The Mob and the City

by C. Alexander Hortis

  These competitive advantages made the Port of New York the busiest port in the world. In old maps, Manhattan resembles a centipede, with wooden wharves and piers jutting out on all sides into the water. Nearly half of all the imports and exports of the United States went through the Port of New York. Moreover, the kind of cargo moving through it was exceptionally valuable. While Baltimore and Philadelphia were handling low-price commodities like iron ore, New York was taking in valuable raw materials for skilled manufacturing, and huge amounts of “general cargo” for finished consumer goods. By 1939, the Port of New York received 82 percent of the nation's imports of raw silk, 70 percent of the gums and resins, and 61 percent of the animal furs. Meanwhile, New York's consumers and food companies took in 72 percent of the nation's imports of cheeses, 64 percent of the wines, and 51 percent of the cocoa beans. The per-ton value of imports coming through New York was double that of any other port in the United States.4

  The bottom line: lots of valuable goods were coursing through the New York harbor.

  1–1: Removing cargo from a banana boat on a New York pier, ca. 1900. Gangsters controlled the piers on the New York waterfront. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

  THE PORT'S VULNERABILITIES TO RACKETEERING

  The port's magnificence helped to mask its vulnerabilities. Its problems with racketeering were first widely exposed by the famous waterfront investigations of the early 1950s later immortalized by the 1954 film On the Waterfront, in which Marlon Brando portrays a gritty longshoreman.

  Close observers of the harbor, however, had been issuing quiet alarms since the previous century. The port had developed haphazardly along the narrow streets and piers of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, with only a single railroad freight line for waterborne cargo, and little warehouse space along the harbors. Ships floated in frustration in the harbor, waiting for openings on the narrow, overburdened piers. As early as 1871, an engineer warned: “From this insufficient breadth of the majority of the piers, the lack of width in the river streets, and the consequent difficulty of access, this quarter of the city is entirely too crowded, and it is impossible to transact the shipping business satisfactorily.”5 Calls for improvements to the shoddy wooden wharves and bulkheads were persistently ignored. “The port, by its great natural advantages, has reached its present position among the ports of the world, in spite of the mismanagement of the docks,” warned another report in 1922.6

  During the 1800s, waterfront squatters and thugs took dominion over these precious spaces to extract payoffs from ships. As early as 1874, the Department of Docks noted the “opposition in the removal of the obstructions on the wharves and bulkheads” by people “who, from long occupancy of public property, have supposed themselves entitled to exclusive possession.”7 The New York City Police Department (NYPD) could not be relied on to maintain law and order; waterfront cops were among the most corrupt in the city. In 1875, the City Council lamented that waterfront streets were “reduced to forty feet by squatters or corrupt police supervision,” which exacerbated the “daily gorges of vehicles now witnessed, lasting frequently for hours, and obstructing commerce.”8 Police corruption on the docks became systemic over time. “Steamship companies, who require police service on their docks…have to contribute in substantial sums to the vast amounts which flow into the station-houses, and which, after leaving something of the nature of a deposit, then flow on higher,” described the Lexow Committee's report on police corruption in 1895.9

  Racketeers perfected these extortion tactics through the “public loader.” Unique to the Port of New York, the “public loaders” were not public employees, nor did they perform a public service; they often did not even do the loading. Rather, they were thugs who muscled in on key docks and assumed territorial control over them. They then demanded payoffs from shippers simply for the right to have their cargo loaded onto a delivery truck. Those who resisted found their shipments of Cuban tomatoes or Honduran bananas rotting on a pier. Shippers paid about $50,000 (in current dollars) more in port charges out of New York than other ports—one of the mysterious fees that came to be called the “mob tax.”10

  Fed up, a shipper denounced public loaders who “with the banner of God and their union in one hand, and an iron pipe in the other, stand between merchants and their trucks and defy them to take away their freight.”11 Privately, shippers lamented that they could not clear away the public loaders “without assistance in the way of police protection,” which they said “has never been forthcoming.”12 As an investigative report concluded, “By merely controlling these bottlenecks and jammed conditions, underworld scum can exact tribute from those who will pay to avoid long lines and excessive waiting time in loading and unloading.”13

  Pilferage was massive as well. Before steel containerization and electronic checking, cargo was shipped in wooden crates and tracked by paper, making it vulnerable to theft. A stevedore could sign a phony signature on a delivery slip indicating that cargo had “short-landed” (never arrived). By the time an overseas shipper learned of the theft, the cargo was missing for weeks. “When a whisky ship came in…it seemed like everybody on the waterfront would descend on the ship. Talk about stealing!” recalled Sam Madell, a waterfront organizer. So why didn't the shippers call the police? “It was pretty widely known among the longshoremen that the maritime police were involved with the stealing,” explained Madell. When stolen cargo turned up in the pier superintendent's office it was clear no one watched the watchmen.14

  Irish and Italian gangsters controlled the labor force using the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA). The ILA's president during the Mafia's ascendancy was Joseph P. Ryan. Bestowed the title “president for life” of the ILA by his cronies, Ryan collected an annual salary of $1.7 million while representing longshoremen who made $20,000 (both in current dollars). Behind the scenes, “King Joe” did the opposite: he collaborated with shippers to quell strikes. Most galling was his defense of the “shape-up” system of hiring in which longshoremen became permanent temp workers; each morning they shaped into a horseshoe crowd around a foreman who collected kickbacks from longshoremen to pick them. In 1916, public reports warned that these “conditions of hiring are degrading in the extreme [and] are open to the danger of graft.” Yet Ryan consistently, and absurdly for a union leader, defended the shape-up system.15

  Joe Ryan's real job was to oversee the smooth running of the rackets. He used his blarney and connections with Irish politicians, from Mayor Jimmy Walker to Mayor Bill O'Dwyer, to fend off scrutiny of the docks. For those resistant to his charm—rank-and-file rebels, naïve shippers, Communist Party agitators—Ryan could call on the many convicts he kept on staff (a third of the ILA staff had criminal records) to drop the hook on troublemakers.16

  THE IRISH AND ITALIAN RIVALRY ON THE WATERFRONT

  The Mafia gradually took over rackets as the ethnic makeup of the waterfront changed from Irish to Italian. In 1880, fully 95 percent of the longshoremen were Irish; but after 1910, one-third of the longshoremen were Italians, and their numbers were surging. A 1916 report found that the Irish “still are predominant in trade union councils and general harbor politics” even as “Sicilians and other South Italians, are rapidly approaching them in number.” Even as the Italians surpassed them in numbers in the 1930s, there was still a “strong feeling of superiority of the Irish-Americans” because “in times past the Irish were dominant on all New York piers.” This hostility was also due to the nebulous “racial” status of South Italians: foremen complained that it was “impossible to get ‘white men’ and that they were obliged to take Italians.”17

  While the West Side was still contested, the Brooklyn waterfront was overwhelmingly Italian by the 1930s. Entire neighborhoods revolved around the hard life of longshoring. “Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, South Brooklyn—I can remember when those waterfront areas used to be like a company town. Most of the longshoremen left their houses and walked five minutes to
the pier,” recalled Frank Barbaro, a longtime resident of Brooklyn. These rough neighborhoods were breeding grounds for gamblers, hoodlums, and loansharks. A young teenager named Al Capone began life as a hard-fighting “wharf rat” on the Brooklyn waterfront.18

  THE MAFIA MOVES ON THE DOCKS

  The first Italian gangster to gain power on the docks was Paolo Vaccarelli, who rode the wave of Italian longshoring on the East Side piers of Manhattan. Diminutive, dapper, and intelligent (he spoke four languages), he took the Irish name “Paul Kelly” and formed the Paul Kelly Association, the strongest street gang on the Lower East Side in the late 1800s.

  Ever the opportunist, he changed his name back to “Paul Vaccarelli” as Italian immigration surged, and he organized the Italian “scow trimmers,” who sorted garbage on waterborne barges, into an ILA charter by appealing to their ethnic solidarity. After rising to vice president of the ILA in 1912, he lost a power struggle with a young Joe Ryan, and formed a breakaway union of Italian longshoremen, which was a thorn in the side of the ILA. Meanwhile, the rising force of the Mafia built ties with Vaccarelli.19

  From his nineteenth-floor office on West 14th Street, on the border between Irish Chelsea and the Italian South Village, the newly installed ILA president Joseph P. Ryan tried to straddle the divide through a grand bargain between the Irish and the Italian syndicates. Scarred by his battles with Paul Vaccarelli, upon becoming president in 1927, Ryan embraced a “non-interference” policy (in reality, anything goes) with the Italian ILA locals along the waterfront.20 The Mafia quickly gained footholds in these locals.

  By the late 1920s, Emil Camarda, Camarda's brother, and two cousins had become the patriarchal rulers of six huge ILA locals on the Brooklyn waterfront. Emil came from a unionist background; his father organized Local 338 in Brooklyn before the First World War. Brooklyn's locals became so identified with his family that they were known as “the Camarda locals.” But during Emil's own rise to the office of vice president of the ILA, he brought in his childhood friend Vincent Mangano, a mobster on the Brooklyn waterfront. Camarda and Mangano knew each other “from the other side,” having grown up together in Palermo, Sicily. The two formed the City Democratic Club, supposedly to represent Italian Americans in Brooklyn. It was a cynical appeal. “They often said the organization existed merely to help many deserving Americans of Italian extraction find their rightful place in the sun of our city,” explained Vincent Mannino, former attorney for the Camarda locals. “I felt that the reason why they were interested in this organization was to help and promote their own personal interests, politically.”21

  Unknown to the public at the time, in 1931, Vince Mangano had become one of the five bosses of the Mafia families in New York City. The Camarda locals quickly deteriorated into tools for racketeering. These paper locals were not really unions at all: they conducted no elections, rarely held meetings of the rank-and-file, and never went on strike. In 1941, Emil Camarda was shot dead under murky circumstances in the office of a stevedoring company during an argument about putting a crony on the payroll.22

  Stalking the Camarda locals like the four horsemen of the Mafia were the brothers Anastasio. Jumping ship from freighters between 1917 and 1924, the four teenagers from Calabria disappeared into the Italian longshore gangs for a time only to reemerge with a vengeance in the 1920s. Anthony Anastasio became a feared hiring boss on the Red Hook piers and a liaison to Joe Ryan. As master of the shape-up, the man they called “Tough Tony” controlled the daily bread of thousands of longshoremen. Anthony Anastasio was secretly also a caporegime (captain) in the Mangano Family. His brother Joseph Anastasio, a pier official for the ILA, reportedly stole cargo “by the ton” according to a shipping association. Meanwhile, the youngest brother, Gerardo “Jerry” Anastasio, a convicted bookie and ILA business agent, demanded shippers put him on their payrolls as a phantom employee or “there would be trouble.”23

  The brothers’ threats were terrifying because everyone knew that their oldest brother, Umberto, was Albert “The Executioner” Anastasia, the psychopathic underboss of the Mangano Family. The compact, pigeon-chested Anastasia possessed a ferocity that shocked even fellow mobsters. Albert worked briefly on the Brooklyn docks, but the job bored him, and he quit after meeting mafiosi Philip and Vincent Mangano in 1920. In 1923, gunmen fired four bullets into Albert's stomach as he sat in an automobile as wheelman on a bootlegging run in Red Hook; he survived what doctors thought were fatal wounds. Prosecutors charged Anastasia with four different murders (one victim stabbed to death by an ice pick) only to see key witnesses change their stories or vanish.24

  Across the East River in Manhattan, what became the Genovese Family gradually took over the smaller East Side piers. As a kid on the docks, Joseph “Socks” Lanza saw how anxious fishing boat skippers were to get their perishable fish unloaded and put on ice quickly in the nearby Fulton Fish Market. Fish-worker unions in New York sometimes refused to unload “non-union” fish, letting it decompose in the barrel. Around 1923, while barely in his twenties, Lanza organized a new union, the United Seafood Workers, which began demanding that all skippers and fishmongers pay a $50 tribute just for the right to have their fish unloaded and “protected” from sabotage and thievery in the market.25

  After Lanza's convictions on federal antitrust charges in the 1930s, his lieutenant Michelino Clemente rose to power. As a young man, Clemente was just another lean Italian longshoreman who worked in his underwear on the docks. But the smooth-talking Clemente's fortunes changed when he became one of the “public loaders” on the East Side piers, where he picked up the nickname “Loader Mike.” In 1941, he set down his cargo hook for good and became the secretary-treasurer and business agent for ILA Local 856, the twelve-hundred-member local encompassing Manhattan's East Side. In 1953, Clemente came under fire when a stevedoring company president testified that he picked up the $97,000 tab for Clemente's daughter's lavish wedding at the Biltmore Hotel. The reception had several mafiosi as invited guests, including Albert Anastasia. It was an open secret that the now dough-faced, nattily dressed Clemente had become the “racket boss of East River piers” for the Genovese Family.26

  1–2: Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio talking to ILA president Joe Ryan, 1953. Ryan upheld a “non-interference” policy with the Mafia-controlled Brooklyn ILA locals. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

  Out on the Richmond docks (Staten Island), Alex “The Ox” Di Brizzi took control of the ILA locals in the early 1930s. Unlike most early mafiosi, Di Brizzi was born in America in 1892 and was a professional boxer before turning to a life of crime.27 The pugilist made himself president of ILA Local 920 in the early 1930s, and he was later appointed vice president of the ILA's commanding Atlantic Coast District by Joe Ryan. Di Brizzi was caught taking thousands of dollars in cash from stevedoring companies while supposedly representing their unionized employees. “I haven't taken no money outside of gifts,” he insisted. Di Brizzi was in fact the Mangano Family's “top man” on Staten Island, overseeing loansharking and gambling operations.28

  This was only the beginning of Mafia rule of the waterfront. As we will see, the mob's stranglehold on the harbor tightened in the 1940s, until it sparked a public backlash that would test its strength. For now, let us step back and scan the city from the vantage point of the Mafia.

  SKIMMING SEVEN MILLION NEW YORKERS

  The sheer enormity of Gotham was a catalyst for organized crime, though for reasons that have not been fully appreciated. Ever since federal census records were kept, New York City was the most heavily populated—and most densely populated—city of the republic. Between 1900 and 1930, Gotham's population doubled from 3,400,000 people, to 6,900,000 people. After 1940, its population never fell below seven million people. As of World War II, one of every eighteen Americans lived within the five boroughs of New York City.29

  These seven million New Yorkers lived and worked disproportionately in crowded neighborhoods and industrial districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn. During th
e early 1900s, the Lower East Side had a higher population density than Bombay, Calcutta, or London. In Little Italy, 3,500 people lived on a single block of Elizabeth Street.30 Immigrants who grew up in these neighborhoods recall them with astonishment. “The block at 112th Street between First and Second avenues was lined with six-story buildings with families that had twelve or thirteen children. You could imagine how many people,” marveled Joseph Verdiccio of Italian East Harlem.31

  To the Mafia, these were seven million pockets to pick. The mob did not make money by engaging in gratuitous orgies of violence. In 1912, an assistant district attorney noted that even with extortion, while Italian syndicates might threaten bombing, they drew the line at “child-snatching” because “America will not stand for kidnapping.”32 The Cosa Nostra preferred schemes where money was quietly skimmed or handed over without any immediate physical force. Mafia soldier Joe Valachi distinguished the common American criminal who “usually stole” and was “taking a chance for his money” from the Italian mafioso (member of the Mafia) who “has racketeering on his mind.”33 Mafia boss Joe Bonanno likewise eschewed violent extortion in favor of collecting surplus profits through monopolies: “In my world, there was a distinction between what constitutes extortion and what does not,” explained Bonanno. “One must remember that in the economic sphere one of the objectives of a Family was to set up monopolies as far as possible.”34

  The Mafia's desire for racketeering was logical: the victims were diffuse and it generated less heat from law enforcement. Rob a million dollars by gunpoint from a bank in Manhattan and soon the Federal Bureau of Investigation is on your trail. Skim a dollar off the budgets of a million New Yorkers through a racketeering scheme and hardly anyone notices. A new phrase arose: the “mob tax.” The Cosa Nostra “made sure people anted up their Mafia ‘taxes,’” said John Manca, a cop involved with the mob.35 The ability to “tax” so many people in so many different ways concentrated in one city enabled generations of mob soldiers to live off New York City.