The Supreme Court next week weighs the fate of the Waterfront Commission, formed after the Sun’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on crime on the docks. The Solicitor General of America is joining the fight over whether corruption or the rule of law will prevail at New York Harbor. Welcome to the fray, we say, even if the general is coming in on the side of New Jersey, which wants to scuttle the agency. It’s the Biden administration against The New York Sun.
Ending the Waterfront Commission — an interstate compact of New Jersey and New York — would be a sop by Mr. Biden to the longshoremen’s union, which has lathered the Garden State with campaign contributions and other support. Termination would be a blow to crime-fighting in a harbor that one ex-commissioner, Ronald Goldstock, calls “the last bastion of organized crime control of an industry.”
It’s hard to imagine that the “Big Guy” of Hunter Biden’s operations is losing much sleep over the need for honest dealings on our docks. Yet the Biden administration’s stance invites a Solomonic solution. That would be if the Nine allow New Jersey to quit the Waterfront Commission while the commission remains free to carry on with one member, New York, and with full policing authority on the docks on both sides of the Hudson.
The more one thinks of it, getting New Jersey out of the way could then free up the Empire State to clean up what the commission couldn’t while the Garden State was a member. New Jersey clearly has been dismayed by the commission’s “renewed vigor, competence, and integrity,” the commission itself says in a court filing. That dismay has obtained ever since the commission was reformed after a shakeup nearly 15 years ago.
The “corrupt and criminal” stand to gain without the commission, it says. Yet Mr. Biden — “the most pro-union President” if he says so himself — seems prepared to overlook the history of the longshoremen and of corruption and organized crime infiltration, as the commission itself observes. The Daily News reckons that closing the commission would mean “the gangsters win and take over the docks” as in “the bad old days.”
The Sun brought malfeasance on the docks into public view in 1948, with a 24-part exposé of criminality on the waterfront. A front-page headline sounded the alarm — “Mobsters, Linked to Vast International Crime Syndicate, Rule New York Piers by Terror.” The reporting, by Malcolm Johnson (father of Haynes Johnson), noted that the “lawlessness and racketeering” was “nothing new” and marked that as “part of this story.”
City and state officials had turned a blind eye to the widespread corruption, Johnson explained: “for many years little or nothing has been done to bring law and order” to the docks. Johnson reported that “the key to the control by the water front criminals is through the unions.” He added that “mobsters,” working “through the union,” were “able to control all key jobs on the piers,” while “rackets operate without interference.”
Under the headline “Meet the Boys,” the Sun’s reporting featured mug shots of union officials like a West side dock boss, John “Cockeye” Dunn, who happened to be on death row at the time for murdering an uncooperative “hiring boss” on Pier 51. The docks were run “with an iron hand” by gangs, Johnson reported, with their rule “enforced by killers and strong-arm squads.” The Sun’s reporting, day after day, caused a sensation in the city.
“You are 100 per cent right,” one dock laborer wrote to the Sun. “An honest man has a hard time keeping a job on the water front today.” An importer of “fine woolen goods” wrote to praise the Sun’s “courage to spotlight a deplorable situation.” The outrage sparked the formation of the Waterfront Commission to clean up the skulduggery. By and large, it has worked. So if New Jersey wants to quit, why not let New York police Jersey’s docks?
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