The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob by T. J. English Read Free Book Online Page B

that had been a neighborhood institution since the turn of the century.
    The ethnic makeup of the neighborhood was also changing. Hell’s Kitchen had always been a melting pot. First it was the Irish and the Germans. Then the Italians, Greeks, and eastern Europeans (mostly Poles and Yugoslavians). And in the decade following the war, there was a huge influx of new migrants, mostly Puerto Ricans and Southern blacks. The reasons were not hard to fathom. In 1944, as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal government increased the minimum wage to thirty cents an hour. In Puerto Rico, the maximum wage for the most skilled worker was twenty-five cents an hour. As for Southern blacks, the postwar period had seen the mechanization of the cotton industry, leaving thousands without employment. Enticed by the prospect of jobs and better wages, they headed north.
    Yet, unlike many parts of New York, where changing neighborhoods had brought about considerable white flight, Hell’s Kitchen was slower to change. The embattled Irish and Italians of an earlier generation were still firmly ensconced in the community’s religious, political, and economic institutions, and they weren’t anxious to relinquish their hard-won positions. As a result, even as racial tensions flared in the saloons and on the avenues, the power structure, both legitimate and criminal, remained remarkably intact.
    In the legitimate world, the most visible example of Irish entrenchment was the Midtown Democratic Club. In the illegitimate world, it was the shylocks, gamblers, shake-down artists, hijackers and assorted strong-arm men who prospered along the waterfront during the second most lucrative era for organized crime in New York City.
    Racketeers on the West Side were in an ideal position to reap the benefits of the Port of New York’s booming postwar trade. Longshoremen seeking work in Manhattan were still under the thumb of a ruthless “shape-up” system, which had existed from time immemorial. Each morning, a group of prospective workers gathered at the piers, where a hiring foreman selected who would work that day. At many piers the procedure grew into hiring a crew or gang as a unit.
    A common result of the shape-up system was the kickback racket. A crew expecting to receive favorable attention from a hiring foreman was required to kick back 10 or 20 percent of its members’ wages. In order to be able to afford such a kickback, many workers were forced to turn to loansharks, or “shylocks,” who were always readily available to loan money at usurious rates.
    With the Hell’s Kitchen docks as its base, it was no surprise that Local 824 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) soon became one of the union’s most powerful. Harold Bowers was a neighborhood delegate to Local 824, commonly known as the “Pistol Local” because its membership was made up of so many convicted felons. But the real power behind Local 824 was Bowers’s cousin, Mickey, whose police record showed thirteen arrests between 1920 and 1940. Mickey Bowers was believed to be behind the death of, among others, Tommy Gleason, a rival for control of the Pistol Local who was gunned down in a 10th Avenue funeral parlor—a convenient spot for a mob hit if ever there was one.
    Of all the Irish racketeers during the Forties and Fifties, the most powerful of all was red-haired Edward J. “Eddie” McGrath. McGrath was a former whiskey baron from Prohibition days who’d made a successful transition to the waterfront rackets. One of an elite group of underworld figures with ties to some of the city’s most influential politicians, he’d been appointed an ILA “organizer at large” by the union’s president, Joseph P. Ryan. At the time, McGrath’s extensive criminal record included arrests ranging from burglary to murder, and he’d once done a long stretch in Sing Sing.
    McGrath’s main “muscle” on the piers was his brother-in-law, John “Cockeye”