Waterfront Winner

A year ago last week, a gunman jumped from a black sedan in upper Manhattan, pumped three slugs into a boss stevedore named Tom Collentine, and got away. Along New York City's 771 miles of crime-ridden waterfront, the murder sent only a ripple of excitement. Most of the New York press gave the killing a good play and then went on to other news. But not the New York Sun. It set a man to digging out the story behind the story. Last week stocky, hard-digging Reporter Malcolm Malone ("Mike") Johnson got a well-earned Pulitzer Prize* for his carefully documented series on "Crime on the Water Front."

Georgia-born Reporter Johnson, 44, whose drawl and easygoing manner hide a bulldog tenacity, was neither a crime specialist nor an I-cover-the-waterfront expert when he started. He was a general-assignment man who had served the Sun for 20 years, on everything from the burning of the Morro Castle to the storming of Okinawa. In a 1946 series on hijacking, he had picked up some waterfront contacts. Using them, he started his digging into waterfront crime.

As news of his assignment got around, he and his wife got a stream of anonymous telephone calls threatening them with dire trouble if he didn't lay off. Johnson changed his phone to an unlisted number and went on prying information out of dockwallopers, union bosses, thugs, shipowners and police files.

In November the Sun sprang his series. It named the racketeers who controlled the piers, stole an estimated $50 million a year from cargoes, exacted a tribute for every pound loaded or unloaded, and held office in, or operated through, locals of the A.F.L. International Longshoremen's Association. Union Boss Joseph P. Ryan let off a windy counterattack that accused Johnson of being taken in by Communist-line reformers. The Sun printed Ryan's bleats along with Johnson's point-by-point rebuttal and went right on blasting.

Last week the Collentine killing was still unsolved, but Johnson's report had run to 50 hard-hitting articles. It had also stirred up three official police investigations and a demand for legislative action to cut down crime on the waterfront. But Johnson and the Sun were still far from being ready to sit down: there was more to come.

Of this $500 Pulitzer Prize award, Reporter Johnson murmured modestly that "the woods are full of reporters who could do as good a job." Then he took time out for an office cocktail party in his honor, and went back to digging.

*Among other Pulitzer Prizewinners in journalism: the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal, for public service; the New York Times' s Washington Correspondent C. P. Trussell, for national-affairs reporting; the Baltimore Sun's Price Day, for foreign reporting; the Boston Herald's John H. Crider and the Washington Post's Herbert Elliston, for editorial writing; the Newark Evening News's Lute Pease, for cartooning; the New York Herald Tribune's Nat Fein, for news photography.

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