The Pulitzer-winning serial that inspired a Marlon Brando classic SAY you're a New York City newspaper reporter and the year is 1948. Your editor tells you to go down to the docks and check out the latest in a string of murders. For some reporters, the task would have meant an afternoon of work. For Malcolm Johnson, the New York Sun reporter who took this particular handoff from his boss, the assignment led deep into the world of organized crime, a "waterfront jungle," as he put it. The result was a 24-part series, a Pulitzer Prize and a movie called "On the Waterfront," starring Marlon Brando. Now, more than 60 years after it all began, Johnson and his investigation are the subjects of a new book, "Dark Harbor." Nathan Ward, a former editor at American Heritage who has written for The New York Times and other publications, has two themes: the newsman's adventure, and the dangerous world of the racketeers and stevedores he documented. For a writer of history, there is always a risk in telling a story that's been told before. In this case, the bar is especially high, because Ward presents a tale that has been told not just often but quite well, first by Johnson and then in the Oscar-winning movie. To make his challenge even greater. Ward brings no huge trove of new information to his account, and he offers no novel grand view to reshape our thinking of this chapter in American history. But he does have a few weapons at his disposed - namely, meticulous reporting, a keen eye for detail and an elegant writing style - and he uses them to make the tale seem new again. Johnson is Ward's guide. This mild-mannered Southerner toiling quietly for a dying paper seems an unlikely candidate to take on the mob men who controlled the city's docks. And indeed, there are times when Johnson makes for a less than satisfying hero: We never have the sense that he is risking much to get this story. His reporting doesn't hinge on a breakthrough discovery. He doesn't go undercover. We don't see him steering his car wildly and ducking bullets as gangsters hunt him down. All he does is pound the streets, develop good sources and write more comprehensive articles than anyone else. He is the quintessential journalist. Still, Ward is wise not to focus his lens on Johnson for too long. Instead, he introduces us to life on the docks. We are taken into a world where some 60,000 men along the east coast worked for lousy pay in unsafe conditions, with little or no recourse when they were hurt, threatened or tossed off the job. We learn why dozens of people were bumped off over the years and why most of those crimes went unsolved. And we meet the individuals populating this brutal city within a city. Sometimes Ward throws too many names into the mix, but his most prominent characters are unforgettable. They include Joe Ryan, the politically connected union boss who ran much of the waterfront; Albert Anastasia, the syndicate man who meted out the roughest kind of justice; and Father John Corridan, the activist priest who went toe-to-toe with the thugs and later inspired Karl Maiden's character in the movie. In the end, Johnson's reporting helped draw attention to the corruption and violence endemic to the waterfront. His articles paved the way for government hearings on organized crime that riveted the nation. Of course, none of this eliminated mob activity from the docks. That makes the climax of "Dark Harbor" a little less dramatic than one might have hoped. The good guys don't exactly vanquish the bad guys, but they do get their story out - first in Malcolm Johnson's newspaper series, then in a movie and now, once more, in Ward's terrific account. Jonathan Eig's latest book is "Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster."

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.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist

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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Former American Heritage editor Ward reveals the seedy history of the old New York waterfront, a brutal, dangerous environment ruled by corrupt union officials and the mob.The author focuses on New York Sun investigative reporter Mike Johnson's Pulitzer-winning series of articles in 1948, which uncovered the graft and terror tactics that characterized life on the docks. These tactics ultimately brought down International Longshoremen's Association "president for Life" Joseph Ryan and improved conditions for the embattled workers. Packed with colorful characters including the murderous thug "Cockeye" Dunn, fearsome "Tough Tony" Anastasio, dapper Abe "Kid Twist" Reles and Charlie "The Jew" Yanowsky (who was ice-picked to death), the book reads like classic noir. Beleaguered laborers marinate in dirty saloons, murders abound, death threats fly and the nation is forced to reckon with the reality of organized crime as sensational TV government hearings drag the dirty business into the light. Arthur Miller was inspired by the murder of a reform-seeking longshoreman to write a screenplay about the milieu. More famously, writer Budd Schulberg's take on the issue became the classic Marlon Brando film On the Waterfront (1954), whose principal characters and situations were inspired by actual people and events. Ward's most engaging characters are the tough, streetwise priest John Corridan, a plain-talking rabble-rouser who courageously walked the docks and agitated for justiceKarl Malden memorably played the figure based on Corridan in Waterfrontand the congenitally crooked union boss Joe Ryan, a blustery operator who hid his misdeeds behind a smokescreen of anti-communist rhetoric. The author deftly marshals vast amounts of research to tell his story, including original interviews with players from the era, and he richly evokes the atmosphere of mid-century New York.A lucid, illuminating history of the epicenter of organized crime in America.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Breathing new life into the history of New York City's docklands, Ward's is a compelling look at waterfront life from the 1930s to the 1950s, when the mob took control of the lucrative trading on the wharves. A lot of dockworkers were trying to make an honest buck, labor unions were bilking those guys out of their honest bucks, mob bosses were stealing these same bucks, and politicos were turning blind eyes. If that sounds like a movie, it is-On the Waterfront, 1954. New York Sun reporter Mike Johnson wrote a series of articles (which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting) that linked the mob to some longshoremen's murders; the public scrutiny following those articles (and the fact that shipping via those huge bulk freight containers became economically unfeasible) made the corruption die off some. A former American Heritage and Library Journal editor, Ward anchors the richly detailed narrative in keen profiles of the main players. Interviews with surviving, if somewhat reluctant, Brooklynites, add a nice edge. Analogues to the film are inevitable. There's slick lawyer Jim Longhi (Rod Steiger), longshoreman union boss Joseph Ryan (Lee J. Cobb), local do-gooder priest John Corridan (Karl Malden), and Fred Gwynne, aka Herman Munster as Slim. (See LJ's original review in the April, 15, 2010, issue and our recent interview with Ward.)-Douglas Lord, "Books for Dudes," BookSmack! 7/1/10 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.