The Pennsylvania State Police report described the picket line incident with the laconic tone of the truly disinterested observer. On the morning of April 18, 1958, a couple of troopers in plainclothes rolled up to the Harvic Sportswear plant in rural Sweet Valley, Pennsylvania. They stayed in their car to watch as the local sheriff tried to enforce a writ of replevin and help the employer get his finished garments shipped back to Budget Dress Company, which had contracted to have them made. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) had declared a strike back on March 5, 1958, and though most dress manufacturers had quickly settled, employers based in Northeast Pennsylvania continued to hold out. A core group of those employers—including both Harvic and Budget—had organized crime connections. Thomas (“Three Finger Brown”) Lucchese, the head of the Lucchese Crime Family in New York, controlled the two companies. The troopers watched as a dozen deputy sheriffs arrived at Lucchese's plant, escorting a truck that backed up to the loading platform.

Five minutes later all hell broke loose. A busload of two hundred women pickets swooped down on the plant, and in the words of the police report, “[t]he pickets began to sing and shout, calling the truck driver and his helper vile names.” The ILGWU picket captain, Dorothy Ney, told the trucking company official who was there “that they could back their truck into the loading platform and take everything, even the son-of-a-bitch Three Finger Brown.” But once the truck had parked, the pickets refused to let it leave. Some of the women tried to let the air out of the truck tires, others put boards with protruding nails under the tires, and apparently still others quietly put sugar into the gas tank. Meantime, “after much bickering and arguing” between Ney and the trucking company official, the truck was allowed to pull away from the plant, but without having loaded any of the dresses for which it had come.Footnote ¹

This same scenario, captured in more picturesque language by other observers, was repeated again and again in Northeast Pennsylvania in late March and into April 1958. Seven days earlier a reporter from the New York Post watched another blocked attempt to move dresses out of the plant in Sweet Valley. This time the women pickets were led by Min Matheson, the district manager of the ILGWU in the Wyoming Valley, who announced, “The only way Mr. Lucchese can get his dresses out is to take his machines out too and leave the valley lock, stock and barrel. We don't want his kind here.” A day before that, women pickets in downtown Pittston demolished a truck that had pulled up to their struck factory. They ripped out the dashboard wires, smashed the cab windows, deflated the tires, and for good measure threw the ignition keys into the Susquehanna River. At another plant, Tony Pardini, a mother with five kids, stood behind a loaded truck and refused to move. “You got to kill me before you move that truck,” she told the driver even as he gunned the engine in warning. And here too the effort to get goods across the picket lines was abandoned. The trucker called his boss and warned him, “We're sitting on a keg of dynamite.”Footnote ²

Observers were struck by the militancy of these women strikers standing up to employers who were all the more menacing because of their mob reputations. A visiting ILGWU staff member from New York City told a reporter, “Believe me, I don't want to take anything away from the pickets in New York, but there it was sort of a family affair with laughing and all. Here it is different. It is a strike from way back.” One article called it a “demonstration of picket-line militancy not seen since the early days of the United Mine Workers.” In a region where mine shutdowns had drawn wives into the workforce to support their families, it was a determination borne out of necessity. “Half this town is out of work,” one news report explained, “and it is the women who are the breadwinners. That's part of why they fight like they do.” These were strikers like Margaret Shinski, from a small town outside of Wilkes-Barre; she had gone to work as a waistmaker to provide for her husband and two kids after his twenty-three years in the mines came to an end. Though they had very different connections to the ILGWU than their counterparts in New York City, these women were often just as appreciative of its importance. “I know that if it wasn't for the union, the boss would cut me [my wages] and I wouldn't have a place to turn,” asserted Carmello Chellino.Footnote ³

In April 1958, Chellino, Shinski, and their fellow women garment workers stubbornly faced down notorious racketeers such as Lucchese, winning the strike in Northeast Pennsylvania after most of the holdout employers abandoned their association and made individual settlements with the union. The story of this strike has been told before, and told well. These previous accounts emphasized the way in which the ILGWU's strike focused on eliminating a wage differential that existed between New York City garment workers and their counterparts in out-of-town shops, mainly in Northeast Pennsylvania. These accounts also acknowledged the influence of organized crime figures among the holdout employers.Footnote ⁴

The goal of this article is not to repeat that scholarship by retelling the history of the strike. Rather it will look more closely at how the strike unfolded against a larger political backdrop in which the issue of racketeering had assumed center stage while a range of different groups were using the rhetoric of anticorruption for a variety of purposes. By April 1958 the largest ever Congressional investigation into union corruption, the McClellan Committee hearings, had been going on for more than a year. Formally known as the US Senate's Select Committee to Investigate Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, the committee held hearings from 1957 to 1959. Conservatives on that committee, such as Senator John McClellan and Senator Barry Goldwater, were invoking the menace of labor racketeering to call for new restrictions on the power of organized labor; indeed it was through this committee that Goldwater rose to national prominence. In March 1958, at the behest of Republicans on the McClellan Committee, hearings had centered on a couple of bitter strikes waged by the United Auto Workers in an attempt to equate the violence involved in those conflicts with the corruption, abuses of power, and goon squad tactics that were earlier uncovered in other unions such as the Teamsters.Footnote ⁵

Conservatives opposed to unions were invoking a broad definition of corruption and racketeering that included a range of legal but aggressive tactics used by unions. Later that year, Senator McClellan would tell the U.S. News & World Report that organizational picketing by unions and secondary boycotts were equivalent to racketeering.Footnote ⁶ In organizational picketing, the union mounted a picket line outside a shop that had not yet signed up with the union, and as a result, the picket line was staffed by people who were not employees of the targeted employer. The goal was to pressure the employer by giving other workers, and the general public, a reason to boycott the shop. Similarly, in a secondary boycott, union members working for one company would refuse to make deliveries, or pick-ups, from another company if that latter employer was the target of a union strike or organizing campaign. Both practices were powerful tactics used by unions faced with small and potentially mobile shops. For the same reason, employers’ groups objected to both practices and were eager to seize on the chance to label them as criminal activities. A statement issued by the US Chamber of Commerce in September 1958 offered a concise example of how antiracketeering rhetoric could be invoked to justify new legal restrictions on union power. Citing the revelations of the McClellan Committee, the Chamber asserted that, “union racketeering and corruption abuses are symptoms or manifestations of excessive economic power wielded by unions and union leaders. This is the heart of the problem.”Footnote ⁷

This was, of course, an assertion that Min Matheson, Carmello Chellino, Margaret Shinski, and their fellow strikers that April would have bitterly denied. In the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, ILGWU members and leaders invoked the struggle against racketeering too, but in a different way and for very different goals. In contrast to the senators on the McClellan Committee and the executives in the Chamber of Commerce, these women had another set of experiences, which informed a perspective on racketeering that was less abstract and more pragmatic. This does not mean that the ILGWU's decision to invoke antiracketeering discourse in the late spring of 1958 was not political; it was. But union leaders used the language of antiracketeering to justify a kind of pragmatic reform effort, to push back against a steady growth of organized crime influence in the garment industry. I am arguing here that a discourse of anticorruption, or antiracketeering, had become popular in the late 1950s, but that it was a discourse that different groups could use to pursue different ends. It was a potent tool for antiunion forces; but it could be utilized by other groups and other individuals for very different reasons. For many within the union movement, the language spoke to their real efforts to deal with a real problem that existed in particular sectors of the economy.

I first started thinking about these different approaches to the racketeering issue a few years ago when I stumbled across a report in the recently opened records of the McClellan Committee. It was dated November 25, 1957, and filed by one of the committee investigators, Arthur Kaplan, who had interviewed Min Matheson, the ILGWU leader in Northeast Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley. The union had sent Matheson out to Pennsylvania in 1946 with instructions to organize the growing number of garment shops that were moving there from New York to avoid the union. If she had not known it before she got there, Matheson soon became aware of the prominent role played by organized crime in towns like Pittston and the link between these gangsters and many of the runaway garment shops. She spent the next decade alternately fighting against these gangsters and negotiating with them to bring their shops into the union. She knew firsthand the dangers involved. One of her brothers, a fellow union organizer, had been murdered in 1949 while trying to organize a mobbed-up firm in New York's Garment District. But Matheson's success had brought her a measure of celebrity. In January 1957, the Reader's Digest ran a flattering profile of her struggle to organize the garment workers in the face of mob resistance entitled, “The Lady and the Gangster.”Footnote ⁸

The timing of the interview with the McClellan Committee investigator was significant. When Matheson spoke with him that November, the ILGWU was preparing to wage its first general strike in more than two decades, and a central goal of that strike was to confront the mob-connected firms that were circumventing the union contract. It might seem, therefore, that Matheson would have welcomed contact with the Senate Rackets Committee. But she didn't. She told the investigator that she had reservations about the committee and its investigation; throughout the interview her position wavered back and forth between wanting to take a stand against racketeering and questioning the methods and goals of the Senate committee. Matheson told Kaplan that she had encountered another committee investigator a year and a half earlier and concluded afterwards that she would not cooperate with the committee. “She states that she felt at that time that the Committee was anti-labor and she then decided that although she had cooperated with Mr. Duffy [the other McClellan Committee investigator], she would not do so in the future.” Still, Matheson continued, she was opposed to racketeering. The committee's recent revelations about corruption within the Teamsters “and her own knowledge of racketeering in this area, both by employer representatives and within the confines of her own union, the ILGWU” made her sympathetic to the antiracketeering cause. “She does believe,” the memo reported, “that it is necessary that the corrupt influences in trade unionism be exposed and perhaps wiped out, and she would be willing to cooperate in every way that she is able.” But Matheson's reservations continued, and Kaplan's very next sentence described how, “In spite of this statement by her, however, a good part of the ensuing several hours was spent in arguing against her reiterated review that there was not much point in continuing to give information because it made her vulnerable, and such investigations were generally futile.” Then, in spite of those concerns, she proceeded to give Kaplan some useful background about the leading Mafia figures in the area and their various business interests.Footnote ⁹

It was an arm's length embrace. The skepticism reflected in part a realistic assessment of the political bias of at least some members of the McClellan Committee. But Matheson also raised the issue of just what this kind of investigation might achieve. As she noted, “such investigations were generally futile.” And yet, for all of that, she found herself drawn into helping the committee because she did want to curb the corrupt influences inside and outside the Garment Workers Union.

The more I researched the history of Min Matheson and of the 1958 Dress Strike, the more I grasped the reasons for her ambivalence. I came to understand that while Matheson and other ILGWU officials embraced anticorruption, they practiced a distinctly different kind of anticorruption campaign from that of the McClellan Committee. It was a more realistic and more pragmatic form of anticorruption activity. It involved a pragmatic acknowledgement of the role that organized crime had come to play in the New York garment industry: the union aimed to curb the mob's role but did not pretend its influence could simply be eliminated.

One way of understanding the pragmatic nature of the union's anticorruption effort is to look at when and how the labor organization raised the racketeering issue during the 1958 strike. It was not an issue that they chose to publicize on the eve of the strike, or even during its first few weeks. A flier issued by the union on the day the strike was declared illustrates this point. It makes a concise but stirring case for the strike, arguing that the employers had forced the conflict on the union as a “test of strength.” It lays out the main goals of the strike, including the issue of strengthening contract enforcement. “We are fighting for fool-proof enforcement provisions that will guarantee that the gains we achieve will not just be on paper but will be reflected in our pay envelopes and actual improved conditions.”Footnote ¹⁰ Although contract evasion was a hallmark of the mob-associated companies, no reference was made to that issue in this statement, or in any of the others in the early days of the strike.

But then, in April 1958, the opponents of the strike narrowed down to the group of holdouts who belonged to the Pennsylvania Garment Manufacturers’ Association (PGMA), and tensions rose as the leadership of this group walked away from several initial settlement agreements. By April 15, 1958 the ILGWU president, David Dubinsky, invoked the discourse of anticorruption. A newspaper article on a speech he gave during a visit to Northeast Pennsylvania to meet with strikers and employers reported that Dubinsky said “some of the ‘hoodlums and their stooges’ operating in the area hoped to obtain preferential agreement with the union.”Footnote ¹¹ According to the news article, the employers were being held back from a settlement “because of threats from racketeers, Dubinsky said.” A few days later, as resistance folded and most of the holdout employers abandoned the PGMA to sign individual union contracts, the ILGWU news release depicted the outcome as an antiracketeering victory. “Mr. Dubinsky described the settlements as a substantial victory against sinister elements who challenged the union's program of stability and enforcement of agreements.”Footnote ¹² Over the next year as the conflict narrowed down to a handful of remaining holdout employers, Dubinsky's rhetoric returned to this theme with even greater emphasis, referring to “underworld elements centered in New York and Pennsylvania” who used violence “to carry out their sinister purposes.”Footnote ¹³

But if the ILGWU's leadership waited to raise this issue in public until April 1958, it was not because union leaders were unaware or unconcerned about the presence of organized crime figures in the garment industry. Internal documents make it clear that the union's leadership was very aware of the role of organized crime, especially in the leadership of the PGMA. Min Matheson, for instance, was able to give the McClellan Committee investigator very specific information on this subject. It is also evident that when discussing the coming conflict among themselves, the union leaders put the issue of confronting the growing role of organized crime right at the center of the effort. Notes on a prestrike conference in January 1958 attended by the top leadership of the strike, a group that included Julius Hochman, Lazar Toper, and Emil Schlesinger, referred to “the forces that spur on the development of irresponsible contracting—the role of the jobbers, truckers, underworld.”Footnote ¹⁴

A report by Julius Hochman to the ILGWU's Dress Joint Board in September 1957 described how the main goal of the coming strike was to win a contract system that would curb the role of gangster-protected contractors and jobbers. As the manager of the Dress Joint Board, Hochman argued that the ILGWU's ability to achieve this goal would fundamentally decide the union's future. “I believe,” he told his fellow union officials, “that our forthcoming negotiations are of utmost importance to our union … I believe that 1958 is the year of decision for us.” “This may be,” he asserted, “the last opportunity in our lifetime—at least in my lifetime—to reestablish our union on a solid foundation.”Footnote ¹⁵

But Hochman's review of how the problem with such gangster-protected shops had achieved its current dangerous proportions also reveals why—at this point—the union's public rhetoric tended not to raise the issue of racketeering. The current problem had its roots in years past, when ILGWU leaders had made special arrangements with organized crime figures, bringing their businesses into the union under terms that offered them a competitive advantage. These arrangements belied the public perception of the ILGWU's leadership, including its president, David Dubinsky, whose reputations for honesty and rectitude were often contrasted with other segments of the labor movement, such as the Teamsters Union. Because Dubinsky and his fellow garment union leaders clearly cherished that image, the union's records tend to make only the most cryptic references to these arrangements with gangsters.Footnote ¹⁶ Hochman's report is the one exception that have I managed to find where a fairly forthright account of these arrangements was actually put down on paper.

Much of the report consists of a review by Hochman, as the Joint Board manager, describing how they arrived at their current situation. He began with the aftermath of the 1936 Dress Strike, when the union had built on its earlier successful organization of the workers by setting up an effective contract system to create a uniform wage scale. The union now had the ladies’ garment workforce in New York organized and had created a uniform wage scale for all employers. But that was when efforts at contract evasion began to involve organized crime. “Soon certain elements in the industry began to seek ways of escaping their obligations under the agreement and the restrictions imposed on them by the union.” In 1939 one of the biggest firms, Kaplan and Elias, led the way in this effort and the union responded by imposing a picket line of the firm. “But then, in stepped Mr. Abe Chait, who was the chief representative of gangsterism at the time, and he assumed responsibility for supplying non-union contractors to Kaplan and Elias.” Chait's influence was centered in the garment trucking industry and in ILGWU Local 102, whose members drove the garment trucks. He arranged trucking services for firms that wanted to avoid the union's restrictions by having the garment pieces sewn together at nonunion shops located outside the city, often in the small towns of Northeast Pennsylvania. Because of Chait's control over Local 102, the ILGWU's national leadership found itself helpless to stop him. As Hochman explained, “For a while this was the pattern. The jobbers, in connivance with gangster-controlled truckers, systematically built up sources of non-union production away from the main centers, far away, in order to undermine our standards and get their work done cheaply.”Footnote ¹⁷

By the mid-1940s, the ILGWU was faced with a dilemma. As Hochman explained, “This new non-union production, organized and backed by gangsterism, put us under tremendous pressure. The development of a group of non-union jobbers created havoc in the market.” Firms that continued to adhere to the union contract “complained justifiably that they couldn't compete with non-union production,” but “at the time we had no way of bringing these non-union jobbers back under our agreement.” So a deal was made with the gangsters involved. “A department of our International [Hochman never specifies exactly who and this kind of cryptic language is typical] was permitted to make certain compromise agreements.” It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. The plan was that “gradually the [gangster-affiliated] jobbers would be brought back under our regular agreement or the equivalent of it. It seemed a logical, a reasonable expectation.” The term jobbers referred to firms that specialized in arranging to have the garments that were designed by particular manufacturers assembled by various contractors.

But it didn't work that way. Once these firms had their competitive advantage they were not willing to give it up. “On the other hand, their success in winning competitive advantages encouraged other jobbers to follow their example.” Hochman was alluding to a pattern in which other firms found themselves forced to compete with these mob-connected jobbers by reaching out to organized crime figures and making arrangements with them. “We decided ultimately that it did no good to allow a department of the International to set up another group of jobbers, and that it would be better if we organized the runaways ourselves.” The resulting organizing campaign, which Hochman does not identify specifically, occurred in 1948.

It did not go well. Thugs charged into the Dress Joint Board offices and beat up the leaders of the organizing drive. Meantime other assaults were taking place on the picket lines set up in New York's Garment District. When the union arranged for help from the Seafarers’ International Union, which dispatched a group of organizers to assist on the picket line, the police arrested the sailors. They also arrested some ILGWU officials and charged them with coercion. After two months the union abandoned the effort.Footnote ¹⁸ A second try in 1949 culminated with the murder of an ILGWU organizer—Min Matheson's brother—who was stabbed to death in broad daylight in the middle of the Garment District. The ILGWU's leadership apparently understood that attack as an effort by the gangsters to send a signal. A blind memo analyzing the possible motives behind this killing explained, “The fear had to be brought right into the market area. Like a political assassination that has to be done in a public place and there be no doubt for what the killing is for, so an organizer has to be assaulted right in the market.”Footnote ¹⁹

As Hochman later summarized the result, “The runaway jobbers and the people who protected them—I'm speaking of the gangsters, the truckers and Local 102, the whole combination—created a set of circumstances in which it was impossible for us to insist on full acceptance of our Joint Board Agreement.” Like the International Union, the Dress Joint Board found itself making arrangements with the gangsters to bring their shops into the union. “We, too, had to compromise, to grant certain exemptions; and we, too, did this with the notion that it would be temporary.” Here again the records of the ILGWU do not offer a lot of specifics. But there are suggestive references in the daily journal kept by David Gingold, manager of the Northeast Department of the ILGWU since 1943, who in the spring of 1950 began referring to meetings between himself, Min Matheson, and the Garment District gangster Abe Chait. Those meetings were followed closely by stormy encounters between Gingold and key leaders from the International Union, Dubinsky, and manager of ILGWU Local 22 (the Dressmakers Local) Sascha Zimmerman. One of Gingold's diary entries from this period reads, “Had another meeting with Minnie Lurye [Matheson] and Sascha Zimmerman again about the Wilkes-Barre Pittston situation. And again meeting broke up in violent disagreement.”Footnote ²⁰

An entry two days later seems to refer to the decision to make special accommodations with the gangster element based in Northeast Pennsylvania and also suggests that this decision came straight from the top of the union.

Gingold's diary would refer to other meetings involving Chait, as well as the official head of the Pennsylvania Garment Manufacturers’ Association, himself, Matheson, and Halpern.Footnote ²² Through these arrangements the ILGWU created a functioning contract with the PGMA, but in doing so it was forming a working relationship with a group it knew was dominated by organized crime figures like Chait.

Chait had assumed a role previously held by Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, a prominent Jewish gangster in the Garment District, who had been executed following his murder conviction in 1944. Sometimes referred to as the “the Judge,” Buchalter headed a criminal group that was based in the Lower East Side's Jewish immigrant community, a community that for a long time had played a predominant part in the city's garment industry. By the late 1920s Buchalter's gang had formed key connections with elements in the garment district's business community and its labor unions. Such connections were not new in the Garment District. Since early in the twentieth century, various employers and union factions had hired different gangsters to wage battles on the picket line. Referring to the prominent role of the Lower East Side Jewish gangster, Benjamin Fein, the historian Jenna Wiseman Joselit observed that, already by 1915, “Dopey Benny and his ilk had become an integral aspect of the Jewish [garment district] economy, influencing conditions in the marketplace and threatening the integrity of the labor movement.”Footnote ²³

Chait's influence (like that of his predecessor Buchalter) centered on the trucking segment of the garment industry. The truckers played a pivotal role in the ladies’ garment manufacturing process, enabling jobbers and manufacturers to hold costs down and meet fluctuating production demands by shipping their cut fabric out to a range of small garment contractors scattered across the New York metropolitan region. Garment manufacturers were in effect saved the overhead costs of maintaining their own factories and workforces. The contractors in turn could set up a small garment factory with little more expense than it took to rent and acquire enough sewing machines to staff it; the garment materials were supplied to them. Linking the two were a couple hundred small trucking companies—most of them one- or two-truck operations—that hauled the cut goods out to the contractors, brought back the finished garments, and then later carried them to long-haul distribution points or retail stores.Footnote ²⁴

Truckers did this work in an incredibly congested setting that left them exposed to various forms of pressure. Each block of the Garment District contained some 475 separate firms, and the only available parking was curbside; the buildings’ elevator facilities were similarly limited. Truckers jockeyed for parking spaces and waited in line for their turn to use a building's elevator. Loading from the truck's side door because there was no room to use the tailgate, a typical delivery of 1,800 pounds of cut goods took one or two hours and three-fourths of that time involved waiting for the elevator. The man driving the truck was often the truck company owner; he was accompanied by a helper who carried the goods on handcarts or garment racks along the crowded sidewalks, to the elevator and then up to their final destination. This was a very public kind of labor, where the street functioned as the truckers’ depot and loading dock. It was also comparatively small scale. To take one example, Ideal Trucking serviced some forty accounts with two trucks and a few handcarts. In the garment trucking industry, the details of an owner's business, including who his accounts were, would be impossible to keep secret, and the loss of a few of those accounts could prove fatal to a small business.Footnote ²⁵

The vulnerability of these truckers left them open to the kind of organizing activity that organized crime often adopted. In 1937, the New York County District Attorney, Thomas Dewey, convicted two gangsters allied with Buchalter (and later with Chait) for their role in organizing a garment truck owners’ association. The two gangsters, John Dioguardi and his uncle Jacob Plumeri, would continue to exert influence over the industry for the next couple of decades. According to Dewey's account, in 1932 Plumeri had set up the Five Boroughs Truckmen's Association in lower Manhattan. The association functioned as a trucking cartel, assigning customers to particular firms and, in return for the group's membership fees, controlling competition by regulating hauling rates. The teenaged Dioguardi was one of the group's enforcers, pushing reluctant operators into the association and policing the cartel's allocation of customers. In 1933, for instance, when the Dependable Transport Company refused to give up a new customer the firm had acquired, the owner's brother was beaten by thugs wielding ax handles. In other cases, recalcitrant trucking operators found emery placed in their truck engines or had stink bombs tossed into their business offices.Footnote ²⁶

According to court testimony, in 1932 a forthright Dioguardi simply told one trucker, “If you don't give up the account, we'll wreck your trucks and put you of business.” When police arrested him the next day outside this same trucker's offices, they found a beer bottle filled with emery in his car.Footnote ²⁷ By 1934, Dioguardi and his uncle Plumeri had expanded their operation by having themselves placed on the payrolls of two other previously independent trucking associations. Dioguardi became the labor manager of the Garment Center Truck Owner's Association. The directors of that association would later be key prosecution witnesses for Dewey, testifying on the stand that they had paid money to Dioguardi and his uncle out of fear. And, though he was never able to prove it, Dewey firmly believed that Dioguardi and Plumeri worked at the behest of the Jewish gangster Buchalter.Footnote ²⁸

By the 1950s, the FBI ascribed a similar role to Chait. Informants within the industry explained to the Bureau that the men who served as directors of the various garment area truck owners associations acted at Chait's behest. For instance, Barney Shapiro, who served as a director of the Garment Truckmen's Association, was described as, “an associate of Abe Chait and followed instructions given to him by Chait.” In turn, the association policed a cartel arrangement among the district's truckers. To operate within the district a trucker had to belong to the relevant association, but once he did so he could register all of his stops with the group and they would make sure no other firm took away his business. These associations insured that a basic hauling rate structure stayed in place, providing these small trucking firms with a kind of secure and stable business environment.Footnote ²⁹

In the 1970s, garment manufacturers invoked a particular metaphor to describe the resulting arrangement; the manufacturer was “married” to his trucker and could not switch from one to another. Nor could the manufacturer effectively bargain to get lower hauling rates. The businessmen did not like the situation, but they also admitted to the FBI that trucking charges were a very small part of their overall costs, so the situation was not a major source of frustration.Footnote ³⁰ For the truckmen, the cost of this beneficial arrangement was the membership dues paid to the association and an up-front initiation fee that could be quite high, as much as $1,500 for a new member. Also, the association received a percentage of the sales price any time one of the truckmen sold an account or his whole business to someone else. The FBI's informant assumed that Chait had ways to siphon the association's revenue into his own hands.Footnote ³¹ But there were other benefits that Chait would have accrued from his involvement in these organizations. It provided him with influence in the entire garment industry, since it would allow him a way to track who was doing business with whom.

He exerted a similar form of influence through the truck drivers’ union, ILGWU Local 102. The head of that local was Sam Berger, described by one FBI informant as someone who “is completely controlled by Chait.” The informant went on to explain how the gangster could use Berger to “bring union pressure to bear on any member and also call strikes when it is to the interest of Chait and his associates.”Footnote ³² A lengthy investigative report by the District Attorney's office in 1948 drew on a wiretap of Local 102's phones that had been in place for eight months in 1946. The report emphasized the close ties that existed between Local 102's head, Berger, and Chait, as well as Chait's associates, John and Thomas Dioguardi. The District Attorney's wiretap recorded the mobsters asking Berger to intercede and help out firms facing a union picket line. They also recorded the gangsters using Berger and Local 102 to track down information on dress manufacturers who were attempting to work with nonunion contractors, discarding the services of their mob-connected truckers. To take one example, in September 1946, John Dioguardi called Berger with a request: “I want you to find out where Seigel and Lenikoff have been sending their work to—what I mean is, find out who the contractors are and if the work goes to N.Y. or N.J. shops.” These transcripts demonstrate how Chait and his associates used their influence in Local 102 to police the existing arrangements between dress manufacturers and the gangsters who provided them with contacts and protection from the union. Through Local 102, the mob could limit the businessmen's ability to dodge the union without paying a fee to them.Footnote ³³

Providing garment manufacturers with access to nonunion contractors, or making it possible for contractors to operate on a nonunion basis, had become an apparently lucrative source of revenue for the gangsters associated with Chait. For a jobber, the arrangement apparently worked like this: he contracted with a mob-connected trucking company that, in return for a set commission on each dress, undertook to have the garments made at below the union rate without the jobber suffering any repercussions. FBI reports and news articles from the 1950s cite figures that ranged from three to fifteen cents per garment as standard commission amounts. Within the industry this was known as purchasing “an edge”; in other words, paying a fee in order to gain an advantage over the competition in the form of lower labor costs.Footnote ³⁴ For their part, contractors might take on a mobster as a partner and gain immunity from union organization and get a steady stream of work from mob-connected jobbers. One contractor described to the FBI the way the arrangement was framed: he was “offered continuing contracts with no union problems [in return] for a piece of the business.”Footnote ³⁵

In the 1940s, much of this activity centered on northeastern Pennsylvania where mob-connected contractors linked to mob-connected trucking firms proliferated. Two large garment trucking firms monopolized the routes to this region, and Chait allegedly had an ownership interest in both of them. He also had a stake in several garment factories in the region. His mob associates, including Thomas “Three Finger Brown” Lucchese, had interests in about forty other similar shops.Footnote ³⁶ Chait also allegedly controlled the leadership of the Pennsylvania Garment Manufacturers Association. The head of the association was a business partner of Chait's wife and the group's “Price Setter and Expediter,” a convicted murderer named Barney Fishgold, was, according to an FBI informant, “in the direct employ of Abe Chait.”Footnote ³⁷ In addition to these commercial ventures, FBI reports indicate that Chait took a share of the money made by loan sharks and gamblers in the Garment District.Footnote ³⁸

These activities made Chait a wealthy man and earned him the title of the garment district's leading racketeer. A 1958 profile in the New York Herald Tribune described him as “one of the toughest, and perhaps the biggest” of the “racketeers who infest the chaotic Seventh Avenue garment center.”Footnote ³⁹ The term racketeer, however, obscured the complex nature of his relationships to businessmen, union officials, and other mobsters. Although, he had served time in prison himself and had ties to men with violent criminal pasts, Chait's relationship to the garment manufacturers did not fit any simple model of extortion through fear. Instead he was someone who sold a service to businessmen who expected to reap a tangible economic benefit from this arrangement. The character of this relationship comes through in a wiretap conversation from 1948 between Chait and a dress manufacturer. In the tape transcript, Chait warns the businessman, Willie Schwartz, that there was likely to be a union picket line placed on his business. Schwartz responds, “You take care of that—that's your job to look after me.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This was not the voice of a terrorized victim. In 1973, when the FBI analyzed why previous law enforcement efforts to curb mob influence in the Garment District had failed, one of the chief reasons they cited was the fact that legitimate businessmen had, in effect, protected the “hoodlum element” by refusing to cooperate with reform efforts. The businessmen acted this way, the Bureau concluded, “due to the need of these businessmen of the services offered by the LCN [La Cosa Nostra, i.e., Mafia], such as quick ECT [extortionate credit transactions, i.e., loansharking] loans, protection from union problems, and in many cases, the elimination of competition from industry wide controls.”Footnote ⁴¹

Similarly, Chait's connection to the ILGWU is worth considering. It was an oddly symbiotic relationship, in which the mob's self-interest led it to support a strong, progressive union. Because wages were the most significant production cost in garment manufacturing, the union's success in organizing the city and setting up a stable uniform wage standard created an economic opportunity for a limited number of shops operating outside the city, which could undercut those standards. The mob's ability to keep those shops nonunion, or to receive favorable union contracts, provided Chait and other gangsters with a way to profit from the situation, but only so long as the union continued to play a dominant role in the industry. In a way, this made Chait and his associates the allies of the union. Indeed, FBI informants used the term “union mob” to refer to Chait and his associates. The term invoked the importance of the connections Chait and his group had with individuals inside the ILGWU's leadership.Footnote ⁴² As one informant put it, they had “union connections and were in a position either to operate non-union shops, furnish protection for non-union shops, or operate under special contract with the International Union.”Footnote ⁴³

A loose structure apparently governed their activities and limited competition between the mobsters. Individual gangsters collected their own payments for protection from whatever firms had decided to deal with them; they would be expected not to poach another gangster's client. A portion of this protection money was turned over to a mob managed pool of funds that was shared out generally and used to aid garment center gangsters doing time in prison. The pool was reportedly managed by Joseph Stracci and Benjamin Kutlow, two crime figures who had earlier belonged to Buchalter's gang.Footnote ⁴⁴ Chait was the overall arbiter, who settled disputes when they arose. As one informant explained it, Chait was “the official judge in settling disputes between unions and manufacturers and various others associated in the garment area.”Footnote ⁴⁵ His partner in managing these arrangements was Thomas Lucchese, who apparently inherited an alliance between this Mafia group and the Jewish gangsters that had first been established by Buchalter.Footnote ⁴⁶

The perspective of informants working with the FBI and New York City's Anti-Crime Commission was that Chait had made a strategic alliance with the ILGWU in the early 1950s. He had agreed to use his influence to help the union organize the nonunion shops in northeastern Pennsylvania because he hoped the union would strengthen his position relative to other organized crime factions that had emerged to challenge his position. An FBI wiretap intercepted a conversation in 1963 in which a Mafia leader, John Masiello, described an agreement reached about ten years earlier between Chait and the ILGWU's president, David Dubinsky. According to Massiello, the deal went this way: “We [the Mob] will produce [for organizing] all the non-union shops, but we want so many [nonunion] shops for ourselves. Dubinsky said, ‘Fine.’—Thirty three guys would be allowed to have nonunion shops.”Footnote ⁴⁷

These accounts also depict the key ILGWU organizer in the Pennsylvania region, Min Matheson, actively engaged in bolstering Chait's influence with local contractors. Referring to the Pennsylvania Garment Manufacturers’ Association, which Chait dominated, an informant asserted, “The men in charge of the organization are able to put the squeeze on various manufacturers through the union local which is headed by a sister of William Lurye [Min Matheson].” By making a demand for higher wages or raising some other grievance, the informant explained, Matheson could force the contractor to turn to the PGMA, and by extension to Chait, for assistance.Footnote ⁴⁸

Such allegations need to be viewed with a measure of skepticism, but it is clear that in the early 1950s, the ILGWU did come to an understanding with Chait. That understanding allowed the union to get contracts signed with a number of nonunion garment firms in Northeast Pennsylvania. As the ILGWU's Julius Hochman, manager of the Joint Dress Board explained in September 1957, the arrangements that allowed them to win that contract were supposed to be temporary, but “these temporary arrangements tend to perpetuate themselves.” They had created a group of jobbers based in New York “who, because of the special arrangements I referred to earlier, are able to compete at an advantage with other Joint Board jobbers. In other words, we have a double competition going on within the framework of our union.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Hochman concluded his report to the union's Joint Board by laying out the solution to this situation, which involved winning a new contract that eliminated these earlier accommodations. “We must be determined not to allow exceptions, special arrangements or anything else that tends to create competition based on labor costs [among union organized shops], a competition that inevitably undermines standards and makes them unenforceable.” Contract enforcement provisions were to be beefed up in order to make it impossible for jobbers to evade those new uniform contract provisions by simply allowing their contractors to pay substandard wages. The new contract would make the jobber financially responsible for seeing to it that the contract was adhered to by his contractors.Footnote ⁵⁰

By seeking to eliminate the special accommodations that certain garment manufacturers had received, the union was waging its own antiracketeering campaign, one that the mob took quite seriously. But, given the role the union's leadership had played in creating those earlier accommodations, this antiracketeering aspect presented its own share of problems in terms of public relations. It makes sense that the union did little to publicize the mob's role in the garment manufacturing association, the PGMA, with which the ILGWU had been working for years. But as the union's adamant unwillingness to continue those special accommodations became clear in late March and April 1958, the strike turned bitter. Certain garment manufacturers attempted to resume production and break the strike. It was at this point that the picket line contests described at the beginning of this article occurred. The mob too responded in its own ways. When a contractor who belonged to the PGMA resigned his membership in the group and signed an individual agreement with the ILGWU, a bullet was fired into his house. It was apparently intended as a warning to other contractors who might seek to break away from the mob-dominated employers association. “The contractors are full of fear,” Matheson reported to her superiors in early April.Footnote ⁵¹

There were also attempts to reach out to the union's leadership, to draw on ties that had been established since the 1940s. Matheson described being summoned to a meeting in New York City with Abe Chait and a group of other Garment District mobsters and organized crime figures from Pittston.Footnote ⁵² Dubinsky's own records cryptically refer to an attempt on March 22, 1958, to make contact with him. “Had a telephone call in the morning from Min Matheson that someone told her for me to see somebody. That same afternoon, conference in Manhattan Hotel [with] Glassberg [an official with the PGMA], Min Matheson, Jack Spitzer, [Harry] Toffell [a prominent jobber with links to Chait], and somebody.” The next pages of this document consist of a Dun & Bradstreet Report that profiles Abe Chait's interest in two garment firms, suggesting who the “somebody” might have been.Footnote ⁵³ McClellan Committee investigators later documented that Chait had returned from a stay in Florida during this part of March.Footnote ⁵⁴ Later, apparently as those efforts to reach out to the ILGWU leadership failed, a red paint bomb was thrown at Matheson's house. This happened a few days after the ILGWU publicly declared in early April that it would no longer negotiate with the PGMA.Footnote ⁵⁵

Most of the firms that had belonged to the PGMA group ended up signing individual contracts with the union. The remaining holdouts were a collection of firms with the most evident ties to particular mobsters, like Thomas Lucchese and Russell Bufalino. The strike against these mob-connected holdouts dragged on through the rest of 1958 and into 1959.Footnote ⁵⁶ It involved violence on the picket line and attacks on the ILGWU's leadership. Matheson's reports described how the holdout firms employed a crew of strong-arm men and news articles included references to women pickets being beaten. As Matheson summed up the situation in April 1959, “the strike and the fights have been very, very rough.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In February 1959, a couple of thugs waylaid Sol Greene, an official with the Dress Joint Board, as he returned home from work and beat him so badly he had to be hospitalized. A few months later, while Sascha Zimmerman was attending the ILGWU's convention in Miami, someone went after him with a blackjack. The attack occurred right outside the convention hotel.Footnote ⁵⁸ The choice of targets seems significant. According to Gingold's diary from 1950, both Zimmerman and Greene had been personally involved in the arrangements with gangsters such as Chait who had first brought the mob-connected firms into the ILGWU. Now, when the union refused to continue those arrangements, they were singled out for public retribution.

Faced with this kind of physical intimidation, Dubinsky turned for help to the Department of Justice. He wrote to the Attorney General, William P. Rogers, referring to “a growing pattern of violence by the criminal elements in the dress industry.” Dubinsky invoked the discourse of antiracketeering that was being circulated so readily by the McClellan Committee and conservative legislators then pushing hard for new restrictions on organized labor. He pointed to the “recent activities of underworld elements centered in New York and Pennsylvania” who had reached across state lines in their attacks on the Garment Workers’ Union leadership. “It is time for the federal government to act,” Dubinsky asserted. “I trust I can look forward to immediate action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in this matter.”

He quickly learned he could look forward to no such thing. Despite the fact that the Eisenhower Administration had publicly adopted an aggressive posture toward labor racketeering, launching 1,500 investigations by 1955, this was not a case that appeared to interest the attorney general. In a letter whose frigid tone speaks volumes, Rogers explained to Dubinsky that simply because a union official became a victim of physical assault did not make it a federal case. The Attorney General offered a loaded comparison to clarify his point. “Attacks against employers and or bombings of their property during a labor dispute,” were also not federal crimes.Footnote ⁵⁹ Similarly, although the McClellan Committee had conducted a preliminary investigation of organized crime influence in the 1958 Dress Strike, the committee chose not to hold any public hearings on the matter and closed their investigation after the Landrum-Griffin Act was passed in 1959.Footnote ⁶⁰

The ILGWU was pretty much on its own, and, left to its own devices, the union's leadership continued its efforts to curb organized crime's role in the garment industry. In doing so, they eschewed the public stance of crusaders. Instead union leaders crafted a more low-key and pragmatic approach by appealing to the group that typically was overlooked in the antiracketeering jeremiads of politicians and journalists: the businessmen. The ILGWU turned to the big dress manufacturers and distributors whose willingness to boost their profits by dealing with mobbed-up firms underlay the corruption that existed in the garment industry. In a letter drafted to be sent out to these businessmen, the ILGWU asked them to stop doing business with the eleven remaining holdouts from the 1958 strike, all of them mob-connected firms. “Each dress that you buy from the firms on the attached list gives support to the Lucheses, the Chaits, and others of their ilk and helps them to solidify their position in the garment industry. Each dress you buy from these firms makes it more difficult for honest employers to deal fairly with our union.”Footnote ⁶¹ The union's lawyers forced them to tone down the final language, but even in its more careful iteration, the appeal makes a poignant plea.Footnote ⁶² It also reframed the responsibility for organized crime's influence in the industry in a way that other voices invoking the antiracketeering discourse of the day almost never seemed to consider. In contrast to the usual condemnation of the corrupt union leader and the complacent union member, the ILGWU's letter cited the pivotal role of the employer and asserted, “The time has come for retailers to decide whose side they are on.”Footnote ⁶³

The experience of the ILGWU in the 1958 Dress Strike offers a chance to look at how antiracketeering discourse could be employed in ways quite different from that of antiunion groups such as the Chamber of Commerce. For the ILGWU leadership, antiracketeering rhetoric was useful because in fact they did want to curb the very real influence of organized crime in their industry. But because that influence was real, and because the ILGWU had had to find ways to respond to it over the years that were often tactical and at times problematic, the union leaders’ invocation of antiracketeering rhetoric was more selective. For much the same reason, their relationship with groups like the McClellan Committee would be more careful; they necessarily kept the Congressional anticorruption crusade at arm's length. And yet, if the antiracketeering efforts the ILGWU mounted were at times problematic, they were also quite practical. The union's leadership and its members were doing more than just political posturing in the halls of Congress; they were endeavoring to win better wages and working conditions for the workers in the garment industry. Given the structure and geography of the industry, at times it made sense to believe that this effort required making accommodations with Abe Chait. When the union's leadership concluded that those arrangements weakened the union, they changed course, mounting an antiracketeering effort that targeted actual organized crime figures and sought to curb their influence in the industry. This was strikingly different from the activities of the McClellan Committee or the Eisenhower Administration, which were at the very same time loudly proclaiming their own antiracketeering agenda.

To what extent did other unions in this era face a situation similar to the ILGWU? Probably many did, although there are almost no case studies such as this one that focus specifically on this issue.Footnote ⁶⁴ The secondary literature that does exist suggests other unions encountered similar dilemmas when organizing in industries where organized crime had established a significant role in particular sectors, such as local trucking. For these unions, organizing and working with employers involved making pragmatic arrangements with organized crime figures, or with individuals who had ties to organized crime. Practical antiracketeering efforts, in turn, meant that the union's leadership sought ways to limit organized crime's influence, while acknowledging the impossibility of completely eliminating it. Steven Fraser's book on Sidney Hillman, the progressive leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), suggests this kind of situation prevailed in the men's clothing industry in New York. Evidence indicates that in the 1930s payments went from the ACWA to individuals associated with the Garment Center racketeer, Louis Buchalter. Fraser concludes that Hillman either agreed to such payments or allowed officials loyal to him to make these arrangements in his stead.Footnote ⁶⁵ A similar arrangement existed in the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union. That union's longtime leader, Alan Block, described his decision to work with Mafia figure Carlo Gambino when the Amalgamated organized the meat industry in New York City. As Block explained the situation in his 1981 memoir, “[Y]ou got to do something. You got to work out some sort of arrangements … . you have got to have some sort of understanding with these people.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Block's assertion was true only for that portion of the labor movement facing the dilemma of organizing in an industry where patterns of corruption and organized crime influence antedated the union's presence, industry competition remained fierce, and labor costs were a more critical element than capital costs.

The particular nature of these arrangements would have varied from union to union, and from union official to union official; they would have ranged across a spectrum of conduct that went from pragmatic but principled officials to those who were nothing more than sellouts. For the labor movement as a whole, this situation complicated its response to the issue of union corruption. Unlike the political figures in Congress who could make dramatic calls for a labor movement completely free of corruption, union leaders faced a more complex situation. A history of pragmatic policies left responsible leaders open to charges of hypocrisy or complicity, and it gave union officials such as Min Matheson valid reasons to be wary of anticorruption probes. This history also undercut the labor movement's effective use of the antiracketeering discourse so prevalent in the 1950s. This was true even though both the issue of racketeering and the anticorruption discourse had a real potency in unions where members and their leaders grappled with the reality of organized crime's presence in their industries.

Viewed from a more long-term perspective, this episode highlights the ongoing contest over how union power would be understood in the twentieth-century United States. Already by the turn-of-the-twentieth century, employers had come to label union tactics such as the secondary boycott as forms of corruption.Footnote ⁶⁷ Andrew Wender Cohen has demonstrated how the term “racketeering” was created in the late 1920s by the Chicago Employers Association, which deployed the term as part of its efforts to “equate certain local unions and trade associations with criminal gangs.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The news media popularized this use of the term, especially after the syndicated newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler exploited a series of union corruption scandals in the early 1940s to depict the entire labor movement as ridden with racketeers. At the same time Pegler demonstrated the potency of labeling particular union tactics, such as secondary boycotts, as forms of racketeering.Footnote ⁶⁹

Union leaders contested this antiunion use of the term. They insisted on a distinction between the actions of gangsters and those of legitimate union leaders whose efforts to better the lives of their union members might lead them to facilitate cartel-like industry trade agreements, or to conduct militant strike actions. In 1928, a Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) official objected to a newspaper headline that labeled a recently murdered Teamster official as a “racketeer.” Noting the murdered man's long career of service to his union members and the vitality of the local union he had created, the CFL official asserted, “Racketeers don't leave any money in the treasury of any organization with which they are connected.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Such assertions involved a tenuously balanced acknowledgement of the degree to which union officials, like the murdered Teamsters leader, had been involved with organized criminal groups, or with employers’ associations tied to such groups. The union's argument required the public to accept a more careful use of terminology such as “racketeering” and to sympathize with the kind of moral compromises some union leaders found themselves forced to make, especially when the balance of power was tipped against them. These arguments lacked the rhetorical punch of the blanket denunciations that critics like Pegler could made.

The limited success of organized labor's efforts to promote more careful use of the term “racketeering” was demonstrated by the fact that its opponents adopted this anticorruption rhetoric again and again in arguing for new legislation to curb the power and reach of organized labor. When the US Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, a law that imposed new restrictions on union organizing, its supporters asserted the measure would mean the “end of the day of the labor racketeer.”Footnote ⁷¹ Over a decade later similar language emerged in efforts to pass new restrictions on unions. These proposals emerged in the midst of revelations produced by the McClellan Committee hearings, in particular about the misconduct of James R. Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters Union. Antiunion groups seized the opportunity to exploit these revelations. In 1957, as Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has noted, officials at the National Association of Manufacturers “concluded that the time was right ‘to crystallize’ the ‘public reaction against labor abuses into specific reform legislation.’”Footnote ⁷² Reform in this case meant provisions in the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959 that banned organizational picketing and tightened existing restrictions on secondary boycotts, both measures long sought by business groups.Footnote ⁷³

The passage of this law, in spite of labor's apparent political power in this period, demonstrated the union movement's vulnerability on the issue of corruption and its inability to sway the public's mind with its own version of antiracketeering discourse. George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, ruefully discussed the problem with a New York Times reporter in 1959 as passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act loomed. “The issue of corruption in some unions,” said Meany, “has been used as an excuse for the view that ‘labor as a whole must be punished.’” He went on to describe how the potent public reaction to that issue had undone the apparent victory labor had won in the 1958 congressional elections. “We are supposed to have elected a good many friends and been successful in defeating those who would have foisted a right-to-work law on us in several states,” he pointed out. But with labor's opponents poised to score a major legislative victory, Meany acknowledged that the issue of corruption had rendered the electoral victory hollow; it had created a political environment where even congressmen elected with labor support would vote to limit union power.Footnote ⁷⁴ And that aspect of the issue was the most telling: the proliferation of antiracketeering discourse fostered a political climate in which liberals, the union movement's erstwhile allies, would support new curbs on union power in the name of reform.

Ironically, the Landrum-Griffin Act, promoted as an antiracketeering measure, hamstrung the efforts of women garment workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, who had just waged a fierce struggle to limit the role of actual organized crime figures in their industry. At the ILGWU's executive board meeting in August 1960, one of the union's top officials explained how “due to the Landrum-Griffin Law it has become next to impossible to organize non-union jobbers.” Since the law banned organizational picketing, it required the union to have the majority of a company's workers signed up before staging a strike. In the small shops that mob-connected jobbers used in Northeast Pennsylvania, this requirement raised an insurmountable barrier to the union. The jobbers had their work “scattered in many shops, sometimes in several states.” Therefore, as the union official explained, “If we succeed in getting all the workers [organized] in one shop, the jobber can withdraw the work and send it elsewhere.” The results dramatically undercut the union's success in the 1958 Dress Strike. “The restriction of the [Landrum-Griffin] law, prohibiting organizational picketing, is, therefore, playing into the hands of the worst elements in our industry.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This union official's comments demonstrate how the issue of antiracketeering played out in ways that were both complex and, in the end, harmful for organized labor in this era.