William J. McCormack

Who is William J. McCormack?

William J. McCormack 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."