How The Mob Took Over The Docks– Through Mafia Movies

In On the Waterfront, Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy pushes into the morning shape-up on a Hoboken pier, where the hiring boss decides who works and who goes home with nothing. On the real piers of the Port of New York, the Waterfront Commission’s own archive says the hiring foreman, “often an ex-felon with a long criminal record,” picked the men willing to kick back part of their wages. This video sets the film beside the Crime Commission and Senate findings, the Hintz murder trial and the 1953 waterfront compact, and rules on each claim: documented, disputed, or omitted.

Lee J. Cobb’s Johnny Friendly gives the racket one face. The record gives it a whole union, the International Longshoremen’s Association under its president for life, Joseph P. Ryan, with Irish crews on the Manhattan West Side and Anthony Anastasio’s Local 1814 in Brooklyn. Talking had a price there too: hiring boss Andy Hintz was shot six times on the Grove Street stairs in January 1947 and named his killers from a hospital bed, and Brooklyn organizer Pete Panto vanished in 1939.

Karl Malden’s Father Barry preaches over a dead longshoreman in the hold, and the speech sounds like Hollywood. Much of it came from a real Jesuit, Father John Corridan, who gave it in Jersey City in 1948. The film ends with the men following Terry to work; the record ends with two states, Congress and the Supreme Court. If you like the record next to the film, one mob movie against its own paperwork every week, subscribe.

Chapters:
0:00 Andy Hintz shot on the Grove Street stairs
0:35 The shape-up: picked at the pier head
1:14 Kickbacks, loan sharks and the public loader
2:06 On the Waterfront’s morning hire in Hoboken
3:09 Johnny Friendly vs the ILA and Joseph P. Ryan
4:15 The Crime Commission and the Senate findings
5:34 Cockeye Dunn, Eddie McGrath and Brooklyn’s Local 1814
6:31 Ruling: Johnny Friendly is a composite
7:12 Joey Doyle and the price of talking
8:05 Hintz names his killers
9:10 The Dunn trial and Sing Sing
10:10 Pete Panto disappears
10:58 Murder, Inc. and The Hook
12:28 Malcolm Johnson’s Crime on the Waterfront
12:59 Father John Corridan
13:43 Father Barry’s sermon in the hold
14:15 The real speech: Jersey City, 1948
15:05 Kazan, HUAC and The Hook
15:37 The 1953 Waterfront Commission compact
16:24 The AFL throws out the ILA
16:48 The dockworkers vote for the ILA anyway
17:34 The film’s ending and eight Oscars
18:22 De Veau v. Braisted, 1960
19:31 New Jersey walks away: 2018 to 2023
20:14 “I coulda been a contender”
20:32 The verdict: On the Waterfront vs the record