This Day in Labor History: April 5, 1956

On April 5, 1956. the anti-union columnist Victor Riesel was blinded in an acid attack. Riesel claimed this was because he was attacking corrupt unions. However, historians have recently shown that Riesel was a lying weasel and in fact he was blinded because of his own activities with the mob, which the FBI and Eisenhower administration knew about at the time. But because Riesel served their anti-union purposes, they ignored the facts and let him do his thing.

Riesel actually came out of a union background. His father was a Jewish labor organizer who helped create the a local of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1913, which despite the name had mostly male leadership. His father was a committed unionist and taught little Victor how important unions were. He even had him make little speeches at rallies, which I am sure were cute if you didn’t know what a complete scumbag this bastard would become. But his father was anti-communist and I mean, there’s no way to get around how brutal these internal union battles were between communist and anti-communist unionists at this time. Like, brawls were common. I make no judgment on either side. Both fought for justice they way they thought best. But young Victor Riesel took the people attacking his father and decided he hated any kind of worker power at all.

Then in 1942, Riesel’s father decided to take on gangsterism in his union, was beaten severely for his actions, and eventually died of his injuries. This was very bad. Gangsters had taken over some union locals. Not very many in fact. But some. Moreover, most of those unions that were taken over by gangsters acquiesced in this because anti-union cops and politicians did absolutely nothing when unionists said they were getting pressure from organized crime. So the way to survive was to make your deal with the mafia. What realistic choice did you have? This isn’t me making any excuses for this. But it is important to recognize what the reality was when you were in an Italian or Jewish neighborhood in New York, you have gangsters threatening your life, and law enforcement doesn’t care. What else are you going to do than cut the deal?

Then Riesel got a job with the New York Post and made his career hating all unions. He claimed to just hate communist led unions and mob led unions, but in truth he hated all unions. The ruling class, which very much included newspaper owners, found Riesel tremendously useful. It wasn’t hard to claim that all unions were made up on commies and Riesel wasn’t splitting many hairs here. He was a huge, unrelenting self-promoter and in doing so, talking about busting mobbed up unions or commies, he got syndicated around the country, talking up evil unions.

When the McCarthyist period came down, Riesel was all in. He would take any claim of communism and say it was a huge conspiracy. He loved the attacks on Hollywood leftists and gave that right-wing hack Adolphe Menjou or that outright fascist Ward Bond full access to drop any info into his column that they wanted. He started working with the FBI and CIA both, or at least so the evidence suggests. And of course Salt of the Earth, this was Satan incarnate. I love to show my students Salt of the Earth. I ask them ahead of time, what in this film is communist. They are always blown away by the allegations. Is it the portrayal of Mexicans? The idea of a strike itself. Of women taking over a strike? Of workers winning? There’s literally nothing about that movie that is communist ideology, except for the people making it.

Anyway, Riesel was a big man by the 50s. He liked to party. Show up at the clubs, hob nob, big wig….and make some deals with the same mobsters he attacked in his columns. Specifically, he became an associate of Johnny Dio, the famed mobster whose full name was John Dioguardi and who was one of the most feared members of American organized crime.

In the early morning hours of April 5, 1956, Riesel left Lindy’s restaurant in Manhattan. A thug threw concentrated sulfuric acid into his face. It was so strong that not only did it blind him, but his tie disintegrated along with his eyes.

Now, do you think being blinded changed Riesel’s life? Not really! This was, in a professional manner anyway, the best thing that ever happened to him! He immediately used it to attack unions. It led to widespread outrage over these corrupt unions and the way these once great organizations (as if most of the people saying this had ever really supported unions) had become thugs. Dwight Eisenhower was one of those most outraged by unions attacked Riesel.

The problem with all of this is that it was a total lie.

Johnny Dio and Riesel not only knew each other but had worked with each other. The government in fact did bring Dioguardi in for questioning and the U.S. Attorney prepared a case before it was dropped. That droppage in 1957 was another piece of evidence of the power of mobbed up unions. Riesel claimed he was a martyr in the fight for clean unions. The media and the government all said that Riesel was probably blinded for his testimony in the spring of 1956 over labor racketeering in New York.

But…..

Riesel in fact did not testify in that 1956 hearing. In fact, he refused based on his belief that reporters shouldn’t do that. The FBI knew that the U.S. Attorney was taking advantage of this to lie and push his own agenda and there is documentation from letters written by J. Edgar Hoover of the Director’s frustration with these lies. In fact, the U.S. Attorney’s Office never presented any evidence at all that Riesel was helping them. But no one bothered to ask for evidence.

There were also claims that Johnny Dio ran the attack as revenge against Riesel writing publicly about him. But Riesel had ever only mentioned Dio twice and not since 1954. When Riesel did write about union corruption, he almost never mentioned anything about Dio’s home turf in the New York garment industry. Why? FBI reports now show quite pervasively that Dioguardi was paying off Riesel and our brave opponent of corruption was happy to take the cash. Later, it turned out that other mob-run unions, such as the Jewelry Workers Union in New York, were also paying off Riesel. JWU leader Hyman Powell even provided the FBI receipts of his payments to the man!

Riesel and Dioguardi got to know each other at a 1953 wedding where they agreed that the former should cover the labor movement in New York more fairly and the deal was sealed with a brand new color TV coming straight from Dioguardi to Riesel’s home, delivered by a close associate. This is all also documented by the FBI, known at the time it happened. They socialized in the years after this too.

Moreover, Riesel refused to cooperate in the FBI investigation into his own blinding, which very much caught the attention of the agency. Hoover himself began to think Riesel was covering something up. And while we should always take anything Hoover said with a gigantic grain of salt, there’s not much reason to think he would be lying about this in internal documents only produced by FOIA requests decades later. Now, not all of these documents tell us that much. Too much was blacked out in the FOIA process.

But here’s what is probably what happened. Riesel was using his connections with Dioguardi for personal advantage, including shaking employers down for help in keeping their workplaces union free. It seems that Dioguardi did not like this at all. Dioguardi, who was unquestionably a complete scumbag, decided he needed to send Riesel a message. But there are still parts of this story we don’t know. What we do know is that the stories Riesel and the government promoted about the blinding were complete fabrications and everyone from Eisenhower to the McClellan Committee (which quite notably dropped any discussion of Riesel’s blinding after an initial look at it) to the Kennedys to Hoover to Riesel all knew it. But it played to everyone’s political interests to keep telling the lies.

What’s more remarkable is that the two men continued to socialize in the years after. It was business after all.

The story of Riesel being blinded for covering union corruption continue to be told today, to the point that they are often cited as conventional wisdom about postwar mobbed up unionism.

I borrowed from David Witwer and Catherine Rios, Murder in the Garment District: The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States, to write this post. This is by far the best book on the relationship between unions and organized crime that exists.

This is the 451th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.