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 Legs spoke from experience. One night the famous hoodlum declared that he was going to get Broderick. First Grade Detective Broderick, Shield No. 226, heard about the boast and went looking for Legs. "I understand you've been looking for me," growled Johnny as some of Legs's backup men started drifting away. "Ah, hell, Johnny, can't you take a joke?" asked a worried Legs. "Not from you, y'bum," replied Broderick as his left hook mashed Diamond into unconsciousness.
The Only Way. John Joseph Broderick came by his talents naturally enough. He grew up in Manhattan's East 20s, the Gashouse district, and while many of his neighbors were learning how to be thugs, Johnny, fresh from parochial school, was driving a brick truck at the age of twelve. A stint in the World War I Navy and a few months as a fireman convinced him that he was not cut out for such tame endeavors. The pug-faced Irishman joined the cops in 1923. "Gimme a gangster, give him a gun, and leave the rest to me," he used to say. Well aware that the hoods of his day had such powerful political connections that it was difficult to convict them of serious crimes, Johnny believed in dealing out punishment on the spot. And only rarely did his targets or the public respond with complaints about police brutality.
The Broderick legend grew steadily. Informed that two men were bothering some ladies in front of a restaurant, Broderick rushed to the scene, righteously flung the toughs through the front window of the place, then raced inside and arrested them for malicious destruction of property. He cleaned out the gamblers at the Polo Grounds by climbing on a chair in a field box and shouting: "Come down, alia yez, and if yez don't, I'll throw yez off the roof." They came.
He was always in the middle of the big cops-and-robbers shootouts. When Francis ("Two-Gun") Crowley was holed up, Broderick gave him two hours to surrender, then marched up to the building and found himself facing Crowley's pistol. He flattened the gunman with a punch before Crowley could find the courage to shoot.