David Burnham, a former New York Times investigative reporter whose work uncovering corruption within the New York Police Division circa the Nineteen Seventies impressed the twice Oscar-nominated Serpico, died earlier this week at 91.
Per the Times, he died after a choking incident at dinner, at his house in Spruce Head, Maine, which brought about his coronary heart to cease.
Detective Frank Serpico, an undercover officer who had been attempting to get the police division to crack down on the graft, labored as Burnham’s chief supply, changing into the eventual topic of the 1973 crime thriller wherein Al Pacino performed him.
FRANK SERPICO, Frank Serpico, 2017. ©Sundance Selects/courtesy Everett Assortment
Commemorating the reporter, Serpico wrote on social media, “Couldn’t have performed it with out you David,” alongside a thumbs up and praying emoji.
Burnham was employed by the Occasions in 1967 after telling the late metropolitan editor Arthur Gelb that the information group’s protection of legislation enforcement was “not very good.” A yr after his hiring, he garnered a significant scoop about how officers on in a single day shifts routinely slept of their patrol vehicles. Whereas an assistant editor initially dismissed the reportage, Burnham took time to piece collectively the article on his personal time, ultimately scoring entrance web page publication.
Burnham’s magnum opus, nonetheless, was his three-part exposé sequence that launched April 25, 1970, which resulted in public hearings and the ruined fame of prime officers, together with then-mayor John Lindsay. The investigative studies outlined how officers extorted hundreds of thousands of {dollars} yearly from companies, drug sellers and gamblers amid citywide coverups.
His work additionally launched the Knapp fee, the investigative fee that Lindsay was pressured to type led by lawyer Whitman Knapp. Serpico was a star witness, which led to the indictment of dozens of law enforcement officials and some convictions.
Whereas Serpico was tailored from the nonfiction guide by Peter Maas, the detective had initially requested Burnham to collaborate on a guide with him. Burnham declined.
Later in his profession, Burnham transferred to the paper’s Washington bureau, the place his work consisted of investigating security hazards at nuclear energy crops, main him to grow to be the go-to journalist for business whistleblowers.
One other main story of Burnham’s involved Karen Silkwood, an Oklahoma nuclear facility employee, whose suspicious demise after being contaminated by plutonium grew to become the topic of the 1983 Meryl Streep movie Silkwood. Co-written by Nora Ephron, the drama racked up 5 Academy Award nominations and in addition starred Kurt Russell and Cher. On the time, Burnham instructed Ephron she was not allowed to make use of his identify within the movie.
Explaining his reasoning in a 1984 essay for the Times, he wrote, “To be a personality in a historic occasion which has been reinterpeted by Hollywood for its personal dramatic functions is an irritating and irritating expertise.”
Two years later, Burnham resigned from the Occasions to pursue book-length investigations of governmental establishments, reminiscent of 1990’s A Regulation Unto Itself: Energy, Politics and the IRS and 1996’s Above the Regulation: Secret Offers, Political Fixes and Different Misadventures of the U.S. Division of Justice.
Close to the flip of the century, Burnham helped discovered the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse mission at Syracuse College, a database that’s nonetheless utilized by journalists as an open-records gathering supply.
He’s survived by his spouse Joanne Omang, a former overseas correspondent for The Washington Submit, in addition to his two daughters from his first marriage, Sarah Tayloe Burnham and Molly Shiny Burnham, and 4 grandchildren.
