Organized Crime Figure, Anthony Anastasio (Tough Tony), was a powerful labor boss and racketeer on the Brooklyn waterfront.  Brother of Mafia figures Albert and Frank Anastasia.  As brother of syndicate chieftain Albert Anastasia,Tough Tony took control of the astoundingly lucrative Brooklyn docks through the International Longshoremen’s Association for which he was a vice president and head of the powerful Local 1814. Through Anastasio’s iron grip of this union, millions of dollars each year were funneled into syndicate coffers from kickbacks on dues, stolen merchandise from precious cargoes, and payoffs from many shipping companies.  Tough Tony ruled the great shipping port for three decades through the mere threat of his brother Albert, head of Murder Inc. It was claimed that he could wreck the country’s imports and exports if he so desired and even cause sabotage to important ships to make a syndicate point. One story, a canard, has it that boss of bosses Lucky Luciano, imprisoned in Dannemora during W.W.II, the most severe prison in New York, wanted a transfer to a more relaxed penal institution. When his request was denied, he ordered Albert Anastasia to talk to his brother. Tough Tony then arranged for the French luxury liner, Normandie , to be blown up so that federal authorities would quickly realize that Luciano could, in the tradition of Cagliostro, “afflict as well as heal.”  Because of the explosion, the tale goes on, Luciano was transferred to more comfortable prison surroundings.  Nothing could be further from the truth. An exhaustive investigation concerning the Normandie’s explosion which caused the ship to capsize at its mooring docks failed to support this story, one that Anastasio himself spread to increase his own lethal prestige.  Anastasio was the first to identify his brother’s body after Albert was slain at the Park Sheraton Hotel in 1957.  He then rushed to Frank Costello where newsmen later found both men sobbing and embracing each other, dispelling any notion that Costello had ordered the killing of Anastasia. Tough Tony Anastasio’s influence along the New York docks waned after his brother’s mob execution but he was allowed to hold on to his position by Vito Genovese, who had been behind Anastasia’s murder. Tony Anastasio died of natural causes in 1963.