Peter Panto

[TSNYC]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/09/nyre ... -ios-share

Where Is Pete Panto?
A union leader on the Brooklyn docks disappeared 81 years ago, presumably murdered by the mob.

By Helene Stapinski

July 9, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

On a dreary day in the autumn of 2020, Joseph Sciorra took a walk through St. Charles Cemetery on Long Island. Dr. Sciorra, like many trapped inside during the pandemic, had added cemetery strolls to his list of safe activities. But at St. Charles, he was on a mission. He was looking for the grave of a man named Pete Panto.

Dr. Sciorra is a scholar of Italian American culture who helps run the Calandra Institute at the City University of New York. For decades, he has been fascinated by the tale of Mr. Panto, a labor organizer who went missing in 1939. When Mr. Panto first vanished, his fellow longshoremen scrawled his name on walls and sidewalks, in subways and on overpasses in Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights.

“Dov’è Pete Panto?” the graffiti asked. Day after day, the chalked words would be erased. But day after day, they would reappear. “Where is Pete Panto?” — sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian.


When Mr. Panto disappeared, longshoremen scrawled his name on walls and sidewalks, in subways and on overpasses in what became a haunting cry.
When Mr. Panto disappeared, longshoremen scrawled his name on walls and sidewalks, in subways and on overpasses in what became a haunting cry.Credit...Brooklyn Daily Eagle
When Mr. Panto’s body turned up in 1941, his death put a chill on rank-and-file union protests for decades; longshoremen feared they, too, would end up dead for complaining about working conditions and corruption. Now and then, Mr. Panto’s name would appear in a union pamphlet. But workers secretly continued to scrawl his name in silent protest, even as Mr. Panto faded from headlines and from history.

In 1947, taking a walk through Red Hook, Brooklyn, during a bout of writer’s block, the playwright Arthur Miller came across some of that graffiti, and after poking around, learned who Mr. Panto was. His unproduced screenplay “The Hook” was inspired by Mr. Panto; so was Elia Kazan’s movie “On the Waterfront.”

Dr. Sciorra was a fan of the film but even more a fan of the real man behind the story. So on that November afternoon in the early days of the pandemic, he and his son took the hour drive out to Farmingdale. They stopped at the cemetery office and got Mr. Panto’s plot and grave number, then walked to Section 9, looking down at the stone markers as they searched.

When they reached Mr. Panto’s grave — No. 224 in Row F, out near an airfield — there was no stone. Just an empty stretch of yellowed grass and some dead leaves.

“We were like, what’s going on here?” Dr. Sciorra said. “Not only was he erased from the historical record, but here he is erased again in the cemetery. It was heartbreaking.”

“Where is Pete Panto?” suddenly took on a whole new meaning.


The tragic story of Pete Panto begins in 1910, when he was born to a plasterer named Carmelo who lived on Sackett Street in Brooklyn, originally from Messina, Italy. When his mother died in childbirth two years later, Pete and his older sister were sent to Sicily to be raised by family while their father stayed in New York City for work.

Life in southern Italy was difficult. A feudal system forced laborers to gather each morning hoping to be chosen by the padrone for work. The system existed well into the 20th century, sending millions to America for better lives. The “shape-up,” as the work ritual was called, carried over to the New World.


Each day, thousands of longshoremen would stand in the rain and cold, shivering in doorways on Sackett, Union and Columbia Streets, waiting to be chosen for work unloading giant sacks of coffee or copper from the ships that docked in Red Hook. It was dangerous work that too often ended in lost limbs, or even death. “America,” Arthur Miller wrote, “stopped at Columbia Street.”



As in Italy, kickbacks were common. Those who borrowed from mob loan sharks or spent money at union-approved “company stores” — barbershops, clothing shops and wine-grape sellers charging inflated prices — were given jobs.

Though the International Longshoremen’s Association claimed to represent the dock workers, there were few benefits to being in the union, according to William Mello, a labor historian at Indiana University who has written about Mr. Panto. Its mob-infiltrated hierarchy was led by Albert Anastasia, head of the criminal gang Murder, Inc., whose brother and his friends in the Camarda family ran the Brooklyn locals. If you complained, you got no work. Or worse.

In the fall of 1930, two dockworkers were gunned down over a turf battle during the St. Michael the Archangel feast in Red Hook. Every so often, a worker would go missing or a heavy load would fall on some longshoreman working in the ship’s hold — sometimes accidentally, but who could say?

These were the conditions Mr. Panto found on his return to Brooklyn as a 24-year-old in 1934. He soon got work on the docks, where he blended into the crowd of other Italian immigrants, a medium-built man with dark hair, a thin mustache and a gap between his front teeth. “But he had incredible charisma,” said Nathan Ward, the author of “Dark Harbor: The War for the Brooklyn Waterfront,” one of the few books that recounts Mr. Panto’s story.

At that time, Mr. Ward said, the West Coast rank and file had organized successfully against waterfront corruption in San Francisco, but the East Coast was far behind. After a few years working on the piers, Mr. Panto landed a job as a hiring foreman in 1939. Seeing firsthand how crooked the system was, he rallied the 2,000 workers in Brooklyn that spring, giving stirring speeches in his accented English. After one meeting of more than 1,200 longshoremen, Emil Camarda, vice president of the dockworkers’ union, privately told Mr. Panto that Mr. Anastasia, the union boss, was unhappy with the trouble he was causing. Mr. Panto was offered $10,000 to cool off. But the defiant 28-year-old wouldn’t back down, refusing the bribe.

Some longshoremen, then and now, considered Mr. Panto a hero. Others thought he was crazy or just stupid for risking his life. But most agree that changes were needed on the waterfront.

On Friday afternoon, July 14, 1939, Mr. Panto left his job on the piers and went to see his 20-year-old fiancée, Alice Maffia. He and Alice, who worked in a moth bag factory, had a date that night and planned to go to the beach the next day.

But a dark sedan pulled alongside Mr. Panto, and he got in. Witnesses said that Mr. Camarda was in the car with union agents.

When Mr. Panto didn’t show up for his beach trip with Alice the next day, she expected the worst. “Something horrible must have happened to him,” she told The Brooklyn Eagle in the days that followed. Worry spread through the rank and file, leading to the “Where is Panto?” graffiti.

That question would be answered the following spring when a government informant told the Brooklyn district attorney that Mr. Panto and the union officials had gone to New Jersey for a “meeting” with Mr. Anastasia at a farmhouse in the Meadowlands.

Eighteen months after disappearing, Mr. Panto’s body was found in a shallow quicklime pit on a chicken farm near the Passaic River. He was identified by the gap between his teeth. He had been strangled and stabbed in the chest, then garroted and wrapped in a canvas bag. His frozen, decomposed body was driven back to Brooklyn on a flatbed truck with a police escort.

Terry Scotto-Spinelli, 97, who still lives in Brooklyn, was a 16-year-old student at Bishop McDonnell High School on Eastern Parkway when Mr. Panto’s body turned up. Her father, Pasquale Scotto, who was an undertaker, got a call that January day with the news, and he eventually held a wake for Mr. Panto the following April. Back then, families held their wakes in their own homes, but the Panto family was most likely too afraid to do so.

“I remember people being extremely upset about what they did to him,” Ms. Scotto-Spinelli recalled. “There were people who said, ‘Why would he want to get involved in all that?’ But everybody was scared.”

Nonetheless, hundreds of dockworkers bravely joined a funeral procession that wound through Red Hook. After a requiem Mass, Mr. Panto was buried, not in Brooklyn, with his mother, but in a cemetery on Long Island, in a plot paid for by the nickels and dimes collected from waterfront dockworkers.

John Heyer, the current director of Scotto Funeral Home, with a framed photo of Pete Panto’s funeral in Red Hook.
John Heyer, the current director of Scotto Funeral Home, with a framed photo of Pete Panto’s funeral in Red Hook.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
His family eventually moved to Ohio, his fiancée married another man, and no one was ever arrested for his murder. Mr. Panto was nearly forgotten.

Dr. Mello, the labor historian, said that until Dr. Sciorra visited St. Charles Cemetery, he had no idea there was no marker on the grave. “Maybe it was left unmarked so the mob wouldn’t take his body,” Dr. Mello suggested. “Maybe it was a way of putting him to rest without giving the mob a place to desecrate.” Perhaps he was buried far away to discourage dockworkers from congregating at his grave site and following through on his labor union efforts.

Standing at the unmarked plot on Long Island, Dr. Sciorra decided to honor Mr. Panto. This past spring, he raised $7,450 through GoFundMe for a stone and cemetery fees. He contacted Ms. Scotto-Spinelli, the closest living relative of Pasquale, who still holds the deed to the grave site. She gave her blessing for Dr. Sciorra to place the marker on the plot.

The epitaph will be the last two lines of a poem written by an anonymous longshoreman for Mr. Panto’s funeral 80 years ago — found by Mr. Ward in a dockworkers’ newsletter:

Drop hooks all you longshoremen
This Panto burial day
This working man from off the docks
Our martyr in the fray.


One of the few people in the neighborhood who knows the Panto story is a longshoreman by the name of Anthony Camarda, a distant cousin of the man who helped deliver Mr. Panto to his death. Though his family never spoke of it, Mr. Camarda discovered their connection to Mr. Panto years ago and read Mr. Ward’s book. “I was like: ‘Wow. This Panto guy was trying to fight the corruption down here,’” said Mr. Camarda, shaking his head. “But this Emil Camarda was not a nice guy. It was kind of surreal to see my name in the book.”

Mr. Camarda, who works on the docks in Elizabeth, N.J., is happy that a stone will be placed on Mr. Panto’s grave. “This guy changed the whole industry, and there’s nothing to remember him by,” he said. Mr. Panto’s death, he had learned, alerted the government to racketeering on the docks, which led to famous televised 1950s public hearings and the Waterfront Commission that cleaned up the unions.

“Panto definitely didn’t die in vain,” Mr. Camarda said. “He died for people like me. A regular man, a working man.”

[The Greek]

Great read thanks for posting. This area is Carroll Gardens now. Union and Sackett at Columbia is pretty nice part of CG w a bunch of great restaurants. Scotto Funeral Home used to be on 1st Place but it looks like back then it was at 139 Court St. That later became a Key Foods now it's a CVS. Great neighborhood though

[SonnyBlackstein]

Thanks for posting.