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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.