Jasckie Again - page 2
(Another happy hijacking)
I was asked a few questions. I don't recall filling out an application. When I was told they would think about it I said I'd keep looking. They said I was hired. I was an obvious fit for the job - a "checker" writing up the manifests for what went into each truck. I had supervised checkers in Vietnam.
JFK is cold in the winter with wind blowing off Jamaica Bay. T&Sc Assembly was cold in the winter with an open loading dock and wind blowing off the Hudson River. Working all day on a concrete floor, no amount of socks, no thickness of soles of your shoe could keep your feet warm. And, during my first month on the job, I was pigging out on ice cream every night and still loosing weight. But it was a good job.
Once again the game of disappearing freight was played. The fellow who received freight worked with a bottle in his hand. It would be empty by day's end. He worked steadily except for regular trips to the telephone to place bets with his bookie. And the game was, if a local trucker delivered 32 cartons of dresses, he might get a receipt for 31 or even 30. That left one or two cartons for us that would disappear into the attic or go down to the basement. I have no idea how it was justified to the shipper but that was how the system worked. When cartons of work boots piled up, a sale would be held and the truckers would have a chance to buy back what had been stolen from them.
A few cartons here, a few cartons there. You never knew what might come but not go. I could only puzzle at how nobody ever seemed to investigate the shrinkage. Who paid the bill? Was it the shipper - usually a dress manufacturer? Was it the trucking company? Why was anyone allowed to get away with it? But everyone seemed to understand the system.
Mornings we would receive cartons from local manufacturers, mostly dressed from garment factories but sometimes other items, even cosmetics. Once we had a number of crates of model sailing ships. One worker was puzzled. What could you do with them? You couldn't eat them. You couldn't do sex with them. Why would anyone want them? Nobody thought "decoration."
My job was to write up boxes being received and load them into the trailers that would take them to department stores in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and beyond. By the end of the afternoon everything that had been received in the morning would be loaded onto one of the outgoing trailers and drivers would come with their tractors to pick them up. Once when there had been a strike somewhere to the west and one of the tractors arrived with a few bullet holes — just a friendly warning not to cross the picket line.
One night a truck arrived to pick up a trailer but the trailer was already gone. Shucks, it had been hijacked. The trailer was found, empty, a week or so later, in Queens I believe. No violence. Just merchandise walking off again. Although I never mentioned it to anyone - after all, I didn't know what others might have known — I recognized the driver of the truck that arrived just a little too late. It was Jackie again.