Bugging the FBI

A waterfront probe with a leak

There have been federal investigations of corruption on the waterfront for almost as long as there have been an FBI and an International Longshoremen's Association. But the latest two-year probe into racketeering at East Coast and Gulf ports has a new wrinkle: some targets of the investigation have been keeping abreast of the agents' findings by reading their secret progress reports to the Justice Department.

The source of the leak is not known, but TIME has learned that the problem began more than a year ago when the FBI, with federal court approval, placed a bug in a New York City office used by Anthony M. Scotto, president of the Brooklyn longshoremen's local and one of the more unusual figures on the waterfront. A graduate of Brooklyn College, he was named by the Justice Department in 1969 as an alleged captain in the Gambino crime family. Nonetheless, he has remained respectable enough to lecture on labor at Harvard and attend a White House conference in the Johnson era.

Agents eavesdropping on Scotto kept their reels of tape recordings and transcripts in supposedly safe FBI and U.S. Attorneys' offices in New York. From time to time, the FBI sent memos to the Justice Department on what the bugs were picking up. One day agents were startled to overhear someone in Scotto's office discussing the FBI memos. They later learned that Scotto's men wrongly believed the information came from a doublecrosser who had been wired for sound by the FBI.

The FBI does not know how the information was passed on to Mafia leaders. But as a result of the leak, one of the largest Mafia gatherings since the celebrated Apalachin, N.Y., meeting in 1957 took place on Feb. 18 and 19 in Miami. Assembling on the beach near the Fontainebleau Hotel and in a closed restaurant, at least a score of top Mafiosi discussed gang affairs, including ways to blunt the FBI probe. In addition to Scotto, the investigation is chiefly aimed at two other powerful I.L. A. officials, George Barone and William Boyle, both of Miami.

Among the Feds' other sources of information is a Florida shipper who tried to recruit an undercover FBI agent to assassinate a competitor. Holding a homicide charge over the shipper's head, the Feds forced him to divulge details about huge bribes, totaling upward of $5 million a year, paid by shipping companies to union officials to buy labor peace. The FBI also infiltrated waterfront racketeers in New York at such a level that one undercover man became a courier for payoffs from shipping companies to the union. Justice Department lawyers expect to obtain indictments against both union officials and shippers starting next month.

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