During Toschi’s time in San Francisco, he was known for dressing well, being meticulous, wearing his gun in a trademark quick-draw holster, and constantly munching on animal crackers.
The man who can make that claim is Dave Toschi, who served as an inspector in the San Francisco Police Department from 1952–83.
When your name gets mentioned as the possible inspiration behind both Inspector Harry Callahan of Dirty Harry fame and Steve McQueen’s turn as Lieutenant Frank Bullitt in 1968’s Bullitt, you know you’re cool. Einstein was also gifted with languages-when need be, he could converse with suspects and witnesses in Yiddish, German, Polish, Hungarian, and even Chinese. For the most part, the pair became successful detectives because of their willingness to work long hours and their native knowledge of New York City life. Unlike fictional detectives, Einstein and Smith weren’t neurotic geniuses who relied on their vast wealth of knowledge. Ultimately, it wasn’t the criminals who sank the careers of Izzy and Moe, but their own fellow agents, who grew increasingly jealous of the pair’s success. Sometimes, the pair got away with hiding in plain sight, even though most speakeasies had their pictures hanging on the wall. Somehow, Einstein and Smith managed to convince their superiors by selling them on the idea that hoodlums would never suspect two portly, regular-looking guys of being undercover agents.Įinstein and Smith, like Sherlock Holmes before them, gained a reputation for being excellent at concocting disguises that actually worked. When the duo first applied to work for the Prohibition Bureau for $40 a week, the G-men in charge weren’t overly impressed. Before becoming the premier booze detectives of their day, the Austrian immigrant Einstein had been a street peddler and a postal clerk, while Smith had owned a cigar store. It’s slowly and inevitably become its own franchise, spawning a movie, video game, and the Before Watchmen prequel comics.Isidor “Izzy” Einstein and Moe Smith were two middle-aged men from New York’s Lower East Side who managed to arrest 4,932 offenders, haul in roughly five million bottles of illegal liquor, and sport a conviction rate of 95 percent from 1920–25. Popularly cited as the point where comics came of age, Watchmen’s sophisticated take on superheroes has been universally acclaimed for its psychological depth and realism. The conspiracy they uncover will entwine their secret traumas and twisted psychologies, ultimately asking where the fine line is drawn between heroes and villains? It begins with a murder-mystery before unfolding into a planet-altering conspiracy: When a retired hero is killed, his former teammates must investigate.
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Watchmen takes place in an alternate world where the mere presence of American superheroes changed history: The US won the Vietnam War, Nixon is still president, and the cold war is in full effect. It’s the only graphic novel to make Time’s 100 Best Novels list, one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 novels of the past 25 years and has made fans of everyone from film directors Zack Snyder and Darren Aronofsky to the writers on Lost. Ozymandias.Īt this point, who doesn’t? It’s sold over a million copies and is the first thing people mention when talking comics–for-adults.