NEW YORK: The Payoff Port

The Port of New York is a majestic natural harbor endowed with deep rivers, estuaries and bays and rimmed by 770 miles of profitable piers and docks. Thirteen years ago New York handled 22% of all the tonnage shipped to & from the U.S. Today tonnage has slumped to 15%. Principal reason: the New York waterfront is the realm of hoods and racketeers, where a payoff is as casual as a Christmas card, where whole truckloads of merchandise can vanish, where watchmen never make an arrest, and where mobsters recruit musclemen who are still serving time in Sing Sing.

Last week a five-man State Crime Commission opened public hearings in Manhattan on the plight of the waterfront. To lay a basis, the commission first cast its subpoena net into a school of neatly groomed waterfront businessmen—heads of stevedoring and shipping companies. In theory, these were the helpless victims in the domain of President Joe Ryan of the A.F.L.’s International Longshoremen’s Association. In fact and testimony, most of the witnesses turned out to be men who would dangle a dollar on the end of a hook for either bait or payoff, whichever was in order. The basis they laid: racketeering runs rampant on the waterfront because nearly everyone there complacently accepts corruption as a matter of course.

Gratuities & Goodwill. Take the matter referred to as “gratuities.” The largest stevedoring firm in the U.S. is the Jarka Corp., which unloads some 4,000 ships a year, did $40 million worth of business on the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes between 1947 and 1952. Jarka’s president, Frank W. Nolan, admitted that Jarka paid out nearly half a million dollars in petty-cash “gratuities” in the last five years. Committee Counsel Theodore Kiendl prodded Nolan into an admission: Jarka paid off not only labor racketeers but agents and executives of shipping companies to get their unloading business. E.g., a vice president of the Waterman Steamship Lines got $2,500 a year for three years, the local manager of the Holland-America Line got $15,000 a year for two years.

Not all stevedore company executives admitted to such lavishness with customers and racketeers. But most admitted paying heavy tolls to the International Longshoremen’s Union as regularly as they would drop nickels into a parking meter. Jarka paid out some $58,000 to I.L.A. officials, with a regular $100 Christmas envelope for Joe Ryan, the boss of I.L.A. Jules Sottnek & Son, stevedores, paid I.L.A. bosses $14,402 in five years. A Sottnek vice president staked Mike Clemente, an I.L.A. straw boss and graduate of the Socks Lanza mob, to an $11,000 wedding for his daughter. President James C. Kennedy of the stevedoring firm of Daniels & Kennedy, Inc. personally dropped off a sealed envelope, containing $1,500 in cash, every year at Joe Ryan’s office. All burly Joe said was “hello,” and “thanks.”

“Isn’t it a fact,” asked Counsel Kiendl, “that you paid these moneys for the purpose of avoiding the possibility of … flash strikes?” Replied Kennedy: “I say I gave him the money. If it prevented strikes, then that’s what it done, but I didn’t actually pay to prevent strikes.” Kiendl: “Your motive was to pay the money and hope that it would keep you out of trouble?” Kennedy: “Yes, sir.”

Hiring Bosses. The stevedore companies also paid to get on good terms with the hiring bosses on the piers. The hiring boss runs a dockside institution known as the “shape-up,” a ragged morning muster of all the local union longshoremen who want to work. Since there are usually more men than jobs, the boss’s power is absolute: he can demand kickbacks, hire & fire at will, dispense I.L.A. union cards at cut-rate initiation fees, and threaten any stevedoring company with a quick strike. Under the union contract, the hiring boss is a foreman appointed by the companies themselves. But he is actually the free & unhampered agent of the local I.L.A. czar.

In 1950 Jarka Corp. wanted to work a new pier. The word was passed for Jarka to hire a pier boss named Tony Anastasio, brother of Murder, Inc.’s lord high executioner, Albert Anastasia.* When Jarka refused to stand for the shakedown, Anastasio’s other piers went on strike. Jarka complained to Joe Ryan, and Joe blandly “recommended” Anastasio. Anastasio was hired.

But this sort of thing was not entirely distasteful to some firms. Jarka Vice President Captain Douglas Yates put it succinctly when he explained why he hired one Albert Ackalitis, a mobster with a police record as long as a towline. “The guiding thought in hiring Ackalitis,” said Captain Yates, “frankly, was to have on that pier some order and discipline, as I call it, amongst the men.”

Orderly Racketeering. Such order is inevitably made for disciplined racketeering. One stevedoring superintendent testified that the Grace Line paid off Timmy O’Mara, a Sing Sing alumnus (burglary) and boss loader on the North River, by carrying him on the payroll under a phony name. O’Mara never did a lick of work, but he netted $24,130 in five years. Portly, white-haired Jones Devlin, the general manager of the powerful U.S. Lines (S.S. United States, America), related with bored weariness how the U.S. Lines abandoned one of its midtown piers rather than try to cope with organized pilferage. Asked Counsel Kiendl: “Were there ten tons of steel stolen from that pier?” Replied Devlin: “That was the most remarkable case of pilferage.”

The Exception. In its first week of public hearings, the Crime Commission got a good look at four live I.L.A. operators. Big Frank Russo, a pier boss, admitted that he had received $1,400—plus an unspecified amount of “vacation money.” Sullen, hulking Fred Marino testified that he was elected shop steward of local 327, denied earlier testimony that he had demanded that the Luckenbach Lines bar all cops and FBI agents from his pier. Anthony Delmar, Brooklyn pier boss, was sworn in while holding up his left hand, contributed little that was either sinister or helpful. Jerry Anastasio, one of the notorious brothers, spent 14 minutes on the stand. He sucked his tongue, picked his nose, blew into his hands, spat into his handkerchief and belched—but the only words he would utter were his name.

By week’s end, the committee got a refreshing look at a hearty, roaring ex-seafarer, Phineas Blanchard, 74, president of the Turner & Blanchard, Inc. stevedoring company. Boomed Old Seaman Blanchard: when Jerry Anastasio and Russo asked to be put on his payroll in 1951, “I came damn near throwing them out. My company has never put anybody —any I.L.A. representatives—on the payroll.” How about gifts to shipping lines? In 38 years, snorted Phineas, his Christmas remembrances have consisted of a form letter sending his customers “every good wish for Christmas and the coming year.” But even Blanchard admitted that the I.L.A. “appointed” his hiring bosses.

Clean Up? The commission is checking the bank accounts of some New York and New Jersey political big shots in an effort to get at the deeper causes of racketeering on the docks. The waterfront situation was bad 20 years ago and has worsened since the war to the point where even New York may be impelled to start cleaning it up.

*The brothers spell their names differently.