Funeral for Willie

Willie Lurye was a mild-looking, curly-haired little fellow who would give a man the shirt off his back, people said. Like his Papa, who had been a cigar maker in Sam Gompers' union, he was hot for unions. Willie was a dress presser in the biggest in New York, the International Ladies' Garment Workers (405,000 members). With a wife and four kids to look after, Willie gave up a $180-a-week pressing job last fall to work for $80 as a special organizer: there were still some non-union no-good-nicks in the garment center.

The union, for all its immense power and prestige, had felt some of the old troublesome signs: hoodlums had walked into the offices of the union and beat up three organizers; pickets had been slugged. Massed in the street between the towering loft buildings on West 35th Street (called "Chinatown" from the days when "coolie wages" were paid there by the makers of low-priced dresses), 25,000 union dressmakers listened one day as their leaders issued a warning to the remaining unorganized employers: the union would not tolerate the return of gangsters like the late Louis ("Lepke") Buchalter and Jacob ("Gurrah") Shapiro.

Four Men at a Booth. After that, for a while, the gorillas lay low. They were on the prowl one hot afternoon last week when Willie Lurye went into the ground-floor lobby of a Chinatown loft to make a phone call. Traffic was heavy in the building and nobody noticed anything wrong until the man at the cigar stand saw Willie come out of the booth, walk with painful erectness toward the door, call out "Tony" in a strangled voice. Tony was Tony Milletti, another organizer.

Blood spread in a widening stain across the front of Willie's shirt, and ran between the fingers clutched to his belly. In the telephone booth he had been worked over by three men and stabbed. The three hoodlums had raced out of the building, fought off Milletti and got away. At the hospital, Willie's wife, Beatrice, sat beside him until, around midnight, he was ready for the operating room. Then Willie managed a thin grin and said: "Why don't you put some lipstick on and quit crying? You better go home and take care of your kids." Four hours later he was dead.

Shoulder to Shoulder. One hundred cops were put on the case, padding patiently from one building to the next in the garment center, questioning 400 people. The great I.L.G.W.U. rose in its wrath. It offered $25,000 for the conviction of Willie's murderers, ordered 65,000 dressmakers to quit work for four hours to attend his funeral.

Black-bordered and six-feet high, Willie's photograph hung above the stage in the vast Manhattan Center, where Willie lay in state. Beneath it was the sentence: "We mourn our loss." Four thousand of his union brothers & sisters crowded into the high-vaulted auditorium for the service. Outside 20,000 more heard the impassioned voice of Union President David Dubinsky exhort the mourners: "Little did we think that in 1949 we would have to sacrifice a man. What a mistake that employer made! This union will not permit it, no matter what the police department or the district attorney want to do."

Up broad Eighth Avenue went the funeral cortege: the slow hearse and the funeral cars and tens of thousands of deadly silent garment workers marching shoulder to shoulder from curb to curb, packed solid for two blocks. After Willie was buried the union did not forget his family: it set up a $50,000 fund for them. And it vowed that it would not give up its search for Willie's killers.

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