NEW YORK: To Be Continued

After its first indignation at the discovery that Brooklyn cops had been taking a million dollars a year in bribes from bookies. New York City seemed to relax and enjoy the scandal. This was due, in part, to a certain reluctant civic pride in the proportions of the skulduggery. But mostly it reflected the city’s undisguised delight in its new police commissioner. As he took office, burly, well-tailored Thomas Murphy (TIME, Oct. 2) gave New Yorkers the same deliriously doomlike sense of expectancy they had experienced when Babe Ruth strode to the plate in Yankee Stadium.

Lawyer Murphy, already famed as the federal prosecutor of the Hiss case, not only stands a reassuring 6 ft. 4 in. and weighs an impressive 245 Ibs., but is equipped with a luxuriant mustache. As a prosecutor in the courtroom, he invariably conjured up the image of a Victorian guardsman. Eyeing his new photographs, it was almost impossible not to visualize him in an old-fashioned cop’s helmet, or to picture him as an honest bartender, white apron, gold watch chain and all, stepping out of the gaslit past, with a bung starter in one meaty hand’, to scatter the rascals for good.

Whispering Wires. The city’s newspapers, in fact, became so fascinated with the Murphy mustache that they seemed on the verge of forgetting the great gambling expose. Murphy quickly reminded them of it. He held a conference with Brooklyn’s District Attorney Miles McDonald, the man who had cracked the case by tapping the telephone wires of a perfumed Big Bookie named Harry Gross, and getting undeniable evidence of police graft and collusion.

Then Murphy called 400 administrative heads of the force to a meeting in the barnlike line-up room at Headquarters, and kicked every last one of the city’s 336 plainclothesmen back into uniform. It was the most drastic police shake-up in history. But Murphy made it plain that this was only a beginning. “In every instance where corruption exists,” he warned, “the commanding officer . . . will be carefully investigated.”

Sputtering Cops. While all this was going on, the Brooklyn grand jury which had been laboring for nine months to obtain evidence of police corruption went about its chores with fire-breathing enthusiasm. By last week the jury was happily frying droves of cops on its griddle like so many sputtering frankfurters.

The political repercussions were even hotter. Acting Mayor Vincent Impellitteri—who moved into City Hall when Mayor William O’Dwyer prudently went off to be Ambassador to Mexico—was obviously praying that the scandal would help him get elected for good in November. The appointment of Murphy was a feather in his cap. But he had plenty of competition.

Regular Democrats applauded the Murphy cleanup but did their best to depict Impellitteri as just an amateur statesman. Republican candidates applauded too, but happily seized on the whole scandal as wonderful campaign proof of Democratic graft and incompetence. According to grapevine report, other Republicans were plotting feverishly to get Ambassador O’Dwyer hauled home to answer a long list of embarrassing questions.

This week, as the gambling investigation bloomed, New York got another jolt. The president of the Board of Education reported evidence of widespread irregularities in the repair and maintenance of schools. In pointing out the general pattern, of conditions since 1931, he charged that millions of dollars worth of material had been bought from favored contractors, without bidding, and much of their work had failed to meet specifications.

Newspaper readers, who were following developments with a chronic serial-reader breathlessness, could hardly wait to see what the investigators would uncover next.