Death on the Waterfront: Abe Reles, Albert Anastasia and the murder of Pete Panto
In the late 1930s, most of the western locals of the International Longshoremen’s Association left the notoriouly corrupt organisation to form the left-wing International Longshore and Warehouse Union, sparking a bitter fight for control of America’s docks. With the ILA relying on its allies in organised crime to hold onto its eastern base, any signs of dissent were soon met with swift reprisal. Most infamously, the head of the Brooklyn Rank-and-File Committee, Pete Panto, disappeared in 1939, a message to anyone who dared defy the rule of ILA President Joe Ryan.
Although the case remains officially unsolved, it was generally believed to have been ordered by Anthony Anastasio, head of Brookylyn’s ILA Local 1814. At the time, his brother, Albert Anastasia, who had altered his last name at some point, was the boss of a powerful New York Mafia group later known as the Gambino crime family. As such, Anthony Anastasio had had a direct line to the Mafia’s official death squad, Murder Incorporated, which is believed to have killed hundreds, if not thousands during the 1930s. Reportedly, Anastasia was the Mafia boss responsible for the mostly-Jewish Murder Inc, which was captained by pioneering labour racketeer Louis “Lepke” Buchalter.
During the late 1920s, Buchalter had risen to power in New York’s Garment District, taking control of local unions and forming business associations with employers which served as a legitimate front for kickbacks. In doing so, he would clash with radical elements of organised labour during the 1930s, who threatened his rackets with their demands for improved conditions, union democracy and racial solidarity. At the time, industrial unrest was sweeping the country, and Buchalter’s model would spread with it.
In 1934, massive dockworker’s strikes had taken place along the West Coast, led by alleged Communist Harry Bridges. Three years later, Bridges formed the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, taking with him all but three locals of the ILA’s Pacific Coast district. The new ILWU soon clashed with the ILA, along with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, as it attempted to expand, meeting strong resistance from labour racketeers.
It was amidst the wider conflict between the ILA and the ILWU that Pete Panto rose from obscurity. Although Panto’s exact politics are not immediately apparent, it appears that he was close to organisers from the Communist Party. At any rate, his attacks on the racketeers and their close relationship with employers soon won a following. Then, in July 1939, he went missing after leaving home for a meeting. Two years later, his body was found in New Jersey by detectives working the lead of Abe Reles, a former Murder Inc gunman who had turned against his crew in exchange for immunity.
The Panto case never went to trial however, because the prosecution’s key witness fell out of a window while supposedly under close supervision on the sixth floor of a New York hotel. The official story was that he had tried and failed to escape from the police officers protecting him from certain death at the hands of the Mafia. Whatever the real story, the case against Albert Anastasia was dismissed, with the International Longshoremen’s Association retaining its close links to organised crime.
Unsolved to this day, the Panto case is now largely forgotten. While the story was adapted for the screen by Arthur Miller, his script was rejected by Hollywood producer and Mafia ally Henry Cohn. Cohn had demanded several “pro-American” changes to the script, and when Miller refused to accept these significant alterations, the film was made without him by screenwriter and Operation for Strategic Services veteran Budd Schulberg. Although Schulberg’s “On the Waterfront” would go on to be one of the first major exposés of the labour racket, it deliberately ignored the true relationship between organised crime and the established order, achieved through acts of violence such as the death of Panto.