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Catucci was elated. He had been trying for years to get the Port Authority, where Gargano still serves as vice chairman, to agree to a long-term lease deal. Such a lease would let Catucci bring in additional shipping customers, expand his business, and add to the 600 workers already employed on the docks. That's what the local community board and politicians such as Congressman Jerrold Nadler and City Councilman David Yassky have been pushing to happen, arguing that Brooklyn's deepwater container port is a vital economic engine that cuts environmental woes by using waterborne cargo transport instead of air-fouling trucks.

In recent years, however, there's been little official interest in that plan. Under the Pataki administration, the bi-state Port Authority gave it the cold shoulder, saying it wanted to limit shipping to Staten Island's container port at Howland Hook on the narrow Arthur Kill waterway and the huge freight hubs on the New Jersey side of the harbor. Even stiffer opposition has come from the Bloomberg administration, which has been pressing to replace the gritty containers with cruise ships and a Sausalito-like waterfront offering glittering views of the Statue of Liberty and the towers of lower Manhattan.

The container port's current lease runs out at the end of March, and the Port Authority has moved to transfer the land to the city for what would be a "mixed-use development"—likely to include market-rate housing. Those who want to see Brooklyn hold on to a marine freight terminal capable of handling ocean-going vessels are frantically trying to win the attention of the incoming Spitzer administration.

The dispute over its fate has become one of those basic "Which Way for New York?" debates, one that pits a handful of blue-collar job advocates against a seemingly invincible army marching under the flag of Condos With River View.

Which is why Gargano's sudden interest in the terminal back in 2003 was received as such good news. "When Charlie Gargano's call came in, I thought, 'Wow. They're finally paying attention. Now he's showing interest,' " Catucci recalled.

Indeed he was. Within a few weeks, a newly optimistic Sal Catucci had a new attorney under retainer: Charlie Gargano's nephew. And not long after that, the waterfront executive was finally getting the attention from state decision-makers that he'd long sought. But when those meetings produced little more than kind words, and when he was back again fighting just to stay in business, Catucci wondered exactly what had prompted that unexpected phone call. Whatever made him pick up the phone, Charles Gargano wasn't saying, refusing to respond to requests for comment. His nephew, Frank Gargano, also didn't want to talk about his involvement, acknowledging only that he had represented Catucci's company. Exactly how that came to pass is one more disturbing tale from New York's waterfront.

At 72, Charles Gargano still cuts a suave figure. He wears expensively tailored suits and French cuffs and prefers to be addressed as "ambassador" in deference to his service in the Reagan administration as envoy to Trinidad and Tobago. A successful Long Island construction contractor, he won his economic development post after serving as a key fundraiser for Pataki and his ally, former senator Alfonse D'Amato. The position has allowed him to hobnob with the glitterati, and he's appeared in five movies since taking office, including the Robert De Niro mob comedy Analyze That and, most recently, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, in which he plays himself. The job takes him to ordinary places as well, and he arrived on the Red Hook docks that spring in a dark, chauffeured limousine with official plates and a radio antenna jutting from the trunk. Catucci greeted Gargano effusively, packed him into his "pier car," and proceeded to give him the full tour of his operations. But he said the ambassador didn't seem very interested.

"He didn't say much until we got back to my office," said Catucci. "Then he sat on the couch and asked some questions about what contractors we worked with, what lawyers we used." Sitting there, one of the things that struck Catucci was that while city and Port Authority bureaucrats had been burying him for months in extensive policy objections to the Red Hook port, the state's top economic development official didn't seem fazed by them. Instead, Gargano gave the impression that those were minor obstacles that could be overcome. The bigger problem, Catucci said the ambassador suggested, was the expense of the fight. "He said, 'You're fighting the city; you're fighting the state. This is going to cost you many hundreds of thousands of dollars for consultants and lawyers and all.' " Catucci said Gargano then added, "Maybe there's another way," and suggested that Catucci could cut his costs to "about $300,000" if he used the right approach. Shortly afterward, Gargano got back in his limo and drove away. Catucci watched him go, wondering what the hell that was all about.

Not that anyone would ever call Sal Catucci naive. He is 68, and like Gargano, keeps himself in trim shape. But while the ambassador exudes boardroom polish, Catucci is a scrappy, salty-talking businessman given to wearing black turtlenecks and a wide-brimmed black hat with a colored band that makes him look like an aging Zorro. After 40 years of making his living around the piers, he has fielded most everything that rough-and-tumble world throws at its denizens. The Red Hook terminal was virtually defunct when he took it over in the early 1990s, and he has turned it into a thriving port that handles more than 50,000 containers a year. Along the way, he acknowledges, disputes with the mob-ridden International Longshoremen's Association, which represents many of his workers, led to angry pushes and shoves.

Law enforcement officials have claimed that Sabato "Sal" Catucci owes his survival and success on the docks to his status as an associate of the Gambino crime family. Mob informants have also described him in familiar terms, and a business partner, also dubbed a mob ally, pled guilty to tax evasion in 2004. Given the mob's longtime hammerlock on the waterfront, such ties are hardly a stretch. But Catucci angrily denies them, citing his antagonistic relationship with the Mafia-friendly ILA, which has never gone to bat for him in his fight to remain in Red Hook. And authorities acknowledge that unlike many others who do business on the docks, Catucci has a clean record, and he hasn't personally shown up in their many surveillances of mob social clubs or wiretaps. Continue