Claiming the New York Harbor Waterfront Commission is holding it back from bigger profits and more jobs for the state, New Jersey will make its case at the Supreme Court in February to end its shared custody of the port watchdog with neighbor New York.

New York is not quite ready, however, to divvy up the commission’s authority as a key line of defense against organized crime.

New York officials argue that New Jersey unilaterally withdrawing from the commission — founded in 1953 to get the mob out of the ports, in a pact approved by the U.S. Congress — is a violation of the Compacts Clause of the Constitution. 

The commission itself was inspired by The New York Sun’s Pulitzer-winning reporting about crime on the docks in the late 1940s.

New Jersey’s bailing on its commitment would “trample New York’s sovereignty” and “allow New Jersey to renege on its commitment to a bistate approach to bistate problems that New Jersey acknowledges still affect the port,” Empire State attorneys wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court. 

In the middle of the divorce are the crime families of La Cosa Nostra and their foothold at the harbor. 

The port today is “probably the last place where the mob has control over an industry in New York,” a former commissioner from New York, Ronald Goldstock, told the Sun. “All the others have been taken out, so the port becomes an area that’s important.”

New York Harbor is the third-largest port in the country and the only one to span two states. Eighty percent of shipping containers are offloaded in New Jersey, where there’s more land, but New York accounts for the majority of the market. The port generates $100 billion in annual income and supports 239,000 jobs. 

The waterfront commission comprises two commissioners, one from each state, who run a specialized team of more than 30 detectives responsible for investigating and referring cases on gambling, narcotics, extortion, and other crimes within the Port of New York district, a 25-mile radius extending from the Statue of Liberty. 

The commission is also tasked with processing background checks of firms and individuals working at the ports, and has final authority to approve the hiring of about 8,000 longshoremen, checkers, and pier guards. The commission can deny applicants and suspend registrations for workers tied to organized crimes. 

The union shop and the management association operating at the port — the International Longshoremen’s Association and the Shipping Association of New York and New Jersey, respectively — have made no bones about their desire to see the commission shuttered. 

“They make the rules up as they go along as to what qualifies a person and what doesn’t” to work at the port, according to the president of the shipping association, John Nardi, which represents ocean carriers and terminal operators at the port.

“We’re the only port in North America who has a waterfront commission, and my view is that a lot of its initiatives are to ensure the survival of the waterfront commission, not the business of the port,” Mr. Nardi told the Sun. 

His sentiments have been echoed by the longshoremen’s president, Harold Daggett, though the longshoremen’s association declined to comment. The commission contends that the longshoremen have allowed for the “perpetuation of criminality and corruption.”

“This year, 18 percent of the ILA’s deep sea longshore referrals did not make it into the workforce because of their prohibited organized crime ties,” the commission’s executive director, Walter Arsenault, wrote in its 2019-20 annual report. “Without the commission’s specialized expertise and oversight, notorious organized figures would be free to directly control and operate at the critical points of interstate and international shipping.” 

“You can extract monopoly profits from any business by controlling goods or services,” Mr. Goldstock said. Union “control of labor gives them the ability to extort from all users of the port. The waterfront commission is the one body that stands in their way of exercising that ability.”

As recently as last month, the commission disclosed its role in a joint investigation that led to the indictment of two Genovese family soldiers, Elia “Chinatown” Albanese and Carmine “Baby Carm” Russo, and seven others for conspiracy and criminal possession of illegal pills as part of an oxycodone ring. The soldiers allegedly obtained prescriptions from Midtown Manhattan doctors and gave them to their colleagues, who would sell the pills on Staten Island.

In August, the commission announced its participation in the arrests of nine members and associates of the Genovese and Bonanno crime families, including Joseph “Joe Fish” Macario, Carmine and Vito Polito, Salvatore “Sal the Shoemaker” Rubino, and Joseph “Joe Box” Rutigliano, among others. The men are accused of running gambling parlors in sports clubs and coffee houses.  

Mr. Goldstock said while the New Jersey state police is a welcome partner for the commission, it does not have the ability to cross bridges and tunnels to conduct investigations, nor is it in the business of conducting the due diligence the commission performs on employment applications. 

“People who work on this day in and day out, they have the expertise to do it … in a way that a generalized police force can’t,” Mr. Goldstock said.

Mr. Nardi said from where he sits, he does not see organized crime plaguing the ports but if it were, it would reflect on the commission, not the unions.

“We’re an industry that has oversight by a government agency whose sole responsibility is to make sure there’s not organized crime at the port,” he said. “They’ve been doing that for 60-plus years. If there is organized crime at the port, they have failed miserably.”