NEW YORK: Joey's Pals

Flint-chinned Joseph Fay was a man of appalling power. As vice president of the A.F.L. International Union of Operating Engineers, bellicose Joey Fay bossed the building trades of the New York-New Jersey area for years, and labor leaders, industrialists and politicians paid him homage. (Once Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City welcomed him home from a European trip with a chartered boat and the Jersey City police band aboard.) But Joey got into trouble: in 1945 he and his pal Jim Bove, vice president of the Hod Carriers Union, got 7½-to-15-year prison stretches for conspiracy to extort $368,000 from contractors...