office image article_title name
at stuyvesant town / peter cooper village in background the transit mix east river cement factory with william_mccormack _ % 28businessman % 29.jpg william j. mccormack -lrb- businessman -rrb-
 william j. mccormack
william j. mccormack -lrb- businessman -rrb-

william j. mccormack -lrb- 1890 -- 1965 ? -rrb-
was a successful new york city businessman of the first half of the twentieth century .
mccormack was born in jersey city , new jersey to irish potato-famine immigrants from county monaghan .
mccormack began life as a grocer 's `` wagon-boy '' running errands along new york 's west side docks and went on to establish penn stevedoring , one of the most important produce handlers in the united states .
by the mid-1930s , penn held a virtual monopoly on the stevedoring of all the perishable food shipped to the city of new york via the pennsylvania railroad .
for almost thirty years mccormack was known as `` big bill mccormack , '' or symply as the mysterious `` mr. big '' of the new york waterfront .
in the early 1950s , details of mccormack 's relationships with international longshoreman 's association president joseph p. ryan and various organized crime figures , were revealed in a series of new york sun articles by malcolm johnson entitled `` crime on the waterfront . ''
these articles , and the 1953 waterfront crime commission hearings that followed , provided elia kazan with the factual background for his classic 1954 film `` on the waterfront . ''
