Tomorrow morning, after a long and fishy night’s work, the workers at the Fulton Fish Market were supposed to pack up and move to their new facility in Hunts Point, where they were scheduled to open for business late Sunday night. A lawsuit has put that plan on ice.

Filed in state Supreme Court last Friday by a deputy mayor during the Giuliani administration, Randy Mastro, the lawsuit says the city’s plan to return the market’s fish-unloading operations to the same people who ran the market before the reforms of the 1990s is akin to handing the reins back to the mob.

“If the city’s decision to allow the wholesalers to take over the unloading function were to stand, it would reverse 10 years of progress that have been made in keeping organized crime at bay at the Fulton Fish Market, and would effectively invite organized crime to try to come back to the market when it moves to Hunts Point,” Mr. Mastro said in a telephone interview.

The Fulton Fish Market, which has been operating along the East River near South Street Seaport since 1822, has had ties to La Cosa Nostra organized crime family since the 1920s, according to the claim Mr. Mastro filed on behalf of a private fish-unloading firm, Laro Service Systems Incorporated. The mob’s control of the market centered on its command of the unloading functions, the suit said.

When Mayor Giuliani cracked down on crime at the market in 1995, his main point of attack was the unloading function. He worked with the City Council to pass a law that required the market to use an independent, city-licensed unloading firm. The city chose Laro and ever since, unloading prices have been lower than they were before 1995.

This year, however, as the market was preparing to move to a new, $85 million, 400,000-square-foot indoor facility in the Bronx, the city licensed both Laro and a cooperative of the fish wholesale businesses to do unloading at Hunts Point. The Laro lawsuit says the city’s licensing decision could represent a major step back.

“The very wholesale businesses that now comprise the Cooperative that the city proposes to license to perform this crucial function were part of and complicit in the old market’s extortionate, price-fixing unloading scheme,” the lawsuit says, adding that the city’s plan “shocks the conscience.”

The lawsuit implies that the city’s plan is tied to the mayor’s political ambitions.

“In early 2005, the move of the market from its current location to Hunts Point became even more vital to the Bloomberg administration as Mayor Bloomberg made the move, and the resulting new jobs it would create in the Bronx, a re-election campaign platform,” it says.

The city’s top lawyer, Michael Cardozo, said yesterday that the lawsuit “has absolutely no merit.”

“In a desperate, 11th hour attempt to preserve its exclusive monopoly in unloading fish at the Fish Market, Laro has unjustifiably sought to disparage the fitness of the wholesale fish dealers who make up the Coop, with whom Laro has been perfectly comfortable dealing with in the past,” Mr. Cardozo said in a statement. “It is absolutely legal for the wholesalers to provide the unloading services, and their fitness to do so has been thoroughly investigated by the City’s Business Integrity Commission.”

A hearing about the matter is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. A spokeswoman for the Economic Development Corporation, Janelle Patterson, said she is hopeful that the move to Hunts Point would take place soon after the hearing.

“We’re hopeful that we’ll get a favorable ruling that will let us move forward next two or three weeks, or so,” she said.