The short and simple story is that it is inspired by my musing on what my life might have been like had my maternal Italian grandparents decided to settle in New York City, rather than in eastern Washington State.
The complex version, however, is a little more interesting and derives from an unusual confluence of events. In 1988 I began to write for the Theater. The year before I had started a job as a prosecutor in Brooklyn, a job that eventually gave me access to wiretap recordings of the five New York mafia families and, as important, brought me into contact with many decent, incredibly skilled and very memorable cops and prosecutors, some of whom were of Italian-American descent. That same year, in 1987, I had - at the urging of my Italian grandmother - made contact with some of my relatives who had come over from the same area of Calabria which my mother's family is from, but only thirty years before. With them, I attended a number of Calabrese feasts and confirmations on Long Island. A year later, in 1989, I had returned to my Catholic roots and begun attending services at a church in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, St. Francis Xavier, which - at the time - was a very progressive parish with deep roots in the labor union movement. That same year I moved back to the Carroll Gardens neighborhood in Brooklyn, where I had first lived when I came to New York City in 1983 and which was, six years later, still strongly Italian-American and still connected to the Brooklyn waterfront where many of the retired longshoremen living there had once worked.
Thus, I found myself, in 1989, immersed in several aspects of Italian-American culture, living amongst (in some cases) the same Italian-Americans who my Office was investigating or prosecuting and, at the same time, attending mass at the very church in Chelsea where the real world events which directly inspired Budd Schulberg's screenplay for "On the Waterfront" (those being the articles which Malcom Johnson had written in the late 1940's for the New York Sun) had taken place. On a more personal level, my return to the neighborhood brought back strong feelings of loss and mourning from the collapse of a relationship with a woman who had lived in a nearby neighborhood several years before. Walking around what is now known as the "Columbia Street Waterfront District" neighborhood in 1989 brought back memories of walking in that neighborhood in 1983, when, for me, a sense of loss and sorrow permeated my thoughts like a cold grey fog blown in off the Buttermilk Channel drifting along the waterfront streets and vacant lots like the ghosts whose presence was, for me, palpable.
As I told Budd Schulberg many years later when I met him, I wrote "Stand-Up Guys" in part as an homage to his script for "Waterfront" because, though I love his script and think that it is among the best screenplays ever written, I was not happy with the his line for Brando in which the hero, coulda-been-a-contender Terry Malloy, tells his true love, Edie, that he is going down to the pier to "get my rights." In my experience, people - in moments of crisis - are seldom motivated by abstract ideals but, rather, with more basic motivations: hunger, sex, greed, revenge. In truth, Terry is not motivated by any such abstraction as "getting his rights" but, rather, with a very visceral and understandable desire to avenge himself on Johnny Friendly for having murdered Terry's brother Charlie.
In writing "Stand-Up Guys" I chose to set my story amongst the Columbia Street piers and walk-up buildings that, prior to the construction of the BQE, had formed a very tight, mostly Italian-American neighborhood in the 1930's populated by longshoremen and their families who worked on the nearby piers, shopped on Columbia Street and worshipped at St. Mary's/Sacred Heart Church. This neighborhood, which is now known as the "Columbia Street Waterfront District" was, at that time, known simply as "Red Hook" or "the Hook" or, more generically, "Sout' Brooklyn."
I chose, as the names of my three male protagonists, Italian names which cannot be anglicized: Pasquale (Patsy), which means "Paschal" and alludes to Easter; Salvatore (Sal) which, of course, means "Savior" and Gaetano (Guy) who, for me, was a figure like Pietro Panto, a stand-up guy who has been much mythologized but who, really, is just a "guy."
I truly believe that the most important things in our lives happen for a reason, that - when we are being most true to our true selves - all manner of events occur which, from the outside, appear to be coincidence but which are not.
From "Stand-Up Guys" by Peter Basta Brightbill
In this scene, Sal confesses to his wife, Rose, what he had just told his step-son, Patsy, about his role in the death of Patsy's real father (and Rose's boyfriend), Gaetano. He has been forced to do this in order to prevent Patsy from going down to the piers to meet Tony, since Sal knows that Tony intends to kill Patsy there.
SAL
The night. The night Gaetano was killed. We were all playing poker that night. All the guys on the strike committee. All of a sudden, Gaetano comes running in with this story about one of the "big guys" who he's heard sold out the union. Says he heard a coupla stevedores talking about how one of the union guys--
PATSY
A guy named Tony.
SAL
A guy he thought mighta been named Tony - had sold the union regulars out on the contract. Gaetano tried to talk to Tony Pep about it. Tony kept putting him off. "Don't worry about it." Said he'd investigate it. Guy got fed up, started talking about going to the Waterfront Commission. We all tried to tell Gaetano he oughta just forget he ever heard that, that it wouldn't do no good raisin' a stink now. Stubborn. Typical Calabrese hard head. Then the Waterfront Commission caught up with him. Handed him a subpoena.
ROSE
You never told me this.
SAL
I'm telling you now! That night, the night of the poker game at my place, Tony called. Asked for Gaetano. They talked. When Guy hung up he said Tony had told him that it was all a misunderstanding and that he'd clear it all up. For Gaetano to meet him down at the docks.
(More quietly, a buried memory coming back to haunt him)
He asked me what I thought he should do. I told him I thought he should go meet Tony.
ROSE
Oh, my God.
SAL
I didn't know what was gonna happen to him. If I had known, you think I'd a let him go down there? Then the poker game broke up. Few minutes later, Nicky Tomasso comes running in yelling that he was down by the piers when Frankie Lomanico comes running up to him.
ROSE
Frankie-the-fruit?
SAL
Yeah, only Frankie wasn't injured then. So Nicky tells us that Frankie takes him down [to] the pier where he sees Tony Pep standing over Gaetano and Tony says he seen the stevedore dead, and Gaetano, alive but bleeding a little from the gut, where the stevedore had stabbed him.
ROSE
Bleeding a little?
SAL
Nicky says that Tony had told him to run and get help, that he and Frankie would stay with Guy. So Nicky finds me and we go down there.
[SAL grows very quiet.]
Only when we got there Gaetano was bleeding real bad from the back of his head, and he had died. And Tony is standing over him. And I go to pick Guy up, and I squat down and take his head in my hands. And I can't figure out why he's bleeding so bad from his head! And then I seen it.
[SAL LOOKS STRAIGHT UP AT PATSY, WHO IS HOLDING THE CRATEHOOK BY HIS SIDE].
He's got a cratehook jammed into the back of his head.
[PATSY DROPS THE HOOK, WHICH FALLS TO THE STONE LOUDLY. ROSE BRINGS HER HAND UP TO HER MOUTH.]
ROSE
Mother of God. But Nicky had said --
[SAL nods his head vigorously in assent.]
SAL
We didn't know what to make of it. Rumors started going around that maybe it didn't happen the way it looked.
ROSE
(A dawning horror, something she's refused to believe for many years)
Nicky had an accident right after that...
SAL
(derisively)
Yeah, some "accident". Then, right after that Tony came around saying "Oh, didn't Nicky tell you? I saw the stevedore jump Gaetano".
[ROSE nods towards the cratehook at PATSY's feet.]
ROSE
So you knew. You had to know.
SAL
(pleadingly, desperately)
I swear to God, Rose, I didn't know nothing.
ROSE
You must have. You were with him right before it happened. You knew that Gaetano had found out something. You knew he was in trouble. And you let him walk down there knowing that he was gonna get killed.
SAL
No! Nobody knew. Nobody knew nothing for sure. Tony said that he saw the stevedore jump Guy -
ROSE
And you just ate it up, what Tony said, didn't you?
SAL
It was possible! The stevedores were still mad at Gaetano for what happened to Jimmy-the-Bug!
SAL
(With the pent-up anger of years of silence, of being cuckolded by a ghost)
BESIDES, WHAT IF I DID? HUH? ALL MY LIFE I'D BEEN LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF YOUR BOYFRIEND. GAETANO THIS! GAETANO THAT! "OH, GAETANO HE'S SUCH A STAND-UP GUY." WELL, YOU WANT TO KNOW SOMETHIN'? YOUR BOYFRIEND WAS A FUCKIN' HOT HEAD. HE COULDN'T KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT. NO, NOT THIS TIME. HE WENT TO THE STRIKE COMMITTEE WITH HIS SUSPICIONS. NOBODY WANTED TO HEAR IT, OF COURSE. GO AROUND TELLIN' CRAZY STORIES ABOUT TONY HAVING SOLD OUT THE UNION TO THE MOB, GETTING EVERYBODY UPSET, JUST AFTER THE UNION FINALLY GOT US THAT GODDAMN AGREEMENT. AND EVERYBODY TRIED TO TELL GAETANO THIS. EVERYBODY TRIED TO WARN HIM NOT TO MAKE WAVES. I MEAN, IF HE DIDN'T LISTEN, HE GOT WHAT WAS COMING TO HIM!
[Suddenly very contrite]
Oh, God. I didn't mean that Rose, honest. Gaetano was the most stand-up guy I ever knew. Rose, you gotta believe me.
[PATSY starts to walk past SAL towards the house. SAL grabs onto PATSY's arm as he walks by. PATSY shrugs him off.]
Pasquale. You believe me, don't you?
[PATSY looks down at SAL, then exits the yard.]
Doesn't anybody believe me? I didn't know.
ROSE
You all knew.
SAL
[desperately]
Hell, there were two bodies down there, Gaetano's and the stevedores! That's all anybody knew for sure, Rose.
ROSE
[still quietly, but with bitterness]
Oh, you knew. All you "brave union men". You knew that Gaetano was in danger. And you let him walk right to his death. And all this "stand-up guy" crap. You guys made Gaetano into a real hero, didn't you? Almost a saint. Lies. Lies and guilt, Sal.
From "True Life Tales - On the Waterfront" By: Stephen Schwartz
Film History | Friday, February 11, 2005
II. The Martyrdom of Pete Panto
In the discourse that has developed around On the Waterfront and “The Hook,” much credibility has been attached to Miller’s claim that he was drawn to the issue of waterfront union corruption by walks in Brooklyn, where he claimed to have seen, in 1947, graffiti in Italian reading “Dove Pete Panto?” or “Where is Pete Panto?” According to Miller, “down near the piers… this mysterious question covered every surface… the sentence began showing up in subway stations and chalked on Court Street office buildings. Finally, the liberal press took up the cry, with PM, the progressive daily… explaining that Pete Panto was a young longshoreman who had attempt to lead a rank-and-file revolt against the leadership of President Joseph Ryan and his colleagues, many of them allegedly Mafiosi, who ran the International Longshoremen’s Association [ILA]. Panto, one evening during dinner, had been lured from his home by a phone call from an unknown caller and was never seen again. The movement he had led vanished from the scene.”[11]
Panto, known to some as Pietro, to others as Peter, and to those who most sought to exploit his memory as Pete, appears several times more in Timebends. According to Miller, the author “took to wandering the bars on the waterfront to pick up whatever I could about Panto. It was a time when the heroic had all but disappeared from the theatre along with any interest in the tragic tradition itself. The idea of a young man defying evil and ending up in a cement block at the bottom of the river drew me on. It took only a couple of days on the piers to discover than men were afraid to so much as talk about Panto… Pete Panto had become heroic for me.”[12]
Longshoremen in Brooklyn in 1947 had little incentive to discuss Pietro Panto, as he was known in their community, with a non-Italian stranger lacking standing among them. Although Miller never mentions it, Panto’s disappearance had occurred almost a decade before, on July 14, 1939. It was mentioned in The New York Times six weeks afterward, in an article referring to a local criminal investigation, headed “Amen Will Press Brooklyn Inquiry.” Panto, according to the Times, was a “Red Hook longshoreman who had been fighting terrorists on the docks.” A certain John Harlan Amen, a New York Special Attorney General investigating official corruption in Brooklyn, had received a petition asking for an investigation of the Panto case. The petition was signed by something called the Waterfront Committee for Democratic Action, headed by a woman named Muriel Draper.[13]
Although there was never any evidence that Pietro Panto was a Communist, the entry of the Waterfront Committee for Democratic Action and Muriel Draper signaled the interest of the Communist Party in the case. The above-mentioned New York Times article appeared on a Sunday; the next day, August 28, 1939, the Daily Worker, the main Communist organ in New York, reported in fuller detail on the disappearance of Panto. Its article carried the more focused headline, “Urge Amen Probe in Disappearance of Anti-Ryan Stevedore.” The Communist daily noted the date of Panto’s disappearance, and said, “police agencies of Brooklyn, the Missing Persons Bureau, and the Alien Squad have combed all clues and pressed the search for Panto, to no avail.” The Daily Worker quoted a statement by Muriel Draper, chair of the Waterfront Committee for Democratic Action, as follows: “Pete was just an ordinary dock worker. He come home from his work on the Moore-McCormack piers on Friday, July 14, told some friends he was going to meet ‘two guys I don’t trust,’ and has not been seen since… Pete was also anti-fascist – he’d been back to Italy since the advent of Mussolini.”
The Draper statement appealed, to those interested in the case, to “get in touch with the Waterfront Committee,” but the Daily Worker printed no address for it.[14] The Committee was an ephemeral effort, which left almost no trace (it never appeared anywhere in any investigative records on Communism accumulated by federal and state authorities.) Unfortunately for Pietro Panto’s memory, the Communists at that time were preoccupied with activities justifying the recently-signed Stalin-Hitler pact; thus the Daily Worker, on the day before The New York Times reported on the matter, had a box on its front page stating “Tomorrow’s Sunday Worker will contain cabled news from Moscow, London, and Paris telling of the reactions to the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact,” and exhorting “all Party members and friends” to distribute the Sunday edition throughout the city.[15]
Muriel Draper (1886-1952), for her part, was a well-known Stalinist. Her most ignominious act was doubtless her signature on a statement published in the Daily Worker of April 28, 1938, hailing the verdicts (and death sentences) in the recent Moscow trial of Nikolai I. Bukharin and 17 other Soviet political figures. Therein she joined “such famous Russian and legal authorities,” in the words of the anti-Stalinist Eugene Lyons, as the Hollywood actor “Lionel Stander…, Dashiell Hammett [and] Dorothy Parker.” The list of endorsers of Stalinist “justice” against “the Trotskyite-Bukharinite traitors” totaled 150 prominent Americans.[16] Draper was an active promoter of Soviet interests in America until her death.[17]
In April 1940, The New York Times again reported on the Panto case. The mobster Abe Reles, alias “Kid Twist,” had become an informant to Brooklyn District Attorney William O’Dwyer, and the paper reported on numerous members of New York’s worst criminal gang, as named by Reles. They included Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, Harry (Pittsburgh Phil) Strauss, Joe Adonis, and Charles Lucania, better known as Lucky Luciano. Investigators also identified Albert Anastasia as “one of the higher-ups of the ring.” The Times noted, “Albert Anastasia and Joseph Florino are being sought by the prosecutor’s staff in connection with the disappearance of Pete Panto, Red Hook longshoreman, who had been fighting terrorists on the docks.”[18]
Strangely, however, the Daily Worker’s reportage on the O’Dwyer investigation, appearing one day before The New York Times’ 1940 account, made no mention at all of Panto or Anastasia.[19] The Waterfront Committee for Democratic Action had disappeared. But some Communist interest in the Panto case persisted, at least among the party’s few Italian-speaking followers. On July 20, 1940, a year after his disappearance, L’Unità del Popolo (People’s Unity), a New York Communist Party weekly aimed at Italian-Americans, published a “declaration by O’Dwyer,” in which the Brooklyn District Attorney stated on his 50th birthday that “the best celebration of my birthday will be to solve the murder of Peter Panto.” The article announced that a memorial for Pietro Panto was to be held on July 19 at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Red Hook, with speeches by a prominent follower of the Soviet line, Congressman Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party, and Rev. Edward Swanstrom, who had published a book, The Waterfront Labor Problem.[20]
L’Unità del Popolo also reported that Marcantonio had intended to address a similar meeting two weeks before, at a Knights of Columbus hall, but that Emilio Camarda, vice-president of the ILA, had “succeeding in terrorizing the Knights of Columbus” into refusing the use of their facility for the event. It further stated that a “Rank and File Committee” had been set up to hold the memorial.
A week later, L’Unità del Popolo reported on the Panto memorial meeting, in an issue that bore the auspicious headline, “The borders of true democracy are extended in Europe – The Baltic states agree to join the Soviet Union – A protest by [U.S. Under-Secretary of State] Sumner Welles against this free decision is an insult to all progressive Americans.” The Italian weekly was, like the rest of the Stalinist press in the U.S., mainly concerned to defend Soviet foreign policy, but it also described the memorial for “Pietro Panto, kidnapped and killed by camorristi [gangsters].” In this account, 200 dockworkers had come to the V.F.W. hall, where they encountered officials of the ILA locals spread out in front of the building, threatening them with dismissal and other punishments. But 200 police had also been sent to prevent the outbreak of violence, and the memorial was addressed by Congressman Marcantonio and presided over by Pietro Mazzei, described as Panto’s successor as rank-and-file leader in the union. The article also mentioned an English-language waterfront bulletin called “Shape Up,” distributed by the Communist Party, apparently to Irish longshoremen.[21]
There the case stood until 1947, when Miller began, as he put it, “searching for a handle on Pete Panto.”[22]
But in 1951, the long-past testimony of Abe Reles, who had died in 1941, in an incident described in newspapers as an attempt to escape from custody, during Reles’ disclosures, provided the basis for the most detailed version of the death of Panto, appearing in a book titled Murder, Inc.[23] Co-authored by Burton B. Turkus, who had been Assistant District Attorney for Kings County (Brooklyn) during the 1939 inquiry, and veteran journalist Sid Feder, the volume includes a graphic description of the young longshoreman’s death. “In mid-summer 1939,” Turkus and Feder wrote, “Peter Panto was waging a determined war against gangster rule on the water front. For months, he had been whipping up the longshoremen to shake off the mobster grip. Panto was only twenty-eight… ‘We are strong,’ he urged the union men. ‘All we have to do is stand up and fight.’”
According to Turkus and Feder, Panto’s fate was ordained after he called a meeting of ILA local 929 on July 8, 1939, attended by 1,250 members. Panto insisted on an honest count in an approaching union election. “He was cheered for that – and the cheering did it. The applause was a sign to the hoods that their control of a very lucrative racket was menaced.”
In the Turkus-Feder account, Panto was visiting his fiancée, who bore the unfortunate name Alice Maffia, on the night of Friday, July 14. At 10 p.m. he went out to meet two men, on his way to a union committee meeting. He promised Alice he would return in time to make sandwiches for a trip to the beach in the morning. The couple planned to be married in October. But Peter Panto disappeared, without a trace. A year and a half later, Reles told what he knew about the case. Panto had been picked up by two men, described by Reles only as brothers, who took him to see “certain people.” The latter offered the longshore leader cash to end his activities, but he contemptuously rejected the suggestion. He was then hustled into a car along with at least four others, possibly including Albert Anastasia’s associates Joseph Florino and Tony Romeo.
Peter Panto was, Turkus and Feder said, a slender man of 163 pounds, but in the car he fought wildly for his life, nearly biting off the finger of one notorious gangster, Mendy Weiss, before he was strangled to death. He was then dumped in an empty lot in New Jersey. A lump of dirt and quicklime was eventually dug up by the investigators, who believed it contained Peter Panto’s corpse. According to Reles, Albert Anastasia had overall responsibility for the act.
The Panto murder figured in an inventory of crimes for which Albert Anastasia might have been charged – had Reles, the chief witness, not conveniently died in 1941. Anastasia was not indicted, and a grand jury investigation in 1945 led to the questioning of O’Dwyer himself. At that time, a certain “Peter Masi,” who may be the same person as the previously-mentioned “Pietro Mazzei,” complained to the grand jury about the continued domination of the Brooklyn waterfront by racketeers, and alleged a quashing of the investigation from within O’Dwyer’s office. “Masi” was described by Turkus and Feder as “the former associate of and successor to the murdered Peter Panto as leader of the rank-and-file dock labor.” Tony Romeo, who might have been called as a witness instead of Reles, and through whom the Panto case might have become the keystone of a trial of Albert Anastasia, was murdered in 1942.[24]
It should be noted that Communist writers took up the Panto affair from time to time. As late as 1999, Roy Rydell, a veteran Stalinist activist in the waterfront labor milieu, recalled the case in the People’s Weekly World, successor to the Daily Worker (and nicknamed by critics of the party, because of its fantastic propagandist claims, the People’s Weekly World News, equating it with the supermarket tabloid known for reporting such stories as the allege sex change operation of Saddam Hussein.)
In the typically distorting idiom of the Communists, Rydell wrote, “Pete Panto, a rank-and-file longshoremen who had been calling meetings of longshoremen in Brooklyn, disappeared, and the New York Police Department and the district attorney never did anything about it. Panto’s body was later found buried in a lime pit, but no one was ever prosecuted for the murder.” Rydell described “Shape Up” as “a rank-and-file publication that appeared regularly on the New York waterfront and was distributed by the Waterfront Section of the Communist Party.”[25]
Strangely, in Timebends, Miller refers to “The Hook” as “the screenplay about Panto’s doomed attempt to overthrow the feudal gangsterism of the New York docks,” although not one word of “The Hook” can be cited to support that description.[26] Miller’s quest for information on the Panto case seems to have been carried out in a place far distant from New York itself, in a historical void. By 1947 there had been so many investigations of Brooklyn gangsters and there had emerged enough of a broad insurgency in the ILA that Panto was long-forgotten.
In 1945, a wildcat strike hit the New York docks, and the Communists, as described by Father John Corridan in an article by Schulberg for The New York Times, “did move in and try to take credit for the leaderless, rank-and-file strike.”[27] This upsurge by the real longshoremen offered a powerful repudiation to the cult of leadership in Miller’s “The Hook.” But the longshoremen themselves, overwhelmingly Catholic and fierce anti-Communists, rejected the Stalinist ploy. When the longshoremen struck in defiance of Joe Ryan in 1951, again as reported by Schulberg, rank-and-filers bitterly declared, “The mob called us Reds and the Reds called us Fascists… [we faced] the Commies on one side and the mob on the other.”[28] The situation was remarkably reminiscent of the Stalin-Hitler pact a decade before. But none of this was ever mentioned in Miller, for whom all knowledge of the waterfront began with the Italian graffiti he claims to have seen.
Furthermore, it is never mentioned in the literature that has grown up around On the Waterfront, Kazan, Schulberg, Miller, and “The Hook,” that the American Federation of Labor had joined battle against Joseph P. Ryan, the corrupt head of the ILA, and that the union was expelled from the A.F.L. because of racketeering in 1953, giving On the Waterfront the immediacy of daily newspaper headlines when it was released the year afterward.
