For many years, starting from approximately the late 1930s forward, thefts of truck cargo started to become big business for the mob. Pier thefts from the New York and New Jersey docks had always been a solid racket worked in conjunction with waterfront hoodlums aligned with the International Longshoreman’s Union.
But with the advent and later expansion of manufacturers shipping their merchandise over the road to clients by rolling carrier whether it be locally, or through interstate commerce, the underworld soon went knee-deep into what was to become one of their most lucrative rackets.
After all, like the well-worn underworld joke goes, “When ya don’t pay suppliers for the merchandise you sell, your gross becomes your net.” It was a thought process and a mindset that was to become the mantra for many ambitious hoodlums and racketeers.
Dating back as far as Prohibition rival racketeers and gangsters used to hijack at gunpoint each other’s truckloads of bootlegged booze and labeled whiskey from out of state. Before Prohibition, these thieves were called “Highwaymen” because they’d lay in wait along a lonely road or highway for a victim to come along, and then stop them at gunpoint to relieve them of any personal valuables and whatever cargo they might be carrying.
During the 1920s, Prohibition racketeers would on occasion hijack shipments of rival bootleggers, both to make a quick profit, as well as weaken their competition.
But the hijack racket really started to pick up tremendously right after WWII, when the federal government in Washington was issued a directive from President Harry S. Truman and reassigned the Army Corp of Engineers to now apply their considerable expertise and talents to the design and development of an ambitious national system of interlocking highways to span the entire country, from the East Coast to the West Coast. This initiative was part of what Washington referred to as “The New Deal,” the most expansive economic revitalization plan the United States had ever undertaken.
The reasons this was put into place were twofold. Number one was to help employ all the hundreds of thousands of GIs who had now come back home to the states after the war who desperately needed work to restart their young lives, and number two, to kickstart a battered U.S. economy and treasury that had been seriously depleted because of that costly conflict in Europe.
By the early 1950s, racketeers from across the country were starting to dabble in truck hijacking, and the subsequent disposal of goods stolen off those trucks. The East Coast mobs were especially interested in the racket. Predominantly the Five Families of New York City, and their amici over the bridge in New Jersey. The Chicago “Outfit” was also very active. Outfit guys often intercepted tractor-trailers loads of merchandise crossing through territories the Chicago mob controlled.
Often Imitated. Never Duplicated. Button Guys of The New York Mafia...There's Only One!
