"Nathan Ward's elegant and affectionate visit to gangster New York in the 1940's is excellent true crime and true history. Dark Harbor goes on the shelf next to Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling"ùAlan Hirst, author of sight Soldiers"This is terrific stuff! Carefully researched, Nathan Ward's Dark Harbor nonetheless reads as if it were ripped from the day's headlines. Here is the realù and fascinatingùstory of the waterfront."ùKevin Baker, author of Strivers RowWhat if the world of the old New York waterfront was as violent and Mob-controlled as it appears in Hollywood movies?Well, it really was, and the story of its downfall, told here in high style by Nathan Ward, is the original New York Mob story.When the New York Sun reporter Malcolm "Mike" Johnson was sent to cover the murder of a West Side boss stevedore, he discovered a "waterfront jungle, set against a background of New York's magnificent skyscrapers" and providing "rich pickings for criminal gangs." Racketeers ran their territories while doubling as union officers, from the West Side's "Cockeye" Dunn, who'd kill for any amount of dock space, to Jersey City's Charlie Yanowsky, who controlled rackets and hiring until he was ice-picked to death.Johnson's hard-hitting investigative series won a Pulitzer Prize, inspired a screenplay by Arthur Miller, and prompted Elia Kazan's Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront. And yet, Edgar Hoover denied the existence of organized crimeùeven as the government's dramatic hearings into waterfront misdeeds became must-see television.Nathan Ward tells this archetypal crime story as if for the first time, taking the reader back to a city, and an era, at once more corrupt and more innocent than our own. Read Less