Mike Johnson’s Waterfront Jungle

His brave reporting gave us the Kefauver crime hearings and Mob movies, especially Budd Schulberg’s masterpiece, On The Waterfront.

You may not recognize the name Malcolm Johnson. A reporter most of his working life, his book, Crime on the Labor Front, although featured in the Senate’s Kefauver crime hearings, is decades out of print, and his celebrated newspaper series about waterfront corruption in New York harbor, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1949, was for years available only on microfilm. But if you are old enough to have watched the New York gangsters brought before Senator Kefauver’s television cameras in hearings first inspired by Johnson’s crime series, or if you have seen any of the scores of Mob films and dramas (from On the Waterfront to The Sopranos) made possible by his front-page revelations of a criminal ‘syndicate’, you have been part of a national conversation that he bravely began.

Before there was Woodward and Bernstein, and the generation of investigative reporters they inspired, there was Malcolm ‘Mike’ Johnson, star reporter for the old New York Sun. A Southerner who’d come to New York on the strength of his reporting for the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph, he stood a strongly packed five foot seven, with a wide, intelligent face, black hair and dark, circled eyes. The sportswriter Dave Anderson, who worked as a copyboy at the Sun in Johnson’s…