In Manhattan the loading racket had become the most lucrative s of all. It operated this way: When goods were left on a piershed f truckers needed a helper or mechanical forklift to get the shipment the truck. Those who performed this task-the equivalent of pi porters in a train station-came to control all movements on the Lower Manhattan's narrow piers and antiquated cobbled streets nea waterfront exacerbated the congestion, as did the vast increase in true of freight. The greatest expense in shipping through New York becam waiting time for loading. Truckers in a hurry agreed to pay an extori ate fee to jump the line. In this way a group of middlemen ended up dominating the docks, with thugs and organized crime families fighting for the privilege. One especially brazen case occurred in 1947, when John "Cockeye" Dunn and Andrew "Squint" Sheridan, of the Bowers Gang, emptied a gun into John Hintz, the hiring boss of Pier 51, to gain control of that dock's public loading. The loading racket, Daniel Bell notes in his book The End of Ideology, existed only in New York: "There has never been a loading racket in San Francisco, in New Orleans, in Baltimore or Philadelphia-the other major maritime ports in the U.S. .. . [T]he spatial arrangements of these other ports are such that loading never had a 'functional' significance. In all these ports, other than New York, there are direct railroad connections to the piers, so that the transfer of cargoes is easily and quickly accomplished; nor is there in these ports the congested and choking narrowstreet patterns which in New York forced the trucks to wait, piled up 'time charges,' or made for offpier loading." All these arcane customs created an insular world in which the longshoremen, exploited by their overlords, nevertheless remained isolated from and suspicious of the surrounding community, unwilling to seek redress from it. Shapeups continued to be a sham exercise, since the hiring foreman had a list in advance of favored names. Sometimes men who had placated the union officials would sport a toothpick in their hatbrims or behind their ears. That all this gangsterism should come down to a toothpick! Many of these ingrown practices turn up in the film On the Waterfront (1954), some as central issues, others as researched, but throwaway, background details. For instance, in the shapeup scene, a dockworker is seen putting a toothpick behind his ear and instantly getting picked; the foreman subsequently throws on the ground some metal discs he calls "tabs," which are fought over by the remaining applicants, though what these actions mean could only be grasped by moviegoers already in the know. More familiar to 1950s audiences will have been the general problem of corrupt longshore unions, the code of silence, the fighting priests who crusaded against these practices, and the barrage of Crime Commission hearings investigating waterfront racketeering.