“Allowing a Middle Eastern country such as Dubai to run our
ocean ports seemed pretty bizarre to me until I remembered that
during World War II, we turned the security of the New York/New
Jersey docks over to the Mafia,” explains Palm Beach Post
columnist George McEvoy. “The government hired the mob to keep the
piers safe from Nazi saboteurs and espionage agents.”
As the story goes, there wasn’t much trouble on the docks from
Nazi infiltrators after some of Tony Soprano’s goombahs were
running the show. The joke among U.S. intelligence agents was that
the bottom of the Hudson was littered with German spies in cement
shoes.
McEvoy explains that the U.S. government was desperate: “In
1942, the French ocean liner Normandie burst into flames
and sank at its Hudson River pier. With France officially out of
the war, the United States had seized the vessel and planned to
convert it into a troopship, capable of carrying an entire
division.”
U.S. Navy intelligence knew that information was being leaked to
the Germans, and to German submarines operating right off the U.S.
coast, regarding sailing dates, cargoes and military operations at
the New York port, reports McEvoy, including plans for the
conversion of the Normandie: “The official explanation for
the mysterious fire was that an unknown workman had been careless
with his acetylene torch, but nobody in New York older than 12
believed that story.”
To better nail things down, the government could have put some
rookies from the Naval Academy on the dock. And if they did things
back then the way they do now, these guys would have been ready
after a few weeks of classes on the illegalities and
insensitivities of profiling to go out and stop the correct
percentages of Irish nuns and Swedish deckhands.
Instead, operating with more savvy than is generally apparent in
today’s intelligence maneuvers, the government recruited New York’s
wise guys. “Naval intelligence, headquartered at 90 Church Street
in downtown Manhattan, had an idea,” reports McEvoy. “One of their
agents approached a gentleman named Joseph ‘Socks’ Kanza, a known
Mafioso who controlled the sprawling Fulton Fish Market. Would he
be willing to act as a go-between to get the mob patrolling the
piers?”
Under indictment for extortion, “Socks” agreed to play ball and
the feds quashed the indictment. Top Mafia boss “Lucky” Luciano,
serving 30 to 50 years on multiple counts of running a prostitution
ring, also was brought on board.
“Luciano promptly was moved to a prison closer to Manhattan and
soon had regular meetings with Naval Intelligence agents,” reports
McEvoy. “Exactly what was discussed never has been revealed, but
soon, a strange army of counterintelligence began working the
piers.”
The “strange” assemblage included “longshoremen, fishermen,
people who knew every inch of the port,” explains McEvoy. “This
army of spy catchers even included a good number of the prostitutes
and their pimps who regularly plied their trade along the
piers.”
The result? “Within a few weeks, instances of sabotage dropped
to practically zero,” McEvoy reports. “Any Nazi who tried to get
information on sailing times and cargoes was taking his life in his
hands.”
Under American interrogation after the war, German spies told of
comrades in New York who had been beaten by “very violent men” and
of a number of their cohorts who had simply “disappeared.”
And so, what’s better? “Socks” from a mob-run fish market or
Sheik Mohammad from Dubai? Or “Lucky” and his hookers or a company
that’s in bed with the leaders of Communist China?
A recent editorial in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
pointed to the dangers of the latter: “Fast on the heels of the
scuttled Dubai Ports World deal, the Bush administration is
finalizing a no-bid contract with Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. of Hong
Kong to help operate sophisticated port radiation detection
equipment in the Bahamas, sans any on-site U.S. oversight.”
On top of monitoring shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and
the Arabian Sea, Hutchison Whampoa holds leases on port facilities
on both sides of the Panama and Suez canals. The firm’s president,
Li Ka-Shing, continued the Trib, “is so close to Communist
China’s leaders and the People’s Liberation Army that intelligence
sources are convinced the company is a front to aid China’s
strategy of world hegemony.”
All things considered, I’d stick with the American wise guys and
the homegrown working girls.
