Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (40 page)

Although waterfront mobsters tended to come in all shapes, sizes, and ethnic denominations, over a fifteen-year period, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the ranks of the ILA in the Port of New York became a haven for the some of the toughest characters in the Irish American underworld. Thanks to Boss Joe, many unreconstructed bootleggers found new life as dock wallopers and union enforcers through the institution of a system that was beneficial mostly to stevedore companies, union business agents, and waterfront employers, not to the workers. Individual locals broke down along ethnic lines; Italian American locals controlled business on the waterfront in Brooklyn, Staten Island, Bayonne, and Hoboken, while the Irish controlled the docks in Jersey City and on Manhattan’s West Side.

Among the many notorious members of the waterfront mob who owed their power to President Ryan were:

Edward J. “Eddie” McGrath
—A former truck driver for Owney Madden and Big Bill Dwyer during the glory days of Prohibition, red-haired Eddie McGrath first became an ILA organizer in 1937, just six months after being released from Sing Sing prison. He’d been arrested thirteen times over the years on charges ranging from burglary to murder. An elite member of the New York underworld, McGrath controlled the lucrative numbers racket in the Port of New York and was believed to be on close terms with many high-ranking mafiosi. In 1943, Joe Ryan appointed Eddie McGrath an ILA adviser for life, later sending him south to shore up ILA operations in South Florida.

John M. “Cockeye” Dunn
—As Eddie McGrath’s brother-in-law and designated muscle, Cockeye Dunn was perhaps the most feared gunman on the waterfront. Born in Queens, New York, he was four years old when his father, a merchant marine, was lost at sea. Dunn bounced in and out of various Catholic reform schools and was often in trouble with the law, garnering early arrests for assault and robbery. In 1932, he was convicted of robbing a card game at gunpoint and sent to Sing Sing for two years.

Once out of prison, Dunn teamed up with McGrath, who was part owner of Varick Enterprises, a front company whose main function was to make collections for waterfront boss loaders to whom every truck man on Manhattan’s West Side was paying tribute, usually in cash. The collections were enforced by goon squads armed with guns and blackjacks. In 1937, when a reluctant truck man was found dead, Dunn and McGrath were arrested on a charge of homicide but were eventually discharged for lack of evidence.

Dunn went on to form his own powerful local with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and became the overseer of all waterfront rackets on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, which included some sixty piers. In 1947, Dunn was arrested along with two other men for the murder of a hiring stevedore in Greenwich Village; his trial was one of the more memorable events of the whole waterfront era. Cockeye was found guilty and given the death penalty. He died in the electric chair.

Andrew “Squint” Sheridan
—On the waterfront, any rising underworld figure worth his salt had to have a more violent junior partner to do the dirty work. Joe Ryan had Eddie McGrath. Cockeye Dunn had Squint Sheridan, a psychopath who found his calling as a notorious ILA enforcer. Once, when a longshoreman on the West Side piers threatened to start a dissident movement and take on the union leadership, Sheridan stopped by the pier and asked the man to step into a portable toilet for a conference. There Sheridan shot the man in the head and left him to die. When another dockworker had some negative things to say about a prominent ILA business agent, Sheridan drove up in a car, walked to the platform, and asked, “Who’s Moran?” When Moran stood up, Sheridan pulled a gun, fired two shots, and killed the man in front of numerous witnesses—none of whom were willing to testify against him.

Squint Sheridan eventually became a victim of his own bad karma. In 1947, he was arrested along with Cockeye Dunn in the famous Greenwich Village murder of hiring stevedore Andy Hintz. They went on trial together and met the same fate: Sheridan was put to death in the chair just a few minutes after Cockeye, his friend and mentor.

Pistol Local 824
—With Hell’s Kitchen as its base, it was no surprise that Local 824 became one of the ILA’s most powerful crews, presiding as it did over the luxury piers where the
Queen Elizabeth
and
Queen Mary
were docked. Harold Bowers was a neighborhood delegate appointed by Joe Ryan to Local 824, commonly known as the Pistol Local because its mostly Irish American membership was comprised of so many convicted felons. Bowers himself had been arrested for grand larceny, robbery, and gun possession, done time in prison, and was suspected of being an accessory in numerous waterfront murders.

The real power behind Local 824 was Harold Bowers’ cousin, Mickey, whose criminal record showed thirteen arrests between 1920 and 1940. Mickey Bowers was believed to be behind the death of (among others) Tommy Gleason, a rival for control of the Pistol Local who was gunned down in a Tenth Avenue funeral parlor—a convenient spot for a mob hit if ever there was one. Local 824 was legendary for its nepotism, with brothers, cousins, and barely qualified ex-con-in-laws first in line for lucrative administrative positions within the union.
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George “the Rape Artist” Donahue
—Donahue got his start as a loading boss on the Jersey City piers and served as an ILA liaison with the political administration of Mayor Frank Hague, the least charming of all the big city Irish American political bosses. Hague’s influence reached beyond Jersey City to include Hoboken and much of Hudson County; his reign lasted from 1915 to 1949 and was militantly enforced by a famously brutal police department. Boss Hague was known to use the New Jersey waterfront as a major patronage plum, doling out jobs and favorable contracts as payback to loyal operatives. He was also tight with Joe Ryan, frequently serving as cochairman alongside New York Mayor Jimmy Walker at the annual testimonial dinner of the Joseph P. Ryan Association.

George “the Rape Artist” Donahue, Hague’s waterfront overseer, first became president of Local 247 after he and two bodyguards stormed into the Local’s headquarters and demanded the resignation of the president and vice president. When the two men refused, Donahue pulled out a gun, stuck it in the president’s mouth, and told him either his signature or brains would be on the resignation papers. The president signed away his leadership. When the vice president hesitated to sign, his front teeth were knocked out with a gun butt. He also signed.

Donahue’s leadership of Local 247 was marked by violence. When Boss Hague left office in 1949, after a thirty-four-year run, Donahue lost much of his clout. In January 1951, a bomb went off under the hood of his automobile when he started the ignition. Miraculously, Donahue survived unhurt, but his days as president were numbered. He was lucky to live to see retirement.

Many of the hoodlums, union men, and politicians who operated within the Port of New York were rulers in their own right, but none could hold a candle to Boss Joe. On a daily basis, Joe Ryan’s ILA created the illusion of democracy; there were local meetings, district councils to hear complaints, an ILA executive board, and a national convention held every year. But none of that mattered to Ryan. If ever he harbored aspirations for a unified workforce, for whom he would be a magnanimous advocate, those dreams were crushed in Boston and on the West Coast, when his attempts to negotiate a strike settlement had been so dramatically repudiated.

Boss Ryan was determined to show that such humiliation could never occur on his home turf. In the Port of New York, thanks to his unprecedented gathering of ex-cons, killers, and various political sycophants, his authority would remain absolute.

You Push, We Shove

In the long history of the American labor movement, the ILA was not alone in its use of hard men and questionable tactics. The reasons for this are buried deep in the history of America’s industrial beginnings and inexorably intertwined with the Irish American experience.

Before Joe Ryan ever rose to the top of the longshoreman’s association, labor politics in the United States were steeped in bloodshed. Among the first laborers in the country to become advocates for basic principles of employment such as a minimum wage, safe working conditions, and some version of Workman’s Compensation were Irish immigrants and Irish Americans. Paddy dug the canals, built the bridges, and, along with Chinese, African American, and Italian laborers, laid down the tracks of the transcontinental railroad. The work was brutal and often lethal. In the anthracite coal mining region of Pennsylvania, black lung disease and mining accidents took the lives of thousands of workers, including more than a few under the age of ten.

Secret labor organizations like the Molly Maguires sprang up in direct response to an owner’s unwillingness to address abysmal working conditions. In rural Pennsylvania’s Schulykill County, where nine out of ten Irish immigrant males worked in the mines, the Molly Maguires took matters into their own hands, embarking on a campaign of sabotage and violent acts aimed at specific mining companies, with the intention of forcing management to the bargaining table. The coal mining companies responded by hiring the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who planted an Irish American spy deep inside the organization. Thus, the tactic of labor espionage on the part of management was established, injecting an aura of paranoia and fear into America’s industrial workplace that would persist for at least the next century.

The Industrial Revolution only intensified the deep-rooted animosities between workers, management, and the corporate manufacturers who pioneered the staple of American industry: the factory assembly line. There were few significant labor laws at the time and only the beginnings of a union movement. Whereas in the mid-nineteenth century the proletarian rabble was mostly forced to engage in full-scale rioting to bring about social change, the new century saw the emergence of labor agitation, or the strike, as a viable strategy of mobilization.

Due to their spectacular success at infiltrating the Molly Maguires, the Pinkerton Agency became the leader in a brutal and systematic campaign to undermine union agitation wherever it occurred. Strikebreaking became a hugely profitable enterprise for Pinkerton and other private detective agencies that specialized in recruiting and transporting antiunion goon squads and armed guards. Finding men willing to partake in violent strikebreaking activities for pay was not difficult. From 1870 until at least the 1920s, employment among the working class was chronically unsteady, and each year there were several hundred thousand people who were unable to find work for at least a few months. In industries such as slaughtering and meat-packing, iron and steel, brick and tile, garment manufacturing, and the building trades, work was seasonal, with no unemployment insurance or social welfare system of any kind to help get a worker over the hump. Men desperately in need of work were willing to do almost anything to make a buck, including spying for the company store or strikebreaking, in which men armed with lead pipes, rocks, and guns set upon picket lines and union halls looking for heads to smash.

The same sort of person who might once have hired himself out as a bootlegger, political slugger, dock walloper, or gangster also had the right stuff to be a strikebreaker. Given that such a high percentage of the workforce was of the Celtic persuasion, Irishmen, in the eyes of management, made ideal spies and strikebreakers. Some even found their calling in the fink markets.

One such man was James Farley. Born into a lower-middle-class Irish American family in the Upstate village of Malone, New York, Farley began his career in organized labor as a street car motorman who, in the midst of a general strike, turned against his fellow workers and joined forces with the corporation. Not only did Jim Farley go on to become a notorious commander of professional strikebreakers with a standing army of twenty-five hundred men, but he also achieved the highest level of cultural notoriety a man could receive in pre-Hollywood America when Jack London, the top commercial novelist of his day, mentioned Farley by name in his novel
The Iron Heel
. Farley was singled out by the famous writer as an example of a pernicious trend, men who were “private soldiers of the capitalists…thoroughly organized and well-armed…held in readiness to be hurled in special trains to any part of the country where labor went on strike or was locked out by employers.” In London’s apocalyptic vision of the class struggle between labor and “the Oligarchy,” strikebreakers were an ominous sign of bad times ahead.
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As a young man, Farley was adventurous and reckless. At the age of fourteen he ran away from home to join the circus. When the circus went to the wall in the town of Monticello, he obtained employment in a hotel there, first as a poolroom attendant, then as a bartender and clerk. One day he became uncontrollably violent when he accidentally swallowed an overdose of cocaine during a visit to the dentist and ended up being chased into the woods, where he was hunted for weeks as a wild man. Unemployed and penniless, he drifted to Brooklyn and found work there as a detective.

Detective work led Farley to a career in strikebreaking, which began in the 1895 Brooklyn streetcar strike, when the company put him in charge of a squad of fifteen special officers. After taking part in other antiunion campaigns in Philadelphia and Richmond, Virginia, Farley realized that what was needed was a more organized approach: Successful strikebreaking required that a single boss assume complete command from the company and supply all the men. Over the next eight years, Boss Farley put together an underground strikebreaking network that was tops in the country. Farley was always at the forefront, overseeing an organization that broke strikes from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In newspaper advertisements, he claimed to have at his command an “army of forty thousand men ready to do his bidding.” No one doubted him. The Farley organization broke over fifty strikes without suffering a single defeat.