http://www.irishecho.com/search/searchstory.cfm?id=19677
Blowing the whistle
Kevin McGowan investigated organized crime during his 28 years as a detective with the Waterfront Commission. He resigned in February.
Cops fought the Mob, then their own bosses
By Peter McDermott
September 30, 2009
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There’s often a price to be paid for doing the right thing. In the cases of Kevin McGowan and Brian Smith — two decorated police officers with unblemished records — it was their jobs.
McGowan was a career detective in the police division of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, a bi-state agency set up in 1953 to combat organized crime and improve hiring practices on the docks.
Smith was a longtime federal agent who was appointed its police chief in 2005.
“The key phrase is ‘improve hiring practices,’” Smith said of part of the agency’s mission.
But serious concern about the Waterfront Commission’s own recruitment policies led its top two police officers to contact the authorities in both New Jersey and New York, a move which initiated an investigation into the agency.
McGowan, who was assistant chief, and Smith had wanted the police division to recruit women and minority detectives in accordance with present-day norms. New Jersey Commissioner Michael J. Madonna blocked their efforts and instead proposed a series of white suburban males with whom he was friendly. Background checks proved each of them to be unqualified and unsuitable, according to McGowan and Smith. They were hired anyway.
As the agency’s full-time executive director Thomas De Maria and its New York Commissioner Michael Axelrod always backed Madonna, the two cops felt they had no option in May 2007 but to become whistle blowers.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer ordered a probe into “allegations of malfeasance and nonfeasance by personnel of the Waterfront Commission, including allegations of misconduct, conflicts of interest, abuse and waste.” Days before the publication of the New York State inspector general’s scathing 60-page report last month, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine fired Madonna. Axelrod and De Maria had already moved on.
Recently at a downtown coffee shop, McGowan and Smith couldn’t help but laugh at times when discussing the ludicrousness of the hires that made a respected agency that fought the Mafia look like the Keystone Cops.
Of course, the episode had its less than amusing sides. Smith was dismissed without reason in September 2007. McGowan followed him out of the agency last February, having served 28 years. The assistant chief, who was born in 1952, just months before the Waterfront Commission was established, had hoped to continue as a detective until he was 62. However, despite the reported clean sweep at the top of the commission, John Hennelly, an ally of Madonna’s with whom McGowan had clashed repeatedly, was appointed the new police boss.
McGowan and Smith’s alliance grew out of a rivalry of sorts: they went to different Christian Brothers schools. “Our basketball teams, our track teams — we were just in fierce competition,” Smith said of La Salle Academy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which he attended, and Power Memorial on the West Side.
“The Christian Brothers were the foundation of my education,” Smith added. “The Mafia didn’t scare me after that,” McGowan jokingly agreed.
Waterfront crusader
Their biographies have certain parallels with that of the Rev. John Corridan, the Jesuit priest whose work fighting Irish gangsters, as well as mobbed-up businessmen and union officials, led to the formation of the Waterfront Commission, and whose sophisticated media outreach began his association with “On the Waterfront” screenwriter Budd Schulberg.
The cops, too, were from upwardly mobile New York Irish-American families and went on to Catholic colleges after school. Both even have roots in Kerry, where Corridan’s parents were born.
Two of Smith’s great-grandparents were from Tralee. McGowan’s mother was a native of Ballylongford and he’s a regular visitor, as his wife Mercedes is also from Kerry. His father was an immigrant from Sligo who worked for a time as a longshoreman before becoming a transit worker. He was chairman of TWU Local 100 when he retired. And like Corridan, the future Waterfront detective went to school with people who chose a life of crime. McGowan, who got his degree at Manhattan College, knew future members of the Westies at Power Memorial.
He joined the Port Authority Police Academy in 1980 after gaining experience in different aspects of law enforcement. The Port Authority had one of the best-paid police forces in the country (it still has), and its training academy was for the first time choosing people based on merit rather than who they knew or were related to. McGowan came second in a class of 60.
Coming near the top of the class a few months earlier was a 25-year-old graduate of St. Francis College in Brooklyn, Brian Smith, who then began his career with the Port Authority police. Smith went on to work for the U.S. Department of the Interior and was later a special agent for the U.S. Customs Service. He was regional inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services in the six years before he was appointed police chief of the Waterfront Commission.
His path would cross with McGowan’s from time to time over the years. One connection was Smith’s brother, who was an officer with the Waterfront Police. “We remained friendly,” McGowan said.
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McGowan, Kevin [MC????]
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