New York’s ‘Dark Harbor’ of Organized Crime

People who hate newspapers, whose number appears to be legion, choose toforget that newspapers often have been the catalyst for useful, needed reformin American life. Instances of such newspaper-induced reform, while notsimilarly legion, have been many, but few have been as influential as thereporting of Malcolm (“Mike”) Johnson for the old New York Sun.

What was originally a routine assignment from Johnson’s editor to lookinto the murder of a dockworker led to a lengthy investigation detailingorganized crime’s absolute control over New York’s waterfront. The investigation resulted in a24-part series, “Crime on the Waterfront,” that ran in the Sun, the city’s most conservative newspaper, in November andDecember 1948. The series won Johnson a Pulitzer Prize and was the basis forthe 1954 Oscar-winning movie On theWaterfront and the inspiration forArthur Miller’s play A View Fromthe Bridge.

The series still makes for gripping reading, as I can attest, havingread it five years ago when it was published in book form. What Nathan Ward, aformer editor at American Heritagemagazine, has done in Dark Harbor: TheWar forthe New York Waterfront (Farrar,Straus & Giroux) is to not only describe Johnson’s investigation, but putit into the context of its times, presenting a nice slice of American historyand evoking a wonderful era of newspapers. Johnson was the first to reveal theexistence of a sort-of trade association in crime that had originated duringProhibition. The key to the dockside rackets, Johnson found, was mob control ofthe International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), a union that was a havenfor ex-convicts, through which mobsters were able to control all key jobs onthe piers and operate rackets without interference.

Ward shows how Johnson uncovered numerous rackets or crimesextortion,kickbacks on workers’ wages, smuggling, usurious loan-sharking, paddedpayrollsbut thievery was the biggest. Whole truckloads of cargo coulddisappear from the piers without a trace; it was so extensive, Johnson wrote,that it amounted to “an unofficial national tax.”

The next biggest was the loading racket. This was a system by whichgangsters and their union henchmen collected a fee on every pound of cargotrucked from the piers by compelling truckers to pay so-called public loadersto load the trucks.

Some of the most infamous names in American crime figure in thesepagesFrank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Albert Anastasia, Meyer Lanskybut the“docks overlord” was John (“Cockeye”) Dunn, later executed for the murder of aboss stevedore. Among the consequences of Johnson’s reporting were Sen. EstesKefauver’s congressional hearings into organized crimea television sensationin the early days of the mediumas well as state legislative hearings. It alsoled to a number of reforms, including the Port Authority Commission thatoversees hiring along the New York/New Jersey waterfront to this day; the expulsionof the ILA from the AFL-CIO; and the imprisonment of the union president.

Perhaps greatest of all was the banning of the system of hiring that,Johnson wrote, permitted the rackets to flourish, the “shape-up.” Through theshape-up, by which men were hired or rejected at the whim of a hiring boss, itwas possible for criminal gangs to place their own men in key jobs on thepiers, thus solidifying their rule. This system was replaced with hiring halls.

Two years after publishing the waterfront series, the Sun set for the last time after 117years of existence. Since then newspapers have been dying at an increasingpace. It is good to learn that they did not all die in vain.