PREFACE: WHO WANTS TO BE A DEAD HERO? "Oh, I know what you want to hear about," Jim Longhi said with false reluctance the first time I called him, interrupting a chess game with his wife, Gabrielle. "The old waterfront-gangsters, rackets, the Anastasias." He was right. My interest in what Mr. Longhi elegantly called the "criminal coloration" of the docks was what had brought us together. Longhi was a cultured Manhattan attorney on the threshold of his nineties when we met in his cheerful apartment on Sutton Place one summer afternoon. He had just removed his work tie from the collar of his silk shirt as he led me out onto his small balcony. Below us and a few hundred yards away was the East River, a pretty staid thoroughfare at that point in its life compared to the rough old waterfront I had come to hear about, and Mr.

Longhi weighed the calm barge traffic he saw against the river in his head. "A very different waterfront," he judged. As we talked about his early days, the suave manners of the Columbia- educated attorney loosened a bit, following his tie, revealing a son of the Brooklyn docks. Longhi's father had been a radical docks organizer ("When I was born, my father had seven bodyguards, seven Italians with ice picks!"), and he had started out himself as a waterfront lawyer like Mr. Alfieri, the character his friend Arthur Miller modeled on him for A View from the Bridge . We spent some wonderful hours among his memories of one friend's dangerous feud with "Tough Tony" Anastasio or another whose longshore activism had dropped off after "they broke his legs." This was the world I was after. I'd first become interested in the waterfront when I lived in South Brooklyn, in a brownstone owned by an old Italian longshoreman with missing fingers.

Ships would occasionally appear at the end of my street, to be unloaded or repaired or sent off with a burst of nighttime fireworks. I grew familiar with the tug and ferry horns and watched the sunset flights of pigeons that zagged around the rooftops, much as in the famous Brando movie. But I knew almost nothing about the old days until I happened across a reference to a 1940s newspaper series on waterfront gangsterism. It had run for twenty- four days-an extraordinary amount of space to give to any subject then, let alone to the lowly docks-and caused a national scandal; could the piers really have been as brutal as they looked in the movies? When I met Jim Longhi again it was in his law offices on lower Broadway and he was wearing a beautiful brown suit. The high windows looked across to the old New York Sun building and beyond to another waterfront, busy with beautifications. On a distant pier by the Brooklyn Bridge, where Longhi remembered watching desperate men fight a hook- swinging riot, a new riverside playground was being dug. We sat for an hour talking about some valiant old causes and vivid, long- dead thugs of the harbor. Months before he died, I called Mr.

Longhi once more at his office with a foolishly cinematic idea: to take my ninety- year- old friend out on a boat and tour the harbor, perhaps starting at the Narrows and hugging the shoreline to see what he remembered, pier by vestigial pier; Longhi would narrate as he drifted around the city, recalling who had owned what or done what to whom. ("You say, 'Mafia,' and it's provincial," he had told me. "You say, 'Mob,' and it extends way beyond the Italian underworld.") The small tour boat Geraldina was ready to pick us up, her captain, herself a historian of the harbor, eagerly standing by with a video camera and microphone to capture the floating lecture. I then called Mr. Longhi to ease any remaining old- guy concerns about the trip, describing the level, relatively uncomplicated Chelsea dock (with an outdoor bar) where we imagined him stepping aboard after a steadying cocktail. He listened to my pitch, then paused and sighed into the phone. "It kind of sounds like a pain in the ass," he said at last.

"I have my own picture of where everything was in my mind. I don't need to see the waterfront today to tell me that." Seeing it today would indeed muddle things. At the edge of the Erie Basin, a ferry service lures visitors from Manhattan to a giant IKEA store that sits among the relics of the Brooklyn industrial waterfront. The store has a large upstairs cafeteria where, after a long afternoon touring housewares and furniture kits, you can eat Swedish meatballs and watch the sun lengthen across the car park, paved over a deep old dry dock that once held warships. For decades, much of the abandoned waterfront was walled off by empty pier sheds. There was a forlorn beauty to the slow dilapidation, even if the water was blocked by a kind of ghost town. Many old sheds have since been flattened into parks; a trapeze school now sits atop Chelsea's Pier 40 building, and swinging out over the Hudson River waterfront, you have a clear downtown view uncluttered by slings or crates or Hi- Lo trucks.

Looking out from the promenade that overhangs the expressway in Brooklyn Heights, you see a rotting wet railroad pier, all that remains here from Jim Longhi's time, the dark planking and rail track punctuated by shrubs that grow in green tufts; large concrete piers, recently cleared of their cargo sheds for park space, surround the ruin, which has been retained among the planned ice rink, new ballfields, and condominia pushing south from the bridges and toward the hugely still gantry cranes of the Red Hook Marine Terminal. Beyond the cranes sits the boxy white- brick headquarters of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, established in the fifties to mind the gangsters on the docks and recently folded into Homeland Security. The harbor Mr. Longhi kept in his head was the world's greatest port, a collection of bays rimmed with more than nine hundred piers and noisily crowded with hundreds of express liners, freighters, ferries, lighters, garbage scows, car floats, battleships, yachts, floating elevators, coffee barges, and constantly whistling tugs. The Hudson was still known as the North River (to distinguish it from the Delaware, or South River) along its length from the Battery, where freighters often lined up for their tug escorts, to the deep Midtown piers. This book is about that old waterfront, and its "criminal coloration," where money washed in and out, and graft mingled the longshore union with the racketeers. Touring the harbor today, it is hard to imagine these quiet frontages of rot and renewal ever knowing such a fearful time that a reporter could write, "It has been said, and with some justification that the waterfront of New York produces more murders to the square foot than does any other one section of the country. Most such murders go unsolved.

" In fact, in 1948, the year the shooting of a young boss stevedore brought reporter Malcolm "Mike" Johnson of the New York Sun to the West Side docks, the Manhattan district attorney claimed there'd been at least two dozen unsolved waterfront murders since 1919. Johnson soon learned that snaking around the watery edges of his town was a very different city. "Murder on the waterfront is commonplace," he wrote, "a logical product of widespread gangsterism." I have tried my best to evoke the dock world the longshoremen knew long before the newspapers discovered it. But at its heart, this is a reporter's story. If Mike Johnson's sleuthing along the docks has a hardboiled familiarity, echoing any number of later Mob tales involving hoods and rackets and an intrepid investigator, it is because his was the original-creating the Mob investigation form that runs from On the Waterfront to The Valachi Papers and Donnie Brasco . Johnson's discovery of what he called a "waterfront jungle" is also the story of a clash of New York institutions-a fading newspaper, backing its unshakable veteran star reporter; the Mob, near the height of its influence, whose leaders had largely come to power and of age during Prohibition; and the longshore union and the pugnacious survivor at its helm, "president- for- life" Joseph Ryan. "One of the constantly astounding things about New York is that it can endure so much crime and corruption and still manage to get on," the New York Herald Tribune editorialized during the waterfront scandals.

Indeed, the city had "gotten on" for several decades under an imaginary bargain, despite the occasional alarms raised by citizens' groups about port corruption and the bodies that turned up from month to month, deposited by what newspapers obtusely called the "dock wars." New Yorkers were aware that gangsters shared their town, primarily robbing and shooting one another and running the better nightclubs but never holding the reins completely as they had in Chicago. For many, their city's sinful reputation was the price of cosmopolitanism. Reporters had toured the waterfront before Mike Johnson, dabbling in its rough atmosphere and lore as the movies did-as a setting for brawls and deals or other seamy behavior beyond the edge of society. Investigating the deaths of some twenty- one stevedores in Brooklyn's Irishtown neighborhood, The New Yorker 's Alva Johnston wrote in 1931 that the total lack of arrests was "not because there is anything secret or underhand about these murders, but because the witnesses won't talk." Loyalty to the waterfront code against "squealing" also marked the death of the Brooklyn dock boss Red Donnelly, who, balehooked a.