Joseph McGreal

Joseph McGreal is a Teamsters organizer whose influence in Philadelphia is presented through two linked features: his place in the labor movement and his effort to build power inside Teamsters Local 107. In the narrator’s recollections, McGreal could offer access to union work, but he also commanded a muscle crew and cultivated dissension in a local already divided by competing factions. That combination makes him an important figure in the book’s account of union politics: a potential sponsor for an aspiring organizer, and a rival seeking control of the institution that could provide such sponsorship.

Union Organizer and Possible Sponsor

The narrator first identifies McGreal as an organizer out of Teamsters Local 107 and as the person for whom he ran football lotteries. He admired the way organizers such as McGreal and the business agents handled themselves on behalf of union members, and told Russell Bufalino that union work appealed to him. The narrator was tired of irregular truck-driving jobs and hoped a steady union position would provide a reliable paycheck for his family and a path to advancement.

McGreal told him that Local 107 had no vacancies and that other men were already waiting. Getting in, he explained, required knowing someone high up who could support and vouch for a candidate—a sponsor the narrator described as a rabbi. The narrator had also approached his shop steward, but believed the steward had little influence to spare and wanted to become an organizer himself. In this exchange, McGreal is neither simply a gatekeeper nor an assured patron: he explains the bottleneck, but offers no position.

The possibility of a different route emerged through the narrator’s acquaintances in the criminal world. Skinny Razor repeatedly urged him to move beyond driving a truck, saying the men around him should help him advance. The narrator told Skinny Razor that he wanted union work and mentioned McGreal. He inferred that Skinny Razor spoke to Angelo, who in turn spoke to Russell Bufalino. Later, while the narrator and Russell sat over bread and wine, Russell asked why he did not try to enter the union. The narrator explained McGreal’s response; Russell answered with a Sicilian saying about uncertain weather and matters being in God’s hands. Soon afterward, the narrator was told to come to the Friendly before eight because Russell wanted him to speak with someone. The account thus places McGreal within a wider chain of introductions and influence, without stating that he personally secured the narrator’s eventual advancement.

Local 107 and Factional Conflict

Teamsters Local 107 was described as the country’s fourth-largest local, too large to manage easily and repeatedly troubled by internal conflict. Its president, Raymond Cohen, faced public criticism and a Senate corruption investigation. The narrator opposed Cohen’s leadership, making monthly motions to remove privileges such as his car or expense account. Cohen supported Jimmy Hoffa publicly, but, according to the narrator, resisted Hoffa’s priorities behind the scenes, including the proposed nationwide Master Freight Agreement.

McGreal’s position in this struggle was more direct. The narrator says that McGreal had his own muscle crew and was always looking to sow dissension so he could take over Local 107. He portrays McGreal’s rebel group as lacking a known name or legitimate standing: it consisted of muscle men trying to displace Cohen and, in the narrator’s view, take up the same corrupt practices. The charge is specific but remains the narrator’s assessment, not an independent account of McGreal’s motives.

The account explains the alleged attraction of controlling a local in practical terms. A union official could extract under-the-table monthly payments from an employer in return for labor peace; without payment, workplace trouble might follow. In that arrangement, the narrator says, workers became pawns. He contrasts McGreal’s ambition with his own later record, claiming that when Hoffa gave him a local in Wilmington in 1966, employers respected him because he never shook them down. The contrast presents the narrator’s version of McGreal’s faction as a contest not merely over leadership, but over who would profit from the authority of the union.

Associates and the Limits of the Account

McGreal also appears in the narrator’s account of Jay Phalen. The narrator says he sold football lotteries for McGreal and understood Phalen to be associated with him. After Phalen had been barred from Dante’s Inferno for pulling a gun on a customer, the narrator found him back in the establishment and suspected that something was wrong. He connected that suspicion both to Phalen’s return and to McGreal’s association with him, whom he characterized as someone who did not keep Phalen around for conversation.

That suspicion precedes a double murder at Dante’s Inferno: Jack Lopinson’s wife, Judith, and his accountant, John Malito, were shot, while Lopinson was wounded. The narrator’s recollection establishes his unease about Phalen and his perceived connection to McGreal; it does not establish that McGreal ordered, knew of, or participated in the attack. Keeping those facts separate matters: McGreal is placed in a network where union factionalism, muscle, and violence overlap, but the account does not turn association into proof of involvement.

Narrative Role

McGreal’s appearances are episodic, but together they show how influence travels through overlapping personal and institutional networks. He is an organizer who can explain the union’s hiring barriers, a faction leader seeking control of a troubled local, and a point of association through which the narrator interprets Phalen’s return to a bar. The narrator’s description is openly shaped by his own ambitions and judgments: he wanted a union position, opposed Cohen, and later distinguished his own conduct from the shakedowns he attributed to McGreal’s faction. The resulting portrait is therefore not a detached biography. It is a view of McGreal as a consequential local actor, filtered through a narrator who was both trying to rise within the Teamsters and alert to the violent power that accompanied its internal rivalries.