cover image Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront

Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront

Nathan Ward, . . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 (250pp) ISBN 978-0-374-28622-4

This gritty examination of the corrupt New York City waterfront provided by Ward, a former editor with American Heritage and Library Journal, has all of the local color, rich detail, and notorious gangland figures of Elia Kazan’s film masterpiece, On the Waterfront . Ward parallels the 1948 muckraking efforts of Malcolm “Mike” Johnson, a legendary New York Sun reporter, to uncover three decades’ worth of unsolved rubouts on the West Side docks. Instead, he discovered, in Ward’s words, “a city apart, with its own bosses, language and codes, bankers, soldiers, and even martyrs.” Johnson found widespread corruption linking the city fathers, police, and waterfront racketeers. Ward serves up some stirring profiles of characters like “suave” lawyer Jim Longhi, with a radical past; shrewd, politically well-connected union boss Joseph Ryan; Father John Corridan, the anticorruption “waterfront priest”; and stoolie Abe Reles, whose plunge from a Coney Island hotel window ended an early probe into the bloody antics of Murder Inc. Extremely valuable to all interested in 20th-century New York City, the book tells a bitter truth: despite Johnson’s three-week-long scandal-baring newspaper series, which stirred the pot, nothing loosened the iron grip of the mob on the waterfront. (June)