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A physical-fitness buff, he never drank or smoked, and he worked out at Stillman's Gym every day. He always preferred using his fist to a gun, and his knuckles took such a beating that Bellevue Hospital used him as an exhibit to show how much punishment the human hand could take. After a while, to make it easier on the knuckles, he took to grabbing victims above the knots of their ties with his right hand and twisting hard while firing a few lefts. Two were usually enough. Following the example of kings and queens and Franklin Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey used him as a bodyguard; once Dempsey confessed that Broderick was the only man he would not like to fight outside the ring.
"Times Have Changed." Broadway reporters fattened their columns with Broderick lore. Damon Runyon turned him into Johnny Brannigan, and Edward G. Robinson played him in the movies (Bullets or Ballots). But the imitators were always second best. When a gushing socialite claimed Broderick had given her his whistle, he growled, "I never owned a whistle because I never had to call for help." When he arrived alone at a Harlem riot and was asked where the rest of the squad was, he replied, "Hell, this ain't the World War." Only occasionally could he be topped. On being introduced to Humphrey Bogart, he leaned in close and said, "I don't like Hollywood tough guys, see. What happened to all of them?" Bogey leaned even closer: "I run 'em all out of town, see."
Broderick retired in 1947 after 24½ years and eight medals for valor. His career had not been without hints that he had been on the take—which were perhaps inevitable when a man on a detective's salary found money enough to wear the best of suits, always tightly tailored to his trim 5-ft. 9-in., 175-lb. frame, and cream-colored, monogrammed silk underwear. Such sartorial habits made him "The Duke" to oth ers on the force, but in the outside world he was "The Boffer." And the verb "to broderick" became part of the language as a synonym for clobbering.
Today it would not work. Law-enforcement officers are learning to operate within the law. And on his farm in upper New York State, retired Johnny Broderick recognized the change. New York was not his kind of town any more, he acknowledged. "I know what I would have done in my day," he said of current crime problems, "but I'm not going to give today's cops any advice. Times have changed."