McGowan was a career detective in the police division of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, a bi-state agency set up in 1953 to combat organized crime and improve hiring practices on the docks.
Smith was a longtime federal agent who was appointed its police chief in 2005.
“The key phrase is ‘improve hiring practices,'” Smith said of part of the agency’s mission.
But serious concern about the Waterfront Commission’s own recruitment policies led its top two police officers to contact the authorities in both New Jersey and New York, a move which initiated an investigation into the agency.
McGowan, who was assistant chief, and Smith had wanted the police division to recruit women and minority detectives in accordance with present-day norms. New Jersey Commissioner Michael J. Madonna blocked their efforts and instead proposed a series of white suburban males with whom he was friendly. Background checks proved each of them to be unqualified and unsuitable, according to McGowan and Smith. They were hired anyway.
As the agency’s full-time executive director Thomas De Maria and its New York Commissioner Michael Axelrod always backed Madonna, the two cops felt they had no option in May 2007 but to become whistle blowers.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer ordered a probe into “allegations of malfeasance and nonfeasance by personnel of the Waterfront Commission, including allegations of misconduct, conflicts of interest, abuse and waste.” Days before the publication of the New York State inspector general’s scathing 60-page report last month, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine fired Madonna. Axelrod and De Maria had already moved on.
Recently at a downtown coffee shop, McGowan and Smith couldn’t help but laugh at times when discussing the ludicrousness of the hires that made a respected agency that fought the Mafia look like the Keystone Cops.
Of course, the episode had its less than amusing sides. Smith was dismissed without reason in September 2007. McGowan followed him out of the agency last February, having served 28 years. The assistant chief, who was born in 1952, just months before the Waterfront Commission was established, had hoped to continue as a detective until he was 62. However, despite the reported clean sweep at the top of the commission, John Hennelly, an ally of Madonna’s with whom McGowan had clashed repeatedly, was appointed the new police boss.
McGowan and Smith’s alliance grew out of a rivalry of sorts: they went to different Christian Brothers schools. “Our basketball teams, our track teams — we were just in fierce competition,” Smith said of La Salle Academy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which he attended, and Power Memorial on the West Side.
“The Christian Brothers were the foundation of my education,” Smith added. “The Mafia didn’t scare me after that,” McGowan jokingly agreed.
Waterfront crusader
Their biographies have certain parallels with that of the Rev. John Corridan, the Jesuit priest whose work fighting Irish gangsters, as well as mobbed-up businessmen and union officials, led to the formation of the Waterfront Commission, and whose sophisticated media outreach began his association with “On the Waterfront” screenwriter Budd Schulberg.
The cops, too, were from upwardly mobile New York Irish-American families and went on to Catholic colleges after school. Both even have roots in Kerry, where Corridan’s parents were born.
Two of Smith’s great-grandparents were from Tralee. McGowan’s mother was a native of Ballylongford and he’s a regular visitor, as his wife Mercedes is also from Kerry. His father was an immigrant from Sligo who worked for a time as a longshoreman before becoming a transit worker. He was chairman of TWU Local 100 when he retired. And like Corridan, the future Waterfront detective went to school with people who chose a life of crime. McGowan, who got his degree at Manhattan College, knew future members of the Westies at Power Memorial.
He joined the Port Authority Police Academy in 1980 after gaining experience in different aspects of law enforcement. The Port Authority had one of the best-paid police forces in the country (it still has), and its training academy was for the first time choosing people based on merit rather than who they knew or were related to. McGowan came second in a class of 60.
Coming near the top of the class a few months earlier was a 25-year-old graduate of St. Francis College in Brooklyn, Brian Smith, who then began his career with the Port Authority police. Smith went on to work for the U.S. Department of the Interior and was later a special agent for the U.S. Customs Service. He was regional inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services in the six years before he was appointed police chief of the Waterfront Commission.
His path would cross with McGowan’s from time to time over the years. One connection was Smith’s brother, who was an officer with the Waterfront Police. “We remained friendly,” McGowan said.
Officers from different agencies would work together on bodies such as the inter-agency task drug force, which McGowan served with for eight years.
“I loved it. I wasn’t a job for me; it was a vocation,” McGowan said of the Waterfront Commission police division. “I did it well. I’m proud of what we did.”
Smith said of his former fellow officer: “From my perspective, the only person in that agency that had talent and was able to start an investigation and follow it through to prosecution was Kevin.
“So you take Kevin out of there, and you have 50 people running around in circles,” he added about an agency that has cut back its hours to 9-5, Monday to Friday.
Flipping a turncoat
McGowan cooperated with the FBI on the case of Dino Basciano, who is now in the witness protection program and Matteo Ruggerio, who got 20 years. They had been smuggling cocaine from Latin America into New York harbor. (Organized crime correspondent Jerry Capeci wrote in the Daily News at the time: “Hiding Dino, with flaming red hair and tattoos of Bamm-Bamm and Pebbles on his arms, won’t be easy for the feds.”)
McGowan then helped lead the investigation that culminated in the jailing of Peter Gotti, Richard Gotti, Richard Gotti Jr., Red Scollo, Anthony S. Ciccone and a dozen other members of the Gambino crime family.
“The guys who controlled Local 1814 in Brooklyn — we took them right out, and the ILA [International Longshoremen’s Association] president,” he said, referring to Scollo.
During that case in 2002, McGowan flipped Primo Cassarino. That star witness in the Gambino case, and others after it, is now also in the witness protection program.
That came at the end of the two-year probe that involved wiretapping. In many ways, the Waterfront Commission, which had other successes against the Mafia in recent years, was made for such patient probes. McGowan described the institution he served for three decades as “staid” and “conservative” in certain ways.
“We never had scandal,” he said. “It was a well-respected agency. We had high-caliber people.”
He cited Nicholas Scoppetta, the current commissioner of the Fire Department of New York, Philip Spinelli, who was chief of police until his ouster in 2003, and long-time executive director Leonard Newman as examples of the kind of first-rate public servant that worked for the agency.
Spinelli was removed because he refused to do Madonna’s bidding, according to McGowan and Smith. “I was down in Miami arresting Arthur Coffey, the head of the ILA,” McGowan recalled. “When I got off the plane, I’m the acting chief of police. I couldn’t believe it.”
When Smith joined the force as chief of police in 2005, he worked with his colleague McGowan to recruit African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, Russian-American and Polish-American officers to reflect both the demographics of the community at large and the workforce on the waterfront.
Meanwhile, detailed background checks showed up serious problems with Madonna’s alternative candidates. One lied about graduating from West Point, while another had a record of clashing with superiors. Both were hired despite the protests of the police division’s top officers (though the latter hire was quietly dismissed when he repeatedly fell asleep in class).
Another candidate failed the written test twice. Madonna demanded a copy of the questions and also that his young friend be given a third chance.
“The kid comes in and takes the test and scores the highest mark in the history of the Waterfront Commission,” Smith said. “They hired the guy.”
He came unstuck when he suggested to a non-police employee of the Waterfront Commission that she take the test. He said it was very tough but that “the big guy” (Madonna) gave him the questions.
The job supervisor and reference of a fourth Madonna-approved applicant was a Mafia soldier and although there was no suggestion the applicant was himself in anyway involved with organized crime, the connection was too close for McGowan and Smith.
“At the same time, through our diversity recruiting, I had a black female applicant with a masters degree in forensic science at John Jay who was an investigator at the medical examiner’s office for five years,” Smith recalled. “And I had a black male applicant with a criminal justice degree, a four-year degree. He was highly recommended.”
They weren’t hired.
Issues of security
McGowan and Smith believe that the fundamental problem was that the two commissioners, Madonna and Axelrod, were linked to the police union. Madonna was the PBA state president for New Jersey during his time with the Waterfront Commission. “That’s a conflict of interest,” McGowan said.
“They were part-time commissioners who ran it 24/7,” McGowan said. “Nothing got done without De Maria calling Madonna up.”
Smith, whose one evaluation by De Maria came back marked “excellent,” was called into the executive director’s office on Sept. 12, 2007. The boss told him: “I don’t know how to say this, but the commissioners want to go in a different direction. You have to be out of the office today.”
Smith, who had turned down lucrative private-sector job offers after 9/11, was 39 days short of being eligible for a 5-year state pension.
De Maria, who is now public safety commissioner in Hempstead, L.I., told the New York Times that he had a “blowout” with Madonna over the hires, but said to his police chiefs that unlike them he didn’t have enough seniority to retire. “I guess I said something about a mortgage to pay and two kids to put through college,” he told the paper.
“But it’s a security issue as well,” said Smith, who has studied the subject in recent years in postgraduate work he’s done at the Institute of World Politics in Washington and Boston University. “It’s a national security issue.”
Here again there was a parallel with the Waterfront crusader of a half-century ago. Fr. Corridan argued before a Catholic lay gathering in New Jersey in the late 1940s that the well-regulated waterfronts of the West Coast, even though heavily under the influence of the pro-Soviet labor leader Harry Bridges, were less of a security risk that the Irish gangster-controlled port of New York. “And the government knows it,” the Jesuit said.
Sunnyside, Queens resident McGowan has also specialized in security questions. In 2000, he presented a paper to the Presidential Committee on Port Security in the United States. More recently, he has become an expert on intellectual property theft, particularly as it relates to the importation of goods. He has lectured on the subject around the world.
McGowan, who has received more than 50 public service commendations, knew that whistle-blowers, particularly those in police forces, never benefit materially. He certainly knew that he couldn’t be appointed chief, making nonsense of the claim by detractors that he resigned because he wasn’t given the job. (Traditionally the chief’s position was an outside appointment in any case. Hennelly is the first to have been recruited from the ranks.)
There was also the inevitable institutional backlash. In among chapters detailing rampant cronyism, incompetence and corruption are chapters on the misuse of parking placards and agency cars by senior staff, including McGowan.
Commented the Village Voice’s Tom Robbins about these alleged misdeeds: “It is a good thing that this is not the standard yardstick for misbehavior. If so, we’d have to lock up half of the D.A.s, detectives and court officers in the city.”
McGowan, who said he was on call 24 hours a day, denied any wrongdoing.
There was another type of backlash. He said: “I’ve had a long-time friend in law-enforcement who basically turned his back on me. He said ‘what you just did was a career ender. You shouldn’t have gotten involved.’
“But if you don’t do it. What do you do?” McGowan said. “I couldn’t live like that. I couldn’t work like that.”
For more on the Rev. John Corridan, read “On the Irish Waterfront: the Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York” by James T. Fisher, which is published this month by Cornell University Press.
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