The Mob and the City (17 page)

Many union locals ended up sheltering racketeers from scrutiny, too. With notable exceptions, like those of David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’
Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), national unions avoided dealing with racketeers in union locals. Reform was stymied by a hands-off approach to locals, mobster intimidation, and the weakness or indifference of rank-and-file members. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was lackluster in pursuing cases of union corruption.
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THE MOB'S UNION LEVER

The labor union became a new lever of power for the Mafia. Not only was labor racketeering a moneymaker for the Mafia families, but it also gave them influence over businessmen and politicians in New York and the United States. “We got our money from gambling, but our real power, our real strength, came from the unions,” said mobster Vincent “Fish” Cafaro. “Ultimately, it was labor racketeering that made Cosa Nostra part of the sociopolitical power structure of twentieth-century America,” James Jacobs argues convincingly.
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Greater coordination between the Mafia syndicates, the expansion of national labor unions, and the advent of telephones and airplanes all facilitated labor racketeering across the country. “The gangsters who infiltrated a local in New York were tied into a national syndicate that included gangsters attempting to do the same thing in Chicago, Kansas City, and in numerous other locations where Teamster locals and criminal organizations existed side by side,” described a report on the IBT.
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In dealing with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), Chicago Outfit leader Paul Ricca told mobsters “to be free to call on Charlie Lucky [Luciano] or on Frank Costello…if we find any difficulties here [in New York] in our work, and if we need anything to call on them, because that is their people.”
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Take John Dioguardi's consulting work on the ILGWU. In 1953, Dioguardi flew to California to assist mobsters in entering the garment industry in Los Angeles. He told them to target an ILGWU official. “What you've got to do is hurt this fucking guy and make him run to New York,” Dubinsky advised. “Let [David] Dubinsky know you're going to have your own fucking way out here.” They sent a union official to the hospital with a cracked skull, and opened a union-free shop. The kid bully from Little Italy had gone national.
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CASE STUDIES OF MOB POWER OVER NEW YORK UNIONS

Equally important as taking power was keeping and using that power. The following case studies show how the Mafia controlled and exploited unions.

Case One: Squashing Union Reformers—The International Longshoremen's Association on the South Brooklyn Docks

The Mafia used fear and terror to maintain its stranglehold on the South Brooklyn waterfront. In 1939, an insurgent led a rank-and-file uprising of longshoremen. The mob's reaction taught a terrible lesson to anyone who would challenge its power.

The Mob's Waterfront in the 1930s

No outsider could crack the waterfront. Organizers for the Communist Party USA in Manhattan got nowhere on the other side of the East River. CPUSA organizers spread leaflets attacking the ILA in Brooklyn, but they gained little traction among the Catholic longshoremen.
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Although the prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey obtained convictions of racketeers in the restaurant and garment business, and sent Charles Luciano to prison in 1936 for a prostitution ring, he got nowhere on the waterfront. Later in life, Dewey revealed what happened. “There was a time when we thought we had it organized…to really make frontal assault on the waterfront,” he recalled. “We finally found a policeman who would undertake to be head of the undercover investigation.” The officer had second thoughts. “After a week of it, he came back and said, ‘I'm sorry. I'd like to ask to be excused from this assignment,’” recounted Dewey.

The prosecutor described the web of power on the docks. “The unions were filled with ex-convicts,” he noted. “They don't talk.” The shippers were often complicit in schemes to ensure labor peace. “You can never tell whether what you've found is extortion or bribery,” explained Dewey. Most importantly, the “political power of some people connected with the water front is very great, and
they've always been close to Tammany Hall.” The racket buster was stymied on the docks.
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The Insurgent: Peter Panto and the 1939 Campaign

Peter Panto was an unlikely insurgent. Born in America in 1911, he spent his childhood in Italy and returned to Brooklyn as a young man. Like so many poor Italians, Panto became a longshoreman on the Red Hook piers. As a member of ILA Local 929, Panto paid union dues to Anthony Giustra (brother of the slain gangster Johnny “Silk Stockings” Giustra).
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Panto was stirred by the indignities he suffered under his own union. Panto gave back almost half his salary through kickbacks to get work. What really bothered him was that the ILA sold eight thousand mandatory “tickets” to a Christopher Columbus Day Ball in a hall that held only five hundred. For all that, the ILA did not even hold rank-and-file meetings.
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In the spring of 1939, the twenty-eight-year-old Panto began organizing private meetings with fellow longshoremen. Panto had an infectious smile, he spoke both Italian and English, and he was persuasive in both. He started calling public meetings in Brooklyn. The audience grew from several hundred to over twelve hundred longshoremen by July. In Panto's speeches, he raised practical issues like: “Are you in favor of Union Hiring Halls?” or “Are you ready…to help organize the I.L.A. on a democratic basis?”
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To the mob, those were dangerous ideas.

Albert the Executioner

A gangster took Panto aside one night. “
Benedetto
[blessings],” the gangster said menacingly as he sliced his finger across his neck.
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Panto was undaunted. On Wednesday, July 12, 1939, Emil Camarda, union boss of the Brooklyn ILA locals, summoned Panto to his office. When he arrived, a bunch of goons were standing around Camarda. “Peter, some of the boys don't like the way you're calling meetings and making a rumpus,” Camarda told him. “Some of them might want to harm you, but I told them you're a good fellow.” Panto refused to stop.
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Albert Anastasia had had enough of this troublemaker. Nothing was getting through to this guy. Anastasia talked to his henchmen about “some guy Albert had a lot of trouble with down in the waterfront,” who was “threatening to expose the whole thing.” Albert the Executioner came up with a solution.
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On Friday, July 14, 1939, Panto was shaving for a night out with his fiancée. A call was placed to Panto at the store across from his boardinghouse in Red Hook. The caller persuaded him to come to a meeting. “I don't think it is entirely on the square,” he told his fiancée. Nevertheless, he kissed her goodbye, put on his fedora, and walked out the door. Panto was last seen entering the automobile of an ILA official with two men, one of whom was later identified as Anthony Romero.
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Peter Panto looked out the window at Manhattan as the car crossed over to New Jersey. When they arrived, Panto walked into the house for the meeting. Waiting inside were James “Jimmy” Ferraco, Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss…and Albert Anastasia. As soon as Panto walked in he realized what was happening. Panto lunged for the door. Mendy Weiss, a hulking thug, grabbed him and “mugged him.” Panto bit and scratched Weiss's huge hands, desperately trying to break his grasp. We can only imagine the terror running through the young longshoreman's mind in those final moments.
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The men transported his dead body to the marshy meadowlands outside Lyndhurst, New Jersey. They dumped him in a shallow grave and covered him in quicklime.
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Whenever the Mafia is romanticized as the “Honorable Society,” or minimized as a supplier of victimless vice, Peter Panto's last night on earth should be remembered.

4–1: Official photograph of Peter Panto distributed by NYPD in 1939. (Courtesy of the New York Police Department)

Terrorizing the Rank-and-File Committee

After Panto disappeared, graffiti started appearing on pier facilities: “Where is Pete Panto?” It became a rallying cry. That October, Pete Mazzie, a twenty-three-year-old longshoreman, called for a public meeting of the Rank-and-File Committee. About four hundred longshoremen filled the chairs of the smoke-filled hall. A gang of thugs took seats smack in the middle of the hall.

“This is the opening of a headquarters where longshoremen can meet and talk,” Mazzie declared. “The rank-and-file committee is taking up where Pete Panto left off. So any phonies present tonight will find—”

“What do you mean by phonies?” shouted a tall thug popping up from his chair.

“I'll tell you what I mean—” Mazzie tried to continue.

The thug stormed up to the speaker's table and slugged Mazzie. Another goon bashed a chair over Mazzie's head. By the time the police arrived, the hall was a wreck and Mazzie was on his way to the emergency room.
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4–2: Albert Anastasia, October 1936. (Courtesy of the New York Police Department)

Even as he was recovering, Mazzie was warned that he “better watch his step, and remember what happened to Pete Panto.”
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In January 1941, investigators dug up Panto's body in New Jersey. His corpse was so badly decomposed that he had to be identified by his teeth. Brooklyn District Attorney William O'Dwyer's office publicly identified the suspects as Anastasia, Ferraco, and Weiss. O'Dwyer later claimed the case fell apart on November 12, 1941, when one of the key witnesses, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles fell—or was thrown—out of the sixth-floor window of the Half Moon Hotel while under police custody. Few
longshoremen believed Reles fell on his own. The violence had an effect. Panto became a martyr on the docks. But fewer and fewer longshoremen dared appear at public meetings. The uprising fell apart.
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CASE TWO: RUNNING A UNION RACKET QUIETLY—UNITED SEAFOOD WORKERS LOCAL 359

Although the Mafia demonstrated it was capable of extreme violence, most of the time it sought to manage its labor rackets quietly. When possible, the Cosa Nostra preferred more subtle forms of coercion, and collaboration with corrupt businessmen. This was revealed in the 1935 federal prosecution under the Sherman Antitrust Act of Joseph “Socks” Lanza of the United Seafood Workers Local 359.
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The Mob in the Fresh Fish Markets

Fresh fish rots quickly. This biological fact gave the fish handlers leverage beyond their rank in life. The teenage Joseph “Socks” Lanza realized this soon after he started working in the Fulton Fish Market in the 1910s. In 1923, when he was barely twenty, the precocious Lanza helped organize Local 359 of the United Seafood Workers union. Lanza's cronies founded the Fulton Market Watchmen and Patrol Association to collect a “protection fund” from retailers to prevent thefts or “labor troubles” in handling their perishable fish.
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The first investigations into the fish markets focused not on the Mafia, but on Jewish fish wholesalers. In July 1925, the federal government charged seventeen fish wholesalers for conspiring to violate the Sherman Antitrust Act by “creating an artificial market and dictating prices to retailers.” They pled guilty and paid fines.
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Then, in September 1926, the state attorney general charged fish companies with another conspiracy to “restrain competition, increase prices and conduct a monopoly in white fish, carp, pike and other fished used by Jewish people during the forthcoming holidays.” But witnesses failed to cooperate.
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