On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  “Goddamn right,” Terry said.

  “For what he did to Charley,” Father Barry poured it on. “And a lot of men who were better than Charley. Then don’t fight ’im like a hoodlum down here in the jungle. Sure, that’s just what he wants. He’ll hit you in the head and plead self-defense. And beat that rap like he beat all the others. Now listen to me, Terry, the way to fight him is in the hearings with the truth. Hit him with the truth, instead of with that—that cap pistol of yours.”

  Slowly Terry had begun to listen. He frowned and screwed up his face as if it were hurting.

  “Just a minute. Don’t rush me,” he said.

  “Get rid of the gun,” Father Barry said. “Unless you haven’t got the guts. Because if you haven’t, you’d better hang on to it.”

  Terry took the gun out of his pocket and studied it thoughtfully. Father Barry’s lips were dry. He ran his hand over them, looked anxiously at the gun and called to Jocko. “Give me a beer,” Father Barry said, slapping his cigarette money on the bar. Terry was still looking at the gun. “Make it two,” Father Barry said. He pushed a glass toward Terry. He drank his down thirstily. Terry drank his slowly.

  “If you don’t want to give me that gun, leave it here,” Father Barry said.

  On the wall in the back of the bar was a framed picture, taken in happier days, of Johnny Friendly and Charley Malloy flanking their International president, Willie Givens. It had been taken at Jamaica and caught the three of them arm in arm and wreathed in exaggerated smiles.

  “The hell with it,” Terry said aloud, and hurled the gun over the bar into the middle of the glass-encased picture. “Tell Johnny I was here.”

  Father Barry gave an audible sigh of relief when they got outside.

  “I’m going to put you up at my place tonight,” he said.

  “I aint afraid where I am,” Terry said.

  “Did I say you were?” Father Barry said. “I thought I’d go over your testimony with you. You can really slam ’em with your stuff on the Doyle and the Nolan jobs. And what they did to Charley. There are going to be three or four other fellas you know over there working on what they’re going to say. We want to get the picture as full as possible. That’ll hit Johnny where it hurts.”

  He took Terry by the arm and started to walk through the sleet toward the rectory.

  “Hey, Terry, don’t happen to have a cigarette on you, do you?”

  Twenty-three

  FROM THE COURT HOUSE, where the waterfront hearings were conducted by the Crime Commission, the years and decades and generations of corruptive filth, of criminal sludge, of collusive mire were being dredged up and poured out over the city. The headlines were thick and black. Radio and television commentators conjured the specter of New York harbor as a contaminated giant. National magazines, awakened at last, threw open their pages to the inhumanity of the shape-up, the waterfront distortion of trade unionism and the shameless complicity of the shipping executives and tainted city officials. The lid was off the waterfront and the sewage was spilling out at last. As if the warning to stay away from the waterfront unless on pastoral duties had been a preliminary danger-signal, now there followed a last-minute order from the Bishop to Father Donoghue forbidding Father Barry to take the stand at the hearings. But the curate was too elated at the way things were going to feel discouraged. He knew, through his own underground, that Monsignor O’Hare was bringing into play every strategy he could devise to protect his old friends Willie Givens and Tom McGovern, and he was sure his higher-ranking rival was doing everything in his power to prejudice his case with the Bishop. Just the same, he had his Pastor moderately, or perhaps judiciously, on his side, and he felt secure in his conviction that the overwhelming evidence of waterfront racketeering and violence would swing the diocesan headquarters over to his side.

  On the opening morning of the hearings he had added to his prayers at Mass a special plea for the successful outcome of this investigation, so that the men of the waterfront could begin to enjoy the human dignity of labor which Christ understood and which God intended for them. O God, knock those Johnny Friendlys out of the box for good, he had prayed, and while You’re at it, God, don’t forget their respectable protectors. The same ones Xavier used to beef to the king about in the 1550’s.

  Father Barry did his best to keep up with his hour-to-hour religious and parish duties while sending out for every new Extra, sneaking in radio reports and getting excited telephone calls from Moose and Jimmy and some of the other of his boys who were sitting in on the hearings or waiting to be called. At least, if he wasn’t there, he had the satisfaction of knowing that some of the harbor workers who had consulted him were in there taking the oath to lay the facts on the line. Not that he had gone by any rule-of-thumb conviction that they should testify. Luke, for instance, had come in with the problem of how to feed a family of five if he was to get up there and tell how Negroes got the short end of the short end on the docks.

  “My wife is so scared she’s been cryin’ every night,” Luke had said. Father Barry promised he would talk to the Commission Counsel about that. He didn’t think they could ask men with families to take those chances without some assurance of physical and economic protection.

  A bandy-legged member of the watchmen’s union, affiliated with and in fact dominated by the longshoremen bosses, told Father Barry he had been subpoenaed because of the high percentage of pilferage on the pier he was supposed to watch. It happened to be a Johnny Friendly pier. “My first week on the job I was so green I saw some stealin’ of ladies’ gloves, whole cases of ’em, and so I reported them to the police. Next day this fella Truck comes up to me, asks me if my name is Michael McNally, and when I says ‘yes’ he hauls off and cracks me nose. ‘From now on, mind your own business,’ he says to me. ‘I thought watchin’ is a watchman’s business,’ I told him. ‘You just watch yourself,’ he says to me. ‘That’s all the goddamn watchin’ you have t’ do.’ ”

  Now McNally’s problem was: should he tell that story? It meant the end of his job, and at his time of life there weren’t too many jobs a man can do. Father Barry hadn’t urged him to testify, as he had Terry, preferring to let this old man make up his mind for himself. The troubled watchman had come back the following day to say that he and his wife had talked it over and decided that he had to testify. “Our faith is supposed to teach us a right and a wrong,” he had said, and Father Barry, whose parents came from a Kerry where courage counted more than safety, had to smile. He would talk to Father Vincent, whose family owned a chain store and perhaps might have a watchman’s opening for McNally. “I knew you’d get me into this circus of yours,” he could hear Harry Vincent saying, good-humoredly disapproving.

  Port Watchman Michael McNally was the first witness called, and when, after describing his violent initiation to the job, he said: “If I knew at that time what I know now, I never would’ve bothered to try ’n save those boxes of gloves,” the honesty of his admission was so startling that a laugh of recognition ran through the audience. The truth has a lovely ring, like a ship’s brass bell, Father Barry thought to himself as he heard a playback of McNally’s testimony over the radio at lunchtime. But to millions of people McNally’s testimony would be just so many lines of questions and answers, Q—, A—, Q—, A—. Behind this long line of witnesses were human beings, with fear, doubts, bread-and-butter problems, and for the rebels and turncoats the big Question—Life, and the possible answer—Death.

  The watchman was followed by an insurance-company detective who gave a chalk-talk with charts on systematic wholesale pilferage. “It’s like fighting an army of locusts,” he admitted before he stepped down.

  A florid-faced head of a stevedore company admitted he had given an East River union boss $15,000 to pay for the wedding of the boss’s daughter.

  “Isn’t that an unusually generous wedding gift?” the dignified Commission Chief Counsel asked with a straight face.

  “We were personal friends and she hap
pens to be a very nice girl,” the stevedore executive insisted.

  “Isn’t it a fact that the $15,000 was paid out by the McCabe Stevedore Company and not by you personally?”

  The stevedore employer got a little redder in the face and asked if he could consult with his lawyer before he answered.

  A raw-boned thug admitted that he had come directly from Sing Sing back to the docks, had gone back on the union payrolls as a delegate at a hundred and fifty dollars a week salary and expenses and had cut himself in for a share of the loading graft. Only he put it more delicately.

  A. “I went back to this here perishable pier and bein’ I done the work there before I was away, we talked it over and decided the three of us would be partners.”

  Q. “And you didn’t use any pressure to get them to agree to that?”

  A. “You c’n ask them if I done anything.”

  Q. “You became a working partner?”

  A. “If there was anything to do. But as a rule there was nothin’ to do.”

  Q. “Isn’t it the real honest-to-God truth that you came back from Sing Sing after serving three years for assault with a deadly weapon, that you muscled your way into this loading racket and took half the profits, at least two hundred and fifty dollars a week, while holding down your union job?”

  The public loader asked to consult his lawyer.

  A Negro longshoreman testified that he had to pay a double kickback, first two dollars to a colored strawboss who shaped the Negroes in the basement of his own home and ran what he called a kickback club. Three dollars went to the white hiring boss on the pier. The witness had finally given up longshoring, he testified, because “you got to pay up too many dollars to get those jobs and even then a colored man don’t get no good chance on the waterfront.”

  A frightened Italian longshoreman from Brooklyn testified that he had protested paying his three-dollars-a-month dues when there were never any meetings or financial reports.

  Q. “Who did you protest this to?”

  A. “Our business agent and there were two other fellers with him.”

  Q. “And then what happened?”

  A. “I got kicked by someone. I don’t know who it was.”

  Q. “You got kicked in the groin?”

  A. “Yes, sir.”

  Q. “And sent to the hospital?”

  A. “Yes, sir. I was out of work nearly five weeks.”

  Q. “And this assault took place right in front of the pier where you work?”

  A. “Yes, sir, where I used to work.”

  Mrs. Collins took the stand to tell how her husband, as assistant hiring boss on Pier B in Bohegan, had refused to hire short gangs, which meant that fewer men had to overwork in order to support the hoodlums who did no work. “Andy was a good man,” she said, and began to cry. “Every time I hear a key in the latch I get the feelin’ it’s him comin’ home.” She dabbed at her prematurely lined face. “I’ve got a boy thirteen, and one thing I promise, he’s not going to be no longshoreman—not while that bunch of gorillas are running the thing.”

  The criminal record of Alky Benasio was examined and a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney was questioned as to how it happened that a report on a waterfront murder in the 40’s associated with Alky had disappeared from the police files. The former official spoke at some length, but was unable to clarify the point.

  Alky himself was called to the stand, a medium-sized, unimpressive, self-contained figure whose name was known to have sent murder to at least two dozen victims.

  Alky would admit nothing, not even that his brother, Jerry Benasio was now a power on most Italian-manned docks. At one point when the cool-mannered Chief Counsel was asking him a particularly vexing question, he cried out with deeply felt indignation, “Look, you got the records in front of you. You went to college. You got the Government with you. You got everything on your side. I had to work my way up from the bottom.”

  “Where do you think you are now?” the Counsel asked, perhaps baiting him unfairly because Alky Benasio, in the eyes of the law, was a free man and those murders of his were artistic jobs that would never be proved.

  Slicker McGhee, up from Florida with a sun-tan, in a tailored flannel suit and a tastefully striped tie, listened politely to a reading of his record of five convictions, his appointment by Willie Givens as an organizer and his association with the country’s underworld elite. He looked like a Madison Avenue advertising executive, and the recital of the waterfront murders with which the Commission investigation implicated him seemed incongruous. To any and all questions, including the name and address of his mother, he replied in perfect diction rarely heard on the waterfront, “I refuse to answer on the grounds that the question will tend to degrade or incriminate me.” He stepped down from the stand with a bland smile, as if forgiving the authorities for this gratuitous waste of time, and a few hours later he was winging back to his life of pleasure in the Florida sun.

  A very nervous Mayor Bobby Burke of Bohegan claimed he did not know his Police Commissioner Donnelly had once been a bootlegger employed by Johnny Friendly. And he denied using the docks as an outlet for petty patronage, although a disenchanted precinct worker testified that Burke paid him off by sending him down to Friendly with a note to carry him on the payroll week-ends to get time-and-a-half. Mayor Burke also denied that the late Charley Malloy was known as a City Hall “fixer” and go-between linking the Mayor’s office to Johnny Friendly’s operation. But there was something about the Mayor’s answers that did not carry conviction. Often his responses were ludicrously evasive, and when he was asked how he had managed to bank sixty thousand dollars on an annual salary of fifteen thousand, he took refuge in long, fevered consultations with his attorney.

  “If that’s the Mayor, I hate to think what the rest of Bohegan is like,” a Manhattan reporter at the press table said, grinning.

  “You should talk—over there in Manhattan!” a Jersey reporter threw back at him good-naturedly.

  A few minutes later the Chief Counsel was offering in evidence documentary proof that all the officers of the local that serviced the luxury-line piers on the midtown West Side were habitual criminals with long prison records. These boys were not only the union leaders for the luxury liners, but had their own stevedore company as well on the piers serving nearly all the high-class tourist trade. In fact, the terminal superintendent for the Empire Lines was asked:

  Q. “Now the police record of the secretary-treasurer of the stevedore’s company that does the work for your piers shows he was convicted of grand larceny and that he was a fugitive from the New Jersey State Prison. And the president of this company was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and subsequently jumped bail. Also his familiar nickname on the dock is ‘Sudden Death.’ Are you aware of that, sir?”

  A. “No, I didn’t know that.”

  Q. “Another loading boss on your piers is Timmy Coniff who has been convicted three times for burglary, robbery and attempted grand larceny and has spent five years in Sing Sing and three years in State Prison. Do you know him?”

  A. “I may have met the gentleman once or twice.”

  Q. “Were there ten tons of steel stolen from Mr. Coniff’s pier?”

  A. “Yes, sir.”

  Q. “Wouldn’t you call that a remarkable piece of pilferage?”

  A. “Yes, sir.”

  Q. “Now, as an executive of one of our greatest shipping firms, doesn’t it strike you that there may be some connection between pilferage of such proportions and having habitual criminals in position of authority on your docks?”

  A. “You might say so.”

  Q. “Might? You would say so, wouldn’t you?”

  A. “I wouldn’t want to say exactly, sir.”

  Half a dozen other shipping executives had heard of pilferage and criminality on their docks but were strangely vague as to the source of it.

  One unhappy vice-president of a world-famous line even admitted accepting a twenty-fi
ve-thousand-dollar bribe from an Interstate stevedore official in order to swing his company’s business to Interstate. Witness after witness—some of them lowly “insoigents” hoping for a change, some reluctant fence-sitters forced to describe overt acts of violence, some defensively respectable, some openly hostile—recited almost casually their tales of bribery, thievery, intimidation and murder. The crimes of extortion and criminal exploitation were being proved not once or twice, but monotonously, day in and day out, through hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of damning testimony.

  Father Barry devoured every line of it and was jubilantly ready to bet that the Johnny Friendly type of labor racketeer, as insidious a gangster figure as violent America had ever known, was ready for the skids. What could save him or his underlings or his superiors now that the bottom muck of waterfront viciousness was finally being dredged up to the surface for all to see?

  And the show had hardly begun! Not one, but eight waterfront local treasurers in a row all maintained with various degrees of indignation that their financial records had mysteriously disappeared on the eve of the investigation.

  “Strange,” said the Chief Counsel, “that there should be this rash of robberies and that the only property stolen in a dozen different parts of the city should be financial records.”

  Big Mac McGown, who served as treasurer of Johnny Friendly’s pistol local as well as hiring boss for the Hudson-American Line, was an uncomfortable witness to this mysterious case of the vanishing record books.

  He sucked his apple cheeks in, scowled and looked plaintively toward his lawyer, the silky Sam Millinder, as the Commission Counsel read off his list of convicted crimes. As preparation for his vital job as dock boss for one of the major American export lines, Mac had robbed a bank and done time for manslaughter. An interesting development was that Johnny Friendly had promised him his hiring-boss slot while he was still “away,” as they called it, in the State can. The inference was painfully clear that the manslaughter rap was a favor for Johnny Friendly and that the choice hiring spot was Johnny’s way of discharging an obligation.