On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  Q. “You mean to tell me that the local which you serve as treasurer takes in six thousand dollars a month in dues alone, not to mention special assessments and frequent cigar-box collections—a minimum seventy-five thousand dollars a year—and keeps no financial records?”

  A. “Sure, we kep’ records.”

  Q. “Perhaps, Mr. McGown, you could help our investigators locate them?”

  A. “Well, the trouble is, we was robbed last week, and we can’t find no books.”

  Q. “Did you report this—unfortunate robbery to the police?”

  A. “Well, we—we …” Big Mac rolled his eyes in agony. He wasn’t used to thinking this much on his own. It was a unique experience for him. “We—wanted t’ make sure the books wasn’t lost somewheres around the office before we put the police to any trouble.” He turned to look at Sam Millinder for approval.

  Millinder was unhappy. He was a knowledgeable, rather sophisticated figure who did not mind counseling Willie Givens for his seventy-five-thousand-dollar-a-year retainer, but these muscleheads who couldn’t even parrot-back what you had rehearsed with them were more than Sam had bargained for. Somehow Sam Millinder had managed to maintain his position as a respectable cloak for the Longshore International, but now this cloak seemed in danger of being shot through with too many holes. At one point Sam Millinder was unable to restrain his own mirth at one of his client’s inane evasions.

  Big Mac was asked to explain how he had managed to bank fifty thousand dollars over the past four years on a salary of nine thousand five hundred dollars. Was it, by any chance, as a result of kickbacks from longshoremen over whom Big Mac had absolute economic control?

  A. “No, sir. I been lucky on the horses. I got a barber who gives me pretty good tips.”

  Q. “Has this—good fortune of yours been reflected in your income-tax returns? I see no evidence of it here.”

  A frown of puzzlement clouded Big Mac’s face.

  A. “Uh, I—I’d like to ask my counsel the answer to that question.”

  Sam Millinder signaled for the microphone to make a nice distinction. “I wish to make it clear to Counsel and the Honorable Commissioners that I am not supplying the answers to any questions you may ask, but am simply here in the role of adviser as to the constitutional rights of the members of the union I represent.”

  An air of expectancy ran through the crowded court room the day that International president-for-life, Willie Givens, took the stand. Sam Millinder’s conduct had verged on discourtesy to some of the more obvious criminal types, but now he hovered around the flabby bulk of Weeping Willie like a fond mother mystified because her little darling has suddenly grown into a monster. And two of Millinder’s assistants were close at hand, like lesser tugs trying to nuzzle a disabled leviathan into safe harbor.

  Willie’s face looked like a great clod of clay which a careless sculptor had thrown together and never bothered to finish. Occasionally the powerful, brawling, hard-drinking longshoreman of forty years ago peered through its prison of fat and easy living. The jowls were formidable and the bulbous, blue-veined nose was held aloft as an ornament to its owner’s long nights of congenial fellowship. Yes, Willie Givens was a good fellow, a professionally Irish good fellow who could sing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” as huskily as any 12th Avenue or River Street dock walloper.

  Weeping Willie had come a long way from the horse cars and the meat wagons of 1912. Once upon a time he had worked side by side with Runty Nolan and Pop Doyle for thirty cents an hour, and he was no smarter than they were or braver or better at his work. But he had something that was still paying off big in America. Call it cupidity or a gift for the main chance, the art of doing nothing in particular and doing it very well, doing it with a flourish, doing it with a knowing rap of the gavel, doing it with a torrent of official-sounding words and a fix in here and a cut back there, doing it with a nod to the Mayor, doing it with a wink from the shippers, doing it with his big red hands making seemingly heartfelt gestures, ready to cry for his forty thousand longshoremen to whom his life was devoted, working day and night for them with no thought except for their welfare, their economic advancement, their social security. Weeping Willie Givens, who had worked his way up from a two-and- a-half-dollar-a-day horse-truck loader to a mover and shaker of the metropolis who could be asked such questions as:

  Q. “Now, Mr. Givens, isn’t it a fact that five of the seven organizers you appointed in the past ten years had serious criminal records?”

  A. “Nobody asked me to check back on their records.”

  Q. “But as an International labor leader, you would not wish to appoint known criminals to organize your workmen, would you?”

  A. “I appointed men who had the confidence of their fellow members. I appointed the best men available.”

  Q. “When you appointed Mr. McGhee an organizer at ten thousand a year and expenses, were you aware of the fact that he had served two terms in Sing Sing and had fourteen arrests, including twice for murder?”

  A. “I’m not sure I knew that at the time.”

  Q. “But when it was pointed out to you by members of the local to which you yourself belonged, did you take any action to remove Mr. McGhee?”

  A. “I can’t take any action without the recommendation of my Executive Board.”

  Q. “Well, did your Executive Board ever take any action?”

  A. “Yes, sir. They appointed a sub-committee to investigate the conduct of Brother McGhee.”

  Q. “I see. And did this sub-committee come to any conclusion?”

  A. “I’m not sure. I don’t think they made their report yet.”

  Q. “Now, Mr. Givens, who was chairman of this sub- committee?”

  A. “Oh, I think it was Mr. Malloy.”

  Q. “Mr. Charles Malloy, better known as Charley the Gent?”

  A. “I knew him as Malloy, Charley Malloy.”

  Q. “Isn’t he the same Charles Malloy who was found murdered in an alley in Bohegan recently?”

  A. “I imagine that would be the same man.”

  Q. “Now, Mr. Givens, when you appointed Mr. Malloy to head a committee to look into the fitness of Slicker McGhee as a union organizer, didn’t you realize that Mr. Malloy was the business agent for the Bohegan local headed by John Friendly, who is waiting to be called as a witness here and whose police record shows convictions for bottlegging, for grand larceny and for criminal assault? And to whom stevedore and shipping-company executives have testified in this court room that they have given him over the past five years bribes exceeding fifty thousand dollars?”

  Old Willie Givens asked for a glass of water, more familiar to him as a chaser than as a drink to be enjoyed for its own sake. He had sat with the mayors and the judges and the city machine bosses in the boxes at the ball games, but now his hand had begun to tremble. His putty nose seemed to go a shade bluer. His jowls hung limp as surrender flags along his neck. Pop Doyle and Jimmy Sharkey were in the audience, having arrived at the Court House door two hours early to be sure to get in. Watching Willie’s discomfort, they knew that somewhere Runty Nolan must be enjoying himself and maybe drinking his toast, “Here’s mud in the eye of Weeping Willie.”

  Well, there was a little justice left in this sin-soaked world, they chuckled to each other as they listened to Willie ramble through one of his characteristically circuitous explanations.

  A. “You see, as regarding John Friendly or anybody else, we have in our organization what is known as local autonomy, and before I could take any action regarding any individual, I could only suggest to the Executive Committee that they appoint a sub-committee to examine all the evidence of anything detrimental to our organization or to the industry as a whole, and inasmuch as I…”

  Q. “Yes, yes, now I quite understand that, Mr. Givens, but what I am asking you directly is whether you knew that Mr. McGhee and Mr. Benasio and Mr. Danny Dondero and Mr. John Friendly, all ranking officers in your organization, were known a
nd habitual and dangerous criminals who merely use the longshoremen’s union as a screen for their continuing criminal activities? Now after your forty years as an officer of this organization, can’t you honestly answer that question ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?”

  A. “There may be a little crime on this waterfront, but I don’t see how it’s any worse than any other waterfront or any other section of society for that matter, and if anybody’s breaking the law down here, then it’s not my job to clean it up, but a job for the police and the district attorneys.”

  Q. “And you think they have been doing a good job?”

  A. “I think it’s been pretty well taken care of.”

  That’s about the way it went with Willie Givens. Only there was a whole day of it. If one-third to a half of all the longshore officials had criminal records, he was certainly surprised to hear it. But Willie’s jowls hung lowest when he was forced to admit that he had reached a sticky hand into his union’s own emergency fund for such items as:

  Q. “$1,450 for golf-club dues?”

  A. “Well, I …”

  Q. “$11,575 for two Cadillacs?”

  A. “Mmmm, that …”

  Q. “$850 for a Caribbean cruise?”

  A. “I—uh …”

  Q. “$9,500 for premiums on his personal insurance?”

  A. “The Executive …”

  Q. “$600 for ties and shirts from Sulka’s?”

  A. “Now just a …”

  Q. “$1,000 for the funeral of his wife’s uncle?”

  A. “I can ex …”

  By the time Willie stepped down from the stand at the end of the day, mopping the sweat from between the folds of his face, straightening his dapper, fat man’s gray double-breasted suit and doing a feeble imitation of his old good-time-Willie smile, by that time the mighty president-for-life seemed to have come not only to the end of the day, but perhaps to the end of the road, and Pop and Jimmy and Moose only wished that Runty could be with them to enjoy the wake. As the headlines proclaimed next morning, there was mud in Willie Givens’ eyes, more mud than even Runty could have hoped for.

  There had been rumors that Big Tom McGovern, at the top of this pinnacle—or dungheap, as some were beginning to call it—would manage to escape a subpoena, but Mr. Big—as the newspapers preferred to call him—finally had his day in court. Father Barry got a private chuckle out of this, for he had played a small, sly and possibly effective part in McGovern’s questioning. There had been a prevalent rumor that Tom McGovern had enough political power to frighten off the State Commission. One of his old friends, a former magistrate, was sitting on the Commission, Judge Gilhooley, and it was being said along the waterfront that Gilhooley would see to it that Big Tom was never called. Father Barry, with the touch of larceny that peppered his personality, called the Bohegan Graphic waterfront reporter to ask if this was true. The reporter said he didn’t know, but he would ask the Commissioners. When the Commission Chief Counsel heard that the press was calling, he was persuaded that they would all be leaving themselves open to criticism and perhaps an aroused public opinion if they failed to call the man whose dominance on the docks had become an open secret.

  Like Willie Givens, Big Tom McGovern had risen from a thirty-cent-an-hour horse-truck job forty years earlier. He and Willie had been young, ambitious roughnecks together, but they were a different breed of men. McGovern was paunchy and meat-faced too, but there was a power in him that was lacking in Windbag Willie. Tom McGovern had longshoreman’s hands and eyes that were used to being obeyed. His hair was white, but he still had all of it, worn in a crew-cut that accentuated the size of his neck and the stubborn cut of his fleshy but hard and intelligent face. He owned a seventy-foot yacht and he was known as a good tipper at the Colony, El Morocco and the Stork, but his voice had never lost its hard River Street edge. He had sons who had gone to Harvard and were something of a disappointment to him, but he prided himself on maintaining his original, even his uncouth, vigor. He had become the chairman of boards, the officer of exclusive city clubs, the intimate of many leading figures in the State, a director of charitable institutions and the Mayor’s favorite trouble-shooter for labor-management problems in the harbor. He had even referred to himself, humorously, as a “one-man port authority.”

  He listened patiently while his various waterfront enterprises were read off: He was the president of the Interstate Stevedore Company, the largest firm in the harbor, operating with a dozen different lines at fourteen piers from Bohegan to Red Hook. He owned half a dozen tug-boat and lighter companies. He owned the oil company that sold the harbor cities all the oil the local administrations consumed. His sand-and-gravel company had nearly all the city contracts. He owned the National Trucking Company, one of the largest in the harbor. He owned a dry-dock, a paint company, a wholesale fruit company.

  The list grew laughably long, but Big Tom McGovern did not laugh. He had done this, he whose father had come to this country penniless and who died penniless, a poverty-ridden dock laborer glad to work for two bits an hour. Young Tom had seen the beaten look in his old man’s eyes and had sworn it would never shadow his own. So now he sat firm and heavy on the stand while they laughed at the inventory of the hundred-million-dollar empire he had built with his own two, tough-knuckled hands. This was America, goddamn it, and he’d play his cards the way he picked them off the table.

  Q. “Mr. McGovern, an inspector of the books of your Interstate Stevedore Company shows a withdrawal of over one million dollars in the last four years, without any vouchers covering this amount. How would you explain that?”

  A. “I don’t.”

  Q. “You’re not even willing to guess.”

  A. “It’s not my business to guess.”

  Q. “As one of our leading businessmen, wouldn’t you say it was odd procedure to withdraw an amount of such magnitude without any vouchers to cover it?”

  A. “I don’t know. We do a lot of entertaining in our business.”

  Q. “But these sums were not applied to entertainment.”

  A. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Q. “The hiring bosses and boss loaders on every one of the Interstate Stevedore Company’s piers has a criminal record. Could there be any connection between the pay-offs to these men and the unexplained withdrawal of one million dollars?”

  A. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Q. “As president of Interstate, don’t you follow the affairs of your company?”

  A. “Not that closely. It’s only one of many enterprises in which I’m interested.”

  Q. “But you did take time off personally to request a parole for Mr. McGown and for Mr. Karger, stating to the Parole Board that you had jobs waiting for them when they would be released?”

  A. “I was told they knew their jobs. That’s all I was interested in.”

  Evidence was then introduced to show that one hundred and fifty convicted criminals were carried on the Interstate payroll.

  Q. “Mr. McGovern, four years ago you were chairman of the Mayor’s Port Committee to report on conditions in the harbor. Your general conclusion was that conditions were satisfactory. Is that true?”

  A. “Yes, sir.”

  Q. “Did you investigate the fact that your own loading operation was gangster-ridden?”

  A. “No, sir.”

  Tom McGovern had come up a hard road and he gave hard answers, his Yes, sirs and No, sirs chopping like ax-strokes into the scaffold the Chief Counsel was trying to erect for him.

  When it was all over, no one in the court room had any illusions about Big Tom McGovern. He had been chipped away at, and his wife and his ivy-league sons must have paled a little, but he was still Mr. Big. He surveyed the room with a final, ironic, go-to-hell expression and stepped down. Outside his uniformed chauffeur and his Lincoln town car were waiting to rush him home to the penthouse overlooking Central Park, forty years and fifty million dollars away from River Street.

  The morning Johnny Friendly was to testify, Terry
Malloy came down the aisle with a police guard and was seated in the row in back of him. Terry had been under police protection since the night he had spent with Father Barry in the rectory. He had protested that he didn’t want a police guard, but Commissioner Donnelly was taking no chances. He and Mayor Burke were feeling shakier every day, and if anything should happen to Terry now, it would only dig their political graves deeper.

  In these strange, unexpected surroundings Terry felt numb and spiritless. He wasn’t on fire to testify, but he wasn’t afraid to either. He’d like to see Johnny get his for crossing Charley, but he wasn’t too sure, now that he had time to think it over, that this hearing would really put the blocks to Johnny Friendly. Father Barry seemed sure though, and he had to admit that Father Barry was as smart in one way as Johnny Friendly was in another.

  Johnny Friendly was a cold, proud, hostile witness, glaring at the row of Commissioners and the counsel staff as if they were all on trial and he was in the prosecutor’s seat. That was the way he felt. Here were a bunch of phonies, politicians, cop-lovers, canaries. Big Tom McGovern, Mr. Upstairs, had pointedly ignored him when they had passed each other in the lobby outside the hearing room. But the Big Guy had shown them how to do it, tell ’em nothing, admit nothing, deny everything in a big, loud Yes, sir-No, sir voice.

  Q. “Mr. Friendly, has your local ever kept a bank account?”

  A. “No, sir.”

  Q. “Why not?”

  A. “That was up to Mr. Malloy, our business agent.”

  Q. “You don’t know why Mr. Malloy never deposited the union funds in a bank?”

  A. “I don’t know what he done.”

  Q. “As president, weren’t you interested?”

  A. “I don’t think we had enough money to put in the bank.”

  Q. “Mr. McGown has testified that it was coming in at the rate of at least six thousand dollars a month, hasn’t he?”

  A. “I wasn’t in this room when he testified.”

  Q. “But surely you know how much your own union takes in?”