Life on the Brooklyn Waterfront: The Death of Pete Panto

I have  lived most of my professional life in Brooklyn, often writing about its history, books, and sports from boxing to handball. While I have always admired the New York harbor, I came to the story of its violent past only about six years ago when I learned that the famous Brando movie, On the Waterfront, was originally based on the true heroics of a New York Sun reporter named Mike Johnson. He'd uncovered which gangsters controlled which New York piers and dared to run it front-page for 24 days in 1948. His series caused a national scandal and earned him death threats and the Pulitzer Prize. The following excerpt, about an earlier reformer Johnson admired, the Brooklyn longshore leader Peter Panto, sets the scene of the  grafty racketeers' waterfront the longshoremen endured. Panto led a brief revolt against this corrupt system, displeasing, among others, Murder Inc.'s Albert Anastasia, and he vanished near the Navy Yard in July 1939. Panto, a Saint to many of the dockworkers since his murder, deserves his own book. As one of the old guys told me reverently, "Peter Panto you only talk about with your family."

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The pier where Pietro Panto worked jutted into the brackish current of the East River just upstream from the cabled span of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking across to the ferry sheds and the bottom of Manhattan. On the afternoon of Friday, July 14th 1939 Pete Panto left the Moore-Mack pier where he served as hiring foreman at five o’clock and headed home to his rooming house near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. An affable, dark-eyed young man in work clothes and a fedora, he was wiry but strong, a black mustache above his easy smile that sometimes showed a gap in his teeth.  In his room on North Eliott Place he was shaving for a date later that evening with his fiancée, Alice Maffia, when her younger brother Michael came to the room with word that Panto had a telephone call at the corner cigar store. Panto wiped his face and made his way downstairs, but when he returned from his conversation his mood had darkened. He seemed uncharacteristically spooked as he told Michael he would be meeting “two tough mugs” or “men I don’t like” for an hour or so that night, warning “If I don’t get back by 10:00 o’clock tomorrow morning, tell the police.”
 
Panto left behind his wallet and empty suitcase, and his work clothes were still laid out on his bed when a car appeared out front around seven. He was dressed in his best suit and dark hat for his later outing with Alice when he climbed inside and saw two men he knew from the longshoremen’s union, Emil Camarda and Gus Scannivino, riding with someone less familiar. He took his seat with the others, then the sedan rolled away down North Elliot Place into the summer evening and Pete Panto was gone.
 
Panto had arrived on the Brooklyn waterfront some time in the mid-thirties, a young longshoreman whose accent hinted he had divided his life between Brooklyn and Southern Italy. Brooklyn was then home to drydocks and repair basins as well as warehousing and shipping terminals and the great Navy Yard. After a period of breaking in along the docks, Panto got his union card in 1937 and at age twenty-six secured a regular job at the Moore McCormack line’s pier 15, at the foot of Brooklyn Heights.
 
The five-mile stretch of Brooklyn shore that ran south from Brooklyn Bridge to Twentieth Street was overwhelmingly staffed by Italians like himself, many of them recent immigrants who worked the less desirable cargoes. These six Italian locals of the International Longshoreman’s Association were overseen by vice president Emil Camarda, a waterfront patriarch with a foot in the legitimate world whose family used their union titles to act as middlemen in many of the docks’ predatory side-businesses. Some fourteen thousand dockers labored in “Camarda locals” like Panto’s, much of them in the area called Red Hook, stretched between the Buttermilk Channel and the Gowanus Canal. The Camardas’ home rule had the distant blessing of the union’s quotable longtime President Joe Ryan, whose organization in Manhattan had been dominated since the teens by the West Side Irish. “Over in Brooklyn” was a favorite phrase of Ryan’s to express his bewilderment with events across the East River, a shoreline he saw dense with alien Italians and Red insurgents kept in rough order by the Camarda clan.
 
As if his union wasn’t already welcoming enough to gangsters, Emil Camarda helped found Brooklyn’s City Democratic Club, quartered in a Clinton Street building owned by a Mafia leader named Vincent Mangano. Inside, longshore union figures could do business with local mobsters under friendly cover of pinochle games. Mangano was Committee Chairman for the club’s annual Columbus Day ball, held at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights, whose program boasted pages bought by other syndicate men Joe Profaci, Albert Anastasia, and Joe Adonis. Pete Panto soon discovered the direct connection between the political club and the waterfront rackets: longshoremen bought thousands of tickets to the ball as a suggested “donation” toward getting dock work; “eight or ten thousand” sold for a ballroom that held only “four or five hundred people,” he told his friend the  Brooklyn labor lawyer named Marcy Protter. Often, the ticket money was already deducted from their pay envelopes. ( A Brownsville mobster arrested for murder in 1939 was carrying several hundred unsold tickets, with the sellers’ names—Hugo, Foxie, Battling Joe, Sharky—scribbled on the back.)
 
Beyond the ordinary pier crap games and policy lotteries that drained their pay Panto encountered other kickbacks and tributes: “In order to obtain work on a certain pier,” he explained to Protter, “you had to enter into a form of contract to have all your haircuts at a certain barber shop, and you paid in advance, each month, for those haircuts.” Likewise, every fall many longshoremen were obliged to buy their wine grapes from a designated dealer at lush prices, whether they planned to make wine or not. Panto claimed that many longshoremen paid out almost half their wages in kickbacks to qualify for work, and that union meetings in the Camarda locals were almost never held. Dockers did whatever was needed to gain favor in the shape, including buying into the pier boss’s “hiring clubs” or taking loans from waterfront loan sharks; gang-cutting (15 men doing the work of a full gang of 20, with the “ghost” pay going to the hiring boss), compounding the risks in an industry where mangling injuries were common but insurance scarce. Longshoring ranked near tree-topping among deadly occupations.
 
A man who can inspire loyalty in his crew is always useful, and Panto rose to hiring boss by 1939 despite his feelings about the racketeers. But he was soon rousing unity beyond his own pier, joining his local’s Rank and File Committee of men attracted by the gains won on the West Coast docks by the radical Harry Bridges.  “Pete Panto was a very dynamic person, and he was a good speaker in Italian, and he held a number of public meetings,” Sam Madell, a longtime Communist organizer of Brooklyn longshoremen, later told an interviewer. “We are strong,” Panto reminded his men, “all we have to do is stand up and fight.”
 
In the spring of 1939, Panto led a series of increasingly large and rowdy meetings. Crowding before the piers at night, hundreds of men applauded his speeches demanding union democracy–regular shop meetings and an end to the shape up and kickback system. In mid-June, 350 union men heard him speak about waterfront corruption, and he addressed a still larger group on July 3. What the rank-and-file viewed as a reform movement, however, the Camardas and Joe Ryan saw simply as an insurgency, and union spokesmen vilified Panto as a dangerous Red even as rank and file leafletters were roughed up along the docks. In early July, the casual threats he had heard around Columbia Street in Red Hook and dismissed with a grin escalated to a formal summons. Emil Camarda called him to his waterfront office.
 
When Panto arrived, at the dock end of President Street, he noticed Camarda was accompanied by several hired men, “some of whom he knew by reputation,” Marcy Protter reported. Panto refused to speak in front of these “henchmen,” and Camarda sent them from the room, leaving the patriarch of the Brooklyn waterfront alone with the young leader of the dock rebels: “[I]n the course of the conversation,” Protter explained, Camarda told him that “he personally liked Pete, and thought he was a very fine fellow, but some of the boys didn’t like some of the things he was doing and saying, and he advised him that maybe it would be better if he stopped what he was doing.”
 
Panto refused. Camarda’s warning about “some of the boys” was deadly Red Hook code for the Mob’s displeasure. Friends from the Rank and File Committee cautioned Panto that his life was now in danger, that he should never travel alone. Panto repeated that he would not be intimidated, but agreed to be more cautious about traveling unguarded. At his last meeting,  days before his disappearance, he surrounded himself with some 1250 longshoremen in South Brooklyn's Star Hall, which echoed with the rough eloquence of his Italian speechmaking and the catcalls of the men. But mixed clumsily into the crowd were observers sent by Albert Anastasia.

That summer, the World’s Fair brought thousands to Queens to see the Trylon and Perisphere, the Belgium Pavilion Tower and World of Tomorrow. But it became a fearful season along the Brooklyn waterfront, where a graffiti campaign began with the dock workers whose revolt Peter Panto had been leading when he vanished on July 14th. It began within days, dov’e Panto? (“Where is Panto?”); scrawled in anger along the Red Hook piers, on freight cars, trucks, and warehouses, marking walls in the Italian longshoring neighborhoods, puzzling outsiders like a foreign code when it reached the blue-slate walks above the harbor. The plea spread from the water’s edge to subway walls and the sides of downtown Brooklyn office buildings, and leaflets titled “Where is Pete Panto” littered the area near the Navy Yard.
 
Each sodden corpse that bumped to the surface of the rivers around New York was hauled out and checked against photographs of the smiling young hero of the docks. Panto’s friends worried in the press that his body was irrecoverably “weighted down with stones” on the harbor floor or swept along with the night tides that ran from Sandy Hook to Hell Gate. “Coppers are worried about Pete Panto, a courageous dockworker, who was bothering Brooklyn banditi,” the gossip columnist Walter Winchell announced. “Police fear Pete is wearing a cement suit at the bottom of the East River.” When the communist Daily Worker put its writer on the mystery he discovered that Panto had been immediately replaced by a more obedient hiring boss and that Italian longshoremen refused to speak for print except anonymously, “We are men with families,” one explained, “and want to live.”

Excerpted from DARK HARBOR: The War for the New York Waterfront by Nathan Ward, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright (c) 2010 by Nathan Ward. All rights reserved.