The Press: Payoffs' Price

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In its two years of investigating labor rackets, the U.S. Senate committee headed by Arkansas Democrat John McClellan has found corruption under rock after rock—and on more than one occasion the enterprising U.S. press has helped the committee turn over the rocks. But last week the McClellan committee took a look at some of the press's own labor relations and found corruption, if not under a rock, at least on the New York loading docks. In three days of testimony it became all too clear that over a period of many years New York dailies have been paying off as sleazy a bunch of labor bums as ever took the Fifth Amendment.

Last week's Washington hearings showed how a small but powerful union can sandbag management. Ostracized by the other newspaper unions, the New York Newspaper and Mail Deliverers' Union (4,500 members) controls a vital link in the chain of distribution: its drivers pick up bundled papers at the loading docks, truck them to the city's 16,000 newsstands and to certain distribution points in the city and the suburbs. From this strategic position, as testimony last week revealed, the hoods who front for the haulers exacted more than half a million dollars in tribute—probably a fraction of the total take—from New York publishers and distributors willing to buy "labor peace" at any price. Items:

¶ Since 1956, the Metropolitan News Co. of New York, one of 37 concerns that distribute New York papers, has paid out sums totaling $107,768 for "miscellaneous travel expenses." Asked by Chairman McClellan if these mysterious disbursements were payoffs to "some union officials," Metropolitan's Secretary Harold Weinstock took the Fifth Amendment.

¶ Over the past 14 years, the Neo Gravure Printing Co. of Weehawken, N.J., which prints Sunday supplements for three New York papers and one in Boston, paid out $307,136.80 to preserve a truce with the Deliverers. Most of this went to Harold Gross, a convicted labor extortionist who runs a Teamster local in Miami, has been on Neo Gravure's payroll (together with four of his relatives) since 1945, after serving three years in the pen. But a share was slipped to a Longshoremen's Union official, Cornelius Noonan, who helped Gross engineer the shakedown. <J In 1948, $43,143.62 was extorted from the high-minded New York Times as tribute for moving the Times's Sunday supplements during a Teamster strike. The Times, faced with the alternative of losing $160,000 in supplement advertising, coughed up the money. Similarly, $13,856.38 was extorted from Hearst's New York Mirror the same year.

¶ In 1949, Theodore O. Thackrey, onetime editor of the New York Post, ran into difficulties with the haulers in his attempt to publish a new tabloid, the left-wing Compass. Referred to an ex-convict (bail jumping, dope peddling) named Irving Bitz, Thackrey paid Bitz $10.000—half what Bitz demanded—for a trouble-free contract with the Deliverers. After collecting the money, Bitz introduced Thackrey to Joseph Simons, then president of the Deliverers' union. The Compass died three years later, but it had no trouble with Simons' union.