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Hiring Bosses. The stevedore companies also paid to get on good terms with the hiring bosses on the piers. The hiring boss runs a dockside institution known as the "shape-up," a ragged morning muster of all the local union longshoremen who want to work. Since there are usually more men than jobs, the boss's power is absolute: he can demand kickbacks, hire & fire at will, dispense I.L.A. union cards at cut-rate initiation fees, and threaten any stevedoring company with a quick strike. Under the union contract, the hiring boss is a foreman appointed by the companies themselves. But he is actually the free & unhampered agent of the local I.L.A. czar.
In 1950 Jarka Corp. wanted to work a new pier. The word was passed for Jarka to hire a pier boss named Tony Anastasio, brother of Murder, Inc.'s lord high executioner, Albert Anastasia.* When Jarka refused to stand for the shakedown, Anastasio's other piers went on strike. Jarka complained to Joe Ryan, and Joe blandly "recommended" Anastasio. Anastasio was hired.
But this sort of thing was not entirely distasteful to some firms. Jarka Vice President Captain Douglas Yates put it succinctly when he explained why he hired one Albert Ackalitis, a mobster with a police record as long as a towline. "The guiding thought in hiring Ackalitis," said Captain Yates, "frankly, was to have on that pier some order and discipline, as I call it, amongst the men."
Orderly Racketeering. Such order is inevitably made for disciplined racketeering. One stevedoring superintendent testified that the Grace Line paid off Timmy O'Mara, a Sing Sing alumnus (burglary) and boss loader on the North River, by carrying him on the payroll under a phony name. O'Mara never did a lick of work, but he netted $24,130 in five years. Portly, white-haired Jones Devlin, the general manager of the powerful U.S. Lines (S.S. United States, America), related with bored weariness how the U.S. Lines abandoned one of its midtown piers rather than try to cope with organized pilferage. Asked Counsel Kiendl: "Were there ten tons of steel stolen from that pier?" Replied Devlin: "That was the most remarkable case of pilferage."
The Exception. In its first week of public hearings, the Crime Commission got a good look at four live I.L.A. operators. Big Frank Russo, a pier boss, admitted that he had received $1,400—plus an unspecified amount of "vacation money." Sullen, hulking Fred Marino testified that he was elected shop steward of local 327, denied earlier testimony that he had demanded that the Luckenbach Lines bar all cops and FBI agents from his pier. Anthony Delmar, Brooklyn pier boss, was sworn in while holding up his left hand, contributed little that was either sinister or helpful. Jerry Anastasio, one of the notorious brothers, spent 14 minutes on the stand. He sucked his tongue, picked his nose, blew into his hands, spat into his handkerchief and belched—but the only words he would utter were his name.