Tales of the Gotham Hoods

Engineer Dennis J. Walsh of the firm of Sanderson & Porter reported last week on a recent survey of ports and shipping. New York has lost coastwise trade since World War II, and has barely held its own in foreign trade with 53% of the nation's total of cargoes. Baltimore, on the other hand, has advanced from 10% to 15%, New Orleans from 13% to 17%.

The New York waterfront--like the hills of Tennessee and the old West--is best understood through its folk tales. They are extremely hard to collect. They are sung from a witness chair rather than before a campfire, and their heroes and/or villains are so expendable that most bards and/or stool pigeons can remember only a few. But last week the New York State Crime Commission procured the services of two witnesses who were able to bridge almost 20 years of noisy pierside warfare.

A Load of Furs. Gangster Francis Smith (who was hustled down under guard from Green Haven Prison, where he is doing seven-to-ten years for highjacking) matter-of-factly admitted doing a lot of shooting himself back in the 1930s. He told of having set himself up as a pier boss after ending a hitch in prison. It was easy. With three other hoodlums, he "decided to take a pier ... off two brothers by the name of Dillon, which we did. It was the Italian Line, Pier 59, North River. They went off without any trouble. They knew what would happen ..."

But Smith & Co. were soon involved in an uproar that kept the waterfront echoing like a shooting gallery. "One morning, myself, George Keeler and John Harvey and Thomas Porter were cruising up the waterfront. We spied a truck that was loaded with furs. Keeler wanted to go and speak to the driver there. 'He must have something good there, and I can get him to give it to us.' . . . He comes back and he says, 'There's a load of furs worth $100,000 . . . and he's going to give us the truck.' [But] while we were waiting for the truck to pull away from the dock, four other men highjacked it ...

"Well, Keeler knew where one of the men lived. That's Sonny Campbell. [So] one morning we stuck him up, and we wanted to know where the furs were. [But] the man didn't know." Campbell, it turned out, had already tipped off the Jersey waterfront mob under "Charlie the Jew" Yanowski (since ice-picked to death), and Charlie had highjacked the furs from the original highjackers. Despite their prior claim, Smith & Co. formally agreed to let the Jersey mob keep the boodle. Meanwhile, Campbell's pals, unaware that he had double-crossed them, set out to avenge his temporary kidnaping at the hands of Smith & Co. Four of them led by John ("Cockeye") Dunn (since electrocuted for murder), pulled alongside Smith in a car at Pier 72 and punctured him with one pistol bullet and eight shotgun slugs. The anti-Dunn Jersey mob, grateful for their furs, took the wounded man in, got him patched up by a doctor, and sent him to Cliffside Park, N.J. to recuperate. According to Smith's testimony, Cliffside's Chief of Police Frank Borelli assured him of protection as "long as we didn't do anything." Borelli, he swore, tipped him that the FBI was moving in, and he ducked away to Marlboro, N.Y. (Cried the chief last week: "I don't even know the bum.") But Smith had hard luck--he went back to New York, got shot again, recuperated again, got shot again, recuperated again, and was yanked back to "the walls" as a parole violator.

A Pat on the Cheek. At just about this time, last week's other star witness, an ex-robber named Dominick Genova, was getting out of prison. Genova went to the waterfront, too, and witnessed the meteoric rise of slim, ham-handed Mickey Bowers--boss of the I.L.A.'s "pistol local," which today dominates the great piers of the French Line, the United States Lines and the Cunard Steamship Co.

Genova testified that he first heard of Bowers through John ("Apples") Applegate, an old pal from Sing Sing. Shortly thereafter a hood named Gregory the Bandit was mysteriously shot to death in a Twelfth Avenue barroom. Gregory was the pistol local's delegate. Mickey Bowers moved in.

In 1944, one of Gregory the Bandit's pals, Tommy Gleason, walked up to Mickey in front of a waterfront bar & grill. "They seemed to be on friendly terms, and it seemed like Gleason was going to pat him on the cheek, but he had a knife in his hand and he cut him in the throat. I was standing outside there. Bowers grabbed his throat and ran back inside the bar, and Gleason jumped in a cab and ran away." Bowers and some pals scrambled into a car and gave chase. "They lost him in traffic. They were looking for him high & low. I think it was a week or two later [that Gleason] was murdered in an undertaking parlor, sitting there having a snooze. Somebody walked in and shot him."

An Unfortunate Milkman. Due to his connections with Mickey and Apples, Witness Genova worked steadily for years. But in 1947 Apples had a barroom fight with a milk truck driver and got his face badly chopped by a broken beer glass during the struggle. Genova was unwise enough to sympathize with his old pal, Apples. "This guy has got to go," Apples told him, "and I want somebody ... to take care of him." Genova refused.

Next day Genova had no job. A little after that, the milk wagon driver was machine-gunned to death. A little after that, according to Genova, a trucker named William Acosta invited him to dinner, "and he started telling me that he had seen Apples that day and Apples had asked him to set me up ... bring me some place where they could get at me ... So I told him why they were after me. See, the milkman had been killed already at this time. So he said, 'I'm going to say that I missed you, that you wouldn't go with me.' "

As he talked before the crime commission, Genova was asked: "You haven't worked on the waterfront since that time, have you?" Said Genova, in one of the understatements of the year: "No, I haven't."

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