New York Sun, by Malcolm Johnson
Winning Work
There exists in the United States today an underworld syndicate, with national and international connections, which controls organized crime throughout the country. Through powerful political alliances, and with untold millions of dollars to spend, the syndicate can, and does, exert influence in high places. It operates in every major city and it also has big interests abroad. The syndicate rules a vast empire of crime, and it has millions invested in legitimate enterprises as a cover for its shadier operations.
Fantastic? Yes, but existence of the syndicate is accepted without question by federal, state, and city investigation agencies. They say that it has existed for years. Composed of big shots of the underworld, the syndicate has brought efficient big business methods to crime.
The syndicate participates in many rackets, but its principal source of revenue is from gambling. Its total revenue is beyond calculation, but the “take” from gambling alone runs into many millions of dollars annually. It controls the narcotic traffic and all major organized rackets. It controls certain labor unions and certain politicians. The syndicate’s power is such that it is not necessary for it to participate directly in every criminal operation of racket. But not racket can flourish anywhere, particularly in New York and other big cities, without the knowledge and consent of the syndicate— and presumably without the syndicate getting its cut.
SYNDICATE MEMBERS HAVE RICH HOLDINGS
In the field of legitimate business, members of the syndicate have investments everywhere. They have huge real estate holdings. They own fashionable restaurants and nightclubs, strings of hotels, expensive resorts, skyscraper office buildings, and stores. Recent reports indicate that the syndicate is planning to extend these holdings on a large scale in Europe, Mexico, and South America. It already has large investments in Mexico.
“No question about it,” said Colonel Garland Williams, head of the federal narcotic bureau in New York. “The Syndicate, or Combination, as I call it, has existed for many years. But it is not a dictatorship, not a one-man organization by any means. The personnel shifts. Some of the leaders drop out and others take their places. But the Combination has connections in various cities.”
Other officials agree with Williams’s estimate, describing the syndicate as a big, loosely knit organization, a sort of trade association in crime.
The syndicate originated during Prohibition, but has long since abandoned the blazing warfare that characterized that lawless era. Today, the organization prefers to operate behind numerous legitimate fronts, with high-priced lawyers, the “cooperation” of practical politicians and crooked policemen, and with an intricate system of interlocking interests in practically every field of business.
REPORTED ROSTER OF THE SYNDICATE
Who are some of the members of this big syndicate?
Well, on the East Coast, names most frequently mentioned by the police, state, and federal agencies include the following: Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Joe Adonis, Meyer Lansky, and Longy Zwillman. There are others, especially in the lower echelons, but these are mentioned as among the top figures.
If there is any head man in the syndicate, Costello is regarded as that man. On that, investigators agree. Certainly he is the top boss in New York, and his name commands underworld respect throughout the country.
For many years, Costello was brilliantly successfully in avoiding publicity. During his rise to power, beginning during Prohibition, his name rarely appeared in print, and the police professed to know little about him.
Today, however, newspaper filing envelopes are fat with clippings concerning Costello’s activities, or suspected activities, as a judge maker, gambler, slow-machine operation, ex-convict, racket boss, and behind-the-scenes power in local Democratic politics.
LUCIANO IS CALLED BIG MAN IN ITALY
According to Colonel Williams, Charles (Lucky) Luciano, the arch-criminal and vice lord, still is a power in the syndicate, despite the fact that Luciano was deported to Italy.
“Luciano is still very much in the picture,” said Williams. “He is handling the movement of narcotics from Italy.”
At least three big seizures of narcotics, smuggled here during the last few months, were attributed by federal authorities to Luciano’s operations in Italy. From all accounts, Luciano is a big man in Italy today, highly respected and admired. He has his own press relations department, holds “press conferences”, and, in general, represents himself as the potential savior of Italy. He has plenty of money, derived from the syndicate, and he boasts that he will enter the motion picture business there and build an industry rivaling that of Hollywood.
Luciano was close to Costello in earlier days. Convicted as a vice lord and sentenced to a long term in prison when Thomas E. Dewey was a racket-busting special prosecutor, Luciano had his sentence later commuted by Dewey as governor during the war under circumstances that have never been explained. Costello personally saw him off when Luciano was deported.
Of the relative power of Costello and Luciano, a former representative of the District Attorney’s Office, now in private law practice, said: “If Luciano were back in the United States, it would be a toss-up, in my opinion, was to who would be the big boss— Costello or Luciano. Personally, I’d put my money on Costello. If the Syndicate has a chairman of the board, Mr. C. is that man. In my opinion, Costello is the most powerful, wealthiest underworld figure in the United States today.”
HENCHMEN OF ADONIS RULE BROOKLYN DOCKS
Also close to Costello, particularly in the syndicate’s multimillion-dollar gambling operations in New York. New Jersey, and Florida, is Joe Adonis, also known as Joe A. Doto and Joe A. Adonis, who is the boss racketeer of Brooklyn, ruling in absentia from New Jersey and points south. His henchmen control the Brooklyn waterfront, where violence and racketeering flourish.
Meyer Lansky, also identified with the syndicate’s gambling concessions, is widely known to the police, although he has always managed, somehow, to escape serious difficulty with the law. He has been arrested seven times, but has only one conviction. That was for violating the Volstead Act, in 1931, for which he was fined $100.
Lansky was a partner of the late Bugsy Siegel, the gangster slain in Hollywood, California, in June 1947. They were once the leaders of the so-called Bug and Meyer gang, which starts din New York and braced out to Philadelphia, where it became rich and powerful. Lansky and Siegel were closely associated at one time with Louis (Lepke) Bulchalter, the industrial racketeer who dominated the garment center, and who finally was executed for murder after the smashing of the organization of hired killed known as Murder, Inc.
Lansky and Siegel, in the old days, were reputed to have supplied gunmen and strong-arm squads for Lepke. In recent years, they extended their operations to the West Coast, with Siegel handling the business there. Siegel is believed to have cut himself in on gambling in Las Vegas, Nevada, and on other rackets, a circumstance that may or may not have provided a motive for his murder.
DIRECT LINK IS SEEN TO WATERFRONT RACKETS
A direct link between the Syndicate and the New York waterfront rackets— assuring that Lansky is, as reputed, a member of the syndicate— is seen in the fact that John M. Dunn, the waterfront gangster, sought out Lansky in Hollywood, Florida, shortly before the murder of Anthony Hintz, hiring stevedore, who was shot and fatally wounded in January 1947 in New York.
A record of telephone calls from Lansky’s hotel room in Hollywood shows that Dunn made calls from the room to the Colonial Inn, the swanky gambling establishment, of which Lansky ostensibly is one of the owners, and to the Green Acres, a nightclub controlled by syndicate members.
When Dunn showed up in Hollywood in December 1946, he first asked for Andrew Sheridan, one of his gunmen, later convicted with him for the Hintz murder. Sheridan was not home at the time, and Dunn left word that he would be with Lansky at the latter’s hotel room.
During the period in which Dunn was there, there were telephone calls from Lansky to Ed McGrath, Dunn’s brother-in-law and partner; from Lansky to Dutch Goldberg, another underworld character; from Lansky to Dunn’s wife in Queens; from Lansky to Joe Adonis n New Jersey; from Lansky to Hot Springs, Arkansas, identity of the recipient unknown; from Lansky to Bugsy Siegel in Palm Springs, California, and to Siegel in Las Vegas; from Lansky to a member of the old Cotton Club mob, who was then in Havana for the season; from Lansky to Frank Costello and to Dandy Phil Kastel, Costello’s lieutenant in New Orleans, who handles Costello’s vast slot-machine operations in Louisiana.
ZWILLMAN PASSES WORD THAT HE HAS “RETIRED”
Abner (Longy) Zwillman, another product of Prohibition, was for many years the biggest power in Newark, and maybe he still is though in recent years he has passed the word that he has “retired.” Zwillman, once listed by the late police commissioner Valentine as a “public enemy,” is tremendously wealthy, and he still commands a healthy respect in the New Jersey underworld.
Moreover, investigation in to the death of Charles Yanowsky, the Jersey waterfront gangster murdered last July, has shown connections between Yanowsky and Zwillman, giving weight to the theory that Yanowsky had strong alliances in Jersey enabling him to rise to power on the waterfront and in other rackets. It also indicates a link between the syndicate and waterfront operations.
Then there is an ex-convict named Vincent Alo, better known as Jimmy Blue Eyes, a very mysterious character. According to underworld informants, he is regarded as a contact man for the syndicate, particularly on the waterfront. He is said to be close to Costello, and, in general, acts as an emissary for the big shots here and in Florida. Questioned by the police in August 1947, All said that he was in the restaurant business, and that he owned an interested in the Green Acres nightclub in the Miami area. He was a friend of Bugsy Siegel, the police say, but always has denied that he was ever in business with Bugsy.
Perhaps the most plausible theory connecting the big syndicate with the waterfront rackets concerns the traffic in narcotics. According to this theory, it is vital for the syndicate to control, directly or indirectly, the entire waterfront in order to maintain its grip on dope smuggling, a huge source of revenue.
JOE RYAN AND THE ILA
In his office on the nineteenth floor of the Lawyers Trust Building, 265 West Fourteenth Street, bulky, red-faced Joe Ryan, president of the International Longshoreman’s Association, AFL, drummed on his shining glass-topped desk and said that there just wasn’t any organized crime on the New York waterfront.
Ryan flatly denied charges of widespread lawlessness on the docks. He denies that gangsters controlled the piers, ruling by terror. He denied that racketeering flourished, denied that any organized rackets existed, and denied vehemently that there was any graft or racketeering in his union, which controls labor on the docks.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Ryan. “Where is the Police Department? We got a Police Department, haven’t we? The police wouldn’t stand for a situation like that. Our men wouldn’t stand for it. The union wouldn’t stand for it. The steamship and stevedoring companies wouldn’t stand for it.”
ANSWER BY RYAN: UNEQUIVOCAL DENIAL
To any and all criticism of his union, to charges that it is graft-ridden, that it condones racketeering and protects known racketeers, and that, specifically, the kickback in wages is a common practice, Ryan’s answer as a simple and unequivocal denial. It was all untrue.
“I defy anybody to prove there is any kickback in our organization,” he said. “I don’t care who says so, and they have been saying it for years. But it’s never been proved.”
What about the charge that the waterfront is a haven for ex-convicts, that any ex-convict can get a job there, anytime?
“We welcome ex-convicts — well, now, maybe we welcome is too broad a statement,” replied Ryan. “But we believe every man, regardless of what he has done, has a right to a second chance. If the ex-convicts can’t work on the waterfront, where can they work? But we don’t ask for them, I can tell you that. They dump them on us all the time—the parole boards. There are some criminals on the waterfront, but they are a minority, and they don’t run in packs. Ninety-nine percent of the men in our organization are decent, hardworking, God-fearing men. Men with families, trying to make a living.”
What about Mickey Bowers, a known criminal whose gang reputedly controlled the upper Manhattan piers, above Forty-second Street?
“Mickey Bowers? Don’t believe I know him,” said Ryan. “There is a Bowers who is an ILA delegate or business agent up there, I think.”
“That’s Harold Bowers, Mickey’s cousin,” Ryan was told.
“Oh.”
RYAN IS QUESTIONED ON OTHER GANGSTERS
The names of other gangsters were mentioned. Gangsters and other criminals who, in many instances, had attained official positions in the ILA, according to the union’s own records. Men like Charlie Yanowsky, the powerful Jersey mobster who was murdered last July, who was secretary of an ILA warehouse local and connected with various other locals. Men like John Dunn and Andrew Sheridan, who were convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Anthony Hintz, an ILA hiring stevedore. And Ed McGrath, Dunn’s brother-in-law and reputed partner in the waterfront rackets? What did Ryan have to say about them?
“I’ll tell you about Yanowsky,” Ryan said slowly. “I didn’t put him in that warehouse local. I didn’t want him. The first time I saw him, right here in this office, I said he couldn’t have the job. He said the men wanted him and had elected him. What could I do? I’ll say this for Yanowsky: he’s done a good job. The men wanted him and were happy under him. He got things for the men.
“As for John Dunn— he didn’t have anything to do with the ILA or the waterfront. He and McGrath and some other organized the motor and bus terminal checkers and platform men. They were underpaid and they needed organizing. They got an AFL charter.”
RYAN DENOUNCES PROSECUTOR AS DUMB
“Now, you take a man like Teddy Gleason,” Ryan volunteered, referring to one of his right-hand men in the ILA, an official in a checkers’ union whose name, next to Ryan’s, is mentioned most frequently on the waterfront.
“You probably hear all kinds of things about Gleason,” said Ryan. “Well, I have known him all his life. I knew his father, and I worked with his father, and I want to tell you that Teddy Gleason has never been arrested for anything in his life.”
As if in afterthought, Ryan did mention that Gleason was taken into custody as a material witness in the Hintz murder case, but said that the district attorney obviously didn’t have anything on Gleason, for he was released and never was called upon to testify.
Ryan then angrily paid his respect to that “crazy Keating down there,” referring to Assistant District Attorney William J. Keating of the Homicide Bureau, whose tireless work was instrumental in helping to break the Hintz case.
“That fellow Keating doesn’t know what it’s all about,” said Ryan. “he’s so dumb he doesn’t know his own name.”
Well, then, what about the loading racket? Wasn’t it a racket, and hadn’t it existed for more than twenty years, controlled by racketeers who levied a fee on every pound of cargo loaded on trucks at the piers?
Ryan smiled patiently.
“My answer to that is that loading is very hard work,” he said. “We do set the rates, and we do insist that three men be used as loaders. That’s a matter of union policy. Why, every district attorney for years back has investigated the loading racket— I mean, the so-called loading racket— and has not found anything. If there was anything wrong there don’t you think the DAs could find it? They’ve all had a try at it—Tom Dewey and all the rest. Now the men do the loading and it’s hard work. The men themselves split the fees. It’s all divided up. Gangsters do not pocket that money. That’s simply not true. Why, the men wouldn’t stand for it.”
SAYS MEN NEVER ASKED FOR SHAPE-UP CHANGE
What did Ryan have to say about the shape-up, the system of hiring on the waterfront— a system condemned by various investigating agencies, over a period of many years, as antiquated, inhuman, and degrading: as lending itself to abuses, and making it possible for criminals to control the docks?
“The men have never asked for a change,” says Ryan. “They could change it if they wanted to. There must be some reason, some benefit from the shape-up, or they’d change it.
“When I went to work on the waterfront, in 1912, we made 30 cents an hour for a 60-hour week, and we had to shape-up from hour to hour, any hour of the day. Today, there are about 65,000 ILA men on the New York waterfront. They make a general rate of $1.75 an hour for a 40-hour week, 8 to 12 noon and 1 to 5 P.M., Monday through Friday. At all other hours, they get $2.62 an hour at time and a half. They now shape-up only twice a day, at 7:55 A.M. and 12:55 P.M. All I can say is that any group of men who can bring their pay and working conditions up that way must have something. The men at no time have asked to change the system. You’d think they’d ask if there was something wrong with it.”
(Since Ryan made the above statement, the ILA workers, as a result of the recent strike, have won wage increases which make their new ray of pay $1.88 an hour for straight time and $2.82 an hour for overtime. They also won better vacation terms, a welfare fund, and other benefits.)
Such was Joe Ryan’s defense, delivered calmly and without rancor, of the ILA, and of general conditions on the waterfront. He was unimpressed by any evidence to the contrary, and as a parting shot, he said: “I’ll stand back of everything I’ve said. Let ‘em prove all this stuff you have been hearing about.”
HOW RYAN ROSE IN LABOR’S RANKS
Joseph P. Ryan, to give him his full moniker, is a two-fisted, rough-and-tumble labor leader of the old school who came up from the ranks and who has never ducked a fight. He’s Irish all the way through, a product of Manhattan’s West Side. He grew up on West Nineteenth Street, quit school when he was twelve, and went to work in his early youth on the docks. He received his first union card in Local 791 of the ILA, then a comparatively minor laver union in the Port of New York, on March 23, 1912, and he has been active in the union ever since.
In 1913, Ryan was made financial secretary of his local. Then he was elected an officer of the New York district council, which negotiated wage agreements for the port in 1915. In 1918, he became vice president, and in 1927 he was elected international president. He’s held the job continuously, and, today, at sixty-four, he is secure in a lifetime job as president, so voted by his union, at a salary of $20,000 a year. Ryan’s thick reddish hair and heavy eyebrows have turned gray, but he has lost none of his visor and continues to fight his enemies, in and out of the union, with all his customary gusto.
They say that in his younger days Ryan was mighty handy with his fists, never hesitating to wade in and hand out the lumps when he deemed such action necessary.
The charge has been made repeatedly through the years that Ryan condones racketeering in his union, protects the racketeers, and refuses to do anything to eliminate the evils within his organization. Under the Ryan leadership, the union has been denounced as autocratic, a complete dictatorship in which the members are viciously exploited by its leader.
RYAN YEARLY HOBNOBS WITH THE MIGHTY
Ryan also has been publicly accused of associating with known criminals. If he does it must also be said in fairness to Ryan, that he likewise hobnobs with some of the country’s most influential business men, politicians, and high public officials.
Every year, Ryan is the honored guest at the Joseph P. Ryan Association dinner. It’s a big affair, and all kinds of people, including criminals, turn out for it. High state and city officials invariably are among those present. In 1931, for example, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor for New York; Mayor Jimmy Walker; Frank Hague, the Jersey political tycoon; and William Green, the president of the AFL, were listed as honorary chairmen of the Ryan dinner.
Everybody “in the trade,” so to speak, attends loyally, and so all kinds of elements on the waterfront are represented. At the dinner last year, held at the Hotel Commodore, the guests included Mickey Bowers, the ex-convict and gangster, who controls the piers above Forty-second Street; his lieutenant, John Keefe, also an ex-convict; and Harold Bowers, a cousin of Mickey’s and delegate of Local 824 of the ILA.
PHOTO SHOWS RYAN POSING WITH CRIMINALS
Similar dinners are held annually in honor of Teddy Gleason for the benefit of the Teddy Gleason Association. At the dinner in 1939, one of the souvenir snapshots taken shows none of than Joe Ryan, posing as big as life, with such known criminals as John M. Dunn, ex-convict, gangster, and labor racketeer, now in the death house at Sing Sing under a stay of execution for murder, and Danny Gentile, also in the Sing Sing death house, having been convicted with Dunn in the Hintz murder.
Also pictured with Ryan in that memorable photograph are such worthies as Robert Baker, alias Barney Baker, an ex-convict who was a collector for Varick Enterprises, which was a strong-arm collection agency for the loading racket at the time; and John Adams, who was vice president of Varick. Adams has a police records, which includes a suspended sentence for felonious assault in 1927.
During the years of Ryan’s rule in the ILA, he has been the target of both left-wing and conservative critics. Some of the mildest things they have said about him is that he is an archreactionary, an “enemy of true labor,” willing to exploit his men to maintain his power. Ryan either brushes aside such criticism or else replies in kind.
VIOLENTLY ANT-RED AND WAVES THE FLAG
He is violently, and probably sincerely, anticommunist, and opposes anything or anybody he conceives to be slightly pink, and his standards are ultraconservative. At times, when critics press him too hard, Ryan figuratively waves the flag and yells “Communist.” He sometimes waxes fervently patriotic when discussing his union.
“The ILA,” Ryan once proclaimed grandly, “stands for ‘I Love America.’”
Ryan belongs to the Winged Foot Gold Club in Mamaroneck, Westchester, where the membership also includes prominent business and professional men, judges, politicians, and city officials. He is a friendly, sociable man, but can be very tough when riled. As a golfer, Ryan is enthusiastic but no par buster.
In his personal habits, Ryan is a “good liver” but prides himself on the fact that he neither smokes nor swears— the result of his devout upbringing, he says. But he likes good food, has a reputation— and the figure— of a trencherman, and takes a drink when he feels like it. He also has a weakness for expensive, well-tailored clothes.
SUN’S PREPARED SERIES ASSAILED HOTLY BY RYAN
Since the above interview was written, as a part of this prepared series of articles, Ryan has had quite a lot more to say, much of it uncomplimentary, to The New York Sun, and to this reporter.
Ryan’s blood pressure began to mount when the ILA strike began on November 10, his men having rejected the contract which he had recommended. On the day the strike began, without the sanction of Ryan and his lieutenants, the blustering ILA president charged that the men were striking because of resentment against these articles, which The Sun had been publicans two days earlier, on November 8.
This statement, ridiculous on the face of it, caused only loud and derisive laughter from rank-and-file members of the ILA, who charged that Ryan had sold them out again. Ryan dropped the line of defense quickly enough after the strike spread to the entire East Coast, forcing him to go along with it and make it official.
During the eighteen-day strike, Ryan, referring to the number of ex-convicts in his union, boasted: “The Sun has been writing about some of the boys from the old ladies’ home up the river who came down to the waterfront and made good. I’m proud to have them as members of this union. I’m proud to have my picture taken with them and proud to be in their company.”