Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (43 page)

Ryan was forced to concede that he had knowingly appointed convicted thieves and violent felons like Eddie McGrath and Harold Bowers to important positions within the union. Ryan claimed not to know that as many as 30 percent of ILA officials had police records, that more than half of forty-five locals in the Port of New York could produce no financial records or minutes, and that many of his union officials had increased their own salaries from time to time without ever consulting their members. It also came out that, in 1948, Ryan had sent a stern warning to Manhattan District Attorney Frank S. Hogan—a “threat,” Hogan called it—that if he continued his investigation of a string of waterfront murders, it might precipitate a strike on the piers.

None of these revelations hurt Ryan among his own members; in fact, the argument could be made that he was merely standing up for the rights of his men, whether or not they had criminal records. What even Ryan’s biggest supporters could not countenance, however, was his personal plundering of union funds, especially when it was revealed that the Boss had used $50,000 from the ILA’s Anti-Communist Fund for things like luncheons at the Stork Club, repairs to his Cadillac, expensive clothes, and a cruise to Guatemala.

Ryan sought to portray these expenses as mere bookkeeping mistakes or even venality on the part of his underlings. Commenting at the end of his long day of testimony, he laughingly asked, “When the teller of a bank is guilty of something, they don’t hold the bank president, do they?” It was vintage Joe Ryan—dismissive, evasive, and imperial—but the damage had been done. Ryan’s reputation as a great anti-Communist was in tatters. Within weeks of the conclusion of the crime commission’s hearings, the Boss was indicted by a New York County grand jury for stealing money from his union and was under investigation by the FBI, the IRS, and two other grand juries in connection with his tax returns and additional matters.

At the same time that Ryan’s lawyers were dealing with his mounting legal problems, the American Federation of Labor (AF of L), in an unprecedented move, announced its intention to expel the ILA from its membership. In September 1953, as top labor leaders from around the country gathered for the AF of L’s annual convention in St. Louis, Missouri, President George Meaney announced: “We’ve given up all hope that the officers or members of that union will reform it. We’ve given up hope that the ILA will ever live up to the rules, standards, and ethics of a decent trade union.”

Upon hearing of Meaney’s announcement, Joe Ryan growled and uttered the last words he was ever quoted saying in public: “We’ll hold on to what we got.”

In St. Louis, Ryan waged a losing battle to maintain control of the union he had ruled for twenty-six years. As part of a deal for the ILA to remain a member of the AF of L, Ryan was forced to resign. One year later, in a New York courtroom, he was found guilty of having accepted gratuities from employers in violation of the Taft-Hartly Act. He was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $2,500.

Ryan did his time quietly and retired in obscurity. In the years that followed, on those rare occasions when his name was mentioned at all, it was usually by some old-time stevedore, longshoreman, or dock walloper who asked, “Hey, whatever happened to Joe Ryan?”

The answer, invariably, was, “Beats me.”

The man whose name had once been synonymous with fear, power, and racketeering on the waterfront was relegated to the dustbin of history.

Corridan’s Legacy

The person who was most responsible for the purging of flagrant mobsterism on the docks did not testify at the Waterfront Hearings. Father John Corridan had been invited to appear, but he declined the invitation. He later explained his reasoning: “Any testimony that I might have given would weaken the belief of people around the waterfront in my trustworthiness as a priest to keep confidences. Some of the information had come to me in the confessional. Much of the rest of what I knew had been given to me in confidence.”

Members of the commission conceded the validity of Corridan’s position. They asked if he would be interested in submitting a proposal for waterfront reform, which he did. The proposal became known as “Corridan’s Law” and served as a blueprint for leading the ILA out of the stone age and into the bright light of twentieth century labor reform.

Corridan’s contribution did not end there. In 1952, just as the crime commission hearings were getting under way, Corridan had been approached by an eager young screenwriter named Bud Schulberg. Schulberg had been enlisted to write a screenplay loosely based on Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning series in the
New York Sun
. Although Father Corridan had never heard of Schulberg, he was familiar with the screenwriter’s creative partner, Elia Kazan, the famous director who’d already directed
A Streetcar Named Desire
,
Viva Zapata
, and other well-known Hollywood movies.

Corridan viewed Schulberg and Kazan’s interest as a golden opportunity to call attention to conditions on the waterfront. He spoke at length with Schulberg and introduced him to numerous contacts on the docks. The savvy, street-smart screenwriter took it from there.

Schulberg was fascinated by Father Corridan, whom he later described as “the antidote to the stereotyped Barry Fitzgerald-Bing Crosby ‘Fah-ther’ so dear to Hollywood hearts. In West Side saloons I listened intently to Father John, whose speech was a unique blend of Hell’s Kitchen baseball slang, an encyclopedic grasp of waterfront economics, and an attack on man’s inhumanity to man based on the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

Having gotten his start as a boxing writer, Schulberg was comfortable in the brawny, profane world of the waterfront. His personal politics were on the side of the working man. He immersed himself in the world of the piers, guided mostly by a devoted disciple of Father Corridan’s named Arthur Browne—an Irish American longshoreman who was proud to be one of the stand-up “insoigents” in the Chelsea local run by “fat cats and their pistoleros.”

Following months of research, Schulberg fashioned a script that contained a character named Father Pete Barry, based on Corridan. The screenplay’s other main character was a working palooka named Terry Malloy, a former boxer and sometime strong-arm man for waterfront racketeers who, inspired by the crusader priest, develops a conscience and becomes disillusioned with business as usual on the docks. Terry eventually turns against the union’s corrupt overseer, a petty dictator named Johnny Friendly, and testifies against him in front of a commission looking into mobster activity on the waterfront.

In their quest to get Schulberg’s screenplay financed as a movie, the writer and Kazan were turned down by every major studio in the business. Kazan’s cache as an Academy Award–nominated director made no difference. Hollywood had little interest in making a film about common laborers. “Who’s going to care about a lot of sweaty longshoremen?” asked Warner Bros. Studio head Daryl Zanuck after reading the script.

Eventually, once Marlon Brando agreed to play the character of Terry Malloy, Schulberg and Kazan were able to find financing at Columbia Studios. The budget was modest, with much of it going to Brando. Veteran stage actor Karl Malden was chosen to play the Corridan stand-in, Father Barry.

The movie was filmed primarily in Hoboken, New Jersey, utilizing numerous nonprofessional bit actors culled from various ILA locals. The emphasis was on authenticity, with actual waterfront locations, believable dialogue, and a general level of realism that was unheard of for a big-studio Hollywood movie in the 1950s.

On the Waterfront
contains many classic scenes, but the moral center of the movie is a scene in which Father Barry, after a longshoreman has been killed in a work-related “accident,” climbs down into the hold of a freighter to deliver last rights. There he makes a fighting speech about “Christ in the shape-up,” comparing the longshoreman’s death to the Crucifixion. His dialogue is taken almost verbatim from a famous speech Father Corridan once gave to a group of longshoreman that became known as “the Sermon on the Docks.”

When
On the Waterfront
opened in theaters in September 1954, it was an immediate sensation, garnering rave reviews, impressive box office totals, and, eventually, Academy Awards for Schulberg, Kazan, and Brando. Today, the movie is rightfully considered a classic, but, at the time of its original release, its main power was as a “straight from the headlines” exposé. Appearing in theaters on the heels of the New York Waterfront Hearings, the movie was that rare item: an explosive, socially relevant presentation of a contemporary labor condition, told unabashedly from a proletarian point of view. Among other things, the movie played a major role in the turning-of-the-tide against corrupt forces within the ILA, most notably Joe Ryan, whose legal comeuppance in the courts was taking place at the same time that
On the Waterfront
played to large audiences around the country.

To the extent that movies are able to reach the masses and enlighten minds,
On the Waterfront
was a landmark. The movie helped to expose a culture of gangsterism in the ILA that had existed for decades. While the awards for this went to Schulberg, Kazan, and Brando, the moral imperative that made it all possible came from the Waterfront Priest. According to Bud Schulberg, “Without the life, activism, and example of Father John Corridan, there’s no way
On the Waterfront
ever would have happened. It was Father John who took on the mobsters—and the rest is history.”
⁷

CHAPTER
#
Nine

9. the patriarch

I
n the decade of the 1950s, America was in the throes of committee fever. Secret agendas, subterranean alliances, and subversive activities were a national obsession, and it appeared that the only way to root out the enemy within was through official governmental investigation. Hot on the heels of the Kefauver Hearings on organized crime and the Waterfront Commission’s public tribunal in New York came the anti-Communist witch hunts of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. The McCarthy Hearings were televised and, like the Kefauver Hearings, captured the public imagination. McCarthy was allowed to run rampant, making wild accusations and destroying careers, until he eventually overstepped his boundaries by taking on the U.S. Army.

Before Joe McCarthy’s vile and divisive subcommittee crashed and burned in December 1954, he appointed an eager young attorney named Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy as his assistant counsel. Kennedy was the seventh of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy, the well-known billionaire banker, tycoon, ex-movie mogul, and former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James during the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. The elder Kennedy was a friend and financial benefactor of Joe McCarthy’s. Over the years, the alcoholic senator from Wisconsin had occasionally been a guest at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, where he once almost drowned after falling from a sailboat into the bay. He was saved by another son of Joe Kennedy’s—John—at the time a congressman from Massachusetts, who dove into the water and helped pull McCarthy back into the boat.

On McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee, Bobby Kennedy served under Roy Cohn, the senator’s vicious and unscrupulous lead counsel. As the subcommittee became more wantonly unethical in its pursuit of phantom communists and subversives, Kennedy bolted, astutely surmising that McCarthy’s crusade was headed for disaster.

Bobby Kennedy may have recognized the flaws and public relations limitations inherent in McCarthy’s scorched-earth approach, but that did not mean he was against the notion of high-profile governmental committees. In late 1956, when Kennedy was approached by Senator John J. McClellan of Arkansas to take part in yet another major senate investigation—this one looked into the role of mobsters and labor racketeers in the Teamsters Union—the young lawyer jumped at the chance.

Officially, the investigation was to be called the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. The committee and their investigators would be given the power to subpoena whoever they wanted. For Kennedy, thirty-two years old and looking to put his career on a par with that of his older brother John, the offer was irresistible. As chief counsel, he would be given the opportunity to square off with major mafiosi and corrupt union officials similar to ILA boss Joe Ryan and others of his ilk. Kennedy, notoriously competitive, relished the prospect.

When Bobby told his father that he had accepted the offer to become chief counsel for what would come to be known as “the McClellan Committee,” the patriarch of the Kennedy family was livid. According to Bobby’s sister Jean Kennedy Smith, the argument that ensued at the family’s annual Christmas gathering at Hyannis Port was bitter, “the worst one we ever witnessed.” Bobby argued that by taking on organized crime in the labor movement, the Kennedy family would be establishing a reputation for independence. Recalled longtime Kennedy confidant Lem Billings, “The old man saw this as dangerous…. He thought Bobby was naïve.”

Joe Kennedy’s main argument against Bobby’s involvement was that it was going to cause an upheaval that would turn organized labor against Senator John Kennedy, thus damaging his quest for the presidency. Ever since the tragic death of his first son, Joe Jr.—a fighter pilot whose plane blew up while transporting explosives during World War II—Papa Joe’s desire to see J.F.K. elected as the first Irish Catholic president of the United States had become his overriding ambition in life. His own personal designs on higher office had been permanently derailed long ago, during his disastrous tenure as ambassador to England, so Kennedy had transferred his hopes to his children, becoming for them the ultimate man behind the man, cajoling and manipulating with the skill of a master puppeteer.