Chief albert seedman nypd recruit
Chief albert seedman nypd recruit
Chief albert seedman nypd recruit 2...
Chief Al Seedman: Legend and Fact
May 20, 2013
The flamboyant former Chief of Detectives Al Seedman died last week at the age of 94, and a legend was already in the making.
In the NYTimes, Seedman was eulogized as the tough-talking, cigar chomping, first and only Jewish Chief of Detectives who, as the novelist Jerome Charyn put it, “seemed more Irish than the Irish.”
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly issued a statement, saying Seedman “came to epitomize for investigators the world over the image of a no-nonsense Chief determined to get his man.”
Then, thinking perhaps of the John Ford movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and its immortalized line “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” Kelly, added of Seedman: “The image and reality were one and the same.”
But contrary to Kelly’s words, for Seedman -— like much of the NYPD — image and reality were not one and the same.
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