HIGH LIFE TURNED TRAGIC ON THE WATERFRONT

Joseph E. Piva was earning close to $1,000 a week a long time ago as a
Teamsters agent, tooling around town in a Cadillac and currying the respect
of the fishermen he once worked shoulder-to-shoulder with at sea and on the
docks.

Life couldn't get any better for a fifth-grade dropout, he thought.

"I had it all -- the money, the car, the credit cards."

And then, 17 years ago, that dream slowly unraveled.

He tried to move higher in the union ranks, running for local Teamsters
president.

He lost.

He struggled to find another job on the waterfront -- the only workplace he
knew.

No one would hire him.

Door after door slammed shut, he recalled.

The bills began to mount. His young wife gave birth to a daughter. He felt
the finances strain as the bank accounts quickly emptied to meet bills. He
worked odd jobs elsewhere in the city, sometimes painting, struggling to
stay financially afloat, dreaming always of once more returning to
waterfront work.

And then came the offer that would change his life.

He was given $80,000 -- cash -- to buy a boat for a group of men who needed
a vessel to haul marijuana up the East Coast in the early 1980s. After the
drugs were off-loaded, the boat was his.

The money was too tempting to turn down at first, he said. It was, after
all, his ticket to the future.

"I was thinking, I'm finally going to own my own boat," Mr. Piva recalled.

He deposited the cash in the bank -- and then, he insists, began to get
cold feet.

"I didn't know what I was thinking. ... I didn't even smoke the stuff. I
didn't use drugs. I gave them the money back. I couldn't do it," Mr. Piva
said.

It would be five years later -- after finally winning a job as port agent
for the Seafarers International Union, after leading 600 fishermen on a
bitter strike against boat owners in 1985, after picking up the financial
pieces of his life -- that the offer of a lifetime would come back to haunt
him.

In what was described as the largest federal indictment for marijuana
smuggling in New England history, eight men were accused of helping to
smuggle 160 tons of marijuana worth at least $150 million in six operations
between 1982 and 1983.

Mr. Piva -- the man federal officials called a relatively minor character
in the scheme -- was now facing federal drug conspiracy charges.

Four months after his indictment, Mr. Piva was tried, convicted and sent to
federal prison for 10 years.

Anthony "Tiny" Pacheco -- a confessed drug-smuggler, swindler and
"leg-breaker" turned government informant -- would testify that smugglers
gave Mr. Piva $100,000 to buy a boat and another $10,000 to find docking
space. But Mr. Piva later returned $75,000 after failing to get the boat,
Mr. Pacheco testified. The rest of the cash, Mr. Pacheco testified in U.S.
District Court, was used for "personal stuff" and a lawyer by Mr. Piva.

Despite what Mr. Piva said was the urging of his attorney and family, he
refused to testify on his own behalf.

He said he couldn't. It was, he said, a matter of honor.

"In my heart, I really wanted to keep honor," Mr. Piva said. "I wanted
people to remember me as a man of honor who didn't rat anyone out. That and
a quarter, you can buy a cup of coffee."

He didn't want to let anyone down.

Instead, Mr. Piva said, he was the one that was let down.

He was fired as Seafarers port agent, banished as a convicted felon from
working for a union. His wife divorced him, finally remarrying and moving
out of state.

"I lost everything," Mr. Piva said. "I lost my family, everything."

It is a message of loss that anyone feeling the temptation of drug money
should heed, he said.

"I was the one who went to jail, not the other guys," he said. "They still
have their houses, they still have their cars. I don't have anything. ...
The price I paid was too much."

Too many people strapped for money in the early 1980s looked to marijuana
smuggling as easy cash, he said.

Some got away with the crimes -- and the money.

Some -- like Joe Piva -- did not.

"If anyone was going to do this today, they would be crazy," he said. "They
couldn't get away with it. There are too many rats; they'll snitch. There's
no honor."

Today, this former union leader, who once thought the waterfront was his
world, manages an Acushnet Avenue rooming house. His office opens onto the
busy street. He lives in one cramped room, his office.

Two years ago, at age 51, he earned his GED. "I felt pretty good about
that," he said, grinning broadly.

He still harbors hopes of returning to the waterfront, of helping fishermen
become better educated, of catching a bit of his former life.

But he knows there may be no return to what was.

And, he said, there is no bitterness in his life, only a sense of a world
that has slipped away and a hope that a new life is on the horizon.

Just a few miles from the unwalled docks he called home, Joe Piva now lives
in an apartment overlooking the barbed wire of the Ash Street Jail in New
Bedford.

"Isn't that ironic?" he said.

He tries to look forward, without regret, and learn from past mistakes.

He takes pride in new accomplishments: clearing the rooming house of
troublemakers, clearing out drugs.

"This is my home for now," he said, smiling the same smile that won him the
callused hearts of the fishermen along the waterfront years back. "I was a
good man on the waterfront. I still have a lot to offer. I don't know if
anyone would listen now."

Checked-by: jwjohnson@netmagic.net (Joel W. Johnson)