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Democracy, Organized Crime, and Workers Control on the Brooklyn Waterfront

Forrest Hylton

May 1, 2023

In This Feature

1I would like to thank the late Marilyn Young and the participants of the Tamiment Library Seminar at New York University for their comments on an earlier draft. I am grateful to Tamiment Library for funding part of the research in this article through a postdoctoral fellowship. I would also like to thank Kevin Boyle for comments and encouragement, and Steve Striffler for shrewd editorial advice.

Figure 1: Montague St. Tunnel, Brooklyn, 1939. Graffiti reads, "WHERE IS PETE PANTO?" Source: Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Figure 1: Montague St. Tunnel, Brooklyn, 1939. Source: Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Introduction: Panto’s Ghost

2“Police Dig Up Yard, Fail to Find Panto,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 23, 1940, 1, 3; “Panto’s Ghost Walks,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 19, 1951, 22; “The Vault,” Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library. For the Camarda locals, see, Peter Brown, Robert Ensher, and George Berlstein, “Interim Report of Evidence Adduced by the State Crime Commission Relating to Six Brooklyn Locals of the International Longshoremen’s Association,” September 1952, New York State Crime Commission Records, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University, hereafter referred to as “Interim Report.”

Having warned his fiancée, Alice Maffia, and her younger brother, Michael, that he was off to meet two people he “didn’t trust,” on July 14, 1939, twenty-eight-year-old Pietro “Pete” Panto, a hiring boss for the Moore McCormack lines, left the Maffia household in Fort Greene, after work on Friday. He arrived at Gargiulo’s Funeral Home in Red Hook at 7 p.m., across the street from ILA headquarters.3“Supreme Court: Kings County, in the Matter of Intercepting Communications Being Transmitted Over Main 5–2030,” Murder Inc., Box 1, Folder 5, Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, New York Municipal Archive. After a twenty minute discussion with officials from the ILA locals—Emil Camarda, Constantino “Gus” Scannavino, and Anthony “Tony Spring” Romeo—Panto got into Tony Romeo’s car, which sped off. One of the three gangsters later boasted, “He is where he will not bother anybody.”4Ibid.

In June 1939, as the leader of the Brooklyn ILA Rank-and-File Committee, Pete Panto spoke to a crowd of some eight hundred longshoremen at an open-air rally, at which he demanded a union hiring hall. Then in July, he organized a rally against the ILA’s President, Joseph Ryan, that attracted more than one thousand longshoremen, as well as notables like Congressman Vito Marcantonio. The latter represented the American Labor Party (ALP) which, by allying itself with Republicans in support of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, helped break the Democratic monopoly on municipal politics—including the criminal justice system—organized through the Tammany machine, while strengthening the hand of President Franklin Roosevelt and Governor Herbert Lehman.5George Morris, A Tale of Two Waterfronts (New York: Daily Worker, 1953), 12–13. In addition to his public activities, in July 1939, Panto refused to pay the kickback of $10 per week (he earned $18 to $20 per week) demanded by Gioaccino “Dandy Jack” Parisi.6“(#271- Boyle and Assigned),” Murder Inc., Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, Box 1, Folder 5, New York Municipal Archive.

Having ignored threats—or worse, responded with a smile—Panto was driven out to Jimmy “Dirty Face” Ferraco’s house on a chicken farm in Lyndhurst, NJ. As the five-feet-five, 166-pound Panto entered Ferraco’s house, he saw Albert Anastasia and Emmanuel “Mendy” Weiss, and sought to flee. Weiss grabbed him and put him in a chokehold. Nearly biting Weiss’s finger off, Panto was no match for the professional killer who, weighing some two hundred pounds, strangled Panto. Albert Anastasia was from Calabria, like Anastasia’s associate, “Dandy Jack” Parisi, and alleged to be the “Mr. Big” of the Brooklyn waterfront.

But Vincent Mangano Sr. (“Dandy Jack’s” father-in-law and Gus Scannavino’s brother-in-law) called the shots.7Testimony of Vincent Mannino, New York State Crime Commission (NYSCC), Public Hearings No. 5, December 18, 1952, vol. III, 1508, hereafter cited as NYSCC. By 1931, Mangano had become the leader of one of New York’s five borgatas, with Anastasia as underboss. Emil Camarda was vice-president of the ILA, the East Coast’s largest and most politically powerful trade union. Mangano owned the building on Clinton St. that housed the City Democratic Club (CDC), founded in 1932 by Camarda, Mangano, and Anastasia, in order to bolster the Democratic political monopoly over the 3rd Assembly District with campaign contributions and votes.8Testimony of Constantino Scannavino, in ibid., 1593. Scannavino was Mangano’s brother-in-law and knew Mangano and Camarda from Palermo.

Pete Panto challenged organized crime’s monopoly of ILA union leadership and hiring, which began in the 1920s and was consolidated at the CDC clubhouse in the 1930s. From the offices of the Rank-and-File Committee in Brooklyn Heights, Panto also threatened the CDC’s hold on voters. Panto’s followers voted for Fiorello LaGuardia, who also had the support of President Roosevelt and Governor Lehman, as well as the Communist Party (CP) and the ALP.

Racketeers named communism as the problem: “He’s a red, he’s a radical, he’ll get you and the union in trouble.”9Burton Turkus and Sid Feder, Murder Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), 470, 473. As Panto’s friend, CP member, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizer and longshoreman, Sam Madell, put it, “That was the primary weapon that they used—red-baiting.”10Sam Madell, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Collection (OH 01), Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University. Beginning with the 1919 strike, this approach stood mafiosi in good stead with authorities in the police, the courts, and municipal government. Through dense webs of kinship and effective deployment of violence, threats, and coercion, it became embedded in everyday life in the 3rd Assembly District: what is today Red Hook and Carroll Gardens.

Gangsters cut terrifying figures, but rather than silencing longshoremen, Panto’s disappearance galvanized his successor, Peter Mazzie, and the Brooklyn Rank-and-File Committee into further campaigning and coalition building. They could no longer hold mass rallies. Yet by lobbying politicians, mobilizing longshoremen in smaller numbers, seeking allies among the clergy and in the trade union movement, and cultivating journalists and writers, they kept Panto’s murder from falling into oblivion.

This article is about working class struggle and formation on the Brooklyn waterfront in relation to violence, organized crime, the labor process, electoral politics, industrial capital, law, social reproduction, and state formation during the Popular Front and World War II. In the 1930s, through direct action in the form of strikes, rank-and-file workers in the most important US industries (autos, steel, rubber, electrical) expanded the scope of democratic ideology and practice by confronting corporations. Demands for control of the immediate process of production included hiring. Waterfront workers, seamen as well as longshoremen, on the East, West, and Gulf coasts were an integral part of the radical democratic movement for self-government, which represented a fundamental challenge to US corporations.

Rank-and-file radicals demanded industrial democracy. Following the Great Strike of 1934, Harry Bridges formed the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousing Union (ILWU), affiliating with the CIO in 1937. The ILWU and the CIO offered an alternative to the ILA–AFL: workers controlled the labor process and hiring, and obtained higher wages, better benefits, and job security thereby. Panto appeared to be Brooklyn’s answer to Bridges and the ILWU.

In assessing the consequences of the rank-and-file campaign to organize, mobilize, and democratize Brooklyn ILA locals in the 1930s and ’40s, and thereby loosen the hold of gangsters over the ILA leadership, we should consider the strengths and limitations of the longshoremen’s key allies on the Left: the CIO, the ALP, the ILWU, and last as well as least, the CP. How did these organizations contribute to the struggle to democratize the Brooklyn waterfront during the Popular Front? And what difference did unions and parties of the Left make?

Lacking more than rhetorical support from the Left (the CIO, CP, and ALP), without sufficient resources or personnel, Panto and his followers were isolated and vulnerable. Perhaps more importantly, even though he was born in Red Hook, Panto was from Sicily. He was a newcomer, and could not draw on broad, interlocking kinship networks. The latter were rooted in the assembly district and its basic institutions: the Catholic Church, ILA locals, and the City Democratic Club.

In addition to analyzing and chronicling the class struggle among southern Italian men on the Brooklyn waterfront, using the lens of the neighborhood assembly district (Red Hook–3rd Assembly District), this article makes three interventions in historical materialist theory. In the first volume of Capital, Marx assumes that violence and coercion of direct producers belongs to the period of primitive accumulation, which ends after the Napoleonic Wars. For Marx as well as Marxist economists and political theorists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in sharp contrast to feudalism, extra-economic coercion was secondary to how labor markets functioned in mature industrial capitalism. Such ideal types illustrate what Marcus Rediker and Derek Sayer have labelled “the violence of abstraction,” which is to say interpretive violence that mystifies the real violence of the historic exploitation of labor power.11Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Beacon, 2007), 13. Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytical Foundations of Historical Materialism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Rediker borrows the term from British novelist Barry Unsworth, whose novel Sacred Hunger moves beyond abstraction in its depiction of the Atlantic slave trade.

Southern Italian mafiosi controlled waterfront labor markets in Brooklyn through violence, extortion, threats, corruption, and intimidation. They had the tacit blessing of the Democratic machine politicians.

In the largest and most important industrial port in the world, for most of the twentieth century (this is the first point) southern Italian mafiosi controlled waterfront labor markets in Brooklyn—indeed, along the entire the East and Gulf Coasts—through violence, extortion, threats, corruption, and intimidation. They had the tacit blessing of Democratic machine politicians whose campaigns they funded and for whom they delivered votes, as well as encouragement from shipping and stevedoring companies, along with protection they purchased from the police and courts.

Longshoremen lived where they worked. Thus, the second theoretical point concerns the relationship between production and social reproduction which, I argue, were dialectically interrelated. Geographical contiguity between home and work was crucial to dominating waterfront trade unions, politics, as well as to dictating workers’ consumption patterns in the neighborhood, since mafiosi ruled the neighborhood assembly district through kinship, patronage, extortion, gambling, and loansharking networks.12Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 113–14

Finally, and this is the third point, theoretically informed micro-history helps us see the connections between culture and political economy and illuminates, as if in a flash, the whole social totality—to combine Benjamin with Lukács—of the United States at the moment when it became the world’s industrial capitalist powerhouse. I have chosen the Brooklyn waterfront in part because the sources for it are rich and abundant. I rely mainly on the Brooklyn Eagle, one of the great local US newspapers. I also use other US newspapers, along with police and FBI records, judicial sources, and public hearings (state and federal), oral history, and the archives of Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

US labor and working class historians long ignored New York’s dockworkers, leaving them to industrial sociologists.13See Daniel Bell, “The Racket-Ridden Longshoremen: The Web of Economics and Politics” in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s, revised ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1960), 175–210; Vernon Jensen, Hiring of Dock Workers: Employment Practices in the Ports of New York, Liverpool, London, Rotterdam, and Marseilles (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Jensen, Strife on the Waterfront: The Port of New York since 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). See also, Charles Brinton Barnes, The Longshoremen (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1915); and Clarence Larrowe, Shape-Up and Hiring Hall: A Comparison of Hiring Methods and Labor Relations on the New York and Seattle Waterfronts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955). However, monographs and book chapters have appeared that seek to understand historically the efforts of longshoremen to improve their lives and livelihoods.14Howard Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Calvin Winslow, ed., Waterfront Workers: New Perspectives on Race and Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Calvin Winslow, “Black Workers on the Waterfront, 1890–1920,” International Studies in Industrial Relations19 (2005), 1–29. William Mello, New York Longshoreman: Class and Power on the Docks (University Press of Florida, 2010). None has yet dealt with Brooklyn. The first section of this article provides capsule biographies of leading gangsters and racketeers in the 1920s and ’30s and explains how southern Italian mafiosi seized control of the ILA in Brooklyn. The second section narrates the Left challenge that preceded and followed Panto’s disappearance in 1939. It follows the development of the case against Panto’s killers and charts their fates, as well as that of their erstwhile prosecutor.

 

“The Boys of Brooklyn”

Southern Italian mafia families carved up the Brooklyn waterfront. As a Kings County Grand Jury report noted:

The union leaders have … set up thirty-one [unions] in the New York City part of the port … The net effect of this is to set up thirty-one semi-autonomous “delegates” or officers who are in reality thirty-one petty kings and who in their own language are wont to describe themselves as “owning” the thirty-one different piers.15District Attorney of Kings County and the December 1949 Grand Jury,111. See also, Gordon Hostetter and Thomas Quinn Beasley, It’s a Racket!(Chicago: Les Quin Books, 1929); Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, Revised Edition (Peter Smith: Gloucester, MA, 1960 [1934]), 325–72; Harold Seidman, Labor Czars: A History of Industrial Racketeering (New York: Liveright Publishing, 1938); Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 338-341; John Hutchinson, The Imperfect Union: A History of Corruption in American Trade Unions (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, Inc., 1972), 65–109.

The waterfront was the crown jewel of industrial rackets, because unlike the garment or flour trucking industries, the waterfront rackets were localized in a specific geographic locale, and therefore connected in Brooklyn to the 3rdAssembly District leader, Thomas Cullen, and the Democratic Party.16Alan Block, East Side, West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930–1950 (New York: Transaction, 1983), 194. See also, David Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1890–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2009). On the etymology of the term “racketeer” and its evolution in the 1930s, see Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 254–55, 260, 265–66, 285. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Brooklyn waterfront “belonged” to Vincent Mangano Sr. and underboss Albert Anastasia, and it was administered on behalf of the shipping companies and stevedoring firms through six ILA locals, each of which was dominated by a particular family and its in-laws, who controlled hiring on a particular set of piers. Shipping lines and stevedoring firms worked with racketeers and their kinship networks as part of the cost of maintaining a profitable and predictable business climate. A number of union officials, like Albert Anastasia’s brother, “Tough Tony,” as well as Anastasia himself, worked for stevedoring or shipping companies at one time or another.17Block, 195; Sidney Lens, The Crisis of American Labor (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1959), 114. See also, District Attorney of Kings County and the December 1949 Grand Jury, “Report of Special Investigation, December 1949 to April 1954” (New York, 1955), 112–13.

Of all the industrial rackets, the waterfront was the most lucrative and stable because of the ILA’s relationship to official politics through the City Democratic Club, founded in September 1932. Emil Camarda had by then become general vice-president of the ILA.18New York Times, October 18, 1930, 60; “Labor Aid for Lehman,” New York Times, November 4, 1932, 14. Camarda and his family were central to the formation of Brooklyn’s waterfront unions. Camarda helped Mangano and Anastasia found the CDC on Clinton and Degraw streets, and served as its first president.19“Interim Report,” 48. Camarda knew Mangano “from the other side,” where they had been friends since boyhood. Born in Palermo in 1885, Camarda, who lived in Windsor Terrace, joined ILA Local 338 in 1916 and became its vice-president in 1918; his father helped organize it before the war.20“Labor Leader Slain by Pier Contractor,” New York Herald Tribune, October 3, 1941, 1A. In the 1920s, Camarda does not show up in newspapers or the police files (although his criminal associates do, which suggests a possible division of labor).21“Workers Ruled at Tiny Hall,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 30, 1940, 10.

Vincent Mangano Sr. was born in Palermo in 1888 and came to the US in 1906 at seventeen, settling in Red Hook.22Critchley, 157. He went into real estate and bootlegging. Arrested in Cleveland on December 6, 1928, at a mob convention, Mangano was released on bail the following day. He was arrested three further times.23“Head Off Freeing of 21 Suspects,” Boston Globe, December 7, 1928, 31. Mangano had a son, Vincent Mangano Jr., and a brother, Phillip, who was arrested for homicide and as a suspicious person; the latter was the business agent of Local 903. There was also brother Gerolimo; brother-in-law Constantino “Gus” Scannavino, the business agent for Local 1199 (and one of Panto’s killers); as well as brother-in-law Anthony V. Camarda (Anthony “Nino” Camarda’s son and Emil Camarda’s nephew). There was also a son-in-law, “Dandy Jack” Parisi.24“Interim Report,” 56–57.

As the mafia moved into gambling, narcotics, and prostitution in the early 1930s, Albert Anastasia became the head of the squad of professional killers. He was born Umberto Anastasio in Tropea, Reggio Calabria, in 1902, the third of twelve surviving children. Albert’s father died when he was young, which forced him to work for a living as a child. He arrived in New York in 1917 as a seaman. After jumping ship, he worked as a longshoreman for two years, until the strike of 1919.25Office of the District Attorney (Manhattan), Albert Anastasia Files, 1954–63, Accession #89–8, Box 4, New York Municipal Archive.

Though extensive, Anastasia’s police record in the 1920s and ’30s provides no information about his beginnings as a professional killer. Most likely, he started out guarding trucks carrying beer and liquor for Frankie Yale, owner of the Harvard Inn at Coney Island who was murdered in 1928, as well as Yale’s successor, Anthony “Little Augie Pisano” Carfano, who became an electoral powerbroker in his native Gowanus (Brooklyn’s 8th Assembly District), as well as in Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, before investing in horseracing, hotels, and hospitality in Saratoga, Miami, and Havana.26With blonde hair and blue eyes, at five feet, five inches and weighing 125 pounds, “Little Augie” could often be spotted meeting with Tammany’s local representatives at his restaurant at 4th and Union streets, wearing a gray fedora, brown overcoat, and blue suit. He sold beer to all of Tammany’s clubhouses, ran a speakeasy at Carroll and Court streets, controlled the flour trucking, ice, and laundry businesses in the borough, and bridged the bootlegging and the gambling-narcotics eras. “Enright Claims Tammany Saves Court St ‘Joint,’” Brooklyn Eagle, October 3, 1929, 2; “‘Little Augie’ Pisano Lays Enright Charges to Fight over Italian Votes Here,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 8, 1929, 3; “Enright Names Politician Pals of Little Augie,”Brooklyn Eagle, October 29, 1931, 1, 2; “‘Augie’ Planning Reign of Terror at Polls, G.O.P. Says,” Brooklyn Eagle, November 29, 1929, 1, 3; “Bodyguard for Mike Reilly? Phooey! Little Augie Can’t Scare 8th’s Leader,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 1, 1933, 1; “Luke O’Reilly Opens Fire on Augie Pisano,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 25, 1933, 3; “Eighth AD voters Get Their Ballot Numbers,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 15, 1933, 6. Until Vincent Mangano and Albert Anastasia took over in 1931, “Little Augie” controlled the Brooklyn waterfront.

 As with stints in state penitentiaries like Sing Sing and Dannemora, local connections from “the other side” shaped patterns of criminal association in Brooklyn. Anastasia lived just doors away from the City Democratic Club and worked closely with fellow Calabrians “Dandy Jack” Parisi and Giuseppe “Joe” Florina; both lived within blocks of the CDC. Anastasia was first arrested with Florina in 1921 for murder, but the conviction was overturned after the pair spent seven months in Sing Sing awaiting death.27“In Death Chair’s Shadow 7 Months, 2 Walk Out Free,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 10, 1922, 1. Anastasia was arrested again in 1922 and twice in 1923, serving two years in Sing Sing on a weapons charge.28“Realty Man Victim in Long String of Italian Murders,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 29, 1923, 19. He was arrested once in 1928 and twice in 1932—the first time for homicide with an ice pick—and once in 1933 for the murder of longshoreman Joseph Santora, for which he was acquitted; and yet again, in 1936.29“Slaying Victim Called Member of Murder Ring,” New York Herald Tribune, July 2, 1942, 20.

Witnesses refused to come forward, changed their stories, or turned up dead. Meanwhile, Anastasia became a pier superintendent.30Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Subject: Albert Anastasia,” 60–61. Besides brother Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio, the clan included Gerardo “Gerry” Anastasio, a business agent in Local 929, and Giuseppe “Joseph” Anastasio, a foreman for the JW McGrath Steamship Company. Although “Tough Tony” was in the US for less than a year in 1925 before being deported, he was arrested on murder charges. In 1929, he returned to the US to stay.31“Interim Report,” 34; Office of the District Attorney (Manhattan), Albert Anastasia Files, 1954–63, Accession #89–8, Box 4, New York City Municipal Archive.

These families ran the City Democratic Club, which was formed to reinforce the control of Representative Thomas Cullen in the 3rd Assembly District. Southern Italian mafiosi needed their own political club because Cullen’s club, the 3rd Assembly District Regular Democratic Club, was closed to Italians.32Henry Claflin Wells, “Urban Political Development and the Power of Local Groups: A Case Study of Politics in South Brooklyn, 1865–1935” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1986), 208–10. Though they could not represent themselves politically, southern Italian leaders of organized crime influenced municipal politics, especially in Brooklyn, and in exchange for votes and campaign funds, they bought protection in the courts and on the police force. Not even LaGuardia’s election as mayor in 1933, nor his subsequent reelection in 1937 and 1941, broke this pattern.33Brooklyn Eagle, August 9, 1932, 1.

The City Democratic Club’s first annual reception illustrates the links between machine politics and organized crime. It was held at the Hotel St. George on Henry Street on October 31, 1932. Guests included Lt. Gov. Lehman (Franklin D. Roosevelt was governor), former mayor Jimmy Walker, and Kings County Leader John H. McCooey. The CDC held a dinner attended by the borough president, a municipal court justice, an assemblyman, an alderman, a magistrate, Assemblyman Cullen, as well as ILA President Joe Ryan. At Christmas, the CDC handed out three thousand baskets, each with chicken, cans of tomatoes and peas, sugar, coffee, fruit, and candy, as well as “that most important item in an Italian neighborhood—macaroni and tomato paste.”34“Democratic Club Reception Oct. 31,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 23, 1932, 6: Brooklyn Eagle, September 9, 1932, 33; “Poor Families in 3rdA.D. Are Well Supplied by Political Organizations,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 25, 1932, 2.

Through the CDC, leading figures in organized crime and waterfront racketeering combined electoral clientelism, charity, and relief work, which allowed them to pose as benefactors of the community.35Brooklyn Eagle, February 19, 1915, 30; ibid., October 10, 1926 , 20; ibid., June 28, 1929, 14; ibid., December 13, 1935, 23. Like Anastasia, Mangano Sr. was a member of the Boosters’ Committee in 1936, which solicited small “donations” from the CDC’s eight hundred “members” to help pay for the Christmas baskets. Good works went hand-in-hand with extortion. Like his bosses and associates, Romeo hung around the CDC clubhouse. In 1936, he paid $25 for a full-page ad in the CDC’s souvenir program for the annual ball: an epic looter of Local 346’s treasury, he also served on the CDC’s Advertising Committee, Floor Committee, and Boosters’ Club.

Along with Mangano, Anastasia, and Romeo, “Tough Tony,” took out a full-page ad. “Tough Tony” lurked around the CDC clubhouse playing pinochle. So did Louis Capone (no relation to Al), who was convicted for murder along with one of Panto’s killers, Emmanuel “Mendy” Weiss. Until his electrocution, Capone led a gang of Italian and Jewish hitmen in Brownsville that Anastasia commanded—part of Murder Inc. Capone bought a full-page ad. So did Mangano’s son-in-law, “Dandy Jack” Parisi, who spent six years in prison on a narcotics charge, from 1926 to 1933, having previously been convicted of extortion, grand larceny, and gun possession.36NYSCC, 1510–11.

In addition to its annual balls, which ILA President Joe Ryan never missed, the CDC also held rallies for Tammany candidates. In late October 1938, following a torchlight parade through the 3rd Assembly District with more than one hundred cars and five hundred red and green flares, as well as “stirring band music” on “Candidates’ Night Rally,” former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey headlined to support Governor Lehman’s reelection.37“Bennett to Speak at Red Hook Rally,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 11, 1938, 11; “Jack Dempsey Opens Tour for Lehman Here,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 27, 1938, 7.

 

The Case of Pete Panto

Hiring bosses supervised a system of casual labor that used the shape-up, designed to ameliorate the unpredictability of the winds, the tides, and the volume of trade on behalf of capital, specifically shipping and stevedoring firms.38Winslow, 364–65. They or their foremen decided whom to hire, when, and for how long, and the shape-up was the method that guaranteed the authority of these bosses in an exclusively masculine world characterized by insult, injury, and deep insecurity.

Hiring bosses, in turn, answered to union officials, stevedoring firms, and shipping companies—everyone except the longshoremen. The structural oversupply of labor heightened individualistic competition, limited collective solidarity among longshoremen across ethno-national and racial lines, and strengthened the power and authority of the hiring boss and his associates.39Ibid., 365. This made New York longshoremen among the most divided, oppressed, and exploited sectors of the US working class.

Remarkably, capital on the New York waterfront was as fragmented as labor. There were more than one hundred steamship companies, sixty stevedoring firms, and five hundred harbor craft in the Port of New York, and until the New York Shipping Association (NYSA) was founded in 1931, there was no collective representation of shipping lines and stevedoring firms, which made for a dizzyingly complex and confusing world on the waterfront.40Nelson, Divided We Stand, 52. Even once the association was founded, because each member firm had one vote regardless of size, it did not function as a unified bloc, since large firms were unable to represent their interests as the general interests of the industry. Each firm had to negotiate hiring arrangements with hiring bosses on each individual pier on which it operated. (Even once the NYSA had formed, it was unable to unify foreign shipping lines with the domestic coastwise trade.)

Pietro “Pete” Panto was born in Red Hook in 1910 but grew up in Messina, in Sicily, where he completed sixth grade in 1925. Panto’s occupation was listed as “laborer,” and after serving in the light infantry of the Italian Army as a private and corporal, he sailed for New York on March 4, 1934, to live with his father, Carmilo Panto, a plasterer, and his mother, Domenica Venuti. In 1937, Panto obtained a registration card as an Emergency Snow Laborer with the Department of Sanitation.41“Special Investigating Squad: Memorandum of Certain Documents Found Among Personal Effects of Peter Panto, Missing Person”; “Record of Discharge from Italian Army”; “Identification Card”; “School Certificate,” Murder Inc., Box 1, Folder 5, Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, New York Municipal Archive. He was not mentioned in connection with the waterfront until 1939. According to Madell:

He was a newcomer to the waterfront … Panto was a very dynamic person, a good speaker, in Italian, held a number of open meetings, and many responded, and the officials became kind of worried about the situation … One fine day, Panto disappears. After about a week or so, we felt that something was radically wrong. We went to the police; they were convinced he got into some sort of argument with his girlfriend.”42Madell, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Collection.

None of the available evidence suggests that Panto had romantic difficulties with his fiancée, who wrote to the Brooklyn Eagle asking for help in locating him.43“Worried Girl Pleads for Missing Fiancée,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 16, 1939, 11. It is plausible that police invented the story.

Fighting gangster rule over the ILA union leadership, the Democratic monopoly on longshoremen’s votes, and judicial impunity, the Brooklyn Rank-and-File Committee opened its own hiring hall in 1940 just around the corner from the ILA’s headquarters. Panto’s friend and comrade, Pete Mazzie, helped to form the Pete Panto Memorial Committee to pressure Kings County District Attorney William O’Dwyer, who took office in January 1940.44“General Correspondence, Waterfront Killing of Pete Panto,” Vito Marcantonio Papers; “Panto Murder Solution Seen in New Break,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 28, 1940, 1, Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library; “Longshoremen Open Hall,” New York Times, October 8, 1940, 45; “Union Leader Beaten in Waterfront Riot,” PM, October 10, 1940, 1, International Longshoremen’s Association Reference Files, Box 4, fol. 11, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University; “Longshoremen Ask LaGuardia to Aid,” Baltimore Sun, November 8, 1940, 10. The Memorial Committee formed the Pete Panto Educational Circle, located down the block from Rank-and-File Committee headquarters on Columbia and President streets, which included cultural figures like African American writer and CP member Richard Wright, key leaders from New York’s powerful trade union movement, like City Councilman “Red Mike” Quill from the Transit Workers Union (which joined the CIO in 1937), and political heavyweights like Congressman Marcantonio and his mentor, Mayor LaGuardia, for whom the rank-and-file voted on the American Labor Party ticket.45“Dock Rank and File Indorse LaGuardia,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 21, 1940, 8, Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library.

Following a hunt that lasted three weeks, the discovery of Panto’s body on January 29, 1941, encased in lime along the banks of the Passaic River in Lyndhurst, NJ, was testament to the courage and tenacity of the Brooklyn ILA’s Rank-and-File Committee. Together with Panto’s fiancée, Pete Mazzie identified Panto’s body at the Kings County Morgue. Panto’s family was able to view his body on February 1, and on the wall of the Montague Street ramp, a new piece of graffiti appeared: “Who Paid for Panto’s Murder?”46“Peter Panto’s Body Identified in Kings,” New York Times, February 7, 1941, 40; “‘Who Paid for Panto’s Murder?’ Sign Asks,” Brooklyn Eagle, February 2, 1941, 1.

Having driven gangsters and racketeers from the West Coast docks with “Red Guards,” from Los Angeles to Seattle, Harry Bridges and the ILWU implemented job control through a union hiring hall. Yet this example could not have caught fire in New York if not for the electrifying effect of Bridges’s visit to New York at the end of 1936, and again in the fall of 1937. During his first visit, Bridges, then leader of the ILA’s Pacific District, spoke at a mass rally at Madison Square Garden that was filled to capacity. In defiance of Ryan—who called Bridges a “punk,” and organized paramilitary forces among longshoremen to fight on behalf of shipowners and stevedores—Bridges called for solidarity from East Coast longshoremen with East and Gulf Coast seamen, who had walked out in support of the forty thousand striking seamen on the West Coast. Bridges labeled Ryan a “shipowners’ agent and strikebreaker” but did not devote resources or organizers to democratize the ILA.47Louis Adamic, “Harry Bridges Comes East,” The Nation, December 26, 1936, 753–54.

Bridges and the CIO’s National Maritime Union, formed in 1936, refused to commit to rank-and-file struggle within the ILA because, as Communists, they bet that they would organize longshoremen into the newly formed NMU.

In 1936 and ’37, the CIO successfully capitalized on sit-downs in auto, rubber, and steel, “in one of the great bursts of working-class insurgency in American history.”48Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront, 223. Its potential for growth in industrial sectors beyond the reach of AFL craft unions seemed limitless, but on the waterfront, the CIO’s strategy and tactics of dual unionism all but guaranteed failure against the AFL-affiliated ILA—at a time in which the CIO and the AFL were waging a low-intensity civil war for members and jurisdiction. Bridges and the CIO’s National Maritime Union, formed in 1936, refused to commit to rank-and-file struggle within the ILA because, as Communists, they bet that they would organize longshoremen into the newly formed NMU. This strategy was imposed from above and outside with little regard for local conditions.

Friend of Pete Panto, CIO organizer, and CP member Sam Madell, who worked on the docks, knew that the only way to break the monopoly of the ILA leadership was to challenge it from within, since longshoremen would close ranks against outsiders. Indeed, one organizer sent to replace Madell—whose indiscipline and independence from the CP–CIO leadership were barely tolerated—was nearly beaten up when longshoremen took him for an agent provocateur.49Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets, 93-\–95.

More important than Bridges and his message, then, or the support of the CIO and CP, were the patient efforts of Madell, who lit the torch of rank-and-file resistance and kept it alive through World War II. Madell faced intimidation, threats, and joblessness but also contended with superiors in the CP and CIO, which he joined in 1935 when he began editing the newsletter Shape-Up. He became head of the CIO’s East Coast organizing drive on the waterfront, and in 1936, sponsored action committees to run anti-Ryan candidates in elections. More than a dozen CIO organizers worked full-time for the NMU, but Madell was alone. By 1938, he and the ILA rank-and-file had devised a program. The most important demands were back pay—the recovery of kickbacks—and a union hiring hall: kickbacks and the shape-up were key to gangster control.50Ibid., 123–24.

During the Popular Front, the American Labor Party’s support for democratizing the waterfront was more grounded than the CP–CIO’s. Active in ALP politics, Attorney Marcy Protter was a crucial ally of Panto’s. He chaired the Brooklyn–Queens Labor and Civic Committee, composed chiefly of labor and religious leaders.51“1200 Demand WPA Increase in Boro Rally,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 11, 1938, 5. Some months before Panto began to hold mass rallies in 1939, he visited Protter, explaining that “he wanted to get some degree of democracy” in the ILA, and had decided to form a committee in order to achieve it.52Testimony of Marcy Protter, NYSCC, 1533.

Panto outlined the kinds of kickbacks to which longshoremen were subject: he paid monthly advances to a barber for haircuts he did not receive; if he tried to get a haircut from said barber, however, he would lose his job.53“Got Double Trimming in Gang Barbershops,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 27, 1940, 18. In order to make wine, Panto had to buy his grapes at exorbitant prices at a store at President and Hicks streets. He had to buy tickets for the CDC ball, eight to ten thousand of which were “sold,” that is taken out of the longshoremen’s pay envelopes, even though the venue only held five hundred people. These examples of extortion united exploitation in production and social reproduction in the delimited space of the neighborhood assembly district. Protter agreed to act as legal counsel.54Testimony of Marcy Protter, NYSCC, 1533.

During the first half of 1939, Panto’s group started out small, with private meetings, gradually working up to public meetings of several hundred. Then, of course, the Rank-and-File Committee held mass rallies that aroused the ire of Emil Camarda and “the boys” of the Brooklyn waterfront. In early July 1939, Panto visited Protter at his office for a meeting of the Guidance Committee, describing a meeting with Emil Camarda. The committee discussed the matter and decided that Panto was in real danger. He was to move around in groups whenever possible, never alone.

Soon after, Protter received a call from two Guidance Committee members who feared Panto had been murdered. Protter then made a formal complaint with Mayor LaGuardia’s Commissioner of Investigations, William Herlands, which Herlands sent to Assistant Attorney General John Harlan Amen, to whom Panto had personally appealed for protection. Amen, who was investigating waterfront rackets, had sent Panto to see the police. A week later Panto disappeared.55Ibid., 1534; “Ears to the Ground,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 2, 1939, 11.

In January 1940, William O’Dwyer took over as District Attorney for Kings County. Perhaps with the success of Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey in mind, O’Dwyer announced that he planned to prosecute organized crime and racketeering despite the fact that, like his predecessor, he had been elected with help from the City Democratic Club.56Testimony of Vincent Mannino, NYSCC, 1526. O’Dwyer was ambitious and relatively independent of the Brooklyn Democratic machine, and in late March 1940 staged a publicity coup after Abe “Kid Twist” Reles agreed to testify against Albert Anastasia.

Reles’s testimony made Murder Inc. a household name, and explained the mechanisms of recruitment for hired assassins in Ocean Hill and Brownsville. Reles recalled loitering on the corner of Livonia and Saratoga streets sometime in 1932 when he received word from Louis Capone that Albert Anastasia wanted to see him the next morning at 9 a.m. at CDC headquarters. Along with Anastasia’s gunman, “Dandy Jack” Parisi, Reles, and several others left to meet “Joe” Florina—Anastasia’s longtime Calabrian partner in crime—at a Newburgh, NY, farm with a dilapidated barn filled with what Reles described as “enough ammunition to fight a war,” along with rifles, pistols, and shotguns.57“Re: Training in the Use of Firearms at a Farm in Newburgh, N.Y.” Murder Inc., Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, Box 1, Folder 5, New York Municipal Archive.

Thanks to the testimony of Reles and Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, we know that Anastasia arranged sit-down meetings at the CDC to mediate disputes among gangs of extortionists as well as to mastermind murders. Reles named seventeen killings during the 1930s for which Anastasia was directly responsible, either as killer or supervisor, and claimed that “an unwritten law” came into effect around 1931 according to which no mob hits could be carried out without his permission. When not directly involved, Ansastasia selected the hitmen and helped with “mapping out plans for the execution.” Reles named “Dandy Jack” Parisi as Anastasia’s “ace trigger-man.” Louis Capone, “Mendy” Weiss, “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, and “Allie” Tannebaum all worked for Anastasia as well.58“Report Re: Albert Anastasio (B–57 939),” Murder Inc., Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, Box 1, Folder 5, New York Municipal Archive.

These revelations came as a mixed blessing for Panto’s fiancée, Alice Maffia. In a meeting that began at 2 p.m. on March 28, 1940, and lasted for forty minutes, O’Dwyer told the Brooklyn–Queens Labor and Citizens Committee—represented by Protter and fifteen others, including Rev. Frank Williams of the Brooklyn Church and Mission Federation’s Social Justice Committee, along with leaders from a dozen unions—that he would “deliver Peter Panto or what’s left of him.” Thereafter, Maffia did not leave her house, and her mother forbade her to talk to anyone outside the family. That same day, O’Dwyer handed down his first two indictments in the “murder-for-hire ring,” as it was called.59Testimony from Marcy Protter, NYSCC, 1533–40; “Panto Investigation Bungled by the Police, Citizens Charge,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 27, 1940, 1, 18; “Panto Murder Solution Seen In New Break,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 28, 1940, 1, 8; “Panto Fiancée Feared on Gang’s Death List,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 29, 1940, 1.

Assistant Attorney General Amen’s investigations apparently encouraged District Attorney O’Dwyer, for at the beginning of April, he sought Anastasia—said to have received between $35,000 and $45,000 annually in kickbacks—and his partner, “Joe” Florino, in connection with Panto’s murder.60“2 Waterfront Thugs Hunted in Panto Case,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 2, 1940, 1. Neither could be found; Anastasia was rumored to be in Calabria. Nor could they find Tony Romeo, whom O’Dwyer wished to question as well.61“Missing Man is Key Figure in Dock Probe,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 25, 1940, 1. Amen also subpoenaed Local 327’s books from the Secretary Treasurer, Anthony J. Camarda.62“Fugitive Named Racket Boss,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 1, 1940, 1; “Boro Dock Racket Boss in Italy, O’Dwyer Learns,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 2, 1940, 1, 20; “City May Post Reward for Fugitive Adonis,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 7, 1940, 1.

On May 1, 1940, O’Dwyer began his own investigation. After some one hundred members and officials of the locals had given their testimony, and after Amen’s books had been turned over to O’Dwyer, who met with Emil Camarda and Joe Ryan in mid-May, they agreed Ryan would revoke the charter of three of the Camarda locals (929, 903, and 346), and call for new elections. But as Tony Giustra (whose family ran one of the locals) admitted under questioning, the books Amen gave O’Dwyer had been cooked; Giustra named Romeo as the most egregious looter of treasury funds. In the elections, held in late June, numbers were shuffled along with personnel, such that 328–1, 329–1, and 1199–1 replaced the old designations (929, 903, and 346), and Mangano’s nephew took over from his brother as business agent of Local 903. In Local 923, Romeo’s cousin took over from him as business agent. On the instructions of O’Dwyer, on July 15, 1940, Assistant District Attorney Edward A. Heffernan declared the investigation concluded.

In the words of Pete Mazzie, ‘We used to unload 450 bags an hour, now the men unload between 900 and 950 bags each hour,’ with fifteen hundred fewer men working than usual.

Following Panto’s disappearance and the end of the investigation, violence against union activists continued. In the context of a wartime speedup caused by Brooklyn’s dependence on foreign shipping—in the words of Pete Mazzie, “We used to unload 450 bags an hour, now the men unload between 900 and 950 bags each hour,” with fifteen hundred fewer men working than usual—beatings became commonplace.63“More Work, Less Jobs Paradox of the Docks,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 14, 1940, 7. At a meeting on June 12, 1940, in the auditorium of St. Stephen’s Church, one of Camarda’s relatives grabbed Mazzie by the throat when the latter tried to debate Joe Ryan about the proposed merger of Locals 346 and 1199. The four detectives assigned to the meeting threw Mazzie out.64“O’Dwyer Probes Beating of Panto’s Successor in Union,” Brooklyn Eagle, June 13, 1940, 1.

For longshoremen seeking to carry on Panto’s struggle, public acts of commemoration proved important. In July 1940, Mazzie led two hundred longshoremen at a meeting at the V.F.W. Hall to commemorate the first anniversary of Panto’s disappearance, stating, “His reputation will grow with the years and, when the longshoremen triumph in the ILA, that day will be the cornerstone of his living memorial.” Congressman Vito Marcantonio, honorary chairmen of the Pete Panto Educational Circle, attended, urging longshoremen to continue to fight to rid the docks of “racketeers, bloodsuckers, and murderers.”65“Panto Memorial Quiet as Threats Fizzle Out,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 20, 1940, 9.

Mazzie suffered further beatings but soldiered on. In mid-September, he was attacked by three unknown assailants and saved by the insistent screams of a woman who witnessed the beating.66“General Correspondence, Waterfront Killing of Pete Panto,” Vito Marcantonio Papers. Throughout August and September 1940, Mazzie demanded that Ryan and Camarda incorporate insurgent demands—elimination of the shape-up, a minimum of twenty men to a gang, and a maximum sling load of two thousand pounds.—and threatened to negotiate directly with shipowners if they refused.67“Red Hook Longshoremen Threaten Separate Action,” New York Herald Tribune, September 20, 1940, 30.

Gangsters broke up rank-and-file meetings and prevented democratic discussion. In mid-October 1940, at a meeting of three hundred and fifty men at the Rank-and-File Committee’s headquarters, which was to serve as a rotary hiring hall, Mazzie opened by saying, “This is the opening of a headquarters where longshoremen can meet and talk. The rank-and-file committee is taking up where Panto left off.” When he warned of “phonies,” someone in the front row —either Camarda, Johnny Erato, or Gus Caminiti (Romeo’s cousin)—stood up and punched Mazzie with a right to the jaw. Someone else smashed a chair over his head.

Police arrived too late to prevent the destruction of the camera used by Mazzie’s photographer, who also received a punch in the jaw, but retrieved the film and printed pictures of Mazzie’s attackers.68“Longshoremen Open Hall,” New York Times, October 8, 1940, 45; “O’Dwyer Probes Riot that Balked New Dock Union,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 10, 1940, 1, 3; “Union Leader Beaten in Waterfront Riot,” PM, October 10, 1940, 2. In October 1940, Amen put out a nine-state alarm for Anastasia, “reputed to be the front man for Vincent Mangano.” Anastasia was wanted in connection with the kidnapping of Isadore “I Paid Plenty” Juffe, who had identified Anastasia as his kidnapper.69“Anastasia, Wanted by O’Dwyer, Is Hunted by Amen in Kidnapping,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 3, 1940, 1.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the police protected Mazzie. He received threats from Jonny Erato’s brother, Vince. In response, the Pete Panto Memorial Committee issued a statement asking why Panto’s case had not been solved, labeling the attack on Mazzie the work of “gangster hoodlums tied to the Camarda machine … [that is] imperiling the lives and safety of honest workers and their families.”70“Seek Assailant of Union Head,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 11, 1940, 20. The committee met with O’Dwyer only to learn that he knew who the killers were but would not say. He delayed acting on the assault charges that Mazzie brought against Erato, Camarda, and Caminiti; all were later acquitted.71“General Correspondence, Waterfront Killing of Pete Panto,” Vito Marcantonio Papers.

Undaunted, Mazzie appealed to Mayor LaGuardia and held more public meetings. In early November, Mazzie reminded LaGuardia, whom the Rank-and-File Committee endorsed for reelection, that the investigations against Murder Inc., all of which pointed to the Brooklyn waterfront, had not cleared up Panto’s case, and he warned that a “clash of some kind” was imminent.72“Mayor Gets Plea to Heal Rift on Boro Waterfront,” Brooklyn Eagle, November 8, 1940, 2; “Longshoremen Ask LaGuardia to Aid,” Baltimore Sun, November 8, 1940, 10. The letter stressed collusion between racketeers and officials in city government and blamed the shape-up system of hiring for the continued stranglehold of gangsters.

Though justice was never served, Panto’s memory was honored. In mid-April 1941, a mile-long procession passed through Red Hook, where a crowd of thousands lined the sidewalks, as fifty members of the Rank-and-File Committee, holding aloft a large portrait of Panto flanked with flowers, led the mourners to the Royal Church of the Sacred Heart. Several hundred assembled in front of ILA headquarters. In a prepared statement, the committee declared:

In the death of Peter Panto, organized labor has lost a great and courageous leader. He was murdered because he led the fight on the Brooklyn docks for better working conditions. In his death, the Italian people lost a son who symbolized the best traditions of the workers. Peter Panto lives in the hearts of thousands of longshoremen who are determined that the things he lived and died for shall come to pass.73“Thousands Mourn as Dock Workers Bury Pete Panto,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 19, 1941, 1-2.

The committee vowed to fight in memory of the ideals Panto embodied.

As the US headed toward war, justice was in short supply. O’Dwyer demanded votes in the mayoral race in exchange for cracking the case. O’Dwyer had identified the people who took Panto, the car they took him in, and the car that followed, but maintained that he could not confirm that the same cars had arrived in New Jersey. O’Dwyer asked Protter for help, as well as American Labor Party support. O’Dwyer offered to make Protter’s professional career into a political one—in exchange for ALP votes.74Testimony of Marcy Protter, NYSCC, 1541-43.

Protter refused, and O’Dwyer lost to LaGuardia, although not because he failed to win the Italian vote, which turned against LaGuardia after he finally publicly criticized Mussolini and fascism in 1940. Rather, in November 1941, the state’s case collapsed after Abe Reles “fell” to his death at the Half Moon Inn at Coney Island, despite—or because of—protection from six policemen. Other witnesses to Panto’s murder, like “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss and “Allie” Tannenbaum, had already been electrocuted in Sing Sing.

Police picked up Tony Romeo on a vagrancy charge on Columbia Street in mid-May 1942. He told them he had been warned to stay away.75“Romeo Slain for Gang Defiance Police Declare,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 2, 1942, 1. Romeo soon went missing after telling his wife that he was leaving on a business trip (to a racetrack, as it turned out). At the end of June, his body was found disrobed, partially decomposed, with a broken jaw, marked by twenty-eight bullets, in a patch of woods outside Wilmington, DE, a month after O’Dwyer had left the district attorney’s office for the army.76“Slaying Victim Called Member of Murder Ring,” New York Herald Tribune, July 2, 1942, 20; “Slaying Linked to Brooklyn Gang,” New York Times, July 2, 1942, 23; “Slain Man Thought Boro Racketeer,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 1, 1942, 1, 2. O’Dwyer followed Anastasia, who also joined the army in 1942.

Romeo had been arrested eight times—three times for homicide, twice for vagrancy—and convicted once. Anastasia and Romeo were arrested together for the 1932 murder of longshoremen Joseph Santora, who refused to pay kickbacks; Anastasia was released, and Romeo indicted but acquitted. After May 1940, Romeo was wanted for questioning in connection with O’Dwyer’s investigation of the Panto killing. He was alleged to have received $75 per week as a union delegate, plus $400 to $500 per month from kickbacks. Police suspected the boys of the Brooklyn waterfront murdered him.77“Slain Man Thought Boro Racketeer,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 1, 1942, 2. His wife, Josephine, told Wilmington police, “I guess he got what was coming to him. I’m glad it’s over. I’ve been slipping in and out of morgues for two years now, always expecting to find his body when police called me.”78“Union Man’s 2 Predecessors Slain; He Can’t Guess His Fate,” Brooklyn Eagle, February 10, 1932, 3; “Waterfront Knows Power of Boro Crime Overlords,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 14, 1940, 7. No one attended Romeo’s funeral.

Albert Anastasia was above suspicion, even though he had been a fugitive from justice until enlisting in early 1942. O’Dwyer’s assistant, County Clerk James Moran, pulled Anastasia’s arrest warrant, along with the warrants for the rest of Panto’s killers: Jimmy “Dirty Face” Ferraco (who owned the New Jersey chicken farm where Panto was murdered), Vincent Mangano, and Tony Romeo.79Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Subject: Albert Anastasia,” 14; “Edward J. Divers Testimony: Anastasia Case,” Murder Inc., Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, Box 1, Folder 5, New York Municipal Archive. The case was closed.

The fight to democratize the ILA had been defeated in part because the CP and the CIO refused to invest in it. Without resources or personnel, the ILA rank-and-file radical cause was lost.

Joe Ryan—and with him, Tammany, and the shipping and stevedoring companies—ran the New York waterfront during World War II, as the CP and CIO backed Roosevelt and the no-strike pledge unconditionally. Lacking support on the Left, wildcats in 1942 petered out quickly. When Brooklyn rank-and-file activists met with the CP’s waterfront leader in 1943, he discouraged them from bucking Ryan.80Kimeldorf, 152–53. The fight to democratize the ILA had been defeated, in part because the CP and CIO refused to invest in it. Without resources or personnel, the ILA rank-and-file radical cause was lost.

Thanks to the war, the boys of the Brooklyn waterfront went legit—those who survived, that is—or so it seemed. In early January 1943, Albert Anastasia became a technical sergeant in Indiantown Gap, PA, training African Americans to load and unload ships in dry dock. During the war, Anastasia could be seen in uniform at Belmont, the Jamaica racetrack, or the Aqueduct, laying down $100 bills—up to six in one race.81Testimony of Vincent Mannino, NYSCC, 1533.

Though O’Dwyer lost the New York mayoral race in 1941, he won in 1945, by which time he had become a war hero in Italy. He won again in 1949. O’Dwyer’s ties to Panto’s killers, chiefly Anastasia, resurfaced during the Kings County District Attorney’s race in 1945, however. Republican District Attorney George Beldock revived it, and secured permission to open a Grand Jury investigation, which concluded that O’Dwyer’s office had been grossly negligent to let Anastasia go.82“Abstract of Beldock Jury’s Presentment,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 30, 1945, 5; “O’Dwyer Camp Hits Back at Grand Jury,” ibid., 1, 9; “Abstract of Beldock Jury’s Presentment,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 21, 1945, 8, 13; “Seek Further Probe of O’Dwyer Charges,” ibid., 1, 13. Block, 113–23.

Although Beldock lost his reelection bid, successor Miles McDonald continued what Beldock had started, which led to another Grand Jury investigation in 1949. The following year, O’Dwyer resigned to become US Ambassador to Mexico. Yet in 1951, the accusations destroyed his political career on national television during hearings on organized crime and interstate commerce, which functioned as a morality play with O’Dwyer cast in the role of villain-scapegoat for Joe Ryan’s and Tammany’s sins of commission. Albert Anastasia and brother “Tough Tony” put in memorable appearances.

During the hearings, when queried about a legitimate occupation during the years between 1919 and 1942, Albert Anastasia took the fifth. Senator Tobey (R–NH) explained that he could not incriminate himself by answering a question about legitimate business. Anastasia replied, “I don’t recall any legitimate business that I had.” Special Counsel Halley attempted to shame him: “The fact is that you didn’t have any. Isn’t that the fact? Isn’t it the fact that you just didn’t have a job?” Anastasia replied nonchalantly, “In those years, I don’t remember. I was around the racetrack occasionally. I don’t remember if I had any legitimate business or not.”83United States Senate, 81st Congress, Second Session, 82nd Congress, First Session, “Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce,” 676. Six years later, in 1957, Anastasia was murdered in a barber chair at Manhattan’s Park Sheraton hotel. By then, “Tough Tony” had taken over the Brooklyn waterfront.

 

Conclusion

Today, Pete Panto is a forgotten hero of the Italian working class in the US, but his case became a political lightning rod at the end of World War II and the early Cold War.84Though indispensable, Gerald Meyer, ed., The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism (New York: Praeger, 2003), contains only two brief mentions of Panto. The period leading up to and following Panto’s murder represented a high point of the democratic struggle for workers’ control of production. Because of patterns of campaign finance, patronage, and clientelism within the Democratic Party in Brooklyn during the 1930s and ’40s, as this article has demonstrated, the ILA’s rank-and-file radicals could not overthrow the gangster leadership.

Shipping and stevedoring companies favored mafiosi over workers control on the docks for the simple reason that, haunted by fears of Harry Bridges and the ILWU on the West Coast, they preferred the shape-up and casual labor to the union hiring hall. The shape-up gave them, as well as the criminal intermediaries of labor power, a monopoly on hiring, whereas a union hiring hall would have put that power in the hands of the longshoremen, thereby democratizing production.

Only federal law enforcement could have broken the ties that bound licit and illicit economies to public corruption of trade unions on the waterfront as well as city and state politics. The New Deal defused rank-and-file radicalism rather than empowering it, however, and neither Roosevelt nor the Justice Department had any intention of trying businessmen and Democratic politicians. The (mostly Republican) officials who took up the crusade at the state and municipal levels did so for electoral gain, not in order to foster justice. The organized Left proved ineffectual, if not self-defeating.

Contrary to the abstract, ahistorical theoretical premise that extra-economic coercion takes a back seat under mature industrial capitalism, this article has demonstrated that violence was integral to the exploitation of longshoremen’s labor power on the Brooklyn waterfront, in the labor process as well as in hiring and payment of wages and kickbacks. As Panto’s explanation of the problem to attorney Marcy Protter emphasized, this was equally true in the sphere of social reproduction in the neighborhood assembly district of Red Hook as it was on the docks. Alternatives to Tammany and business as usual, like Mayor LaGuardia and the American Labor Party (and to a lesser extent, the Communist Party), as well as the CIO (in contrast to the AFL), made radical politics and trade unionism so volatile—and so vital—in this period.

This article has sought to convey both by examining political economy in relation to culture and society in order to illuminate the social totality. It has analyzed class struggle-formation in relation to violence, law, criminal justice, kinship, labor markets, and state formation. It has shown how patterns of conflict, competition, and cooperation evolved among Brooklyn’s southern Italian longshoremen in the grip of domination by mafiosi who used the ILA to mediate labor power on behalf of capital. Corruption of the police and the court system, achieved through participation in Democratic electoral politics, as well as support from capitalist firms, was the key to the mafia’s power as an intermediary of labor power. As I have shown, another key was control of social reproduction in the neighborhood assembly district.

Through violent repression of radical democratic struggles for workers’ control of production, mafiosi cemented the rise of Brooklyn and New York as the world’s leading industrial capitalist port.

Following the US entry into World War II, the rank-and-file in Brooklyn’s six locals found themselves abandoned by erstwhile allies on the Left. In addition to funneling votes to Roosevelt’s reelection campaign, the CIO leadership dampened rank-and-file militancy, pushed Communists out of local leadership positions, and shifted the focus toward negotiated settlements and collective bargaining, and away from workers’ control of production and sit down strikes. After Germany invaded Russia in 1941, the CP signed on to the speedup, piecework, the no-strike pledge, and patriotic jingoism. The CP helped the CIO leadership turn the American Labor Party into a dependent appendage of the Democratic Party.85Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (New York: Verso, 1986), 80.

This article reminds us that during the 1930s and ’40s, through violent repression of radical democratic struggles for workers’ control of production, mafiosi cemented the rise of Brooklyn and New York as the world’s leading industrial capitalist port, as well as the Democratic Party’s enduring dominion. It provides the context for understanding those struggles, which were not in vain, as well as the partial victories achieved after World War II, themselves based on the memory of Pete Panto and struggles during the Popular Front.

  1. I would like to thank the late Marilyn Young and the participants of the Tamiment Library Seminar at New York University for their comments on an earlier draft. I am grateful to Tamiment Library for funding part of the research in this article through a postdoctoral I would also like to thank Kevin Boyle for comments and encouragement, and Steve Striffler for shrewd editorial advice.
  2. “Police Dig Up Yard, Fail to Find Panto,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 23, 1940, 1, 3; “Panto’s Ghost Walks,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 19, 1951, 22; “The Vault,” Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library. For the Camarda locals, see, Peter Brown, Robert Ensher, and George Berlstein, “Interim Report of Evidence Adduced by the State Crime Commission Relating to Six Brooklyn Locals of the International Longshoremen’s Association,” September 1952, New York State Crime Commission Records, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University, hereafter referred to as “Interim Report.”
  3. “Supreme Court: Kings County, in the Matter of Intercepting Communications Being Transmitted Over Main 5–2030,” Murder Inc., Box 1, Folder 5, Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, New York Municipal Archive.
  4. Ibid.
  5. George Morris, A Tale of Two Waterfronts (New York: Daily Worker, 1953), 12–13.
  6. “(#271- Boyle and Assigned),” Murder Inc., Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, Box 1, Folder 5, New York Municipal Archive.
  7. Testimony of Vincent Mannino, New York State Crime Commission (NYSCC), Public Hearings No. 5, December 18, 1952, vol. III, 1508, hereafter cited as NYSCC.
  8. Testimony of Constantino Scannavino, in ibid., Scannavino was Mangano’s brother-in-law and knew Mangano and Camarda from Palermo.
  9. Burton Turkus and Sid Feder, Murder Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), 470, 473.
  10. Sam Madell, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Collection (OH 01), Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University.
  11. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Beacon, 2007), 13. Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytical Foundations of Historical Materialism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Rediker borrows the term from British novelist Barry Unsworth, whose novel Sacred Hunger moves beyond abstraction in its depiction of the Atlantic slave trade.
  12. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 113–14
  13. See Daniel Bell, “The Racket-Ridden Longshoremen: The Web of Economics and Politics” in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s, revised ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1960), 175–210; Vernon Jensen, Hiring of Dock Workers: Employment Practices in the Ports of New York, Liverpool, London, Rotterdam, and Marseilles(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Jensen,Strife on the Waterfront: The Port of New York since 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). See also, Charles Brinton Barnes, The Longshoremen (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1915); and Clarence Larrowe, Shape-Up and Hiring Hall: A Comparison of Hiring Methods and Labor Relations on the New York and Seattle Waterfronts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955).
  14. Howard Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Calvin Winslow, ed., Waterfront Workers: New Perspectives on Race and Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Calvin Winslow, “Black Workers on the Waterfront, 1890–1920,” International Studies in Industrial Relations19 (2005), 1–29. William Mello, New York Longshoreman: Class and Power on the Docks (University Press of Florida, 2010).
  15. District Attorney of Kings County and the December 1949 Grand Jury, See also, Gordon Hostetter and Thomas Quinn Beasley, It’s a Racket! (Chicago: Les Quin Books, 1929); Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, Revised Edition (Peter Smith: Gloucester, MA, 1960 [1934]), 325–72; Harold Seidman, Labor Czars: A History of Industrial Racketeering (New York: Liveright Publishing, 1938); Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 338-341; John Hutchinson, The Imperfect Union: A History of Corruption in American Trade Unions (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, Inc., 1972), 65–109.
  16. Alan Block, East Side, West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930–1950 (New York: Transaction, 1983), 194. See also, David Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1890–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2009). On the etymology of the term “racketeer” and its evolution in the 1930s, see Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 254–55, 260, 265–66, 285.
  17. Block, 195; Sidney Lens, The Crisis of American Labor (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1959), 114. See also, District Attorney of Kings County and the December 1949 Grand Jury, “Report of Special Investigation, December 1949 to April 1954” (New York, 1955), 112–13.
  18. New York Times, October 18, 1930, 60; “Labor Aid for Lehman,” New York Times, November 4, 1932, 14.
  19. “Interim Report,” 48.
  20. “Labor Leader Slain by Pier Contractor,” New York Herald Tribune, October 3, 1941, 1A.
  21. “Workers Ruled at Tiny Hall,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 30, 1940, 10.
  22. Critchley, 157.
  23. “Head Off Freeing of 21 Suspects,” Boston Globe, December 7, 1928, 31.
  24. “Interim Report,” 56–57.
  25. Office of the District Attorney (Manhattan), Albert Anastasia Files, 1954–63, Accession #89–8, Box 4, New York Municipal Archive.
  26. With blonde hair and blue eyes, at five feet, five inches and weighing 125 pounds, “Little Augie” could often be spotted meeting with Tammany’s local representatives at his restaurant at 4th and Union streets, wearing a gray fedora, brown overcoat, and blue suit. He sold beer to all of Tammany’s clubhouses, ran a speakeasy at Carroll and Court streets, controlled the flour trucking, ice, and laundry businesses in the borough, and bridged the bootlegging and the gambling-narcotics eras. “Enright Claims Tammany Saves Court St ‘Joint,’” Brooklyn Eagle, October 3, 1929, 2; “‘Little Augie’ Pisano Lays Enright Charges to Fight over Italian Votes Here,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 8, 1929, 3; “Enright Names Politician Pals of Little Augie,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 29, 1931, 1, 2; “‘Augie’ Planning Reign of Terror at Polls, G.O.P. Says,” Brooklyn Eagle, November 29, 1929, 1, 3; “Bodyguard for Mike Reilly? Phooey! Little Augie Can’t Scare 8th’s Leader,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 1, 1933, 1; “Luke O’Reilly Opens Fire on Augie Pisano,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 25, 1933, 3; “Eighth AD voters Get Their Ballot Numbers,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 15, 1933, 6.
  27. “In Death Chair’s Shadow 7 Months, 2 Walk Out Free,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 10, 1922, 1.
  28. “Realty Man Victim in Long String of Italian Murders,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 29, 1923, 19.
  29. “Slaying Victim Called Member of Murder Ring,” New York Herald Tribune, July 2, 1942, 20.
  30. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Subject: Albert Anastasia,” 60–
  31. “Interim Report,” 34; Office of the District Attorney (Manhattan), Albert Anastasia Files, 1954–63, Accession #89–8, Box 4, New York City Municipal Archive.
  32. Henry Claflin Wells, “Urban Political Development and the Power of Local Groups: A Case Study of Politics in South Brooklyn, 1865–1935” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1986), 208–
  33. Brooklyn Eagle, August 9, 1932, 1.
  34. “Democratic Club Reception Oct. 31,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 23, 1932, 6: Brooklyn Eagle, September 9, 1932, 33; “Poor Families in 3rdD. Are Well Supplied by Political Organizations,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 25, 1932, 2.
  35. Brooklyn Eagle, February 19, 1915, 30; ibid., October 10, 1926 , 20; ibid., June 28, 1929, 14; ibid., December 13, 1935, 23.
  36. NYSCC, 1510–
  37. “Bennett to Speak at Red Hook Rally,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 11, 1938, 11; “Jack Dempsey Opens Tour for Lehman Here,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 27, 1938, 7.
  38. Winslow, 364–65.
  39. Ibid., 365.
  40. Nelson, Divided We Stand, 52. Even once the association was founded, because each member firm had one vote regardless of size, it did not function as a unified bloc, since large firms were unable to represent their interests as the general interests of the industry.
  41. “Special Investigating Squad: Memorandum of Certain Documents Found Among Personal Effects of Peter Panto, Missing Person”; “Record of Discharge from Italian Army”; “Identification Card”; “School Certificate,” Murder Inc., Box 1, Folder 5, Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, New York Municipal Archive.
  42. Madell, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Collection.
  43. “Worried Girl Pleads for Missing Fiancée,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 16, 1939, 11.
  44. “General Correspondence, Waterfront Killing of Pete Panto,” Vito Marcantonio Papers; “Panto Murder Solution Seen in New Break,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 28, 1940, 1, Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library; “Longshoremen Open Hall,” New York Times, October 8, 1940, 45; “Union Leader Beaten in Waterfront Riot,” PM, October 10, 1940, 1, International Longshoremen’s Association Reference Files, Box 4, fol. 11, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University; “Longshoremen Ask LaGuardia to Aid,” Baltimore Sun, November 8, 1940, 10.
  45. “Dock Rank and File Indorse LaGuardia,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 21, 1940, 8, Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library.
  46. “Peter Panto’s Body Identified in Kings,” New York Times, February 7, 1941, 40; “‘Who Paid for Panto’s Murder?’ Sign Asks,” Brooklyn Eagle, February 2, 1941, 1.
  47. Louis Adamic, “Harry Bridges Comes East,” The Nation, December 26, 1936, 753–54.
  48. Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront, 223.
  49. Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets, 93-\–
  50. Ibid., 123–24.
  51. “1200 Demand WPA Increase in Boro Rally,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 11, 1938, 5.
  52. Testimony of Marcy Protter, NYSCC,
  53. “Got Double Trimming in Gang Barbershops,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 27, 1940, 18.
  54. Testimony of Marcy Protter, NYSCC,
  55. Ibid., 1534; “Ears to the Ground,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 2, 1939, 11.
  56. Testimony of Vincent Mannino, NYSCC, 1526.
  57. “Re: Training in the Use of Firearms at a Farm in Newburgh, N.Y.” Murder Inc., Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, Box 1, Folder 5, New York Municipal Archive.
  58. “Report Re: Albert Anastasio (B–57 939),” Murder Inc., Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, Box 1, Folder 5, New York Municipal Archive.
  59. Testimony from Marcy Protter, NYSCC, 1533–40; “Panto Investigation Bungled by the Police, Citizens Charge,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 27, 1940, 1, 18; “Panto Murder Solution Seen In New Break,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 28, 1940, 1, 8; “Panto Fiancée Feared on Gang’s Death List,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 29, 1940, 1.
  60. “2 Waterfront Thugs Hunted in Panto Case,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 2, 1940, 1.
  61. “Missing Man is Key Figure in Dock Probe,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 25, 1940, 1.
  62. “Fugitive Named Racket Boss,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 1, 1940, 1; “Boro Dock Racket Boss in Italy, O’Dwyer Learns,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 2, 1940, 1, 20; “City May Post Reward for Fugitive Adonis,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 7, 1940, 1.
  63. “More Work, Less Jobs Paradox of the Docks,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 14, 1940, 7.
  64. “O’Dwyer Probes Beating of Panto’s Successor in Union,” Brooklyn Eagle, June 13, 1940, 1.
  65. “Panto Memorial Quiet as Threats Fizzle Out,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 20, 1940, 9.
  66. “General Correspondence, Waterfront Killing of Pete Panto,” Vito Marcantonio Papers.
  67. “Red Hook Longshoremen Threaten Separate Action,” New York Herald Tribune, September 20, 1940, 30.
  68. “Longshoremen Open Hall,” New York Times, October 8, 1940, 45; “O’Dwyer Probes Riot that Balked New Dock Union,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 10, 1940, 1, 3; “Union Leader Beaten in Waterfront Riot,” PM, October 10, 1940, 2.
  69. “Anastasia, Wanted by O’Dwyer, Is Hunted by Amen in Kidnapping,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 3, 1940, 1.
  70. “Seek Assailant of Union Head,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 11, 1940, 20.
  71. “General Correspondence, Waterfront Killing of Pete Panto,” Vito Marcantonio Papers.
  72. “Mayor Gets Plea to Heal Rift on Boro Waterfront,” Brooklyn Eagle, November 8, 1940, 2; “Longshoremen Ask LaGuardia to Aid,” Baltimore Sun, November 8, 1940, 10.
  73. “Thousands Mourn as Dock Workers Bury Pete Panto,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 19, 1941, 1-2.
  74. Testimony of Marcy Protter, NYSCC, 1541-43.
  75. “Romeo Slain for Gang Defiance Police Declare,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 2, 1942, 1.
  76. “Slaying Victim Called Member of Murder Ring,” New York Herald Tribune, July 2, 1942, 20; “Slaying Linked to Brooklyn Gang,” New York Times, July 2, 1942, 23; “Slain Man Thought Boro Racketeer,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 1, 1942, 1, 2.
  77. “Slain Man Thought Boro Racketeer,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 1, 1942, 2.
  78. “Union Man’s 2 Predecessors Slain; He Can’t Guess His Fate,” Brooklyn Eagle, February 10, 1932, 3; “Waterfront Knows Power of Boro Crime Overlords,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 14, 1940, 7.
  79. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Subject: Albert Anastasia,” 14; “Edward J. Divers Testimony: Anastasia Case,” Murder Inc., Series II: District Attorney’s Subject Files, Box 1, Folder 5, New York Municipal Archive.
  80. Kimeldorf, 152–53.
  81. Testimony of Vincent Mannino, NYSCC,
  82. “Abstract of Beldock Jury’s Presentment,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 30, 1945, 5; “O’Dwyer Camp Hits Back at Grand Jury,” ibid., 1, 9; “Abstract of Beldock Jury’s Presentment,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 21, 1945, 8, 13; “Seek Further Probe of O’Dwyer Charges,” ibid., 1, 13. Block, 113–
  83. United States Senate, 81st Congress, Second Session, 82nd Congress, First Session, “Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce,” 676.
  84. Though indispensable, Gerald Meyer, ed., The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism (New York: Praeger, 2003), contains only two brief mentions of Panto.
  85. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (New York: Verso, 1986), 80.
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An examination of working class struggle on the Brooklyn waterfront during the Popular Front and World War II.

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