Gangsters, sellouts, and City Hall in cahoots and destroying our unions has long been a blight on the workers’ movement. With the incorruptible bravery that would cost him his life a decade later, Carlo Tresca calls out by name the criminals and bureaucrats running Local 4 of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers centered on the leadership of Sidney Hillman, one of the most powerful unions in the country at the time.

‘Racketeers and the Amalgamated’ by Carlo Tresca from Labor Age. Vol. 21 No. 1. January, 1932.

SOON after the colossal jest that was dubbed general strike of the tailors, a jest that cost the tailors very dear, for they saw their salaries reduced and a 5 per cent assessment levied on their wages for the benefit of the union, President Sidney Hillman, of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, opened dare on the Orlofsky, Beckerman & Co. band of Cutters, Local 4, of New York City. Orlofsky, together with his minor followers, was charged with misappropriation of the unemployment relief fund of the local. In the heat of the fight the specific charge was preferred, first indirectly and then directly, that the misappropriated fund had been used to pay the gangsters, to whom Orlofsky and Beckerman had entrusted the task of propping up their dictatorship over the members of the Amalgamated. Orlofsky, claiming to be the victim of persecution, refused to submit to the judgment of Hiilman’s tribunal and mustered his henchmen with a view to starting the process of secession that led to the formation of a new union rivalling the one over which Hillman was holding sway.

The battle, short and fierce, was fought in the bourgeois courts, in the newspapers, in public meetings and in the dark recesses of the underworld.

The phase of the contest which had the courts as its scene of action clearly demonstrated that Hillman, who had long and patiently prepared for the onslaught, had already ousted Orlofsky from all the positions that the latter had secured from Tammany Hall previously to his starting the fight. It is an undeniable fact that no person engaging in any sort of racket can hope to succeed in his enterprise unless assured of the complicity and connivance of Tammany Hall. It is also unquestionable that Orlofsky was looked upon, for years and years, as the unopposed Tammany man in the council of the Amalgamated. Proof of this may be found in the fact that during the campaign for the latest municipal election the Big Four, that is Local 4 of the cutters affiliated with the Amalgamated, was turned into a veritable agency for the support of Walker’s candidacy.

Orlofsky, under the impression that the earth turns around himself, felt so sure of his position as a Tammany man that at the outset of the struggle he scoffed at the visits that Hillman paid to the mayor and to the police commissioner for the purpose of denouncing to the authorities the racketeers and the gangsters hired by Local 4.

It was the belief of Orlofsky that Hillman would strike his head against a wall. He even felt sure of himself when there appeared in court, as counsel for Hillman, none other than Steuer, who is recognized as the right arm of Curry, the dictator of Tammany Hall. He thought, this man Orlofsky, that Steuer’s influence, formidable as it was, would not succeed in depriving him of the favors that Tammany, the political organizer of the underworld, had been lavishing upon him.

Hillman, who, in marked contrast to Orlofsky, is impassive and cunning and yet a determined fighter once he has carefully chosen his course of action—never takes a step without sounding his ground, as is evidenced by his establishing, through his building enterprises, a close friendship with vice-Governor Lehman, and by his securing the expert assistance (richly remunerated) of Tammany’s able lawyer. One link follows another in his chain of acquaintances.

On this ground the battle was fought and won. The first encounter saw the unwary Orlofsky losing his foothold. Then, as an interlude between charges and counter-charges that were aired in the newspapers and in public meetings, there came up the proposal made by the Socialist Party, which had secured the support of Abe Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, for the appointment of an Investigating Committee to be composed of neutral elements chosen and approved by the contending parties.

Hillman declared himself ready to prove that in checking up the accounts of the administration of Local 4 in the preceding year, under Orlofsky’s rule, considerable sums were found missing. Orlofsky demanded that the proposed Investigating Committee should extend its auditing to the whole period of his administration of Local 4, that is from 1922 on. What he was aiming at was simply this: to show that the funds of Local 4 had always been used for the same purpose, in other words, that each and every year mysterious transactions had been entered in the ledger with a view to concealing payments made to gangsters, and that the main office, though appraised of the situation, had not only sanctioned, but also abetted the hiring of gangsters.

The interlude lasted for some time. The Socialist Party threatened to raise hell; Cahan was puffing like a locomotive; Orlofsky and Beckerman were playing blind man’s-buff. Then everything was hushed up and the report was circulated that peace negotiations had been opened. In effect discussions were being held in secret, but…between Hillman and the gentlemen of the underworld. And while all this was going on, those “in the know” were asking themselves: Will Orlofsky and his gang succeed in making a breach in Hillman’s fortress? Will the new and rival union, the International Tailor Clothing Workers Union, be able to gain a firm foothold? Orlofsky and Beckerman could not hope that a wave of enthusiasm would sweep the discontented tailors. Having no faith in themselves, they could not expect to inspire it in others.

In order to arouse the tailors, and to keep alive the rebellion of the cutters who had remained loyal to them, a program would have to be worked out. Orlofsky and Beckerman, however, had no reformation plan to offer. Their attitude as the saviors of the tailors, who were the victims of Hillman’s dictatorship, was on a par with Hillman’s attitude as the savior of the Amalgamated from the nefarious influence of the underworld.

There remained nothing but force.

Brutal force.

Both Orlofsky and Beckerman thought they could rely on that.

There was the terrible, inexorable, implacable Brooklyn gang with wide ramifications throughout New York and surrounding territory; there was the underworld that for so many years had been in the pay of the Orlofsky-Beckerman band. What would they do? Would they remain loyal to their bosses of long standing or would they betray them? This question mark held the solution of the problem that was represented by the feud between Orlofsky and Hillman.

Not to the court, not to the mass was the final word reserved. With the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, under Hillman’s rule, the ultimate decision is always to be left to the underworld. It is a sad, cruel truth, but truth nevertheless.

Orlofsky—this vainglorious man who had so unwittingly played into Hillman’s hands and allowed himself to be stripped, quite unawares, of the peacock feathers he had put on—entertained the hope that the underworld, true to its code of honor and to its discipline, would remain loyal to him.

Hadn’t Hillman called upon the Police Commissioner?

“He is a stool pigeon,” Orlofsky kept saying in his speeches. His purpose was to arouse in the souls of his friends and accomplices of the underworld an invincible aversion to the traitor, the informer, the man who had appealed to the police.

It was Orlofsky’s conviction that he could apply strong-arm methods in the struggle; that he could utilize the underworld, which had remained loyal to him through so many years. This time, however, he did not intend to entice his gangsters, as he had done in the past, by the sound of money—the money of the Union members—but by playing on the flute the arietta of the moral question that only finds response in the souls of respectable people.

Let’s be frank. Had Orlofsky been dealing with the Mafia—the organization whose adherents are effectively held together by a moral code of their own, which forbids forgiveness of police informers and traitors—his appeal might have fallen on willing ears. Orlofsky, however, has always dealt with Irish and American gang leaders, who are not restrained by scruples of any sort, with men who bring to their criminal transactions the thoroughness of the American business methods. Money they wanted, and nothing else.

Thus it happened that Hillman, who had at his command the money of the Amalgamated, was able to best Orlofsky on this ground also.

The battle was won by him all along the line. The underworld, which until then had been in the pay of the Orlofsky-Beckerman firm, was induced by Hillman, with the help of $50,000, to go over to him, arms and all. The group of accomplices that formed Orlofsky’s staff, was also won over by the aid of thousands of dollars. Beckerman pocketed $7,500; Alexander, Strauss, Sternberg and McLeen, $4,000 each; Philip Rosenfeld, $3,000.

Gold has won its day.

The man who had declared war on the racketeers, who had all the daily newspapers credit him as the courageous leader of a Labor Union bravely warring on the worst form of organized criminality, the labor racket, has won because he has placed directly under his control the racketeers that formerly had been paying through Orlofsky and Beckerman.

Beckerman is in hiding. But he will come back. It is agreed that he shall return and be assigned to a commanding position in the Amalgamated. Not that Hillman wants it, but it’s the underworld that so wills.

And all this has been made possible by the dollars wrested from poor workingmen, from the tailors whose salaries have been reduced to a minimum, from the tailors whose conditions are well nigh desperate.

And all this has been done to enable Hillman to maintain his dictatorship as alive, as firm and unchallenged as Mussolini’s.

Go down, you who study the conditions of the organized mass in the United States of America, go down among the tailors, mingle with the cutters, ask them, as we did, ask the officers of the International Tailor Clothing Workers Union, ask the officers of the Amalgamated, and you will hear from all of them, for all know it and this is the talk of the day, that the gang which formerly had been taking orders from nobody but Orlofsky, was paid $50,000 by Hillman.

This is a crying shame.

But a still greater shame is the fact that the press remains silent. Is it possible that the voice of thousands and thousands of workingmen cheated and robbed, does not reach it?

And the Socialist Party keeps silent, too.

Is not Beckerman one of its men? Why this conspiracy of silence regarding crime that is being committed brazenly, in broad daylight, against the interests of the tailors?

Who will arise to point an accusing finger? it may be asked.

We.

We say that all the facts related above are the result of a special, minute, painstaking inquiry.

Labor Age was a left-labor monthly magazine with origins in Socialist Review, journal of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Published by the Labor Publication Society from 1921-1933 aligned with the League for Industrial Democracy of left-wing trade unionists across industries. During 1929-33 the magazine was affiliated with the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) led by A. J. Muste. James Maurer, Harry W. Laidler, and Louis Budenz were also writers. The orientation of the magazine was industrial unionism, planning, nationalization, and was illustrated with photos and cartoons. With its stress on worker education, social unionism and rank and file activism, it is one of the essential journals of the radical US labor socialist movement of its time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborage/v21n01-jan-1932-labor-age.pdf