In the 1981 police drama, “Prince of the City,” both cops and criminals use plenty of four-letter words.
But the word both groups consider the most obscene is spelled is spelled with three letters: R-a-t.
The movie is based on the true-life story of former NYPD detective Robert Leuci (“Danny Ciello” in the film, and played by Treat Williams). It’s based on the best-selling nonfiction book, Prince of the City, by Robert Daley, a former deputy commissioner with NYPD.
Leuci/Ciello volunteers to work undercover against massive corruption among lawyers, bail bondsmen and even his fellow narcotics agents.
Along the way, the movie gives viewers numerous insights into not only how real-world cops work but how they see the world–and their role in it.
Robert Leuci (“Danny Ciello” in “Prince of the City”)
In its first scenes, “Prince” shows members of the elite Special Investigating Unit (SIU) preparing for a major raid on an apartment of Columbian drug-dealers.
Ciello, sitting in a restaurant, gets a tip on the Columbians from one of his informants. He then phones it in to his fellow officers. Together, they raid the apartment, assault the dealers, and confiscate their drugs and money.
The film makes it clear that even an elite detective squad can’t operate effectively without informants. And in narcotics cases, these are either addicts willing to sell out their suppliers or other drug-dealers willing to sell out their competitors.
For the cops, the payoff is information that leads to arrests. In the case of the SIU, that means big, headline-grabbing arrests.
Drug raid
With their superiors happy, the stree-level detectives are largely unsupervised–which is how they like it. Because most of them are doing a brisk business shaking down drug-dealers for their cash.
For their informants, the payoffs come in several forms, including:
- Allowing addicts to continue using illegal drugs.
- Supplying addicts with drugs, such as heroin.
- Allowing drug-dealers to continue doing business.
- Supplying drug-dealers with information about upcoming police raids on their locations.
All of these activities are strictly against the law. But to the men charged with enforcing anti-narcotics laws, this is the price to be paid for effective policing.
But not all police informants are criminals. Many of them work in highly technical industries–such as phone companies.
A “connection” such as this is truly prized. With it, a detective can illegally eavesdrop on the conversations of those he’s targeting.
He doesn’t have to go through the hassles of getting a court-approved wiretap. Assuming he has enough evidence to convince a judge to grant such a wiretap.
A top priority for any cop–especially a narcotics cop–is protecting the identities of his informants.
At the very least, exposing such identities could lead to embarrassment, unemployment, arrest and imprisonment. At worst, it could lead to the murder of those informants by enraged criminals.
But there is another reason for protecting the identity of informants: The cop who amasses a roster of prized informants is seen as someone special within the police department, by colleagues and superiors alike.
He knows “something” they do not. And that “something” allows him to make a lot of arrests–which, in turn, reflects well on the police department.
If those arrests end in convictions, his status within the department is further enhanced.
But while a cop is always on the lookout for informants against potential targets, that doesn’t prevent him from generally holding such people in contempt.
“Rats,” “finks,” “stool pigeons,” “canaries,” “informers”–these are among the more printable terms (for most media) cops use to describe those who betray the trust of others.
Such terms are never used by cops when speaking to their informants.
For cops, the most feared- and -hated part of every police department is its Internal Affairs Division (IAD). This is the unit charged with investigating allegations of illegal behavior by police.
For most cops, IAD represents the devil incarnate. Any officer who would be willing to “lock up” a “brother officer” is considered a traitor to the police brotherhood.
Even if that “brother officer” is engaging in behavior that completely violates his sworn oath “to protect and serve.”
In “Prince of the City,” Danny Ciello gives voice to just these feelings.
He’s preparing to betray the trust of his fellow narcotics officers by exposing the massive corruption among them. Yet he fiercely rejects the idea that he is a “rat.”
“A rat is when they catch you and make you an informer,” he tells his wife. “This is my game.”
Ciello has volunteered to obtain evidence of corruption; he’s not under some prosecutor’s thumb. That, to him, makes him different from a “rat.”
Of course, once Ciello’s cover is blown and his fellow cops learn what he has done, they will forever brand him a “rat,” the worst sort of turncoat.
The movie ends with Ciello now teaching surveillance classes at the NYPD Academy. A student asks: “Are you the Detective Ciello?”
“I’m Detective Ciello.”
“I don’t think I have anything to learn from you.”
For viewers seeking to learn the workings–and mindsets–of real-world police agencies, “Prince of the City” has a great many lessons to teach.
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MORE LESSONS FROM “LINCOLN”
In Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Social commentary on December 5, 2014 at 12:00 amSteven Spielberg’s 2012 movie Lincoln serves up a timely reminder that has long been obscured by past and current Southern lies.
Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) tours a Civil War battlefield
From first to last, the cause of the Civil War was slavery.
According to The Destructive War, by Charles Royster, arguments over “states’ rights” or economic conflict between North and South didn’t lead 13 Southern states to withdraw from the Union in 1860-61.
It was their demand for “respect” of their “peculiar institution”–i.e., slavery.
“The respect Southerners demanded did not consist simply of the states’ sovereignty or of the equal rights of Northern and Southern citizens, including slaveholders’ right to take their chattels into Northern territory.
“It entailed, too, respect for their assertion of the moral superiority of slaveholding society over free society,” writes Royster.
It was not enough for Southerners to claim equal standing with Northerners; Northerners must acknowledge it.
But this was something that the North was increasingly unwilling to do. Finally, its citizens dared to elect Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860.
Lincoln and his new Republican party damned slavery-–and slaveholders-–as morally evil, obsolete and ultimately doomed. And they were determined to prevent slavery from spreading any further throughout the country.
Southerners found all of this intolerable.
The British author, Anthony Trollope, explained to his readers:
“It is no light thing to be told daily, by our fellow citizens…that you are guilty of the one damning sin that cannot be forgiven.
“All this [Southerners] could partly moderate, partly rebuke and partly bear as long as political power remained in their hands.”
It is to Spielberg’s credit that he forces his audience to look directly at the real cause of the bloodiest conflict on the North American continent.
At the heart of Spielberg’s film: Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) wants to win ratification of what will be the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. An amendment that will forever ban slavery.
But, almost four years into the war, slavery still has powerful friends–in both the North and South.
Many of those friends belong to the House of Representatives, which must ratify the amendment for it to become law.
Some are hostile to Lincoln personally. One of them dubs him a dictator: “Abraham Africanus.” Another accuses him of shifting his positions for the sake of expediency.
Other members–white men all–are hostile to the idea of “equality between the races.”
To them, ending slavery means opening the door to interracial marriage–especially marriage between black men and white women. Perhaps even worse, it means possibly giving blacks–or women–the right to vote.
Members of Lincoln’s own Cabinet–such as Secretary of State William Seward–warn him: You can negotiate the end of the war immediately–if you’ll just let Southerners keep their slaves.
After the amendment wins ratification, Lincoln agrees to meet with a “peace delegation” from the Confederate States of America.
At the top of their list of concerns: If they persude the seceded states to return to the Union, will those states be allowed to nullify the amdnement?
No, says Lincoln. He’s willing to make peace with the South, and on highly generous terms. But not at the cost of allowing slavery to live on.
Too many men–North and South–have died in a conflict whose root cause is slavery. Those lives must count for more than simply reuniting the Union.
For the Southern “peace commissioners,” this is totally unacceptable.
The South has lost thousands of men (260,000 is the generally accepted figure for its total casualties) and the war is clearly lost. But for its die-hard leaders, parting with slavery is simply unthinkable.
Like Nazi Germany 80 years into the future, the high command of the South won’t surrender until their armies are too beaten down to fight any more.
The major difference between the defeated South of 1865 and the defeated Germany of 1945, is this: The South was allowed to build a beautiful myth of a glorious “Lost Cause,” epitomized by Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind.
In that telling, dutiful slaves were well-treated by kindly masters. Southern aristocrats wore white suits and their slender-waisted ladies wore long dresses, carried parisols and said “fiddle-dee-dee” to young, handsome suitors.
One million people attended the premier of the movie version in Atlanta on December 15, 1939.
The celebration featured stars from the film, receptions, thousands of Confederate flags, false antebellum fronts on stores and homes, and a costume ball.
In keeping with Southern racist tradition, Hattie McDaniel and the other black actors from the film were barred from attending the premiere. Upon learning this, an enraged Clark Gable threatened to boycott the event. McDaniel convinced him to attend.
When today’s Southerners fly Confederate flags and speak of “preserving our traditions,” they are actually celebrating their long-banned “peculiar institution.”
By contrast, post-World War II Germany outlawed symbols from the Nazi-era, such as the swastika and the “Heil Hitler” salute, and made Holocaust denial punishable by imprisonment.
America’s Southern states have refused to confront their own shameful past so directly.
But Americans can be grateful that Steven Spielberg has had the courage to serve up a long-overdue and much needed lesson in past–and still current–history.
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