Bill Devery

January 9, 1903. Bill Devery's 49th birthday. He spent it signing papers to buy a bankrupt baseball team.

The former chief of the New York City Police Department and his partner, gambler and saloon owner Frank Farrell, paid $18,000 for the wrecked remains of the Baltimore Orioles that day and announced they were moving the franchise to Manhattan. Neither man had ever run a baseball team. Neither seemed to care. They had cash, they had Tammany Hall connections that could get a ballpark built in six weeks, and they had a league boss in Ban Johnson who needed exactly that combination to finally plant the American League in New York. The team that resulted would call itself the Highlanders, then the Yankees. Devery would own a piece of it for twelve years and barely leave a mark on how it was run.

He'd made his real mark already, in a police department where he'd learned that bribery wasn't a scandal -- it was a business model.

The Bowery to the Badge

William Stephen Devery was born January 9, 1854, on Manhattan's East Side, the oldest of five children of Irish Catholic immigrants. He started out tending bar in rough Bowery saloons and, by some accounts, picking up extra cash as a bare-knuckle fighter. Neither trade required much subtlety, and Devery didn't develop any. In 1878, at 24, he joined the NYPD, reportedly paying the standard $200 bribe that got a man his badge in that era (an unremarkable transaction by the standards of the day, if you can call institutionalized corruption a standard).

He kept paying. Every promotion had a price, and Devery kept climbing: patrolman to roundsman to sergeant, and on December 30, 1891, to captain, reportedly for $14,000. Tammany boss Richard Croker had a system for men like Devery -- "honest graft," Croker called it, the tariff collected from every saloon, gambling den, brothel, and off-track betting parlor that wanted the police looking the other way. Devery ran a Tenderloin precinct and became one of the system's most productive collectors. It was there, patrolling the same blocks where a Midtown saloon keeper named Frank Farrell poured drinks, that Devery and his future business partner first got to know each other -- a friendship built on protection money years before either man had heard of Ban Johnson or the American League.

The system nearly caught up with him in 1894, when the state's Lexow Committee hauled Captain Devery in to answer for police corruption citywide. He stonewalled with a line that outlived the hearing itself: asked about a piece of business, he said, "touchin' on and appertainin' to that matter, I disremember." He was charged with bribery anyway. The case never reached trial (he feigned illness), though he was temporarily demoted. Three years later, in February 1897, the department tried again, arresting and convicting him on bribery and extortion charges. He appealed. The New York State Court of Appeals threw the conviction out and put him back on the force.

New York's First and Last Police Chief

Reinstated, Devery kept rising. Inspector on January 7, 1898. Deputy Chief a month later. On June 30, 1898, he became Chief of Police -- the first officer to ever hold that exact title in New York, and, it turned out, the last. Governor Benjamin Odell signed a bill on February 22, 1901, abolishing the old four-commissioner police board and the Chief of Police office altogether, replacing both with a single police commissioner. Devery didn't go quietly into retirement. Mayor Robert Van Wyck kept him on as Deputy Police Commissioner, a title that carried, by most accounts, more practical authority than the one he'd lost.

That lasted less than a year. Reform mayor Seth Low won City Hall in 1901 running against exactly the kind of Tammany-machine policing Devery represented, and on January 1, 1902, Low's new police commissioner, John N. Partridge, called Devery in and ended his career for good. Journalist Lincoln Steffens, who'd covered New York corruption as closely as anyone alive, summed the man up in a line that's followed him ever since: "As a chief of police, he is a disgrace, but as a character, he is a work of art."

Devery walked away rich -- a West End Avenue mansion, real estate holdings piling up out in Far Rockaway. A little more than a year later, on his 49th birthday, he found something to do with the money.

As a chief of police, he is a disgrace, but as a character, he is a work of art.

Buying a Team Nobody Wanted

The Baltimore Orioles that Devery and Farrell bought in January 1903 weren't a franchise so much as a legal charter with a roster attached to it in name only. The Great Raid the previous July had gutted the team, and of the 39 players who'd worn an Orioles uniform in 1902, only about five would ever put on a Highlanders jersey. Ban Johnson needed the team gone from Baltimore and planted in New York, the country's biggest market and the one city the American League hadn't cracked. He needed owners who could navigate Manhattan's political terrain, get a ballpark permitted and built fast, and not blink at the cost of doing business there. Farrell and Devery, between the two of them, checked every box.

The American League approved the move on March 12, 1903. Farrell and Devery installed a local businessman, Joseph Gordon, as the club's figurehead president -- his name went on the letterhead, Gordon helped scout the site that became Hilltop Park, and Farrell and Devery kept the actual control for themselves. It was a common arrangement in an era when a police captain's reputation and a gambling operator's business interests weren't the image a new sports franchise wanted on its stationery.

From there, by nearly every account, Devery was the silent one. Farrell ran the club day to day -- he hired and fired managers, he made the roster calls, he even, in 1904, rented Hilltop Park out to Columbia University for a football game in a scheduling blunder that cost Clark Griffith's Highlanders a crucial doubleheader during a pennant race they'd eventually lose by a game and a half. Devery's name shows up on the ownership ledger. It rarely shows up in the decisions.

A Cop's Idea That Outlasted Everything Else He Did

Devery got one thing indisputably right, and it's the only piece of his ownership tenure that New Yorkers still see every day. Coming off a disastrous 1908 season -- the Highlanders finished 51-103, dead last -- the club needed something to rebuild an identity around. In 1909, Devery reached back into his old life for the answer. The New York City Police Department awarded a Medal of Honor to officers shot in the line of duty, and its design featured two letters, N and Y, interlocked into a single mark. Devery had seen that medal plenty of times. He put it on a baseball uniform.

The interlocking "NY" debuted on Highlanders sleeves and caps in 1909, borrowed wholesale from a symbol meant to honor police sacrifice, not sell tickets. It's never been meaningfully redesigned since. Every version of the Yankees logo you've ever seen -- on the cap, on the jersey, on the merchandise racks in every mall in America -- traces back to a corrupt ex-police chief's decision to raid his old department's iconography for a struggling ballclub. Nobody in 1909 could've guessed that would be the most consequential call Devery ever made in baseball.

The Partnership Falls Apart

Farrell and Devery's ownership never produced a pennant. The Highlanders finished second in 1904 and 1906 -- Devery's best years as an owner in the standings, for whatever credit that's worth him -- and spent most of the rest of the decade well outside contention, including Hal Chase's messy, corruption-shadowed run as player-manager starting in 1910. By the close of the 1914 season, Devery had lost whatever appetite for baseball he'd ever had. Farrell, by then, genuinely loved running the club and wanted to keep going. That gap in enthusiasm -- one owner ready to sell, the other not -- pushed the partnership toward its end, and it didn't end well personally either. Farrell and Devery had been quarreling for a while by 1915, and despite friends trying to patch things up between them (a sportswriter and a future New York governor both took a run at it), the two men reportedly went years without speaking again before Devery died.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Bill Devery?

Bill Devery was a Tammany Hall-connected former New York City police chief who partnered with gambler and saloon owner Frank Farrell to buy the wrecked Baltimore Orioles franchise for $18,000 on January 9, 1903, and move it to New York, where it became the Highlanders and eventually the Yankees. He co-owned the club for twelve years before selling to Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston in 1915.

Was Bill Devery corrupt as a police officer?

Yes, extensively. Devery paid bribes for his original 1878 appointment and for later promotions, ran a Tenderloin precinct that collected protection payments from gambling dens, brothels, and saloons under Tammany boss Richard Croker's system of "honest graft," was charged with bribery following the 1894-95 Lexow Committee investigation, and was convicted of bribery and extortion in 1897 before that conviction was overturned on appeal. He nonetheless rose to become Chief of Police in 1898.

What did Bill Devery actually do for the Highlanders and Yankees?

Less than Frank Farrell did. By most accounts, Devery was the silent partner in the ownership, leaving day-to-day decisions -- roster moves, managerial hirings and firings -- almost entirely to Farrell. Devery's one lasting contribution was adapting the design of an NYPD Medal of Honor into the interlocking "NY" logo that debuted on Highlanders uniforms in 1909 and remains the franchise's logo today.

How much money did Bill Devery make from owning the Yankees?

Devery and Farrell paid $18,000 for the franchise in 1903 and sold it to Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston for a reported $460,000 on January 11, 1915, splitting the proceeds evenly. Despite that return and his earlier fortune from police corruption, Devery's real estate holdings were reportedly almost entirely mortgaged by the time he died in 1919, and his estate was left in the red.

Did Bill Devery create the Yankees' interlocking NY logo?

Yes. In 1909, drawing on his NYPD background, Devery adapted the design from a New York City Police Department Medal of Honor -- awarded to officers shot in the line of duty -- into the interlocking "NY" that appeared on Highlanders uniforms that season. The design has never been meaningfully changed since.

What He Left Behind

Devery's ownership tenure produced no pennants and, by the honest measure of most baseball histories, not much active leadership at all. Jacob Ruppert bought the club Devery and Farrell built in 1915 and turned it into the sport's dominant franchise within a decade -- new stadium, Babe Ruth, the whole operation Devery never seemed interested in building himself. But Ruppert built on a foundation that had to exist first: a New York franchise, a league charter, an American League team where none had been before. Farrell and Devery put up the $18,000 and took the political risk of getting a Tammany-connected ballclub past a skeptical city. Whatever else you say about how they ran it, that part happened because of them.

He died with a mortgaged fortune and a decade-old grudge against the man he'd bought a baseball team with. The logo outlived both of those facts. It's still on every cap.