The New Yorker: The Docks of New York
The Docks of New York
Issue of 2006-06-19
Posted 2006-06-12
This week in the magazine, William Finnegan writes about mobsters, terrorists, and the port-security threat. Here, with Amy Davidson, he discusses the article.
AMY DAVIDSON: You write this week about the Mob, the terror threat, and the docks of New York and New Jersey. How are those tied together?
WILLIAM FINNEGAN: Organized crime, meaning La Cosa Nostra and criminal syndicates such as the Colombian drug cartels, operate extensively and very profitably in and around the Port of New York and New Jersey. This suggests a significant degree of corruption, or at least very ineffective law enforcement. The government has been making a lot of noise lately about improving port security in the face of the international terrorist threat. I was curious about how much progress has actually been made, particularly in a place like New York Harbor, where the authorities have ostensibly been making serious efforts for fifty years or more to chase organized crime off the docks, with little apparent success. I was also curious about the awful possibility that terrorists planning an attack might be able to use the criminal networks already active in the port to further their plans.
How real is Mob control of the docks?
It depends who you ask, but history makes it clear that New York Harbor has been thoroughly “mobbed up” for more than a century. Before La Cosa Nostra began to consolidate its control, in the thirties, the harbor was run by Irish mobs. These days, the rough division of territory has the Genovese crime family controlling the New Jersey side of the port and the Gambino family running the New York side. I’d say the Mob’s presence on the docks is less visible, more subtle, than in the bad old days, when wiseguys supposedly shot anyone who looked at them sideways on the piers. There’s more “paper stealing” now—accounting fraud and looting of union health and pension funds, along with the old standard scams like no-show jobs and bribes paid by waterfront employers in exchange for “labor peace.” The Mob can still play rough, of course. Last fall, two top officials of the longshoremen’s union and one Genovese crime-family captain from Newark were on trial together in Brooklyn federal court, charged with conspiracy to commit extortion and fraud. In the middle of the trial, the Mob guy, Lawrence Ricci, disappeared. Everybody, including his lawyer and his family, seemed to assume that he had been killed. The trial continued, and all three defendants were eventually acquitted. A few weeks after the verdict, Ricci’s body was found in the trunk of a car parked behind a diner in Union, N.J. I still haven’t heard a good explanation for why he was murdered.
Can a port be considered secure if the Mob has a strong presence in it?
In a word, no. But the Port of New York and New Jersey is unique in the United States. With the partial exception of Miami, where a number of mobsters moved after a series of prosecutions in New York in the seventies, this is really the only port in the country with a serious Mob problem. Which is not to say that any large port can ever be made entirely secure. Ports are sprawling places, both physically and commercially, with many ways in and out, both on the land side and on the water side, and cargo and people coming and going all the time. International shipping is an open system. The vulnerabilities are essentially endless. But obviously, with all the security headaches already present in any large port, the last thing you want is a powerful criminal syndicate operating on the docks, and the corruption that inevitably comes with that. Also, New York’s is not just any port; it’s the largest by far on the East Coast. Something like forty million people live within a fifty-mile radius of the port. Any disaster, such as a terrorist attack, that closed New York Harbor would have cascading economic effects that are incalculable.
You point out that many Americans have an image of the old docks that comes from the Elia Kazan film “On the Waterfront,” from 1954. How true to life was that, and what has changed since it was made?
The film was a melodrama, with a triumphant-rank-and-file ending, and in that sense it was fantasy. On the other hand, it was based on a great series of investigative articles by Malcolm Johnson that had appeared in the New York Sun in the late forties, and won a Pulitzer Prize, and the film’s depiction of the waterfront rackets and the victimization of longshoremen by the Mob, often through their own union, was highly accurate. The film led more or less directly to some significant reforms, including the abolition of the “shape-up”—the old practice, vividly dramatized in the movie, of assembling desperate longshoremen at the foot of the pier each morning and handing out jobs for the day in return for kickbacks and other favors. The job has more dignity and basic labor protections now, and the pay is much, much better. The work itself has changed, too. It’s less dangerous, less physically strenuous, as a result of automation. The Mob is still around, of course, but their henchmen on the docks are less likely to “drop a load” on a longshoreman who has dared to cross them, making a hit look like an industrial accident. These days, a Mob-connected pier foreman or hiring agent might punish a troublemaker just by failing to call him for a job that’s rightfully his, making it hard for him to earn a living. People are still afraid, though, and serious dissidents—workers actively trying to reduce Mob influence in their unions, say—still need a lot of courage. They’re certainly courting trouble.
One person you write about is Tom Hanley, a veteran longshoreman. What did you learn from him?
How bad it used to be, back when personnel changes at the union local, for instance, routinely involved horrendous violence, including murder. How the whole question of Mob influence on the waterfront often isn’t black-and-white. I spent a lot of time looking at Hanley’s union local, 1588, in Bayonne, New Jersey. It’s currently under government trusteeship, imposed by a federal judge, because of its long, blatant involvement with organized crime. As a result, there were clean elections for union posts, in which Hanley, who, on the pier where he works, is known for his hostility to organized crime, was elected shop steward. He told me it was the first election he’d seen at the local for that post in his five decades on the docks. But the climate of fear and intimidation on the docks doesn’t go away just because the Feds ride into town. The vast majority of dockworkers are honest, hardworking people who would dearly love to see organized crime chased off the waterfront for good. But it’s never happened, and there’s really no reason to believe that it will anytime soon.
One case that you describe is what the New York City Police Department called the Garment District Plot, which involved Al Qaeda, not the Mob. What happened in that case?
In early 2003, a young Pakistani man, Uzair Paracha, was introduced to three Al Qaeda operatives in Karachi. The Al Qaeda men, who included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, said that they wanted to invest in Paracha’s family’s import-export firm, which had an office in the garment district. Uzair Paracha had grown up partly in New York City, and had a green card. He wasn’t particularly interested in jihad, but he was interested in the Al Qaeda men’s money. So he agreed to help one of them, Wajid Khan, establish a fictitious presence in the U.S. for immigration purposes. Meanwhile, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was seized in Pakistan, and he soon gave up Paracha’s name to interrogators. Paracha was arrested in the garment district in March, 2003. The most interesting aspect of the case, though, is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reportedly told interrogators that his interest in the Parachas’ business—they primarily exported apparel to the U.S.—stemmed from his interest in smuggling explosives into the country in shipping containers. It’s doubly interesting, I think, because one of the Parachas’ customers was Kmart. Now, Kmart is one of this country’s largest importers, and, as such, qualifies, under one of the container-security programs that helps U.S. Customs decide which containers to inspect, as a “trusted shipper,” whose containers normally pass through a “green lane” in which very few shipments are delayed for extra inspection. In other words, Al Qaeda was poised to exploit this green lane in order to smuggle weapons into the United States.
You write that the basic shipping container is sometimes referred to as “the poor man’s ICBM.”
Ninety per cent of international cargo today travels by the basic intermodal container—a steel box, usually eight feet by eight feet by forty feet, that can go directly from ship to truck to railcar. More than eleven million containers arrive in the U.S. each year. If a terrorist group wanted to get a weapon of mass destruction into this country, sticking it in a container would be an obvious way to do it. And unless you wanted to bring world trade, and the world economy, to a screeching halt, it’s impossible to open every container and inspect its contents. So U.S. Customs and Border Protection relies on a variety of programs and protocols to select certain incoming containers for inspection—either at the foreign port where they are being loaded or after they arrive here. Still, less than seven per cent of all containers are inspected, and the great majority of these are simply X-rayed, not opened. Of the containers selected for extra inspection, less than two per cent are actually opened and physically inspected. Slightly more than half of all arriving containers now pass through “radiation portals” as they leave American ports, and that number is expected to rise. The problem with that is the phenomenal rate of false hits—it seems that all sorts of things, including pottery and kitty litter, emit radiation at detectable levels—and the discouraging likelihood that an actual nuclear weapon or a so-called “dirty bomb,” properly packed in a lead sheath, would pass through the radiation detectors undetected.
A few months ago, there was a great deal of controversy about a Dubai company taking over the management of several American ports, including Newark’s, in New York Harbor. How much does it matter if foreign companies control our ports?
Foreign-owned corporations run most of the shipping terminals in the United States. That doesn’t mean that the people working at U.S. terminals are all foreigners—quite the contrary—and I’ve never heard of a case in which a U.S. terminal’s foreign owners were accused of any activity, criminal or otherwise, that threatened U.S. national interests. Obviously, it was the fact that Dubai Ports World is an Arab-owned company that set off alarms in the United States. I actually thought the security review of the deal conducted by the federal government sounded cursory and inadequate. But the controversy was not our finest political hour, since xenophobia seemed to be its leading element.
Why can’t American companies simply step in?
International shipping is a vertically integrated industry. The big steamship lines tend to own large logistics businesses as well as operating their own marine terminals. Also, there is no major American shipping line. The last one was sold to a Singapore company in 1997. So there is really no American player in the global big leagues in this field. There are, of course, American terminal operators—the biggest is based in Seattle—but none with the capacity to take over a great many terminals if, for instance, Congress were to decide that foreign companies could no longer be allowed to operate our marine terminals. Such a decision would close a lot of ports and throw international shipping into chaos. It won’t happen.
You write that some American companies, like Wal-Mart, are actually not happy about some port-security measures. Why not?
There is a built-in tension between commerce and security. Big importers (Wal-Mart is by far the largest American importer), shipping lines, and terminal operators all fear the extra costs involved in strengthening port security. Wal-Mart, working through a Washington lobby that it dominates, has worked hard and successfully to defeat a series of post-9/11 legislative proposals to increase container and port security.
You mention that, while longshoremen are unionized, other port workers, like truckers, are not. Is this a labor issue or a port-security issue?
It’s both. Port trucking was deregulated in the nineteen-eighties. It’s become a chaotic industry, with drivers who are, for the most part, badly paid, overworked, and uninsured, with no safety training, professional licensing, or benefits. It’s a key industry reserved, effectively, for the economically desperate. Most of the truckers at the major ports are Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented. That’s a labor problem. Then, a Department of Homeland Security study, leaked in March, took a close look at nine thousand truckers working in the Port of New York and New Jersey. All had been issued identification cards that gave them access to every area of the port. What D.H.S. found was that nearly half the drivers had criminal records, and that more than five hundred were carrying phony drivers’ licenses. The police, in other words, had no idea who many of the drivers actually were. That’s a port-security problem.
You also visited a very different place—the Scrap. A federal official told you that if he wanted to smuggle a nuclear device into the country, he’d do it through the Scrap. What did you find there?
The Scrap is a marine terminal in Jersey City that ships scrap metal to recyclers. It’s kind of a hellish place, very loud and dirty, and it looks a bit like it’s been through a cataclysmic explosion. For some obscure reason, the people who work there don’t need to go through the criminal-background checks that most workers in and around New York Harbor do, so it’s known as a place where rough characters can get jobs. I don’t actually think it’s at all likely that a smuggled nuclear weapon—what the Coast Guard calls a “low-probability, high-consequence event”—would come through the Scrap pier. But it is a good example of the gaps in security that can presumably be found somewhere, if not in many places, in every port.
Link to Article Source
Issue of 2006-06-19
Posted 2006-06-12
This week in the magazine, William Finnegan writes about mobsters, terrorists, and the port-security threat. Here, with Amy Davidson, he discusses the article.
AMY DAVIDSON: You write this week about the Mob, the terror threat, and the docks of New York and New Jersey. How are those tied together?
WILLIAM FINNEGAN: Organized crime, meaning La Cosa Nostra and criminal syndicates such as the Colombian drug cartels, operate extensively and very profitably in and around the Port of New York and New Jersey. This suggests a significant degree of corruption, or at least very ineffective law enforcement. The government has been making a lot of noise lately about improving port security in the face of the international terrorist threat. I was curious about how much progress has actually been made, particularly in a place like New York Harbor, where the authorities have ostensibly been making serious efforts for fifty years or more to chase organized crime off the docks, with little apparent success. I was also curious about the awful possibility that terrorists planning an attack might be able to use the criminal networks already active in the port to further their plans.
How real is Mob control of the docks?
It depends who you ask, but history makes it clear that New York Harbor has been thoroughly “mobbed up” for more than a century. Before La Cosa Nostra began to consolidate its control, in the thirties, the harbor was run by Irish mobs. These days, the rough division of territory has the Genovese crime family controlling the New Jersey side of the port and the Gambino family running the New York side. I’d say the Mob’s presence on the docks is less visible, more subtle, than in the bad old days, when wiseguys supposedly shot anyone who looked at them sideways on the piers. There’s more “paper stealing” now—accounting fraud and looting of union health and pension funds, along with the old standard scams like no-show jobs and bribes paid by waterfront employers in exchange for “labor peace.” The Mob can still play rough, of course. Last fall, two top officials of the longshoremen’s union and one Genovese crime-family captain from Newark were on trial together in Brooklyn federal court, charged with conspiracy to commit extortion and fraud. In the middle of the trial, the Mob guy, Lawrence Ricci, disappeared. Everybody, including his lawyer and his family, seemed to assume that he had been killed. The trial continued, and all three defendants were eventually acquitted. A few weeks after the verdict, Ricci’s body was found in the trunk of a car parked behind a diner in Union, N.J. I still haven’t heard a good explanation for why he was murdered.
Can a port be considered secure if the Mob has a strong presence in it?
In a word, no. But the Port of New York and New Jersey is unique in the United States. With the partial exception of Miami, where a number of mobsters moved after a series of prosecutions in New York in the seventies, this is really the only port in the country with a serious Mob problem. Which is not to say that any large port can ever be made entirely secure. Ports are sprawling places, both physically and commercially, with many ways in and out, both on the land side and on the water side, and cargo and people coming and going all the time. International shipping is an open system. The vulnerabilities are essentially endless. But obviously, with all the security headaches already present in any large port, the last thing you want is a powerful criminal syndicate operating on the docks, and the corruption that inevitably comes with that. Also, New York’s is not just any port; it’s the largest by far on the East Coast. Something like forty million people live within a fifty-mile radius of the port. Any disaster, such as a terrorist attack, that closed New York Harbor would have cascading economic effects that are incalculable.
You point out that many Americans have an image of the old docks that comes from the Elia Kazan film “On the Waterfront,” from 1954. How true to life was that, and what has changed since it was made?
The film was a melodrama, with a triumphant-rank-and-file ending, and in that sense it was fantasy. On the other hand, it was based on a great series of investigative articles by Malcolm Johnson that had appeared in the New York Sun in the late forties, and won a Pulitzer Prize, and the film’s depiction of the waterfront rackets and the victimization of longshoremen by the Mob, often through their own union, was highly accurate. The film led more or less directly to some significant reforms, including the abolition of the “shape-up”—the old practice, vividly dramatized in the movie, of assembling desperate longshoremen at the foot of the pier each morning and handing out jobs for the day in return for kickbacks and other favors. The job has more dignity and basic labor protections now, and the pay is much, much better. The work itself has changed, too. It’s less dangerous, less physically strenuous, as a result of automation. The Mob is still around, of course, but their henchmen on the docks are less likely to “drop a load” on a longshoreman who has dared to cross them, making a hit look like an industrial accident. These days, a Mob-connected pier foreman or hiring agent might punish a troublemaker just by failing to call him for a job that’s rightfully his, making it hard for him to earn a living. People are still afraid, though, and serious dissidents—workers actively trying to reduce Mob influence in their unions, say—still need a lot of courage. They’re certainly courting trouble.
One person you write about is Tom Hanley, a veteran longshoreman. What did you learn from him?
How bad it used to be, back when personnel changes at the union local, for instance, routinely involved horrendous violence, including murder. How the whole question of Mob influence on the waterfront often isn’t black-and-white. I spent a lot of time looking at Hanley’s union local, 1588, in Bayonne, New Jersey. It’s currently under government trusteeship, imposed by a federal judge, because of its long, blatant involvement with organized crime. As a result, there were clean elections for union posts, in which Hanley, who, on the pier where he works, is known for his hostility to organized crime, was elected shop steward. He told me it was the first election he’d seen at the local for that post in his five decades on the docks. But the climate of fear and intimidation on the docks doesn’t go away just because the Feds ride into town. The vast majority of dockworkers are honest, hardworking people who would dearly love to see organized crime chased off the waterfront for good. But it’s never happened, and there’s really no reason to believe that it will anytime soon.
One case that you describe is what the New York City Police Department called the Garment District Plot, which involved Al Qaeda, not the Mob. What happened in that case?
In early 2003, a young Pakistani man, Uzair Paracha, was introduced to three Al Qaeda operatives in Karachi. The Al Qaeda men, who included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, said that they wanted to invest in Paracha’s family’s import-export firm, which had an office in the garment district. Uzair Paracha had grown up partly in New York City, and had a green card. He wasn’t particularly interested in jihad, but he was interested in the Al Qaeda men’s money. So he agreed to help one of them, Wajid Khan, establish a fictitious presence in the U.S. for immigration purposes. Meanwhile, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was seized in Pakistan, and he soon gave up Paracha’s name to interrogators. Paracha was arrested in the garment district in March, 2003. The most interesting aspect of the case, though, is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reportedly told interrogators that his interest in the Parachas’ business—they primarily exported apparel to the U.S.—stemmed from his interest in smuggling explosives into the country in shipping containers. It’s doubly interesting, I think, because one of the Parachas’ customers was Kmart. Now, Kmart is one of this country’s largest importers, and, as such, qualifies, under one of the container-security programs that helps U.S. Customs decide which containers to inspect, as a “trusted shipper,” whose containers normally pass through a “green lane” in which very few shipments are delayed for extra inspection. In other words, Al Qaeda was poised to exploit this green lane in order to smuggle weapons into the United States.
You write that the basic shipping container is sometimes referred to as “the poor man’s ICBM.”
Ninety per cent of international cargo today travels by the basic intermodal container—a steel box, usually eight feet by eight feet by forty feet, that can go directly from ship to truck to railcar. More than eleven million containers arrive in the U.S. each year. If a terrorist group wanted to get a weapon of mass destruction into this country, sticking it in a container would be an obvious way to do it. And unless you wanted to bring world trade, and the world economy, to a screeching halt, it’s impossible to open every container and inspect its contents. So U.S. Customs and Border Protection relies on a variety of programs and protocols to select certain incoming containers for inspection—either at the foreign port where they are being loaded or after they arrive here. Still, less than seven per cent of all containers are inspected, and the great majority of these are simply X-rayed, not opened. Of the containers selected for extra inspection, less than two per cent are actually opened and physically inspected. Slightly more than half of all arriving containers now pass through “radiation portals” as they leave American ports, and that number is expected to rise. The problem with that is the phenomenal rate of false hits—it seems that all sorts of things, including pottery and kitty litter, emit radiation at detectable levels—and the discouraging likelihood that an actual nuclear weapon or a so-called “dirty bomb,” properly packed in a lead sheath, would pass through the radiation detectors undetected.
A few months ago, there was a great deal of controversy about a Dubai company taking over the management of several American ports, including Newark’s, in New York Harbor. How much does it matter if foreign companies control our ports?
Foreign-owned corporations run most of the shipping terminals in the United States. That doesn’t mean that the people working at U.S. terminals are all foreigners—quite the contrary—and I’ve never heard of a case in which a U.S. terminal’s foreign owners were accused of any activity, criminal or otherwise, that threatened U.S. national interests. Obviously, it was the fact that Dubai Ports World is an Arab-owned company that set off alarms in the United States. I actually thought the security review of the deal conducted by the federal government sounded cursory and inadequate. But the controversy was not our finest political hour, since xenophobia seemed to be its leading element.
Why can’t American companies simply step in?
International shipping is a vertically integrated industry. The big steamship lines tend to own large logistics businesses as well as operating their own marine terminals. Also, there is no major American shipping line. The last one was sold to a Singapore company in 1997. So there is really no American player in the global big leagues in this field. There are, of course, American terminal operators—the biggest is based in Seattle—but none with the capacity to take over a great many terminals if, for instance, Congress were to decide that foreign companies could no longer be allowed to operate our marine terminals. Such a decision would close a lot of ports and throw international shipping into chaos. It won’t happen.
You write that some American companies, like Wal-Mart, are actually not happy about some port-security measures. Why not?
There is a built-in tension between commerce and security. Big importers (Wal-Mart is by far the largest American importer), shipping lines, and terminal operators all fear the extra costs involved in strengthening port security. Wal-Mart, working through a Washington lobby that it dominates, has worked hard and successfully to defeat a series of post-9/11 legislative proposals to increase container and port security.
You mention that, while longshoremen are unionized, other port workers, like truckers, are not. Is this a labor issue or a port-security issue?
It’s both. Port trucking was deregulated in the nineteen-eighties. It’s become a chaotic industry, with drivers who are, for the most part, badly paid, overworked, and uninsured, with no safety training, professional licensing, or benefits. It’s a key industry reserved, effectively, for the economically desperate. Most of the truckers at the major ports are Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented. That’s a labor problem. Then, a Department of Homeland Security study, leaked in March, took a close look at nine thousand truckers working in the Port of New York and New Jersey. All had been issued identification cards that gave them access to every area of the port. What D.H.S. found was that nearly half the drivers had criminal records, and that more than five hundred were carrying phony drivers’ licenses. The police, in other words, had no idea who many of the drivers actually were. That’s a port-security problem.
You also visited a very different place—the Scrap. A federal official told you that if he wanted to smuggle a nuclear device into the country, he’d do it through the Scrap. What did you find there?
The Scrap is a marine terminal in Jersey City that ships scrap metal to recyclers. It’s kind of a hellish place, very loud and dirty, and it looks a bit like it’s been through a cataclysmic explosion. For some obscure reason, the people who work there don’t need to go through the criminal-background checks that most workers in and around New York Harbor do, so it’s known as a place where rough characters can get jobs. I don’t actually think it’s at all likely that a smuggled nuclear weapon—what the Coast Guard calls a “low-probability, high-consequence event”—would come through the Scrap pier. But it is a good example of the gaps in security that can presumably be found somewhere, if not in many places, in every port.
Link to Article Source
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on Tuesday, June 13, 2006 at 10:16.
