owned half of the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was 1933 when Walter again met George V. McLaughlin, president of the Brooklyn Trust Company. O'Malley was chosen to protect the company's financial interests in the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1933. O'Malley also served as designated driver for the hard drinking McLaughlin. It was through McLaughlin that Walter was brought into the financial arrangements for Ebbets Field in 1940. In 1942, when Larry MacPhail resigned as general manager to serve in the United States Army as a lieutenant colonel, O'Malley was appointed the attorney for the Dodgers, and he obtained a minority ownership interest on November 1, 1944. He purchased 25% as did Branch Rickey and John L. Smith (president of Pfizer Chemical), while the heirs of Stephen McKeever retained the final quarter. In 1943, he replaced Wendell Willkie as chief legal counsel. Branch Rickey, who had built the St. Louis Cardinals into champions, replaced MacPhail, and O'Malley began to accumulate stock in the Dodgers. Rickey was a teetotaler, while O'Malley enjoyed alcoholic beverages and tobacco. As O'Malley became more involved in affairs, he became critical of Rickey, the highest-paid individual in baseball, counting salary, attendance bonuses, and player contract sales commissions. O'Malley and Rickey had very different backgrounds and philosophies. It was O'Malley who put pressure on Rickey to fire manager Leo Durocher, who O'Malley felt was a drain on attendance. In board of directors meetings, O'Malley also opposed Rickey's extravagances. When he was with his political friends, he made fun of Rickey at every chance. Daily News columnist Jimmy Powers would deride Rickey for selling off players and for general miserliness. When Rickey asked O'Malley, the team lawyer, if he should sue, O'Malley said no. Powers' campaign became so public that after the 1946 season Rickey gave each player a new Studebaker, which gave O'Malley, a Dodgers shareholder, reason to speak ill of Rickey in the press. It got to the point where everything Rickey did was something O'Malley derided: O'Malley thought Rickey's construction of the state of the art Vero Beach spring training facility, known as Dodgertown, was extravagant; he thought Rickey's investment in the Brooklyn Dodgers of the All-America Football Conference was questionable; he fought Rickey on the team's beer sponsor; and he demanded that players return their 1947 World Series rings before receiving the new ones Rickey ordered. As team lawyer, O'Malley had a role in breaking the racial