Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (42 page)

Whether or not his decision to forego reelection was influenced by the anticipated revelations from Cockeye Dunn, O’Dwyer would not say. The point became moot when, a few weeks after O’Dwyer first went public with his decision not to run, the D.A.’s office announced that they were unable to make a deal with Cockeye Dunn. While much of what Dunn had told them during confidential negotiations was tantalizing, little of it could be backed up with provable facts. Dunn had named one city official as his contact in getting a fat city contract; this official was also allegedly a participant in some of the waterfront rackets. But Dunn failed to back up his charges with any substantial details. The prosecutors concluded that Dunn was merely yanking their chain, insisting on commutation first, testimony later. No go, said the district attorney.

On July 7, 1949, the day scheduled for Dunn’s execution, the waterfront gangster was given one last chance to tell all. He declined, saying only that he was prepared to meet his maker. With his friend and partner in crime, Squint Sheridan, he walked the last mile. The gallows were no more, of course. The hangman’s noose had been replaced by the slightly more antiseptic electric chair. Cockeye and Squint took turns in the hot seat—a rare double execution.

In the wake of Dunn’s death, many people in and around the waterfront must have breathed a collective sigh of relief, including the man Cockeye described as kingpin of the rackets, who wore a mask of respectability.

Two days after the execution, a committee of labor leaders, including Joe Ryan, called on Mayor Bill O’Dwyer at City Hall and asked him to change his mind and run for reelection. He would have their endorsement, they assured him. O’Dwyer said that he was flattered and would think about it. A few days later, he announced that he had reversed his decision and would indeed be campaigning for reelection.

O’Dwyer won his second term as mayor, beating Fiorello Laguardia by ten thousand votes. Thirteen months later, he was forced to resign under a cloud of accusations that he had ties to organized crime—accusations unrelated to the life and death of Johnny “Cockeye” Dunn.
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The Waterfront Commission

The circumstances surrounding the sensational trial and execution of Cockeye and Squint proved to be the beginning of the end for Boss Joe Ryan. The rank-and-file had never been more dissatisfied with Ryan’s leadership, and, in 1951, longshoremen in New York did something they had never attempted before: They staged an unauthorized wild cat strike by walking off the job in defiance of Boss Joe. The strike was costly. It lasted twenty-five days and shut down 118 piers. Thirty thousand men went without pay for almost a month. But in the larger scheme of things, calling attention to corrupt practices within the longshoreman’s union was worth every penny.

The man behind the strike was not a longshoreman at all. He was a stubborn, courageous man of the cloth who had made the waterfront his personal parish. Father John Corridan was the child of Irish immigrants. Born in Harlem, he was the eldest son of a New York policeman who died when John was just ten years old. After fifteen years of theological study, he was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1944. One year later, at the age of thirty-four, he was assigned to the Xavier Labor School on West Sixteenth Street, just a few blocks from the Chelsea and Greenwich Village piers. The labor school was an adjunct of the Catholic university system. With courses taught by both priests and lay instructors, the curriculum was designed to teach the use of Christian principles in dealing with labor management problems.

Corridan was a chain-smoking, no-nonsense man, comfortable in the profane and muscular world of the waterfront. He became friendly with the many longshoremen who attended Xavier Church, adjacent to the school. These men saw in Father John a kindred spirit, and they told him things about how the waterfront really operated—things they would never have told any other outsider. Corridan began to compile index files on the waterfront’s key players and went on walking tours of many piers to inspect working conditions. He attended union meetings, listened to complaints and accusations on all sides. It didn’t take long for the priest to see that the waterfront was a violent universe, fueled by intimidation and exploitation. Clearly, at the heart of the problem was a collusive arrangement between the New York Shipping Association and the mob-dominated ILA, with the common laborer getting the shaft.

Corridan set out to call attention to corrupt labor conditions in the Port of New York. In his quest to expose injustice, he was not afraid to utilize the press. One of his more notable contacts was reporter Malcolm Johnson, who in 1950 published a series of articles in the
New York Sun
entitled “Crime on the Waterfront.” The series, which eventually won Johnson a Pulitzer Prize, was a revelation; it named names and spelled out operating procedures within the ILA that had been hidden for years.

The explosive series in the
Sun
happened to appear in print around the same time that the celebrated Kefauver Committee arrived in town. The Kefauver Hearings, led by Senator Estes Kefauver, Democrat from Tennessee, had been authorized by governmental mandate to undertake a nationwide investigation of organized crime. In a series of hearings held in fourteen cities that included New Orleans, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York, a parade of hoodlums were subpoenaed to testify in front of a five-man panel known as the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. Over a twelve-month period, from mid-1950 to mid-1951, the Kefauver Hearings made headlines around the United States. The most sensational of the hearings, by far, were those held in February 1951 in New York City. These were the first to be broadcasted across the country through the relatively new phenomenon of television. An estimated twenty- to thirty-million citizens viewed the hearings, the highlight of which turned out to be Frank Costello’s hands.

Trusting his innate intelligence and lawyerly ability to bamboozle the committee, the man formerly known as Francesco Castiglia had agreed to testify, but only if his face was not shown. The committee accommodated Costello’s wishes by agreeing to televise only his hands. A rapt national audience watched Costello’s beefy hands close-up, accompanied by his disembodied voice. The hands twitched nervously, reached for a glass of water, and kneaded a ball of paper between thumb and forefinger. Costello was lured into revealing far more than he wanted to about his shady business relationships. The hands became a symbol of the underworld’s grip on American commerce.

Also testifying at the Kefauver Hearings was former Mayor Bill O’Dwyer, who arrived in town from his current posting as ambassador to Mexico. Silver-haired and tanned, O’Dwyer defiantly defended his record as mayor, although he did not enhance his historical standing when he said of Frank Costello, “It doesn’t matter whether a man is a banker, a businessman, or a gangster. His pocketbook is always attractive.”

The Kefauver Committee concluded its barnstorming tour in September 1952. In a highly anticipated report, the senatorial panel, for the first time in American history, officially surmised that there was a vast National Crime Syndicate operating in the United States. “These criminal gangs have such power,” stated the Committee, “that they constitute a government within a government in this country and that second government was the government by the underworld….

“This phantom government nevertheless enforces its own law, carries out its own executions, and not only ignores but [also] abhors the democratic processes of justice which are held to be the safeguards of the American citizen.

“This secret government of crimesters is a serious menace which could, if not curbed, become the basis for a subversive movement which could wreck the very foundations of this country.”

Although the hearings had not focused specifically on the activities of the ILA, the Committee did conclude that “racketeers were firmly entrenched along New York City’s waterfront” and recommended further investigation. Given the popularity of the hearings, it didn’t take long for an enterprising and ambitious public official to answer the call. Days after the Kefauver Committee delivered its explosive concluding report, New York Governor Tom Dewey, shamed into action by Father John Corridan’s labor activism and Malcolm Johnson’s scathing investigation in the
Sun
, announced that the state crime commission would begin public hearings on criminal activity in the Port of New York.

The Waterfront Hearings, as Dewey’s investigation became known, were not televised and therefore did not garner the same amount of national attention as Kefauver’s traveling road show. But over the course of the next seven months, hundreds of waterfront figures would be dragged out of the dark and exposed to the glare of public inquisition. Although the overwhelming majority took the Fifth and declined to answer questions on the grounds they might be incriminated, the parade of union officials with extensive and violent criminal records left the impression that the East Coast ILA might more accurately have been named the Ex-con Benevolent Association.

Among the most revealing witnesses—not for what he said but for what he represented—was a man named William J. “Big Bill” McCormack. McCormack was a multimillionaire industrialist who had risen from hardscrabble roots in Jersey City to become a powerful behind-the-scenes figure in New York area politics. Although nearly seventy years old at the time of the hearings, with a long career in business and public affairs, he was something of a mysterious waterfront figure; McCormack was a man whose name was well-known but whose face was rarely seen—except, of course, for his annual appearance as a guest of honor at the Joseph P. Ryan Association’s prestigious dinner/dance.

Born to Irish potato-famine immigrants from County Monaghan, Bill McCormack and his brother, Harry, first became known in the Port of New York as owners of a small trucking business. They were also stout pillars in the New Jersey political organization of Frank “I Am the Law” Hague, for whom they got out the vote. The McCormack brothers, like so many children of famine immigrants who started out with less than nothing, were esteemed as fearless street brawlers. Bill McCormack was also shrewd. In 1920, he banded together with several others truckers and formed the U.S. Trucking Corporation, installing himself as executive vice president in charge of labor relations. It wasn’t long before McCormack branched off into other waterfront-related businesses—everything including delivering produce, dredging sand from the bottom of Long Island Sound, a concrete company, a waterfront hiring agency, and the largest independent chain of filling stations in the state of New York.

The key to McCormack’s success was his ability to cultivate powerful political connections, a classic first-generation Irish trait. Along with Boss Hague, McCormack was close to Alfred E. Smith, who would eventually become the first Irish Catholic to receive the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. In 1920, Governor Al Smith was defeated in his campaign for reelection. McCormack and his business associates shrewdly made Smith the president, or front man, of their U.S. Trucking Corporation. When Smith was reelected governor, he paid Bill McCormack back by appointing him chairman of the New York State Boxing Commission.

Over the years, the former street kid from Jersey City became a rich man, with an annual income from his various businesses estimated at $20 million a year. Somewhere along the line, McCormack became a close friend and business partner of Joe Ryan. They came from similar humble beginnings and shared a tough, hard-bitten view of the world. They helped each other out whenever possible.

In 1950, when the controversy surrounding labor conditions on the waterfront were at a peak and Mayor Bill O’Dwyer was forced to do something about it, Joe Ryan suggested to the mayor that McCormack be named to lead a prestigious blue-ribbon panel to investigate allegations of racketeering. After months of investigation at the taxpayer’s expense, and contrary to everything that was known about the inner workings of organized crime, this panel concluded, “We have found that the labor situation on the waterfront of the Port of New York is generally satisfactory from the standpoint of the worker, the employer, the industry, and the government.”

McCormack’s name came up often during the Waterfront Hearings. Perhaps the most damning testimony came from a supervisor of employment for the division of parole. The witness stated that he had never met Mr. McCormack personally but had dealt many times with his brother, Harry. Many an application for parole had crossed his desk with a note that read, “Mr. H. F. McCormack will make immediate arrangements for this inmate’s union membership upon his release.” The witness estimated that McCormack enterprises had sponsored the parole of some two hundred men from prison, promising that they had jobs waiting for them with McCormack’s Penn Stevedoring Company.

When called to testify before the Waterfront Commission, Bill McCormack explained his reasons for springing so many convicted felons in humanitarian terms: “It’s because I take a human view of employee problems. I’m human, and they’re human.”

McCormack’s explanation was in keeping with his recent anointing by the Archdiocese of New York as their “Catholic Layman of the Year,” but it didn’t go over well when stacked up against the reputations of men like Cockeye Dunn, Squint Sheridan, members of the Pistol Local, and others who’d been grandfathered out of prison to become the muscle behind Joe Ryan’s leadership of the ILA.

The press had a field day, believing that Cockeye Dunn’s Mister Big had finally been revealed. The
Herald Tribune
editorialized, “Mr. McCormack’s activities on behalf of the longshoreman’s union suggest that he has been pulling the strings for Joseph P. Ryan for years and may, in fact, be a more powerful figure on the waterfront than the Boss himself.”

The 209th and final witness in the Crime Commission’s public hearings was none other than Joe Ryan. After the sensational testimony and headlines concerning McCormack, his friend and patron, Ryan’s long day on the stand seemed like an anticlimax, but it directly resulted in his complete downfall, both as a union leader and politician, and to his trial in a criminal court on charges of theft of union funds.