I met J.R. Richard in 1993 or 1994.

In a sleepy little town in upstate New York, many of my high school friends and I would hang out after school at a local bakery. One of the other bakery denizens was an interesting gentleman named Frank. I'd always assumed Frank was a city guy who'd made enough money to retire a little early into the rustic country life those city types seemed to find so quaint, which in this case was fine with me, since Frank was, as I wrote, interesting: a pleasant conversationalist on a number of topics who waxed philosphical and irreverent to equal degrees.

The bakery began serving dinner a few nights a week, having hired part-time a chef, Richard, who was a former opera singer. His past career had given him a decent capacity for French, Italian and German and a little Spanish. I knew this, as Richard and Frank would often have conversations that flitted about in a few of these languages and I, as a budding little polyglot, always enjoyed listening in on the banter.

One day, Richard barrelled into the bakery and bellowed, "Where the fuck is Serpico?"

It was at this point that I realized, having known the man for at least two years, that our (plain old interesting, sometimes quirky) Frank was, in fact, Frank Serpico of movie and book fame. He was not usually given to talking about his time with the NYPD or the experiences leading up to his getting shot, so for all intents and purposes, he remained plain old interesting, somtimes quirky Frank for all of us. The only time he ever spoke with me about his time on the force was when I was on my way out of town to return to university one break. We both happened to be on the way to the bakery, which we found unexpectedly closed. Neither of us having particularly pressing business, we decided to grab a beer at the restaurant across the square, where I also happened to have worked since I was sixteen. We ended up having dinner and he spoke about his early days as a cop, especially about how he was often called to interpret in court for Italian and Spanish speaking witnesses and defendants.