superiority and the muscle effectively supplied by his chief aide, Bugsy Siegel.)
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Lansky's plan was opposed principally by Waxey Gordon, the bootleg king of Philadelphia. Both he and Lansky had been "brought up" by Arnold Rothstein, perhaps the finest criminal organizer of the 1920s, not illogically nicknamed "the Brain." After Rothstein's murder in 1928, ill feelings between Lansky and Gordon erupted. Gordon suspected, rightly, that Lansky (and Luciano) had frequently hijacked his liquor shipments while Lansky suspected, rightly, that Gordon sought to make deals with Luciano's enemies within the Mafia.
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The feud turned bitter and violent and each side suspected the other, undoubtedly rightly, of several gang murders. Luciano for a time tried to act as peacemaker, but, by 1931, Lansky and Gordon had come to blows in what became known as the "War of the Jews."
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Luciano realized that one or the other of the Jewish mob leaders would have to go, and that leader would not be Lansky. Just as Lansky had helped solve Luciano's Mustache Pete problems, Charley Lucky now took care of Lansky's. It was Luciano who decided the solution lay with the government. Internal Revenue was, at the time (1931), trying to levy tax evasion charges against Gordon, but their case was weak and sketchy. Luciano saw to it that all sort of incriminating documents reached officials. Gordon was sent to prison, never realizing the true cause of his woes.
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Lansky saw that, with the end of Prohibition, the future in booze lay in controlling legitimate trafficking of imports. His natural rival would undoubtedly prove to be Charles "King" Solomon of Boston who handled much of the scotch whiskey entering the country. Solomon's murder took care of that detail, and shortly after that, Lansky's ethnic creation, the Jewish Mafia, finely honed by him in the early 1930s, became the dominant element in syndicate crime along with the Luciano forces.
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The "War of the Jews" had ended in a momentous victory for organized crime.
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Waterfront Rackets
General corruption long proliferated along the waterfronts of most major American ports. Mafia gangsters, first successful in the rackets in New Orleans, ultimately made their biggest push on the New York-New Jersey docks, the country's largest and richest port area. Throughout the 19th century the docks had been the domain of Irish gangsters, but early in the 20th century warfare was almost constant between Irish and Italian gangs for dominance. The flood of Italian immigrants had altered the situation and forced the Irish to battle what they called the "dago invasion." But no matter which ethnic group maintained control of the waterfront, "service" was the same for customers trying to do businessthey always had to pay.
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Slowly the Italians, under Paul Kelly (Paolo Vacarelli) and later under Albert Anastasia, Joe Adonis and Vince Mangano, gained dominance over the Irish. By 1925 with the murder of Pegleg Lonergan, the last important leader of the Irish White Hand Gang (hit in person, by no less a personage than a visiting Al Capone from Chicago), the Italian gangsters won the docks.
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Joseph Ryan, president of the International Longshoremen's Association and with important connections in Tammany Hall, put the union's shakedown operations on an organized basis. Anastasia, Mangano, his crime family head, and Adonis, the payoff man for Brooklyn politicians and police, solidified the underworld's lock on the docks.
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Shippers had to pay if they wished to guarantee their goods would be loaded or unloaded. Thefts of cargo ran into six figures monthly. Workers were bled for kickbacks to "hiring bosses" who decided who would work each day at dock "shape-ups." They were even billed monthly at a set fee for using a mob barber for haircuts, whether they got the cutting there or elsewhere. Loan-sharking became a way of life on the waterfront, and new workers were guided to syndicate agents working inside the union. Since the dockworker's occupation was seasonal, shylocking thrived. The loan sharks demanded a dockworker turn over his pay card as security. The worker had to present his pay card to collect his wages. In such cases the shylocks collected the wages and took out their interest before giving the hand the rest of his money. In a typical case a longshoreman borrowed $100 and for the next 36 weeks had $10 a week taken from his pay. "You," he was advised, "have only paid the interest up to now. You still owe the hundred." Hundreds of New York dockworkers were in the same boat.
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By the late 1930s Anastasia and his brother Tough Tony Anastasio directly controlled six ILA locals in Brooklyn. One insurgent who dared to challenge their hold disappeared, his body turning up a year later in an Ohio lime pit. Another, Peter Panto, was taken for a ride, strangled and his body buried in a mob chickenyard graveyard in New Jersey.
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The mob was frightened by no one in attempting to extract tribute. The
New York Daily News
in 1948 was harassed by a picket line set up around a ship from Canada bringing in newsprint. The pickets demanded $100,000 in tribute, and failing that, one dollar a ton on all newsprint shipped in. Since the newspaper at the time used 300,000 tons, the cost would have been sig-
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