Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (39 page)

The shape-up was a ubiquitous method of employment on the piers. Men arrived twice a day and gathered in a huge mob outside a designated loading dock. A stevedore, or hiring boss, surveyed the crowd and decided who would work and who would not. If you were a lone, unaffiliated individual looking for a day’s labor,
fuggettaboutit
. The only way to procure work was to form into a crew or gang and pay tribute to the hiring boss, who in turn paid tribute to the stevedore companies, who in turn paid tribute to union officials, who in turn paid tribute to politicians and cops, and so on up the ladder. The result was an elaborate kickback system with tentacles that reached into virtually every aspect of modern industrial society—in other words, organized crime in a nutshell.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Irish and Italian laborers waged a bloody battle for control of the commercial piers in many big cities. The Brooklyn dock wars, led by Wild Bill Lovett and Peg Leg Lonergan, may have produced the highest body count, but similar battles sprang up all over the United States. In New Orleans, huge shipping companies deliberately manipulated Irish and Italian longshoremen, pitting one against the other, eventually adding a new element—African Americans, who were brought in at low wages to undercut both groups. In New England, some of the cities’ most renowned gangsters got their start in the region’s dock wars, shuttling from Boston to Providence to Portland, Maine during strikes or when competing work crews clashed. In the Great Lakes region, particularly in Chicago and Cleveland, Irish American longshoremen fought to hold onto jobs that had passed from one generation to another since at least the 1870s, when Irish laborers first arrived in sizable numbers to help build the Ohio and Erie Canals.

Of all the locales where gangsters fought and eventually seized control of commercial mechanisms along the waterfront, none compared with the Port of New York. By the 1940s, especially during the years of World War II and immediately after, the Port of New York emerged as the most lucrative commercial port in the world. The shipping business in New York and elsewhere had survived the lean years of the Depression, which saw a dwindling workforce and a number of crippling strikes. Labor subterfuge and political turmoil may have kept workers from organizing, but it also hindered commercial trade on the waterfront. From an international standpoint, strikes and violent confrontations between workers and police made shipping freight more trouble than it was worth.

All of that changed on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor initiated U.S. involvement in World War II. Among other things, the war years turned out to be an unprecedented boon to the maritime industry, with New York harbor at the epicenter of an economic revival that would continue for at least the next fifteen years.

At the time, the Port of New York included all seaborne commercial activity in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, a gigantic waterfront trade covering 750 miles of shoreline with 1,800 piers. By the middle of the decade, nearly 10,000 ocean-going ships cleared New York harbor a year, or one ship every fifty minutes. These ships were owned and operated by steamship lines that sailed to 155 ports in every corner of the world. With more than a million passengers a year, they carried thirty-five million tons of cargo in foreign trade alone.

Within the harbor itself, cargo handling was serviced by approximately 2,500 tugs, barges, lighters, derricks, car floats, and scows. The adjacent railroad fleets moved more than 750 carloads of export freight daily to 200 steamship piers. Domestic freight was believed to be four or five times higher than foreign trade, with a total cargo somewhere around 150 million tons annually. New York harbor handled between 32 and 38 percent of the nation’s overall cargo, or money cargo in longshore terms, with an annual value that ranged from fourteen to sixteen billion dollars.

This huge flow of commercial activity was bound to attract its share of criminal parasites and bottom feeders. In fact, many sluggers, shoulder hitters, and bootleggers who had survived the Prohibition years drifted into rackets associated with the waterfront trade. The hiring boss, in particular, was frequently a gangster from the booze running days who was adept at attracting and also controlling “dock wallopers.” The docks were a rough-and-tumble universe; shylocks, or loan sharks, fronted money to workers so they could pay tribute to the hiring boss. Workers who were tardy in repaying the loans could be roughed up or even killed. Longshoremen who were on the wrong side of labor disputes also became victims of violent intimidation. And everyone kept their mouths shut; killings on the waterfront almost always went unsolved. Violence became the underpinning of a vast racketeering underworld that included gambling concessions (bookmaking and policy), payroll padding, no-show jobs, organized thievery, murder-for-hire, and all manner of labor corruption.

By the mid-1940s, the International Longshoreman’s Association in the Port of New York boasted a membership of 40,000 workers. Most were part-time employees, and many were beholden to a particular hiring boss or waterfront gang—all of which guaranteed a desperate and compliant workforce. The ILA may have advocated for workers during labor disputes, but it also ruthlessly enforced the shape-up system, which was the foundation for the entire constellation of waterfront rackets. With thirty-two locals from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes and a national membership over 100,000, the ILA had become the glue that held together the vast, interconnecting array of criminal elements, making the waterfront the most lucrative underworld universe since Prohibition.

The ILA, in other words, was more powerful than any Mafia family. It was a legitimate organization with hegemony over a massive commercial and criminal marketplace. Anyone who ruled this universe was destined to be a man of great power, widely revered and feared. Such was the case for the man who ruled as the international president of the ILA for twenty-six years: a tough, proletarian individual known to his workforce simply as Boss Joe.

King of the Dock Wallopers

In all the years that Joseph P. Ryan reigned as supreme commander of the International Longshoreman’s Association, he was never once voted into office by the union’s general membership. In 1927, the year Joe Ryan first ascended to the presidency of the ILA, he was simply handpicked by a cadre of New York–based delegates representing locals from around the country. For the next two and a half decades, Ryan maintained his power, even though rank-and-file longshoremen on the West Coast completely rejected his leadership and eventually bolted from the ILA to form their own union—the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), which Ryan denounced as a “communist conspiracy.” In 1943, after years of strikes and labor agitation in many ILA ports from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast, the Boss was given an unusual vote of confidence: He was named “president for life”—again, not by the union’s general membership but by a proclamation of union business agents.

For a long time, Joe and his union cronies all got fat together, with Boss Joe somehow netting millions on a modest annual salary of $20,000 plus $7,200 for expenses. At the same time, he became perhaps the most powerful labor leader in the country, a benefactor to mayors, senators, presidents, and assorted killers and hoodlums. He was a kingmaker, of sorts, until his own greed and arrogance finally led the rank-and-file to rise up against him. Eventually, the public turned against him. On May 5, 1953, not long after being compelled to testify before a public tribunal known as the New York State Waterfront Commission, Boss Joe was convicted of stealing union funds and carted off to prison.

Joe Ryan’s long march to the penitentiary was rooted in his childhood. He was born on May 11, 1884 to Irish immigrant parents in Babylon, Long Island. At the age of nine, Ryan became orphaned when both his mother and father died of natural causes within a few months of one another. After languishing in an orphanage for a time, young Joe was eventually adopted and went to live with his stepmother in a cold-water flat in Chelsea, a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan, just south of Hell’s Kitchen.

Ryan began his working life as a floor sweeper, stock clerk, and trolley car conductor before landing a job on the Chelsea Piers in 1912. Four years later, at the age of thirty-two, Ryan joined the ILA by purchasing his union book for the going rate of two dollars and fifty cents. Within months, while working in the hold of a freighter, Ryan suffered a minor injury when a heavy sling load snapped and dropped onto his foot. Following a brief recovery in the hospital, he was assigned to the post of financial secretary for ILA Local 791 in Chelsea. Ryan would never again have to callus his hands or stain his shirt collar with sweat while working in a dock or hold gang on the waterfront.
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By most accounts, young Joe Ryan had natural talents as an administrator and organizer. Although he had dropped out of school and terminated his formal education at the age of twelve, he possessed a facility with the English language; his red-meat rhetoric was frequently humorous and sentimental. Unlike many union leaders, however, Ryan preferred to exert power mostly as a behind-the-scenes figure. In the book
Dock Walloper
, a lively memoir of New York’s longshoreman culture, written by Richard “Big Dick” Butler, the author describes how he tried to use then Vice President Joe Ryan as a Trojan Horse in his battles with a rival union leader.
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Butler knew Ryan well, both as head of the ILA’s district council and later as a Tammany-sponsored alderman. Knowing that young Joe Ryan had designs for obtaining the union presidency, Butler suggested to Ryan that, with the backing of Butler and others, he run against the union’s current president, T. V. O’Connor.

Ryan may have been ambitious, but not so ambitious that he would allow himself to be used in what was essentially an internal power struggle, even though it may well have propelled him to the presidency. He respectfully declined Butler’s offer, keeping both Butler and T. V. O’Connor as friends. A few years later, Joe Ryan became president anyway—on his own terms, with all of the necessary relationships and alliances intact.

With his thick torso, barrel chest, huge hands, and a face that only a mother could love, Ryan had the grizzled look and demeanor of a tough guy, but his greatest skills were as a classic Tammany-style fixer. In the mid-1920s, he formed the Joseph P. Ryan Association, a political club devoted to one thing: promoting the career of Joe Ryan. The ILA leader held fundraisers, solicited campaign contributions, and helped get out the vote for numerous Tammany candidates, including Mayor Jimmy Walker. As president of the Central Trades and Labor Council, Ryan was able to garner huge crowds for Walker at political rallies. When Beau James was forced to resign from office following the Seabury Investigation, Ryan issued a statement that read: “The labor movement in the city of New York regrets that political expediency has deprived them of a mayor whose every official act has been in conformity with the Americanistic policies of organized labor.”

From the beginning, Ryan envisioned an ILA so powerful that he would literally be able to control the fate of presidents and dictate the ebb and flow of international commerce. His plans were altered considerably, however, when longshoremen in Boston dramatically repudiated his leadership in October 1931 by going on strike against his wishes. In 1934, an even bigger labor dispute involving a dozen commercial ports from San Francisco to Seattle reached a boiling point in the ILA’s Pacific Coast District. Not wanting to be shut out like he had been in Boston, Ryan traveled to the West Coast to take part in labor negotiations with local employers. Ryan spent more than a month in San Francisco, finally emerging with a settlement that he declared was “fair and in the best interests of our members.”

The grizzled New Yorker made the rounds of various strike committees in San Francisco, Portland, Tacoma, and Seattle, urging them to ratify his settlement agreement. In every location, Ryan was voted down, and the president of the Tacoma local declared in the press, “No body of men can be expected to agree to their own self-destruction.”

The primary issue was the way in which workers were hired. Ryan urged his members to accept the shape-up system, which had been the sole manner of employment in ILA ports since the turn of the century. West Coast longshoremen astutely viewed the shape-up system not only as pernicious and humiliating for the workers, but also as the central way in which organized crime became institutionalized on the waterfront. The West Coast longshoremen preferred a hiring-hall system in which time in the hold and other seniority factors determined who was first in line for employment.

The West Coast longshoremen’s strike of 1934 went down without the support of the ILA president; it was a memorably violent and contentious affair that culminated in San Francisco with the Battle of Rincon Hill—a street confrontation between strikers, professional strikebreakers, and cops that resulted in two deaths and scores of injuries. The National Guard was called in to quell the disturbance.
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Joe Ryan left town denouncing West Coast labor leaders as malcontents and communists, but his rhetoric could not mask what had been a crushing defeat for his leadership. Back in New York, Boss Joe sought to mitigate his West Coast failure by enforcing his will even more resolutely than before. One way the ILA president regulated who obtained power and who did not was through his ability to dispense union charters, which made it possible for groups of workers to form their own locals. Joe Ryan alone dictated who would be given this power. He allowed for the establishment of union locals only by workers who pledged absolute loyalty to Joe Ryan. They also kicked back a percentage of all monthly membership dues directly to the president for his own personal use and consumption (of course, there would never be any records to prove that this was the case).