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Nathan Ward

Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront Hardcover – June 8, 2010

by Nathan Ward (Author)

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What if the world of the old New York waterfront was as violent and mob-controlled as it appears in Hollywood movies? Well, it really was, and the story of its downfall, told here in high style by Nathan Ward, is the original New York mob story.

New York Sun reporter Malcolm “Mike” Johnson was sent to cover the murder of a West Side boss stevedore and discovered a “waterfront jungle, set against a background of New York’s magnificent skyscrapers” and providing “rich pickings for criminal gangs.” Racketeers ran their territories while doubling as union officers, from the West Side’s “Cockeye” Dunn, who’d kill for any amount of dock space, to Jersey City’s Charlie Yanowsky, who controlled rackets and hiring until he was ice-picked to death.

Johnson’s hard-hitting investigative series won a Pulitzer Prize, inspired a screenplay by Arthur Miller, and prompted Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront. And yet J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of organized crime - even as the government’s dramatic hearings into waterfront misdeeds became mustsee television.

Nathan Ward tells this archetypal crime story as if for the first time, taking the reader back to a city, and an era, at once more corrupt and more innocent than our own.

Print length

250 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

June 8, 2010
Dimensions

6.24 x 1.01 x 9.3 inches
ISBN-10

0374286221
ISBN-13

978-0374286224
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In 1948 a New York newspaper published an exposé of murderous corruption on the city's piers; the revelations became the real-life foundation for the now-classic movie On the Waterfront. Ward's history of the story bridges its journey from print to celluloid, beginning with the reporter whose series broke open the scandal. Malcolm Johnson pursued his investigation of several killings of longshoremen into the web of union leaders, mobsters, and politicians who ruled the docks. Ward infuses their biographies with their reputations for ruthlessness, which casts a decidedly noir shadow over the narrative. Against the menace of union boss Joe Ryan and the brass-knuckled racketeers who dictated dockside hiring, Ward pits intrepid reporter Johnson as well as Father John Corridan, the inspiration for the movie's Karl Malden character, and carries the tale through to the consequences of their anticorruption crusades: trials, the Kefauver hearings into organized crime, and adaptation of the story from script to screen. True-crime and film fans alike will be engrossed by Ward's street-savvy research into the original waterfront. --Gilbert Taylor

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (June 8, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 250 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374286221
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374286224
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.24 x 1.01 x 9.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,551,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,799 in Ship History (Books)
- #3,498 in Organized Crime True Accounts
- #56,520 in U.S. State & Local History

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Nathan Ward

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Nathan Ward lives in Brooklyn, New York, not that far from the waterfront that figures in his first book, Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront. Before writing books, he worked on the staffs of American Heritage and Library Journal, and has written for the Village Voice, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. With the late W.C. Heinz, he edited a boxing anthology, The Book of Boxing, and in 2014 published an ebook, The Amateur, about the KGB agent Rudolf Abel's career as a painter and spy in Cold War New York.

His book, The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett, was nominated for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award as well as Bouchercon's Anthony Award. Of The Lost Detective, Alan Furst has written:

"Funny thing about books, some of them are a delight and a pleasure. Thus Nathan Ward's The Lost Detective--yes it's very well written, yes the history is carefully done, but it has that 'glow.' So, this you will like."

And the Hammett scholar Otto Penzler, Editor of The Best American Noir of the Century, adds:

" As a devoted Hammett aficionado, I've read most books about him and published his daughter's memoir, but learned so much in this captivating examination of the great author's life that I feel compelled to reread his complete works with far deeper understanding than ever before."

Ward is currently at work on a book for Grove Publishing about the cowboy detective Charlie Siringo and the American West.

His historical crime novel, Ashes of My Youth: a Tale of New York & The Wall Street Bombing, published in May 2021.

Visit Nathan's publishing site www.Spy-Arts.com

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A History of the Dying Gasps of Corruption on the New York Waterfront

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 16, 2010

Verified Purchase

Beginning the book with the murder Pietro "Pete" Panto, a disillusioned hiring boss on the piers in Brooklyn who was causing trouble for powers above, the author weaves a fascinating tale of the life and times of the waterfront in New York from the 1930s to the 1950s. The book is centered primarily around a few major players in the rackets on the docks and the men who investigated and exposed the corruption.

Featured among the major players is Malcolm "Mike" Johnson, a reporter for the New York Sun that wrote a series of newspaper articles that exposed the corruption and caused the investigation of the docks and those who were major players in the corruption. Joe Ryan, the "President for Life" of the International Longshoreman's Association is heavily featured as are a number of New York mayors and district attorneys that failed to do their jobs. The names are too numerous to list, but most will be very familiar to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of New York history.

The author also writes about the numerous commissions that were set up to investigate, with little results, the crimes that were being committed. He reveals the major players and what the motivations of these people were. And he details the making of a famous movie that was written based on the stories published in the Sun.

One of the major ironies is that the investigations continued until the time that the jobs on the docks in New York were beginning to disappear (along with the corruption) as container freight started to become the popular mode of the movement of goods, which seriously cut into the ability to operate rackets on the piers.

The book is very well written and captures well a time that has long since past. This is a must read for anyone with an interest in New York history or of the history of the longshoremen. It is also recommended for the sheer ability of the book to entertain; much of the time reading like a 1940s detective novel.

13 people found this helpful

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Horace

Padded

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2014

Verified Purchase

There are some good sections to the book which evoke a NY subculture with which I was unfamiliar. But what would have made a great New Yorker article instead meanders around with no clear purpose, bouncing from one irrelevant story to another. Why should a book on the NY waterfront deal so much with what goes on in the lives of those who reported on it? Not what I had hope for.

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seanp

On the 1940-1950s NYC Waterfront of Racketeering

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 30, 2013

Verified Purchase

Excellent read, if you love New York City, and want to learn anout how racketeering ran the New York City Harbor waterfront.. And influenced, or even controlled, New York and, across the way, New Jersey politics. And an account ofbthe New York SUN reporter and Catholic priest who brought crime down on its knees.

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tony smith

The real On the Waterfront.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 14, 2013

Verified Purchase

I enjoyed this book...It took some brave men to expose the corruption and graft along the New York waterfront...Some of these men,NY Sun reporter Mike Johnson and Father Corridan are given special and deserved attention in this book. I would like to read some of Johnsons original articles for the Sun.

One person found this helpful

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Thomas Pierro Sr.

Very good.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 5, 2013

Verified Purchase

Comming from north bergen, NJ and having many faimly members who worked at the docks, this book brought back many stories I've heard growing up.

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amy cloonan

Exceptional; well researched, well written. A must ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 14, 2017

Verified Purchase

Exceptional; well researched, well written. A must for native Brooklynites and Red Hookers, and those who seek the truth. Bought 3 for each of my family members

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 4, 2014

Verified Purchase

A highly informative and enjoyable review of a forgotten part of New York's past. I couldn't put it down. Highly recommended.

One person found this helpful

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Louis Burklow

On the Real New York Waterfront

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 19, 2019

For anyone who loves the movie On the Waterfront or just a good story about corruption, Dark Harbor tells a tale of the violent, Mob-controlled New York waterfront of the mid-20th century. Waterfront scribe Budd Schulberg turns up regularly in Nathan Ward's narrative, as does Arthur Miller, then working on Death of a Salesman. The true writing star here is actually a reporter, Malcolm "Mike" Johnson of the New York Sun newspaper. His explosive reporting on the racketeers who ran the stevedores union in 1948 brought him awards and death threats. Reading this book and its loving descriptions of the long-gone Sun office and reporters makes for a compelling story, now existing only in amber. The only complaint I have is the lack of pictures: I know what Harry Truman, Marlon Brando, Thomas Dewey and Arthur Miller look like but I would have appreciated photos of other people involved in this story and shots of the docks or a crime scene for good measure. Otherwise, Dark Harbor captures a lost moment of crime, (some) punishment and reading about all of it in bold type every day in the paper.

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