Remembering the Reporter Who Inspired ‘On the Waterfront’

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

In May 1948, in a scene that might have come from a gangster movie, a man leapt out of a sedan and fired seven shots at a stevedore named Tom Collentine, three into his prostrate body. As had become routine in previous decades, most New York papers gave decent play to this waterfront murder and moved on. By contrast, The New York Sun sent its star reporter, Malcolm “Mike” Johnson, to do what neither papers, politicians nor policemen had been willing to do before: seek the connections among the regular drumbeat of waterfront murders, rather than treat each death separately.

A year later, Johnson received a Pulitzer for the Sun’s record-breaking twenty-four-day series that made plain that dock life was as savage as any movie depicted it. Indeed, Johnson’s work inspired the most famous dock life movie of them all, Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront,” which cemented the movie careers of both Kazan, already a famous stage director, and Marlon Brando, himself made famous by Kazan’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Nathan Ward’s account of Mike Johnson’s patient digging, which reveals a spider web of union corruption and outright gangsterism choking America’s most important industry, brilliantly captures the shocking reality that governed dock life. Mr. Ward reveals the world of the “shape up,” the daily picking of work crews in which those who resisted offering large kickbacks remained unemployed; the money demanded of ship captains who needed goods unloaded; the pressure — up to and routinely including murder — brought to bear on those who resisted the system; and the unholy alliance between unionist Joseph P. Ryan, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, and the gangsters who skimmed rich pickings from the daily commerce of the world’s greatest harbor.

Ward begins with a chapter that captures the smothered rage of the longshoremen who, but for the rare brave or foolish young man, dare object only under cover of anonymity. “Dov’è Panto?”, “Where’s Panto?”, named for the graffiti that sprang up all over the waterfront and beyond, tells the story of Pietro Panto, an Italian longshoreman employed on a pier staffed by members of six Italian “locals” overseen by Emil Camarda, a mobster and one of Joe Ryan’s VPs.

Panto quickly discovers the many ways in which longshoremen contribute perhaps half their pay in the form of kickbacks, buying regular hair cuts by monthly subscription and over-priced grapes they had no use for, taking loans from waterfront sharks and working twenty-men shifts with fifteen men, with the five “ghost” pay-packets going to the hiring boss. In 1939, Panto leads hundreds of longshoremen in demands for union democracy and an end to the “shape-up” and kickback system. Called in by Camarda, Panto refuses to toe the line, and vanishes several days later.

The graffittied question goes unanswered for over a year, when the gangster Abe Reles (named Kid Twist for, among other things, his “strangling prowess”), arrested for another death, provides evidence that leads to the unearthing of Panto’s quicklimed body in a Passaic River marsh. But this is just one among dozens. Reles describes a “Syndicate” whose nationwide reach shocks the Manhattan D.A., recounting murders so rapidly that, to keep up, investigations of anything more modest are postponed. Seven mobsters were ultimately executed. But the biggest prize, Albert Anastasia, the man responsible for Panto’s death, went free when, after a year under police protection, Reles “dove, fell or was hurled” from the window of his Coney Island hotel room — where his “guard” of six policemen were “all asleep.”

Ward’s story has everything: an intrepid reporter persisting in the face of death threats to his family; the slow discovery of the extraordinary reach of criminal control of the docks; a waterfront priest-firebrand for the suffering longshoremen, asking his listeners to imagine their responsibility to a latter-day Jesus who found work on the docks; the serial reprieves granted Joe Ryan by Washington’s wartime need for quiet on the docks and, later, by the anti-Communism he hid behind almost to the very end. Car bombings orchestrated from jail; the deaths or sudden silence of almost anyone likely to talk; and, most of all, the elaborate web of criminals and politicians — and police commissioners who decline to investigate dock murders vigorously.

Eventually, the scandal raised by the Sun launches the famous crime hearings led by Senator Kefauver (the Manhattan hearings were “the most-watched event then ever televised”). But neither Johnson, nor Kefauver, ever brought down Bill McCormack, the “Mr. Big” who stood behind Joe Ryan, friend (and perhaps owner) of mayors. Ryan himself was ultimately felled by a commission that followed Kefauver’s.

As Johnson knew, “no government clean-up would ever rid the New York waterfront of crime.” But he certainly gave the petty hustlers, the hold-up men, the union thugs and the out-and-out murderers a flesh-wound that would take a long time to heal.

It is a bonus of Nathan Ward’s terrific story that it tells wonderfully the sad last days of the Sun. The newspaper had lost ground to other, less genteel offerings. It fell to the New York Tribune to take up the story’s closing episodes. Johnson himself goes to work for the International News Service. We are left with an indelible image of the paper’s great last editor, Keats Speed, sitting doggedly at his desk months after the paper has closed.

Mr. Rosenberg reviews books for the New York Sun.


The New York Sun

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