Secret labor organizations like the Molly Maguires sprang up in direct response to an owner’s unwillingness to address abysmal working conditions. In rural Pennsylvania’s Schulykill County, where nine out of ten Irish immigrant males worked in the mines, the Molly Maguires took matters into their own hands, embarking on a campaign of sabotage and violent acts aimed at specific mining companies, with the intention of forcing management to the bargaining table. The coal mining companies responded by hiring the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who planted an Irish American spy deep inside the organization. Thus, the tactic of labor espionage on the part of management was established, injecting an aura of paranoia and fear into America’s industrial workplace that would persist for at least the next century.
The Industrial Revolution only intensified the deep-rooted animosities between workers, management, and the corporate manufacturers who pioneered the staple of American industry: the factory assembly line. There were few significant labor laws at the time and only the beginnings of a union movement. Whereas in the mid-nineteenth century the proletarian rabble was mostly forced to engage in full-scale rioting to bring about social change, the new century saw the emergence of labor agitation, or the strike, as a viable strategy of mobilization.
Due to their spectacular success at infiltrating the Molly Maguires, the Pinkerton Agency became the leader in a brutal and systematic campaign to undermine union agitation wherever it occurred. Strikebreaking became a hugely profitable enterprise for Pinkerton and other private detective agencies that specialized in recruiting and transporting antiunion goon squads and armed guards. Finding men willing to partake in violent strikebreaking activities for pay was not difficult. From 1870 until at least the 1920s, employment among the working class was chronically unsteady, and each year there were several hundred thousand people who were unable to find work for at least a few months. In industries such as slaughtering and meat-packing, iron and steel, brick and tile, garment manufacturing, and the building trades, work was seasonal, with no unemployment insurance or social welfare system of any kind to help get a worker over the hump. Men desperately in need of work were willing to do almost anything to make a buck, including spying for the company store or strikebreaking, in which men armed with lead pipes, rocks, and guns set upon picket lines and union halls looking for heads to smash.
The same sort of person who might once have hired himself out as a bootlegger, political slugger, dock walloper, or gangster also had the right stuff to be a strikebreaker. Given that such a high percentage of the workforce was of the Celtic persuasion, Irishmen, in the eyes of management, made ideal spies and strikebreakers. Some even found their calling in the fink markets.
One such man was James Farley. Born into a lower-middle-class Irish American family in the Upstate village of Malone, New York, Farley began his career in organized labor as a street car motorman who, in the midst of a general strike, turned against his fellow workers and joined forces with the corporation. Not only did Jim Farley go on to become a notorious commander of professional strikebreakers with a standing army of twenty-five hundred men, but he also achieved the highest level of cultural notoriety a man could receive in pre-Hollywood America when Jack London, the top commercial novelist of his day, mentioned Farley by name in his novel The Iron Heel. Farley was singled out by the famous writer as an example of a pernicious trend, men who were “private soldiers of the capitalists…thoroughly organized and well-armed…held in readiness to be hurled in special trains to any part of the country where labor went on strike or was locked out by employers.” In London’s apocalyptic vision of the class struggle between labor and “the Oligarchy,” strikebreakers were an ominous sign of bad times ahead.5
As a young man, Farley was adventurous and reckless. At the age of fourteen he ran away from home to join the circus. When the circus went to the wall in the town of Monticello, he obtained employment in a hotel there, first as a poolroom attendant, then as a bartender and clerk. One day he became uncontrollably violent when he accidentally swallowed an overdose of cocaine during a visit to the dentist and ended up being chased into the woods, where he was hunted for weeks as a wild man. Unemployed and penniless, he drifted to Brooklyn and found work there as a detective.
Detective work led Farley to a career in strikebreaking, which began in the 1895 Brooklyn streetcar strike, when the company put him in charge of a squad of fifteen special officers. After taking part in other antiunion campaigns in Philadelphia and Richmond, Virginia, Farley realized that what was needed was a more organized approach: Successful strikebreaking required that a single boss assume complete command from the company and supply all the men. Over the next eight years, Boss Farley put together an underground strikebreaking network that was tops in the country. Farley was always at the forefront, overseeing an organization that broke strikes from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In newspaper advertisements, he claimed to have at his command an “army of forty thousand men ready to do his bidding.” No one doubted him. The Farley organization broke over fifty strikes without suffering a single defeat.
Much of Farley’s reputation as a champion strikebreaker was based on what one newspaper described as his “imperturbable demeanor.” He was a physically imposing man who wore his Colt .38 in a holster, like a gunslinger from the Old West. He was covered from head to toe with bullet wounds and scars from knives, clubs, pistol butts, bricks, and baseball bats. Reputedly, he smoked fifty to sixty Havana maduro cigars a day, preferring big, fat Carona Specials. According to an article in the United Mine Workers Journal, he stood before his mercenaries, mostly tough lumpenproletarians from big city slums, “with the air of a potentate,” wearing “a long Cassock overcoat,” and the men “looked up at him with gaping mouths.” Farley’s power was legendary. During the 1905 New York IRT subway strike, a reporter mentioned IRT President August Belmont, one of the nation’s wealthiest men, to a strikebreaker. The strikebreaker responded, “Who the hell is Belmont? Farley’s runnin’ this road.”
Farley’s near mythical strikebreaking career culminated in San Francisco in 1907. Summoned by the city’s largest private transit company to stop a rumored strike before it began, he arrived in San Francisco Bay on a steamer with four hundred of his mercenaries, recruited from all over the country. In the weeks that followed, there were numerous skirmishes; Farley’s men descended on union members whenever they attempted to gather. The streetcarman’s union accused Farley of deliberately placing explosives on the tracks to turn public opinion against the strikers, an old detective agency trick designed to connect labor with terrorism. He had used similar tactics before, in Cleveland, where a bomb blew up a trolley car injuring ten people, and in Bay City, Michigan, where Farley had been convicted of placing obstructions on the tracks designed to cause wrecks that would be blamed on the union.
In San Francisco, the bloodiest night of strikebreaking occurred on May 7, when Farley’s gang finally faced off against union activists near the Turk and Fillmore street car barn. The workers were armed with clubs and pipes, the strikebreakers with revolvers. Farley’s men opened fire on a crowd, killing four union sympathizers. According to an eyewitness account, the union people were “shot down like dogs.” When all was said and done, the San Francisco transit strike never took place. The union, intimidated by the strikebreakers, voted against the strike. Farley had succeeded once again.
During his strikebreaking career, Boss Jim Farley was paid millions by American corporations to intimidate, brutalize, browbeat, and kill labor activists. He was a mercenary who undertook his violent antiunion campaigns purely for personal profit. Was Jim Farley a gangster? The press of his day did not characterize him as such. The San Francisco Chronicle meant it as a compliment when they described the world’s most famous strikebreaker as “a man who prefers hot blood to water as a beverage.” Other newspapers around the country lionized Farley, characterizing his penchant for violence and mayhem on behalf of employers as a noble calling. He was sometimes taken to
task for his use of extreme tactics, but this too was often portrayed as a kind of daring in which criminal deception and thuggery were regrettable although justified in the face of flagrant social agitation (big city newspapers, most of them notoriously antiunion, frequently editorialized that the labor movement was socialist- or communist-inspired).
Whereas Jim Farley was portrayed as a hero and a necessary response to a social ill, violent activists on the other side were not. During the massive West Coast longshoreman’s strike of 1934, for example, violence occurred on all sides. A small group of ILA members known as the Tacoma Flying Squad frequently roamed from port to port defending strikers, chasing away scab workers, and clashing with overzealous police. Overseen by Paddy Morris, leader of a Tacoma longshoreman’s local, the Flying Squad was revered within the union, but not by the press. The Tacoma Daily Ledger and other West Cost newspapers characterized the Flying Squad as “a union mob of thugs and gangsters.” Yet most of these men had no criminal record and had adopted their defender strategy on behalf of their union, not for personal gain.
The fact that union activists were characterized as gangsters while strikebreakers were viewed as defenders of society goes a long way toward explaining why certain trade unions became paranoid and defensive. The dichotomy was forceful and blunt: One man’s gangster was another man’s labor activist. The union could not trust that the press or even the general public would understand or sympathize with their position. Thus, labor leaders like Joe Ryan were able to brazenly accumulate a standing army of hard men, ex-cons, and gangsters within his union without anyone batting an eye. Ryan could count on a general atmosphere of fear and paranoia brought on by a long tradition of industrial exploitation, subterfuge, and violence, so that if a discerning member of the union were to ask himself, “Are there gangsters in the ILA?” he would have to conclude, “Sure. But at least they’re our gangsters.”
Cockeye and Squint Get the Chair
Early on the morning of January 8, 1947, stevedore Andy Hintz left his apartment on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, just a stone’s throw from Pier 51, where he had worked as a waterfront hiring boss for the last seven months. Hintz never made it to work that day. In front of his building, three men appeared. One of them said, “Hey, Andy.” Then they all opened fire and pumped him with six bullets. Hintz was a tough bastard. He lingered for three weeks in a hospital, drifting in and out of consciousness. Before he expired on January 29, he told his wife, “Johnny Dunn shot me.”
Three longshoremen, Cockeye Dunn, his sidekick Squint Sheridan, and a third man, former prizefighter Danny Gentile, were immediately arrested for the murder of Andy Hintz. The shooting and arrest were major stories in the local newspapers. Murders on the waterfront were part of the city’s lore, and this one appeared to be a humdinger as it involved a couple of notorious gunmen for the ILA.
Dunn, Sheridan, and Gentile were all held without bail, but that didn’t stop Andy Hintz’s wife from fearing for her life. The word was out that Mae Hintz would be the district attorney’s primary witness in the upcoming murder trial of the three men. As a forty-one-year-old former nightclub owner, Mae knew all about how things operated on the waterfront. She knew that Cockeye Dunn and his thugs had been trying to oust her husband and replace him with someone more friendly to the waterfront mob. Before his death, when Hintz had been harassed by a gang of rival longshoremen, he said to the gangsters, “You can tell Cockeye Dunn to go to hell.” Mae Hintz had been living in fear ever since.
As the date of her husband’s killers’ trial approached, Mrs. Hintz disappeared. For a while, foul play was suspected. It looked like the government’s main witness was no more, in which case the evidence against the three gunmen was weak. Lawyers for Dunn and Sheridan gloated, alleging that their clients would soon be set free. But they were wrong: Mae Hintz turned up in Miami, where, out of stark, raving fear, she had gone on the run. Under heavy guard, she was brought back to Manhattan and kept under lock and key.
Mrs. Hintz had good reason to be afraid. Cockeye Dunn was no ordinary criminal. As Eddie McGrath’s brother-in-law and business partner at Varick Enterprises, Dunn was tied into the ILA’s underworld network at the highest levels. Short and slight, with a wisecracking manner (“the midget gunman,” the Daily News called him), Dunn had spent the previous summer at a hotel suite in Hollywood, Florida, as Meyer Lansky’s guest. At the time, Lansky was shuttling back and forth between Florida and Cuba, where he was establishing a working relationship with the corrupt government of General Fulgencio Batista. One of Lansky’s grandiose schemes was to use Cuba as a transshipment point for the importation of heroin and cocaine into the United States. The longshoreman’s association was a key element in this plan, as the product would have to be shipped via freighter and offloaded at U.S. ports. Dunn would be the one to coordinate the importation of Lansky’s drugs, and hotel phone records from his stay in Florida would show that, over a one-week period, he put in calls to some of the biggest names in organized crime, including Frank Costello and Eddie McGrath in New York, Bugsy Siegel in Los Angeles, and Lucky Luciano at the Hotel Nacional in Havana.
Cockeye, of course, was also tight with Boss Joe Ryan. It was Ryan, through his underling Eddie McGrath, who first sponsored Dunn’s membership in the union. Not only had Dunn become the overlord of all the piers on the Lower West Side, but he was also on the Arrangements Committee for the annual dinner/dance put on by the Joseph P. Ryan Association. Tickets for the event, which was held at either the Hotel Commodore or the Waldorf-Astoria, were highly coveted. Police commissioners, district attorneys, judges, and ranking bureaucrats in the city’s many governmental departments were regularly in attendance, as were various notorious figures from the waterfront mob. The guests were there for one reason: to kiss the ring of Joe Ryan, which could bring a political endorsement and/or campaign contribution from his powerful union. Those who couldn’t make it always sent a note, as was the case in 1950 when the reputedly incorruptible, racket-busting governor of New York was unable to attend.
Dear Joe:
I would surely be delighted to come to the annual affair of the Joseph P. Ryan Association on Saturday, May 20 if possible. As it happens, Mrs. Dewey and I have accepted an invitation to the marriage of Lowell Thomas’s only son that weekend, and we just can’t possibly make it.
It is mighty nice of you to ask me, and I wish you would give my regards to all the fine people at the dinner.
On behalf of the people of the entire state, I congratulate you for what you have done to keep the Communists from getting control of the New York waterfront. Be assured that the entire machinery of the governor of New York State is behind you and your organization in this determination.
With warm regards,
Sincerely yours,
Thomas E. Dewey
Ryan’s annual dinner was the capstone on a social profile that placed the ILA president among the city’s reigning elite. He was a regular at Toots Shor’s, the famous sportsman’s watering hole, and a member of the Elks, the New York Athletic Club, and the Winged Foot Golf Club in Westchester County. Apart from Eddie McGrath, Cockeye Dunn, and a small cadre of ILA operatives who comprised his inner circle, Boss Joe, once a man of the people, rarely mingled with the rank-and-file. His flagrant social climbing even caught the attention of activist Dorothy Day. After spending a typical Thanksgiving Day serving dinner to the homeless (a dinner paid for and coserved by delegates from the hospital and prison unions), Day wrote in the Catholic Worker
That day I could not help but think how different was the position of Joseph P. Ryan, head of the longshoremen, who has had a position of trust and power for many years. Where are the hiring halls, the recreation rooms, the library, the communal repasts, the works of mercy performed by the prison and hospital delegates, in the longshoreman’s union? Are Ryan’s offices open to the rank-and-file? Ryan is more often to be found at the tables of the rich than with his men.
Ryan may have been immune to c
riticism from “radicals” and “communists” like Dorothy Day, but he was not immune to criminal prosecution. The murder trial of two of his underlings hit close to home—too close as far as Ryan was concerned. In the months leading up to the trial, he was nowhere to be seen, not even at Toots Shor’s.
The trial got off to a bang when Danny Gentile, Dunn and Sheridan’s accomplice in the shooting of Andy Hintz, flipped and turned state’s evidence against the defense. The two waterfront gangsters could do nothing but sit and watch as Gentile described, on the witness stand, how the three of them had shot the hiring stevedore. In the end, it was as if Andy Hintz had spoken from his grave through his wife and identified the killers. The verdict was swift and sure: guilty as charged.
The real fun began after the trial. The verdict and sentence—death by execution—weighed heavily on Cockeye Dunn’s mind. As the date for his electrocution approached, the man who had for years served as a waterfront enforcer, doling out beatings and even death to those who violated the mob’s code of silence, put out the word to the Manhattan district attorney’s office that he might be ready to talk. Dunn suggested that, if his sentence were commuted to life imprisonment, he could supply information that would solve over thirty murders along the waterfront. Beyond that, said Cockeye, he could name the higher-ups in the field of politics who had protected all the rackets along the docks, including the very top boss of all. One man, Dunn claimed, was Mister Big for all the waterfront rackets, and he was a very powerful man, indeed, with high political connections.
While Dunn and the Manhattan D.A.’s office began negotiating the terms of a potential deal, the town was abuzz with speculation. Who was this behind-the-scenes kingpin on the waterfront? So far, Dunn’s only clue was that it was a reputable businessman known for his charitable works, church affiliations, and political activities. Did this mean others would be dragged into the mess as well? Would this kingpin’s political connections be implicated and exposed?
Paddy Whacked Page 31