In the hierarchy of the Genovese Crime Family, there are the headlines and then there are the lifers. Ralph “Farby” Serpico was a lifer. While his brother Frank “Farby” Serpico was rubbing shoulders with “Trigger Mike” Coppola in East Harlem and Miami, Ralph stayed grounded in the North Queens neighborhood of Corona — the “Crown” of the borough.
For over sixty years, Serpico treated the streets of Corona and Flushing like his personal counting house. Despite a rap sheet that started in 1935 and included dozens of arrests for bookmaking and policy-numbers, Ralph was the consummate survivor. He was a man who preferred the dim light of a social club to the flashbulbs of a courtroom, pivoting seamlessly from operating floating dice games to building a suburban real estate firm aptly named Farby Homes, Inc.
But being a “member in good standing” didn’t make him untouchable. From a terrifying broad-daylight kidnapping at the hands of a postal-disguised gang to being outed in a U.S. Senate subcommittee decades after he first picked up a betting slip, Ralph’s story is a deep dive into the longevity and loyalty of the Genovese rank-and-file.
