On the Irish Waterfront by James T. Fisher

Author:James T. Fisher [Fisher, James T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA)
ISBN: 9780801458583
Google: a_utDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2011-01-15T01:10:31+00:00

PART THREE

Waterfront Apotheosis

12 A Season for Testimony

Anthony “Tony Mike” DeVincenzo worked as a longshoreman for twenty years on the Hudson County piers save for one day spent early in his career on Pier 90 at the foot of West Fiftieth Street in Manhattan. December 15, 1952, found DeVincenzo back in Gotham not on a West Side pier but in the New York County Court House on Centre Street, testifying at a public hearing conducted by the New York State Crime Commission. Since November 1948 a band of investigative reporters, radio and television commentators, and civic reformers—a disparate community mediated by one intensely driven waterfront priest—had attested to the scandalous conditions found along the docks. The only missing piece was a firsthand corroborating account by a working longshoreman.

The waterfront’s code of silence finally cracked from the inside on December 15, day six of the hearings. Under questioning from prominent attorney Theodore Kiendl, special counsel to the NYSCC, DeVincenzo confirmed virtually everything that Pete Corridan and his allies had alleged over the past four years: the shapeup and the loading racket were the centerpieces of organized waterfront criminality, the fulcrum of loan-sharking, kickbacks, and patronage that in Hoboken dominated the waterfront and indeed the city’s entire political economy. Hoboken twists exposed by DeVincenzo included the use of “short gangs”—with union officials pocketing wages of phantom employees—and “ship jumpers,” undocumented workers most of whom came from a village near Bari on Italy’s Adriatic coast. In Hudson County these individuals were treated as virtual indentured servants. The Mile Square City’s political leadership conspired with the local ILA hierarchy, DeVincenzo alleged: they “eat and drink together and split up the money together.”1

DeVincenzo’s motivation in testifying before the NYSCC was surely as complex as that of Budd Schulberg prior to his own testimony before HUAC in May of the previous year. Tony Mike’s willingness to speak out was prompted in part by pent-up anger over decades of injustice he had witnessed on the Hoboken piers. He was also eager to settle scores with Ed Florio, the reigning boss of the Hoboken waterfront, and Michael Borelli, the city’s commissioner of public safety. DeVincenzo alleged that Borelli and Florio, an ILA organizer and president of Hoboken Local 306, were responsible for his firing by Jarka Stevedoring—which controlled the loading on seven of Hoboken’s nine piers—after DeVincenzo complained that Florio “was not living up to the union rules and he worked with short gangs, with aliens, and we don’t want no part of it.” Florio did not act alone, Tony Mike alleged, but conspired with Borelli. “You can’t get a job,” he said, “until you see Commissioner Borelli.” DeVincenzo described Borelli and Florio as former bootleggers who had failed to entice him back in the early 1930s “to come and work in the alcohol business.”2

Michael Borelli and Tony Mike DeVincenzo were first cousins—”born and raised” together, they “were like two brothers”—and Tony Mike had known Ed Florio “since I was a child.” Florio was a driving force behind the

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