They’re control of the unions still give them a ton of clout...they’re street presence has been substantially reduced but the money and power from the unions separate them from every other crime group. A lot of these kids that are groomed for the life are raised in violent households that foster gangster behavior. Violent fathers usually beget Violent sons.



This is the situation on the waterfront today..This gives the mob enormous clout today...



In the view of Walter M. Arsenault, the executive director of the Waterfront Commission, the fundamental relationship between the waterfront and the mob remains unchanged since “On the Waterfront.”

“The only difference is now, it’s in color,” Mr. Arsenault said.

He based that assessment on several indicators, such as the number of relatives of organized-crime figures who continue to hold choice jobs, many of which involve little work and pay unusually high salaries, like the union shop steward position held by Ralph Gigante, the nephew of the boss of the Genovese family, the late Vincent (Chin) Gigante. Ralph Gigante earned $419,000 in 2014, and has said he believes he holds the union office for life — “until death do us part.”

There is also the fact that some of the same New York and New Jersey union officials whom federal prosecutors have in the past accused of racketeering have since risen to the top ranks of the East Coast waterfront union, the International Longshoremen’s Association.

One is Harold J. Daggett, the garrulous president, who owns a 76-foot yacht, the Obsession, and has been spotted by his members riding in a Bentley. One longshoreman said he had been surprised to catch sight of a holster strapped to Mr. Daggett’s ankle during a meeting.
Mr. Daggett declined, through the longshoremen’s association’s spokesman, to be interviewed. But alluding to his brushes with the Justice Department, Mr. Daggett joked at a union conference in Puerto Rico in 2015 that when he was invited to the White House for a labor meeting, “I thought I might have a better chance ending up in the big house, but there I was, your I.L.A. president, at the White House.”
The waterfront today has largely receded from the city’s consciousness and even its geography. And to some extent, so has the mob. Decimated by mass prosecutions over the last three decades, New York’s five crime families have struggled to adapt. While there have been some new, profitable ventures, like online gambling, the waterfront still exerts its own pull. Mr. Arsenault referred to the waterfront as the mob’s “last candy jar.”

In recent years, the union has brazenly recommended friends or relatives of organized crime figures for jobs on the docks, said Phoebe S. Sorial, the general counsel for the Waterfront Commission. She said the union has sought waterfront jobs for “people who posted bail for organized figures” and “people who are in business with organized crime figures,” along with any number of relatives.

In 2014, for instance, the union recommended the 62-year-old daughter of one of New York’s most famous mobsters, Benjamin (Lefty) Ruggiero (played by Al Pacino in the film “Donnie Brasco”), Mr. Arsenault said, adding that other such cases abound.

“You can’t throw a rock on either side of the waterfront without hitting a brother, son or daughter of a made member,” Mr. Arsenault said, using the terminology for someone who has been inducted into a crime family.
The bi-state Waterfront Commission was formed in 1953 to fight organized crime on the docks. For many years, before it came under new leadership in 2008, it was a scandal-scarred and sleepy agency. Since then it has focused on extensive background checks, mapping the familial relationships between mobsters and longshoremen — an elaborate genealogy project.

The Gigantes, for instance, have 10 relatives — mostly nephews, in-laws and grandsons — working on the waterfront, according to the commission. This kind of blatant nepotism was impressive if not especially unusual.

And yet Mr. Daggett, the union president, objects to the assumption that these sorts of arrangements necessarily signal corruption. “There is an old saying,” he once proclaimed at a public hearing, slightly stretching the degree of kinship in the adage, “‘The son or a nephew should not carry the sins of a father or an uncle.’”

Many of those with relatives in organized crime say the insinuation that they themselves are mixed up in racketeering is hurtful, untrue and yet maybe inescapable.
Yet just a few years later, Mr. Catucci, now locked in a battle over a contract to operate the Red Hook port, accused the longshoremen’s union of threatening him during negotiations. He had been told he would be taken out “in a box,” according to a lawsuit he filed. One vice president of the union “shoved me and threatened to knock me out,” Mr. Catucci said in a 2014 affidavit, in which he claimed that some of the waterfront’s most powerful figures “are, or are associated with, thugs who get their way by intimidation and force.”
For years, investigators have suspected that the mob’s most lucrative targets on the waterfront are the longshoremen benefit funds, including what is known as the “container royalty fund,” the fund that pays extra wages to longshoremen each year as compensation for the diminished work that came with containerization. The funds are worth a great deal of money; one received more than $95 million in 2014. They also tend to be rather opaque.

“It is an awfully inviting target, and knowing the cast of characters involved here, to think they’re not getting a piece of this is unrealistic,” Mr. Stewart said.

The list of employees at the benefits fund, said one law enforcement official, include an accountant and a director of operations who are the children of dead organized crime figures.