriptions of sex play were "clinical."
Doubleday was the publisher, and it appealed the New York ruling to the United States Supreme Court. Rather than
rehash the contents of the book, Mr. Knapp rose and said: "The New York statute is valid. Readings by the court of
the book will demonstrate the factual finding of obscenity is reasonable.'' Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter refused to
participate in the case and the other justices were tied, 4-4. So the New York ruling was permitted to stand, although
a subsequent decision overturned it.
In 1950, Mr. Knapp left Mr. Hogan's office to again enter private practice. In the years ahead, he served as a special
counsel to Mr. Dewey, who had become governor of New York, and was a member of the commission that revised the
state's criminal code. He also served in 1953 and 1954 as special counsel to the Waterfront Commission of New York
Harbor, which investigated corruption on the New York docks.
Looking back on the work of the Knapp Commission, Judge Knapp said that the relatively few convictions did not
matter as much as his work did, for he felt his work had changed the culture of the police so that they took charges of
corruption in their midst more seriously. The cultural change did not last as long or go as deep as he would have
liked, since there were other police scandals in the decades ahead. Judge Knapp felt that many of the scandals came
in part from the nature of the law itself.
In 1993, Judge Knapp joined with Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the Eastern District, based in Brooklyn, in declaring that
they no longer would preside over drug trials, a decision that already had been made quietly by federal judges across
the country.
In doing so, they were protesting what they called the failed national drug policies and sentencing guidelines that they
said emphasized arrests and imprisonment, rather than prevention and treatment.
Over the years, Judge Knapp developed a reputation for having a quick temper and being acerbic on the bench. But
he resisted becoming cynical, never losing faith in the ability of police to do the right thing. He said that the public
should not he judgmental about the behavior of the police since, "Human nature being human nature, everyone can
be subject to temptation."
Mr. Knapp married Ann Fallert in 1962. They had a son, Gregory Wallace Knapp. By a previous marriage, to Julie
Marrow, he had three other children, a son, Whitman E. Knapp, of Brookline, Mass., and two daughters, Caroline
Hines, of Manhattan, and Marion Knapp, of Eau Clair, Wis.; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Mr. Knapp enjoyed good health and was quite vigorous until 1995, when he injured himself in a horseback-riding
accident in Millbrook, N.Y., which cracked his hip and ribs and caused a collapsed lung. But even after the accident, he
said he planned to keep working as a judge because "I cannot think of anything more interesting to do."
The New York Times, June 15, 2004, p. C17
Whitman Knapp, Judge Who Exposed Police Corruption, Dies at 95
By Richard Severo
Whitman Knapp, a federal judge with a prosecutor's tenacity and a Wall Street pedigree who led New York City
through a tumultuous two-year investigation into widespread police corruption in the early 1970's, died yesterday at
Cabrini Hospice in Manhattan. He was 95 and lived in Manhattan.
As the commission's inquiry concluded, in 1972, Mr. Knapp was named to the Southern District bench by President
Richard M. Nixon and remained on the court until his death, most recently in senior status. He presided at many major
trials, including the corruption case of the Bronx Democratic leader, Stanley M. Friedman, who was convicted in 1986
in a racketeering conspiracy that involved bribery and fraud in connection with a multimillion-dollar city contract.
But it was a phone call from Mayor John V. Lindsay in the spring of 1970 that led to Judge Knapp's most visible role:
chairman of a five-member commission that would reveal, over many months, a pattern of corruption familiar in
precinct houses throughout the five boroughs. From organized shakedowns at bars and construction sites, to payoffs
from gamblers and drug dealers to ignore their growing influence, no officer seemed to be immune from the scourge
of a department found to be riddled with graft and unable to police itself.
The principal catalyst for the inquiry came from a series of articles in The New York Times by David Burnham, a
reporter who had earlier shed light on a widespread police habit called "cooping," in which officers drove their patrol
cars to out-of-the-way places to nap.
The articles that helped lead to the Knapp inquiry came about after The Times was approached by two disgruntled
police detectives, Frank Serpico and David Durk, who had voiced their concerns and disgust to various officials in the
Lindsay administration, including Jay Kriegel, a top aide to the mayor, and Arnold G. Fraiman, the head of the city's
Commission of Investigations. Mr. Serpico later complained publicly that neither man seemed interested in what he
had to say.
The commission report, based on the work of a 30-person staff, including about a dozen investigators, asserted that
the Lindsay administration had failed to promptly investigate reports on specific corrupt acts, despite evidence that
the corruption was widespread.
It faulted the mayor and the police commissioner, Howard R. Leary, for having "failed to exercise leadership in the
field of corruption." Mr. Lindsay said that over his then five years in office, he had asked the police many times to
take "vigorous and firm action" to correct their own abuses. Mr. Leary quit before the commission filed its report.
On the basis of the commission's work, several dozen indictments were issued and there were some convictions,
although not many, given the scope of the report. If some wrongdoers managed to evade punishment because of lack
of evidence, they saw their careers compromised or downgraded because of the inquiry.
The report has been credited, however, with ridding the department of the kind of pervasive corruption that Judge
Knapp's commission uncovered and, among other things, led to the establishment of an undercover anticorruption
force within the department.
But for Mr. Lindsay, it was a political blow from which he did not fully recover. The mayor had worked hard at trying
to calm the racial and economic tensions of 1960's New York, but the report faulted him, saying he "cannot escape
responsibility" for what happened.
Percy Whitman Knapp was born on Feb. 24, 1909, the son of Wallace Percy Knapp, a New York lawyer, and the
former Caroline Morgan Miller. He dropped the Percy before he went to college.
His mother died when he was 3 years old and, five years later, Percy and two older sisters were sent to live with their
maternal grandmother, Mary Miller. The Knapps were in the Social Register, and Whitman was groomed to carry on
family traditions of success and influence. He went to private schools in New York City, prepped at Choate, then was
admitted to Yale, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1931. His college career gave no hint of his
interest in law or in writing.
He wasn't sure what he wanted to do - he gave no indication that he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps - but
before his senior year was over, he ventured to Cambridge, Mass., and sat in some classes at Harvard Law School.
"It was enough to make me decide that was where I wanted to go," he said.
At Harvard Law, he became editor of the Harvard Law Review, graduated in 1934 and got a job almost immediately
with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in Manhattan. He remained there until 1938, when he left to become an assistant
district attorney in Manhattan under the racket-busting Thomas E. Dewey, for whom he had campaigned in 1937.
By 1941, Mr. Knapp began to think it was time to return to private life, and so he joined the law firm of Donovan,
Leisure, Newton & Lumbard. But within a year, Frank S. Hogan became Manhattan's district attorney. He thought
highly of Mr. Knapp, with whom he had worked in Mr. Dewey's office, and persuaded him to return to the fold. Mr.
Knapp worked well under Mr. Hogan and at one point was chief of three bureaus - appeals, indictments and fraud.
One of his most memorable, and briefest, court appearances grew out of a 1947 decision to ban Edmund Wilson's
"Memoirs of Hecate County" from sale on the grounds that it was obscene and might have "a bad effect" on "the
immature or depraved."
It did not matter to New York that virtually every other major city and state in the union permitted the book to be
sold, which was not surprising, since Mr. Wilson had long been known as a distinguished critic, author and dramatist.
But the naysayers said some of his descriptions of sex play were "clinical."
Doubleday was the publisher, and it appealed the New York ruling to the United States Supreme Court. Rather than
rehash the contents of the book, Mr. Knapp rose and said: "The New York statute is valid. Readings by the court of
the book will demonstrate the factual finding of obscenity is reasonable.'' Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter refused to
participate in the case and the other justices were tied, 4-4. So the New York ruling was permitted to stand, although
a subsequent decision overturned it.
In 1950, Mr. Knapp left Mr. Hogan's office to again enter private practice. In the years ahead, he served as a special
counsel to Mr. Dewey, who had become governor of New York, and was a member of the commission that revised the
state's criminal code. He also served in 1953 and 1954 as special counsel to the Waterfront Commission of New York
Harbor, which investigated corruption on the New York docks.
Looking back on the work of the Knapp Commission, Judge Knapp said that the relatively few convictions did not
matter as much as his work did, for he felt his work had changed the culture of the police so that they took charges of
corruption in their midst more seriously. The cultural change did not last as long or go as deep as he would have
liked, since there were other police scandals in the decades ahead. Judge Knapp felt that many of the scandals came
in part from the nature of the law itself.
In 1993, Judge Knapp joined with Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the Eastern District, based in Brooklyn, in declaring that
they no longer would preside over drug trials, a decision that already had been made quietly by federal judges across
the country.
In doing so, they were protesting what they called the failed national drug policies and sentencing guidelines that they
said emphasized arrests and imprisonment, rather than prevention and treatment.
Over the years, Judge Knapp developed a reputation for having a quick temper and being acerbic on the bench. But
he resisted becoming cynical, never losing faith in the ability of police to do the right thing. He said that the public
should not he judgmental about the behavior of the police since, "Human nature being human nature, everyone can
be subject to temptation."
Mr. Knapp married Ann Fallert in 1962. They had a son, Gregory Wallace Knapp. By a previous marriage, to Julie
Marrow, he had three other children, a son, Whitman E. Knapp, of Brookline, Mass., and two daughters, Caroline
Hines, of Manhattan, and Marion Knapp, of Eau Clair, Wis.; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Mr. Knapp enjoyed good health and was quite vigorous until 1995, when he injured himself in a horseback-riding
accident in Millbrook, N.Y., which cracked his hip and ribs and caused a collapsed lung. But even after the accident, he
said he planned to keep working as a judge because "I cannot think of anything more interesting to do."