William Patrick O’Brien was, in the phrase everyone used, “a cop’s cop.” A burly man with a prominent nose and icy blue eyes in a perpetually florid face, he had a gruff voice and spoke out of the side of his mouth, which gave even his weightiest pronouncements a slightly comical effect. (His was an especially pure example of the Brooklyn accent of an earlier period, in which the word first is pronounced “foist,” while foist, in turn, becomes “first.”) For thirty-three years O’Brien had moved slowly but steadily up through the Police Department; he had long been one of William O’Dwyer’s close friends, and in 1949 the mayor appointed him police commissioner of the City of New York.
The commissioner’s private office, in police headquarters downtown on Centre Street, was a darkly paneled sanctuary that would not have seemed out of place in an English manor house, everything burnished and finely crafted and larger than would be expected, including iron chandeliers, a massive wood-burning fireplace, and a desk that one observer suggested was about the size of a double bed. This was the office in which Commissioner O’Brien held his meetings, and in the grim days of September 1950, those meetings were most often with Chief of Detectives William Whalen and Chief Inspector August Flath. They were the highest-ranking members of a force of nineteen thousand, and together they seemed to embody the palace guard that had so concerned Brooklyn district attorney Miles McDonald, a faction that would do everything in its power to thwart his investigation. When they got together that month, the three men always locked the door behind them and did not invite a secretary to take notes, as would ordinarily have been the case, and, according to those who worked in the commissioner’s outer office, upon emerging from those meetings they appeared nervous and agitated. They had good reason to be, for they were privy to information that was not yet widely known: that all three, earlier in their careers, had received “ice” from Harry Gross.
On September 15, the day of Gross’s arrest, Judge Samuel Leibowitz called O’Brien and Flath to his courtroom for an extraordinary night session. The two men arrived at 9:30; the chief inspector was described by a reporter as “visibly nervous,” the commissioner as “pale and grim.” The two officials sat at one of the counsel tables, with District Attorney Miles McDonald and Assistant District Attorney Julius Helfand at the other. Judge Leibowitz gazed down at them from his bench; he had personally signed the order for a wiretap to be placed on the phone lines leading into Harry Gross’s Inwood wire room, he said, and he wanted the commissioner and the chief inspector to listen to one of the recordings that had been made, as an example of what the investigators were finding. At an instruction from the judge, the “play-back machine” was turned on.
Within seconds, the voices of a pair of bookmakers, “Artie” and “Mickey,” filled the room. Artie, who handled bets in Brooklyn, was heard to complain that the cops in his neighborhood had said that because of the investigation, things were hotter now, and they would need $350 a week instead of the $300 they had gotten before. Not only were the cops demanding more money, Artie complained, but they also said they “had to make a pinch quick.” Mickey, who worked in the Inwood wire room, told Artie that he should stand for the arrest himself; Artie complained that he had “stood for seven already.” Mickey told him to pay somebody to be a stand-in; Artie said that he did not know anyone willing to be arrested. Mickey said he should ask “the Weeper”—the Weeper was always up for a pinch.*1
Back and forth the conversation went; it was like the syncopated patter of an old vaudeville routine, but no one here was laughing, and when the recording came to an end the two police officials sat wordlessly in the silent courtroom.
“Commissioner,” Judge Leibowitz said after some time, “I thought it important that you get this information right from the record, and it may be that you have some real, constructive, forthright suggestions on how to clean house.”
O’Brien stood to address the judge, the action unavoidably reminiscent of a defendant preparing to receive his sentence. He said, “This is a rather unusual proceeding. I was glad to come, and glad to listen. The police commissioner of the City of New York does not take his hat off to anybody in this city in his desire to have a clean Police Department, and to have each and every member worthy of the badge he wears.”*2 He congratulated Mr. McDonald and Mr. Helfand for the great service they were doing for the Police Department and for the people of New York. “We have given them every assistance possible,” he insisted. “We intend to give them every assistance possible. We are as much interested in this as anybody in the city.”
The next day Commissioner O’Brien announced that he was ordering a special departmental investigation of “possible police involvement with graft.” The man assigned to lead the investigation was none other than Chief Inspector August Flath.
On September 24 the lead story in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, citing “unimpeachable sources close to Manhattan police headquarters,” reported that Acting Mayor Vincent Impellitteri had decided to fire Police Commissioner William O’Brien.
The very next evening, Monday, September 25, 1950, police graduation exercises were held in the 71st Regiment Armory on Park Avenue. At 9:30 a row of dignitaries stood on the stage with their hands over their hearts as a police band played the National Anthem; then they sat down and the commissioner stepped to the podium. William O’Brien wore a dark double-breasted suit and a tie with wide diagonal stripes. He congratulated the 496 members of that year’s graduating class, reminding them of the noble history of the department and the special honor and great responsibility that came with the privilege of being a police officer. His gruff voice, so evocative of an earlier time, resounded through the vaulted hall. He paused for a moment and then said, “After thirty-five years as a policeman, I find it my regretful duty to turn in my shield. It is a hard thing for a policeman to do.” Six months earlier he had been offered an “attractive position” in private industry and had considered retiring then, but District Attorney McDonald’s investigation “of a small segment of my department was in progress, and under the circumstances I deferred my resignation.” He was retiring now because his position had become “untenable” and he believed that to remain in office “might prove harmful to one of the finest citizens of our town, Acting Mayor Impellitteri.”
With that the outgoing police commissioner returned to his seat. The acting mayor spoke next. Vincent Impellitteri—Impy, as he was known to all—was small and slight of frame and spoke with none of the rhetorical flourishes and broad gestures that New Yorkers had come to associate with their mayor, after seventeen years of La Guardia and O’Dwyer. “Since certain disclosures last week,” he said, “I have had several conversations with Police Commissioner O’Brien. I have known the commissioner for a long time. I honestly believe that his personal integrity is not involved in the present situation. I also feel that his position has become untenable. During our conversation it was mutually agreed that his resignation at this time would go far toward restoring the public confidence and strengthening any morale of the police force that has been weakened.” Impellitteri announced that the next morning he would nominate Thomas F. Murphy, assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, as the new police commissioner.
In El Centro, California, where he was vacationing while awaiting Senate confirmation of his ambassadorship, William O’Dwyer received a call from Ed Reid of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle; it was Reid’s exposé of gambling in Brooklyn that had sparked the McDonald investigation in the first place. “I believe Bill O’Brien is as honest a man as I have ever known,” O’Dwyer told Reid. “I don’t know the facts, but if there is corruption in the Police Department it is the result of disloyalty by members of the department to Bill O’Brien.”
The widening bookmaking scandal, which had already forced the resignation of Mayor O’Dwyer, had now claimed Police Commissioner O’Brien as well.
So O’Brien was out as police commissioner, to be replaced by Murphy, who in turn would be replaced by Monaghan, and subsequently by Adams, Kennedy, and another Murphy; the previous commissioners had been, in order, McLaughlin, Warren, Whalen, Mulrooney, Bolan, O’Ryan, Valentine, and Wallander. For several decades the New York Police Department, like the Fire Department, had been overwhelmingly Irish Catholic in its membership and leadership alike—so much so that it was not until 1952 that Irish members of the force set up their own fraternal organization, the Emerald Society, as had earlier been done by Italian, Jewish, African American, Puerto Rican, and Polish police officers; before that time, noted one observer, “an organization of Irish policemen in New York might have resembled a committee of the whole.”
Though many of the Catholic colleges in the New York area, such as Manhattan College and Fordham University, maintained basketball programs, the strongest one unquestionably belonged to St. John’s University of Brooklyn, and the Redmen were the team of choice for many of the city’s Catholic college basketball fans, even those who had not attended the school—much as many New York Jews instinctively rooted for City College, and as African Americans throughout the United States became Brooklyn Dodgers fans in 1947 with the signing of Jackie Robinson. A strong Redmen rooting section had long existed among the members of the police force; still, in all of the New York Police Department there had been no more fervent or more visible St. John’s fan than William P. O’Brien.
O’Brien had himself been a talented basketball player in his Brooklyn youth, and through his years as assistant chief inspector and then as police commissioner he attended all of the St. John’s home games, sitting in the front row directly behind the bench. O’Brien, said The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was “the number one St. John’s rooter.” In a testimonial to him shortly after he was appointed police commissioner, Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan amusedly remarked that O’Brien was “kidded a great deal about being called assistant coach to Frank McGuire of St. John’s.”
Frank McGuire was himself the son of a New York cop, and until he discovered basketball in his youth he had thought that he would grow up to be a policeman. In 1950 the best player on St. John’s was center Bob Zawoluk, whose own father had been a New York City policeman until he suffered an unfathomable tragedy: One day while he was directing traffic at a busy intersection in Brooklyn, a Department of Sanitation truck swung too fast around the corner, and a broom hanging off the back of the truck knocked him down and his head hit the street; he died the next day. Since that time the two Zawoluk children had been supported by a widow’s pension and looked after by members of the department including their uncle John, who was a policeman as well. As it happened, McGuire’s father had also died on the job in the most unlikely of circumstances—of jaundice that he had contracted from an infected hypodermic needle after being bitten by a rabid dog—and Frank, too, had been looked after as a boy by his late father’s colleagues on the force. It was an unhappy connection, but one that proved instrumental in bringing Bob Zawoluk to St. John’s. “When McGuire showed up at Zawoluk’s home one evening and began to discuss St. John’s,” noted sportswriter Milton Gross, “interspersing his comments with Police Department stories, Zawoluk’s mother virtually measured him for a red and white uniform.”
McGuire was tall and lean, with devilishly arched eyebrows and a dimpled chin; like Nat Holman he was immaculate in his personal appearance, but while Holman seemed as substantial and prosperous as a bank president or the head of a movie studio, McGuire was younger and flashier, more like a sports car salesman or a cardsharp, from the high crown of his wavy red hair and his immaculately manicured fingernails down to his polished alligator shoes. He had many friends who were cops but he also had friends who were criminals, and from his early days at St. John’s there were whispers about how he afforded his expensive wardrobe, his fancy car, and his lakeside vacation home on a coach’s salary. “He may not have conspired with gamblers or the Mafia members who often underwrote their activities,” wrote Bethany Bradsher, a historian of college basketball, “but no one who knew him disputes that McGuire probably associated with some of the characters who engineered those deals. The son of a city cop, he always kept close association with both the law and the Mob.” (On one occasion, after he had left St. John’s to coach at the University of North Carolina, McGuire asked the UNC team manager, Joel Fleishman, to request additional tickets for an NCAA tournament game at Madison Square Garden. Fleishman asked for two groups of tickets on opposite sides of the arena; the Garden official handling the request suggested that it would be more convenient to obtain a single large block of tickets to accommodate McGuire’s family and friends. “No, no, you don’t get it,” Fleishman told him. “We have the cops and the priests on one side and the Mob and the convicts on the other side.”)
While he was coaching at St. John’s, McGuire had what Milton Gross called a “personal rooting section”—two men on opposite sides of the law. One was a childhood companion who in later years had gone wrong and served time in prison for armed robbery; the other was New York Police Commissioner William P. O’Brien. “Both are McGuire’s friends,” wrote Gross. “They’re for him and he’s for them, no matter what.”
“Frank McGuire and the commissioner were very close,” recalls Frank Mulzoff, a St. John’s player of the time. “I remember the commissioner would often visit the locker room before and after the games.”
In 1950, the New York police commissioner was one of the head coach’s closest friends (said to be for him “no matter what”). The coach maintained friendships with many members of the police force, and himself came from a police family; so, too, did the team’s star player, who was described in an admiring profile in Sport magazine as “something of a ward of the police department.”
The New York City Police Department, Sport noted, “has more than a rooting interest in St. John’s.”