Free Saints Of New York by R.J. Ellory

but they don't really exist. Anyway, they find that
Hoffa created these outfits to milk as much money out of the freight-forwarders
as possible, and that money was going directly to the Lucchese family, and they
were supporting Hoffa's candidacy for President of the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters. Anyway, there's so much corruption and so much money
in all of this. It's a mess. No-one knows who to believe or who to trust. The
New York State Investigation Committee gets involved, there's public hearings
into racketeering at the airport, but it isn't for ten years that anyone is
really charged with anything. That tells you how much they were all Involved.
Politicians, police, representatives of the Mayor's Office, the FBI, the SIC .
. . they were all getting paid off. Finally, in '69, John Gotti takes a fall
for three years for hijacking trucks.
    That
was nothing more than a publicity stunt to give everyone the idea that they
were really changing things down there.'
    'And
your father knew about this?'
    'I'm
getting there. Let me finish with the history. So, 1970, the Luccheses support
the creation of Teamsters Local 851, and this outfit represents over two
thousand truckers and warehousemen and fourteen hundred clerical people, all of
whom were former members of Local 295. New name, old face, right? Anyway, this
same old crap goes on. They are pulling merchandise and money out of the
airport like there's no tomorrow. Finally, the US Attorney General, John
Mitchell, has had enough. It's 1971, and he announces two antitrust indictments
against a whole bunch of trucking companies and the entirety of the National
Air Freight Association. The shit hits the fan. Everyone pleads no contest, the
NAFA is dissolved, and they set up this commission to ensure that air freight
price-fixing is prevented.'
    'But
I guess that doesn't happen, right?'
    'The
airport is fifteen miles from the center of Manhattan, it accounts for thirty
percent of air cargo coming in and going out of the mainland United States. It
covers five thousand acres, and there's endless runways, terminal buildings,
cargo hangars, warehouses, high-security storage vaults, container stations
and truck depots. It has forty thousand people working there. For God's sake,
there's the same number of people working there as the whole of the New York
Police Department. The thing is managed and run by the Port Authority for New
York and New Jersey. The Port Authority, right? For New York and New Jersey. All the way back to the Fifties, when planes instead of ships started carrying
America to the rest of the world, organized crime has been in charge of this
stuff. The Luccheses already owned many of the port trucking firms, and they
were the backbone of the Metropolitan Importer Truckmen's Association. It was
just a matter of switching from one area of business to another. You think that
something so insignificant as the US Attorney General and a few court cases are
going to stop this shunt they had into the financial arteries of the airport?'
    'And
that was what your father was involved in?'
    'Sure
he was. That was what the Saints were all about. If these people needed help
from the NYPD they would call the Saints.'
    'So
how did he manage to get all these commends and citations for his work against
organized crime?'
    'The
Mob gave him people. They sacrificed people every once in a while. A bust or
two. A small truck firm folds and somebody gets a couple of years. The trucks
get confiscated, they are sequestered in a police compound somewhere, and six
months later someone loses the paperwork and they are sold to another trucking
firm for peanuts. That was the way it worked.'
    'And
you never thought to report this to—'
    'To
who? Report it to who? The police were taking more money than anyone else, and
besides, you can't break the police. No-one ever has, and no-one ever will.
Aside from the police closing ranks, aside from the fact that Internal Affairs,
the very people who