All his colleagues privately called him "cemetery bait," and the bookmakers along his Broadway beat said that on any given day, the odds were 9 to 5 he would be killed. But when the shots were fired, they were off target; the knives and brickbats missed; the flung cue balls were wide of the mark. Johnny Broderick, "the world's toughest cop," was destined to die in bed—which he did last week of a heart attack on his 72nd birthday.
No less a connoisseur than Jack ("Legs") Diamond tagged him as the toughest. And...
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