Dock Boss

At a time when New York City's booming waterfront industry was ruled by lawless criminals, one gangster towered above the rest and secretly controlled the docks for over thirty years. Dock Boss explores the rise of Eddie McGrath from a Depression Era thug to the preeminent racketeer on Manhattan's lucrative waterfront. McGrath's life takes readers on a journey through the tail-end of Prohibition, the sordid years of violent gang rule on the bustling waterfront, and finally the decline of the dock mobsters following a period of longshoremen rebellion in the 1950s.

Supplement to 3d ed. called Selected characteristics of occupations (physical demands, working conditions, training time) issued by Bureau of Employment Security.

This study provides the opportunity to compare the hiring and employment practices, within the context of local conditions, as they exist in five major ports. It tells how efforts at regulation are influenced by the various institutions and by market constraints and describes the impact of the differences emanating from the industrial relations systems of each of the countries in which the port is located. In all these ports, the basic problem, to a large extent, is still that of casual employment and the author describes the repeated attempts to achieve a solution and analyzes in detail the efforts that failed and those that succeeded.

The Docks is an eye-opening journey into a giant madhouse of activity that few outsiders ever see: the Port of Los Angeles. In a book woven throughout with riveting novelist detail and illustrated with photographs that capture the frenetic energy of the place, Bill Sharpsteen tells the story of the people who have made this port, the largest in the country, one of the nation’s most vital economic enterprises. Among others, we meet a pilot who parks ships, one of the first women longshoremen, union officials and employers at odds over almost everything, an environmental activist fighting air pollution in the "diesel death zone," and those with the nearly impossible job of enforcing security. Together these stories paint a compelling picture of a critical entryway for goods coming into the country—the Port of Los Angeles is part of a complex that brings in 40% of all our waterborne cargo and 70% of all Asian imports—yet one that is also extremely vulnerable. The Docks is a rare look at a world within our world in which we find a microcosm of the labor, environmental, and security issues we collectively face.