But New York City’s powerful planning chief, Robert Moses, scoffed at O’Malley’s appeal to “keep our franchise in Brooklyn.” O’Malley wanted the city to help him clear suitable land for a privately funded new stadium in the borough. When O’Malley focused on one particular site, he found that Moses was already working with the real estate mogul Fred Trump (father of the current 2016 presidential aspirant). During their cat-and-mouse game, which lasted for years, Moses suggested that the Dodgers build a ballpark in Flushing Meadows, Queens (near where Citi Field now stands). At one point, Moses angered O’Malley by counseling him to simply fix up Ebbets Field.

New York’s mayor, Robert Wagner, shared Moses’ lack of urgency about finding a Brooklyn site for a new Dodger stadium. Asked in 1955 about the possibility that O’Malley’s organization might lose patience and leave town, Wagner said, “I don’t get emotional about it.”

In 1956, showing his unwillingness to accept the status quo, O’Malley moved the Dodgers for seven games to a more accessible park in Jersey City. That fall, he sold Ebbets Field (while retaining the right to use it, if necessary, for several more years).

While O’Malley was still wrangling with Moses and other New York officials, a group of business and public figures in Los Angeles, which lacked a major league team, opened its arms. As various details of O’Malley’s closed-door talks appeared in the newspapers, Arthur Daley warned in The New York Times, “The game has reached the put-up-or-shut-up stage.” Mayor Wagner vowed that his city “will not be blackjacked into anything.” Nelson Rockefeller, hoping to boost his chances to be elected governor of New York, explored a last-ditch plan to buy 12 acres of land that might keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn, but to no avail.

In October 1957, O’Malley arrived in Los Angeles on his team’s Convair 440 (now repainted “Los Angeles Dodgers”) and was greeted like a conquering hero. The following year, Los Angeles voters narrowly endorsed a referendum providing the Dodgers with a substantial parcel of land, as well as new roads and grading services, enabling O’Malley to build a 56,000-seat Dodger Stadium, which opened in 1962 and is still in use today.

Back in Brooklyn — although the New York Giants were simultaneously departing for San Francisco — O’Malley was widely regarded as a traitor. In The New York Times Magazine, the sportswriter William Barry Furlong called O’Malley the Dodgers’ “cordial kidnapper.”