Gesture of Defiance

Handsome Police Captain John G. Flynn had been questioned by the Brooklyn grand jury, presumably about gambling and police graft in his precinct. He had neither been indicted nor recalled for further examination. But one day last week, 49-year-old Captain Flynn, a World War I Navy veteran, showed up at his 68th Precinct Station, retired to his quarters and shot himself through the head. In a note which he left, he denied that his death had anything to do with gambling or money matters; he chose suicide, he wrote, because of "a lot of headaches in this precinct" and the long trip to work from his home.

His death was too much for Mayor William O'Dwyer, himself once a cop on a Brooklyn beat. As a result of a gambling-and-graft investigation by Brooklyn's District Attorney Miles McDonald, a lot of other policemen had been called before the grand jury. A lieutenant had been indicted for perjury about the source of $6,000 in his personal funds; a police inspector had had a mental collapse. As O'Dwyer saw it, Prosecutor McDonald, an ally of O'Dwyer's latest political enemy, Borough President John Cashmore, was carrying on a "war of nerves" against the police department. Furthermore, the investigation reflected on the administration of Mayor William O'Dwyer. The word went out to New York's police to make Captain Flynn's funeral a gesture of defiance to the prosecutor.

Before Captain Flynn's widow and two of his three children marched an imposing procession--the police band, a color guard, 6,000 uniformed cops and plainclothesmen (one-third of the city's entire force). Present at the service in the Roman Catholic Church of the Ascension were the police glee club, which sang the Requiem Mass, the six Catholic, Jewish and Protestant police department chaplains, Police Commissioner William O'Brien and other top-ranking police officials, and, looking grim, Mayor O'Dwyer himself.

Never before had a New York cop gotten such a turnout--not even the late Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine nor any policeman killed in line of duty.

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