David Burnham, Times Reporter Who Exposed Police Graft, Dies at 91

Tipped off by the detective Frank Serpico, he wrote an explosive series on police corruption in New York City, sparking an investigation by the Knapp commission.

David Burnham, a former investigative reporter for The New York Times whose exposé of corruption in the New York City Police Department in 1970 led to public hearings; tarnished top officials, including the mayor; and inspired the movie “Serpico,” about Mr. Burnham’s chief source, Detective Frank Serpico, died on Tuesday at his home in Spruce Head, Maine. He was 91.

His wife, Joanne Omang, said his heart stopped after a choking incident at dinner.

Mr. Burnham, who was known for a scrupulous faith in facts, knocked about at several news organizations before The Times hired him in 1967, after he told the metropolitan editor, Arthur Gelb, that the paper’s coverage of law enforcement was “not very smart.”

Mr. Burnham was brought on not as a traditional police-beat reporter, to cover shootings and stabbings, but to write about the inner workings of the police department. He scored a major scoop in 1968 when he learned that officers on overnight shifts routinely slept in their patrol cars, often because they were worn out from second jobs during the day.

When Mr. Burnham told an assistant editor about the practice, known as “cooping,” the editor at first rebuffed him, as Mr. Gelb described the events in a 2003 memoir, “City Room,” because The Times wasn’t interested in “crusading” stories.

On his own time, Mr. Burnham reported out the details. His article landed on the front page.

His enterprising reporting caught the attention of a longhaired undercover officer, Detective Serpico, who for years had tried to get the police department to crack down on internal corruption. He approached Mr. Burnham.

Following up on tips from the detective and other officers for a year, Mr. Burnham revealed in an explosive three-part series beginning on April 25, 1970, that police graft was widespread, with officers extorting millions of dollars a year from businesses, drug dealers and gamblers while top brass and city officials covered it up.

The reporting pressured Mayor John V. Lindsay to name an investigating commission led by an outside lawyer, Whitman Knapp. At the so-called Knapp commission’s public hearings, Detective Serpico was a star witness. As a result of the hearings, several dozen police officers were indicted, though there were few convictions. Still, the hearings are credited with ending the department’s tolerance of pervasive graft.

In faulting the mayor’s office for ignoring corruption reports — Detective Serpico had complained to administration officials before approaching The Times — the commission badly damaged Mr. Lindsay’s political image as a patrician do-gooder.

The 1973 movie that followed, starring Al Pacino as Detective Serpico, was adapted from the book “Serpico,” by Peter Maas. The detective had first asked Mr. Burnham to collaborate on a book, but he declined.

“Burnham, ethical to the bone, did not feel he should profit from having performed a public service,” Mr. Gelb wrote.

Mr. Burnham later transferred to the paper’s Washington bureau, where he investigated safety issues at nuclear power plants. He became a go-to reporter for nuclear industry whistle-blowers.

One was Karen Silkwood, a young woman who worked at an Oklahoma nuclear facility. An official of the atomic workers union contacted Mr. Burnham and told him that Ms. Silkwood had evidence of shoddy work being performed at the plant and of falsified inspection records. She had already testified to the Atomic Energy Commission that she had been contaminated by plutonium.

Mr. Burnham agreed to meet Ms. Silkwood in Oklahoma City. But on the way to their rendezvous, she swerved off the road in her Honda Civic and was killed when the car struck a cement culvert.

Mr. Burnham wrote the first national article about her death, including her union’s suspicion that her car might have gone out of control after being hit from behind.

The death was ruled accidental, though antinuclear activists and some journalists suggested for years that she was murdered.

After months of reporting, Mr. Burnham found that tantalizing threads about Ms. Silkwood’s life and death had no clear resolutions, and he concluded that she was probably not deliberately killed.

Her story was told in the 1983 film “Silkwood,” starring Meryl Streep in the title role, but again Mr. Burnham declined a chance to have his reputation lifted aloft by Hollywood. He told Nora Ephron, one of the two screenwriters, that she could not use his name in the script.

Explaining his reason in an essay in The Times in 1984, he wrote, “To be a character in a historical event which has been reinterpeted by Hollywood for its own dramatic purposes is an irritating and frustrating experience.”

Mr. Burnham continued to report on nuclear plant safety.

But his time-consuming muckraking was not always appreciated by his bosses. In New York one day, according to Joseph C. Goulden in his book “A.M. Rosenthal and His Times” (1988), the executive editor, A.M. Rosenthal, spotted Mr. Burnham walking toward him in the newsroom and said, “Here comes Johnny-One-Note.” It was a reference to Mr. Burnham’s obsessive pursuit of nuclear safety issues.

Another masthead editor took Mr. Burnham aside and told him somewhat cryptically that he’d have more success getting on the front page if he changed his “tone.”

Mr. Burnham resigned from The Times in 1986 to continue pursuing book-length investigations of government institutions. He had earlier written “The Rise of the Computer State” (1983). It was followed by “A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS” (1990) and “Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice” (1996).

In August 1997, The Nation devoted an entire issue to an article by Mr. Burnham challenging the F.B.I.’s management skills and investigative competence. His reporting was based on data obtained from the Justice Department by a research project that Mr. Burnham helped found at Syracuse University. That project, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, known as TRAC, uses open-records requests to gather hard-to-find data from government agencies.

Its data is frequently cited by journalists, including this year by reporters covering immigration issues.

“TRAC was very near and dear to his heart,” Ms. Omang said of her husband. “He worked on it for 32 years and was still active there until his death.”

David Bright Burnham was born on Jan. 24, 1933, in Boston and grew up in New Canaan, Conn., the youngest of three children of Addison Burnham, an editor at W.W. Norton in New York, and Dorothy (Moore) Burnham, who served several terms as a selectwoman in town government.

David left Harvard in his sophomore year to become a paratrooper in the 11th and 82nd Army Airborne Divisions. On returning to campus, he helped found the Cambridge Parachute Club. He graduated with a degree in history in 1957.

His marriage to Sophy Tayloe Doub ended in divorce. He married Ms. Omang, a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, in 1985. In addition to her, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Sarah Tayloe Burnham and Molly Bright Burnham, and four grandchildren.

Mr. Burnham’s first journalism job was in 1958 in Washington, reporting on Congress for the Monroe News Bureau, whose coverage ran in small regional newspapers. He moved to United Press International in 1961 to cover Congress and regulatory issues, then to Newsweek and later to CBS as a writer for “CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite.”

All his life, Mr. Burnham spent summers with his family on the coast of Maine, first as a child on Bailey Island and later in Friendship and Spruce Head. He was a longtime traveler, skier and sailor.