The Man Who Rocked the Boat

This forgotten masterpiece of a memoir by a prosecutor who took on corruption on the docks of New York came out in 1956, two years after that Marlon Brando classic, On the Waterfront.

William Keating, a hard-nosed, relentless, and incorruptible crime-fighter, gives an inside look at the reign of terror imposed on honest, hard-working longshoremen by the gangsters who ran their union.

Keating was by no means anti-labor – at the start of Chapter 2, he mentions that his father was an official in the United Mine Workers, and that his great-grandfather was a prominent Molly Maguire in the hard-coal… show more.