Nine Hundred & Forty Thieves

Albert Anastasia, a murderous slob in clubman's clothes, dropped in at the New York State Crime Commission hearings on waterfront corruption one afternoon last week. It was a most dramatic moment. As "Lord High Executioner" of Brooklyn's old Murder, Inc., Anastasia superintended the assassinations of 63 of his fellowmen; as a tycoon of crime, today he is the very epitome of these violent, callous and imperious criminals whose word is the only law on Greater New York's 770 miles of piers.

Crowds lined the corridors of New York County Courthouse and murmured as Anastasia strode through. He stared at them with hard contempt--and at the attendants who held them back and at the glare of flashbulbs touched off by his entrance. As a witness he was relaxed and polite. With pudgy fingers he smoothed his suit, touched his conservative black necktie. He was, he said in the hoarse voice of illiteracy and command, a dress manufacturer. Then, save for a few innocuous questions, he quit answering. He departed as imperiously as he had entered.

But his silence only dramatized the investigations being conducted simultaneously by the commission and a Brooklyn grand jury; all week long, the two groups pitchforked up vast, reeking chunks of long-buried evidence on the rackets which bleed a third of a billion dollars a year from the world's greatest port. Amid this sensational expose of crooked politicos, corrupt cops, grafting labor leaders and swaggering gangsters in New Jersey and. New York, Anastasia emerged as a star performer despite himself. The ghost of Peter Panto, an insurgent longshoreman whose body was found in a New Jersey lime pit eleven years ago, came to haunt him--and to haunt New York's ex-Mayor Bill O'Dwyer.

How Panto Died. It was O'Dwyer, as a politically ambitious prosecutor in Brooklyn, who publicly promised justice in the case of Panto. It was O'Dwyer who finally let Anastasia, the killer, go free for lack of evidence after Star Witness Abe ("Kid Twist") Reles "jumped or fell" from a Coney Island hotel room in which six New York cops stood guard. But last week the commission exhumed a report, buried by O'Dwyer, on the exact circumstances of Panto's death.

On Feb. 7, 1941, it developed, one of Murder, Inc.'s "soldiers" named Albert ("Tick-Tock") Tannenbaum told Edward Heffernan. an assistant D.A., about meeting a fellow hoodlum, Emanuel ("Mendy") Weiss, in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Tannenbaum noticed scratches on Weiss's hands and asked him how he had come by them. Weiss's story as told by Tannenbaum:

"He said, 'We had a close one the other night.' I said, 'Yeah?' So he goes on to tell me that [Jimmy] Ferraco and [Albert] Anastasia and himself were in a house waiting for somebody to bring some wop out there that they were supposed to kill and bury.

"He said, 'The guy just stepped into the door and must have realized what it was about and he tried to get out. He almost got out.' He said, 'It's a lucky thing I was there. If I wasn't there, he would have got away. I grabbed him and mugged him . . . and he started to fight and he tried to break the mug, and that's when he scratched me. But he didn't get away.'

"I said, 'What was it about?' "He said, 'It's Panto, some guy Albert had a lot of trouble with down on the waterfront, and he was threatening to get Albert into a lot of trouble. He was threatening to expose the whole thing, and the only thing Albert could do was to get rid of him. He tried all sorts of different ways to win him over and quiet him down, but he couldn't do anything with him. He had to kill him.'"

So Panto was killed, and life for workmen in Brooklyn's six "Camarda locals" of the International Longshoremen's Association--so-called because of their ironhanded rule by a hoodlum named Emil Camarda--went on as usual. Anastasia was not even brought in by O'Dwyer for questioning. Rank & file members of the A.F.L. union, witnesses testified, had to pay their dues to gangsters who simply appropriated them. They were rarely allowed to hold meetings. They not only had to "kick back" up to 40% of their salaries for the privilege of getting work, but to contract for haircuts at a certain shop (which they were not allowed to enter) and to pay exorbitant prices for wine grapes from certain favored dealers whether they wanted to make wine or not.

What did ex-cop, ex-judge, ex-district attorney, ex-general, ex-mayor, now ex-Ambassador O'Dwyer have to say about this? Safely south of the border in Mexi co, last week, he cried: "If they're so goddam interested in Anastasia, then why the hell don't they prosecute the --!

Ordeal of a "Reformer." The commission also heard of bribery, corruption, larceny and sudden death across the Hudson in New Jersey. When Jersey City's "reform" mayoralty candidate, John V. Kenny, ended the 30-year rule of Boss Frank ("I Am the Law") Hague in 1949, there was dancing in the streets. But last week "Reformer" Kenny was accused and re-accused of being hand in glove with platoons of racketeers.

Albert Jordan, his former chauffeur, testified that he frequently drove Kenny to the home of a Jersey gangster and gambler named Charlie Yanowski, who was later stabbed to death with an ice pick. Kenny, it developed, also had a deep interest in the waterfront and held a secret midnight meeting last March with moonfaced, heavy-handed Anthony Strollo--prisonbound Joe Adonis' successor in the Jersey rackets. For reasons never explained, Entertainer Phil Regan, an ex-policeman known as the "Singing Cop," furnished them his room in Manhattan's midtown Warwick Hotel for the rendezvous. Mayor Kenny denied the whole business before the grand jury. But six days later he admitted all. He had dealt with Strollo after all, but he had only gone to see Strollo for civic good--the way "Roosevelt went to see Stalin," he said. He had been ashamed to admit it, "because all my life I have been clean." Chauffeur Jordan had a different story: the mayor had wept on his shoulder, and moaned: "They've got me dead to rights --they must have had a bug [microphone] in the room."

Aroused, Kenny appeared on television to protest that his name was being blackened like that of "Archbishop Stepinac in Czechoslovakia" (the mayor presumably meant Yugoslavia). But the words were hardly out of his mouth before Richard McGrath of the John W. McGrath Stevedoring Co. testified that his firm had agreed to pay Kenny's son-in-law 50% of all profits on one pier to get the use of certain other Jersey City piers--though, as things turned out, the deal fell through, and they paid only $1,000 for good will.

Even the Army. Meanwhile, the commission was told that Jersey City's Claremont Terminal was considered so juicy a prize after the Army took it over in the summer of 1951 that an underworld war was fought for rights to steal from it. (The Army abandoned the pier in disgust less than six months later.) A former longshoreman named Charles Strang testified how one Walter ("Wally the Shark") Marcinski boasted of having Mayor Kenny's "O.K." on the Claremont piers. Wally, said Strang. stole cases of tools from Army tanks. "They stole so much Army equipment that every longshoreman looked more like the Army than the Army itself."

All this sensational talk last week brought no halt to waterfront corruption. It was hard to say whether it ever would.

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