On the Waterfront (38 page)

A. “You c’n ask them if I done anything.”

Q. “You became a working partner?”

A. “If there was anything to do. But as a rule there was nothin’ to do.”

Q. “Isn’t it the real honest-to-God truth that you came back from Sing Sing after serving three years for assault with a deadly weapon, that you muscled your way into this loading racket and took half the profits, at least two hundred and fifty dollars a week, while holding down your union job?”

The public loader asked to consult his lawyer.

A Negro longshoreman testified that he had to pay a double kickback, first two dollars to a colored strawboss who shaped the Negroes in the basement of his own home and ran what he called a kickback club. Three dollars went to the white hiring boss on the pier. The witness had finally given up longshoring, he testified, because “you got to pay up too many dollars to get those jobs and even then a colored man don’t get no good chance on the waterfront.”

A frightened Italian longshoreman from Brooklyn testified that he had protested paying his three-dollars-a-month dues when there were never any meetings or financial reports.

Q. “Who did you protest this to?”

A. “Our business agent and there were two other fellers with him.”

Q. “And then what happened?”

A. “I got kicked by someone. I don’t know who it was.”

Q. “You got kicked in the groin?”

A. “Yes, sir.”

Q. “And sent to the hospital?”

A. “Yes, sir. I was out of work nearly five weeks.”

Q. “And this assault took place right in front of the pier where you work?”

A. “Yes, sir, where I used to work.”

Mrs. Collins took the stand to tell how her husband, as assistant hiring boss on Pier B in Bohegan, had refused to hire short gangs, which meant that fewer men had to overwork in order to support the hoodlums who did no work. “Andy was a good man,” she said, and began to cry. “Every time I hear a key in the latch I get the feelin’ it’s him comin’ home.” She dabbed at her prematurely lined face. “I’ve got a boy thirteen, and one thing I promise, he’s not going to be no longshoreman—not while that bunch of gorillas are running the thing.”

The criminal record of Alky Benasio was examined and a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney was questioned as to how it happened that a report on a waterfront murder in the 40’s associated with Alky had disappeared from the police files. The former official spoke at some length, but was unable to clarify the point.

Alky himself was called to the stand, a medium-sized, unimpressive, self-contained figure whose name was known to have sent murder to at least two dozen victims.

Alky would admit nothing, not even that his brother, Jerry Benasio was now a power on most Italian-manned docks. At one point when the cool-mannered Chief Counsel was asking him a particularly vexing question, he cried out with deeply felt indignation, “Look, you got the records in front of you. You went to college. You got the Government with you. You got everything on your side. I had to work my way up from the bottom.”

“Where do you think you are now?” the Counsel asked, perhaps baiting him unfairly because Alky Benasio, in the eyes of the law, was a free man and those murders of his were artistic jobs that would never be proved.

Slicker McGhee, up from Florida with a sun-tan, in a tailored flannel suit and a tastefully striped tie, listened politely to a reading of his record of five convictions, his appointment by Willie Givens as an organizer and his association with the country’s underworld elite. He looked like a Madison Avenue advertising executive, and the recital of the waterfront murders with which the Commission investigation implicated him seemed incongruous. To any and all questions, including the name and address of his mother, he replied in perfect diction rarely heard on the waterfront, “I refuse to answer on the grounds that the question will tend to degrade or incriminate me.” He stepped down from the stand with a bland smile, as if forgiving the authorities for this gratuitous waste of time, and a few hours later he was winging back to his life of pleasure in the Florida sun.

A very nervous Mayor Bobby Burke of Bohegan claimed he did not know his Police Commissioner Donnelly had once been a bootlegger employed by Johnny Friendly. And he denied using the docks as an outlet for petty patronage, although a disenchanted precinct worker testified that Burke paid him off by sending him down to Friendly with a note to carry him on the payroll week-ends to get time-and-a-half. Mayor Burke also denied that the late Charley Malloy was known as a City Hall “fixer” and go-between linking the Mayor’s office to Johnny Friendly’s operation. But there was something about the Mayor’s answers that did not carry conviction. Often his responses were ludicrously evasive, and when he was asked how he had managed to bank sixty thousand dollars on an annual salary of fifteen thousand, he took refuge in long, fevered consultations with his attorney.

“If that’s the Mayor, I hate to think what the rest of Bohegan is like,” a Manhattan reporter at the press table said, grinning.

“You should talk—over there in Manhattan!” a Jersey reporter threw back at him good-naturedly.

A few minutes later the Chief Counsel was offering in evidence documentary proof that all the officers of the local that serviced the luxury-line piers on the midtown West Side were habitual criminals with long prison records. These boys were not only the union leaders for the luxury liners, but had their own stevedore company as well on the piers serving nearly all the high-class tourist trade. In fact, the terminal superintendent for the Empire Lines was asked:

Q. “Now the police record of the secretary-treasurer of the stevedore’s company that does the work for your piers shows he was convicted of grand larceny and that he was a fugitive from the New Jersey State Prison. And the president of this company was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and subsequently jumped bail. Also his familiar nickname on the dock is ‘Sudden Death.’ Are you aware of that, sir?”

A. “No, I didn’t know that.”

Q. “Another loading boss on your piers is Timmy Coniff who has been convicted three times for burglary, robbery and attempted grand larceny and has spent five years in Sing Sing and three years in State Prison. Do you know him?”

A. “I may have met the gentleman once or twice.”

Q. “Were there ten tons of steel stolen from Mr. Coniff’s pier?”

A. “Yes, sir.”

Q. “Wouldn’t you call that a remarkable piece of pilferage?”

A. “Yes, sir.”

Q. “Now, as an executive of one of our greatest shipping firms, doesn’t it strike you that there may be some connection between pilferage of such proportions and having habitual criminals in position of authority on your docks?”

A. “You might say so.”

Q. “Might? You
would
say so, wouldn’t you?”

A. “I wouldn’t want to say exactly, sir.”

Half a dozen other shipping executives had heard of pilferage and criminality on their docks but were strangely vague as to the source of it.

One unhappy vice-president of a world-famous line even admitted accepting a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe from an Interstate stevedore official in order to swing his company’s business to Interstate. Witness after witness—some of them lowly “insoigents” hoping for a change, some reluctant fence-sitters forced to describe overt acts of violence, some defensively respectable, some openly hostile—recited almost casually their tales of bribery, thievery, intimidation and murder. The crimes of extortion and criminal exploitation were being proved not once or twice, but monotonously, day in and day out, through hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of damning testimony.

Father Barry devoured every line of it and was jubilantly ready to bet that the Johnny Friendly type of labor racketeer, as insidious a gangster figure as violent America had ever known, was ready for the skids. What could save him or his underlings or his superiors now that the bottom muck of waterfront viciousness was finally being dredged up to the surface for all to see?

And the show had hardly begun! Not one, but eight waterfront local treasurers in a row all maintained with various degrees of indignation that their financial records had mysteriously disappeared on the eve of the investigation.

“Strange,” said the Chief Counsel, “that there should be this rash of robberies and that the only property stolen in a dozen different parts of the city should be financial records.”

Big Mac McGown, who served as treasurer of Johnny Friendly’s pistol local as well as hiring boss for the Hudson-American Line, was an uncomfortable witness to this mysterious case of the vanishing record books.

He sucked his apple cheeks in, scowled and looked plaintively toward his lawyer, the silky Sam Millinder, as the Commission Counsel read off his list of convicted crimes. As preparation for his vital job as dock boss for one of the major American export lines, Mac had robbed a bank and done time for manslaughter. An interesting development was that Johnny Friendly had promised him his hiring-boss slot while he was still “away,” as they called it, in the State can. The inference was painfully clear that the manslaughter rap was a favor for Johnny Friendly and that the choice hiring spot was Johnny’s way of discharging an obligation.

Q. “You mean to tell me that the local which you serve as treasurer takes in six thousand dollars a month in dues alone, not to mention special assessments and frequent cigar-box collections—a minimum seventy-five thousand dollars a year—and keeps no financial records?”

A. “Sure, we kep’ records.”

Q. “Perhaps, Mr. McGown, you could help our investigators locate them?”

A. “Well, the trouble is, we was robbed last week, and we can’t find no books.”

Q. “Did you report this—unfortunate robbery to the police?”

A. “Well, we—we …” Big Mac rolled his eyes in agony. He wasn’t used to thinking this much on his own. It was a unique experience for him. “We—wanted t’ make sure the books wasn’t lost somewheres around the office before we put the police to any trouble.” He turned to look at Sam Millinder for approval.

Millinder was unhappy. He was a knowledgeable, rather sophisticated figure who did not mind counseling Willie Givens for his seventy-five-thousand-dollar-a-year retainer, but these muscleheads who couldn’t even parrot-back what you had rehearsed with them were more than Sam had bargained for. Somehow Sam Millinder had managed to maintain his position as a respectable cloak for the Longshore International, but now this cloak seemed in danger of being shot through with too many holes. At one point Sam Millinder was unable to restrain his own mirth at one of his client’s inane evasions.

Big Mac was asked to explain how he had managed to bank fifty thousand dollars over the past four years on a salary of nine thousand five hundred dollars. Was it, by any chance, as a result of kickbacks from longshoremen over whom Big Mac had absolute economic control?

A. “No, sir. I been lucky on the horses. I got a barber who gives me pretty good tips.”

Q. “Has this—good fortune of yours been reflected in your income-tax returns? I see no evidence of it here.”

A frown of puzzlement clouded Big Mac’s face.

A. “Uh, I—I’d like to ask my counsel the answer to that question.”

Sam Millinder signaled for the microphone to make a nice distinction. “I wish to make it clear to Counsel and the Honorable Commissioners that I am not supplying the answers to any questions you may ask, but am simply here in the role of adviser as to the constitutional rights of the members of the union I represent.”

An air of expectancy ran through the crowded court room the day that International president-for-life, Willie Givens, took the stand. Sam Millinder’s conduct had verged on discourtesy to some of the more obvious criminal types, but now he hovered around the flabby bulk of Weeping Willie like a fond mother mystified because her little darling has suddenly grown into a monster. And two of Millinder’s assistants were close at hand, like lesser tugs trying to nuzzle a disabled leviathan into safe harbor.

Willie’s face looked like a great clod of clay which a careless sculptor had thrown together and never bothered to finish. Occasionally the powerful, brawling, hard-drinking longshoreman of forty years ago peered through its prison of fat and easy living. The jowls were formidable and the bulbous, blue-veined nose was held aloft as an ornament to its owner’s long nights of congenial fellowship. Yes, Willie Givens was a good fellow, a professionally Irish good fellow who could sing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” as huskily as any 12th Avenue or River Street dock walloper.

Weeping Willie had come a long way from the horse cars and the meat wagons of 1912. Once upon a time he had worked side by side with Runty Nolan and Pop Doyle for thirty cents an hour, and he was no smarter than they were or braver or better at his work. But he had something that was still paying off big in America. Call it cupidity or a gift for the main chance, the art of doing nothing in particular and doing it very well, doing it with a flourish, doing it with a knowing rap of the gavel, doing it with a torrent of official-sounding words and a fix in here and a cut back there, doing it with a nod to the Mayor, doing it with a wink from the shippers, doing it with his big red hands making seemingly heartfelt gestures, ready to cry for his forty thousand longshoremen to whom his life was devoted, working day and night for them with no thought except for their welfare, their economic advancement, their social security. Weeping Willie Givens, who had worked his way up from a two-and- a-half-dollar-a-day horse-truck loader to a mover and shaker of the metropolis who could be asked such questions as:

Q. “Now, Mr. Givens, isn’t it a fact that five of the seven organizers you appointed in the past ten years had serious criminal records?”

A. “Nobody asked me to check back on their records.”

Q. “But as an International labor leader, you would not wish to appoint known criminals to organize your workmen, would you?”

A. “I appointed men who had the confidence of their fellow members. I appointed the best men available.”