Multiple investigations involving several top members of the Adams administration have prompted over a dozen elected officials to call for the mayor’s resignation. In the wake of the indictment of Adams on federal charges involving illegal gifts and campaign contributions, the chorus will surely grow. 

It’s a good time to review what sparked the most recent resignation of a New York City mayor nearly 75 years ago. Like Adams, William O’Dwyer had also been a cop. 

A shocking scandal led to O’Dwyer’s demise. It involved mob-connected bookies taking bets from kids outside of schools and scores of police inspectors protecting the predators in exchange for a piece of the action. City Hall seemed to be turning a blind eye. 

Although it is absent from most histories of the NYPD, the mid-20th-century corruption scandal ultimately brought down Mayor O’Dwyer, a former police officer, judge and Brooklyn district attorney. It led to a major shake-up of the NYPD. 

When the scandal broke in December 1949, O’Dwyer appeared to be sitting pretty. A month earlier, the Democrat had cruised to reelection. With Robert Moses calling the shots, O’Dwyer’s first term saw a wave of schools and hospitals built, along with the U.N. committing to place its permanent home on the East River. 

Born in County Mayo, Ireland, in 1890, O’Dwyer had been a bartender at a Manhattan hotel before beginning his career in law enforcement. After he moved to Bay Ridge in 1916, he spent six years as an NYPD officer patrolling the mobbed-up Brooklyn waterfront. 

While serving as Brooklyn DA from 1940 to 1942, O’Dwyer gained fame for his prosecution of “Murder, Inc.,” the Italian and Jewish syndicate based in Brownsville. At the same time, O’Dwyer was a member of Brooklyn’s Democratic Party, which retained numerous connections to the underworld. 

In 1941, O’Dwyer and the Democratic machine mounted a respectable campaign against two-term incumbent Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a liberal Republican allied with left-wing labor voters. Soon after his six-point defeat, O’Dwyer took leave from the DA’s office in order to join the Army, becoming a brigadier general. After La Guardia opted not to run for a fourth term, O’Dwyer beat his opponents in the 1945 general election by 35 points. 

Despite his successful first term, in May 1949 O’Dwyer made a surprise announcement that he would not run for reelection because of personal health issues. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, then a large-circulation newspaper closely tied to the Democratic Party, quickly championed Brooklyn Borough President John Cashmore as O’Dwyer’s successor. After changing his mind, the incumbent mayor easily won a second term. 

“Lucrative Borough Rackets Feed Vast Crime Syndicate,” declared the Eagle’s cover headline on a Sunday in mid-December 1949. Thus began a week of shocking stories, most notably “Gamblers Infest Schools, Prey on Kids’ Lunch Money.” A front-page photo of a betting card — with slates of college and professional football and college basketball games — accompanied the frightening account. 

Working closely with Brooklyn District Attorney Miles McDonald, the Eagle’s lead reporter Ed Reid helped dramatize the scandal. “The crime bosses,” warned the hard-boiled Reid, “are taking our children, their pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. They are planting the gambling fever in them and hoping it burns forever.” 

Even more alarming was the role of NYPD brass in providing protection for the racketeers. An anonymous bookie told Reid that many of Brooklyn’s police inspectors and their underlings were on the take, collecting as much as 80 cents on the dollar, which amounted to a few thousand clams per week. 

McDonald assembled a grand jury, causing 500 cops to take early retirement rather than testify. The DA indicted 77 officers. The NYPD commissioner and chief inspector got the ax. Although McDonald’s investigation had implicated one of his longtime deputies, O’Dwyer’s connection to the scandal remained unclear. 

McDonald called on the mayor to testify in the late summer of 1950. But suddenly, in mid-August, President Harry Truman, a fellow Democrat, appointed O’Dwyer as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. Before leaving town, O’Dwyer received a triumphant farewell, with 300,000 people turning out in triple-digit heat for a parade and speeches at City Hall. 

O’Dwyer’s demise nonetheless remains a mystery, given that nothing ever directly connected him to the NYPD scandal. Upon his announced departure, his hometown paper offered an explanation, however. 

According to an editorial in the Eagle, when O’Dwyer had initially decided not to run for reelection, he approached Brooklyn Borough President Cashmore to see if he would like to become mayor. O’Dwyer then “pulled the rug out,” causing “intense embarrassment” for Cashmore. 

Cashmore was also the Democratic Party boss of Brooklyn, and his support for McDonald’s investigation of the gambling racket rankled O’Dwyer. With the mayor’s ouster, Brooklyn, the nation’s largest Democratic county at the time, thus sacrificed control of City Hall until Abe Beame’s ill-fated term in the mid-1970s. 

Brooklyn has held down City Hall since 2014. During Bill de Blasio’s first term, a high-level NYPD corruption scandal nearly ensnared Phil Banks, the department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer. Banks has served as the most powerful deputy mayor in the Adams administration. 

Widely viewed as the shadow boss of the NYPD, Banks has also been under recent investigation. Meanwhile, the actual police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned earlier this month. And the feds soon raided the home of Thomas Donlon, Caban’s successor.

Whether federal prosecutors will bring charges against Banks, Caban and Donlon remains to be seen. But it seems most unlikely the Biden administration will make Eric Adams an ambassador, whether to Mexico, Turkey or any other nation. 

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