On this day in 1963, and 6 years after his brothers Barber shop assassination we saw the death of the younger brother of crime boss Albert Anastasia, Anthony Anastasio. Tough Tony was a mobster who controlled New York City’s docks for several decades.

On this day in 1963, the waterfront underworld lost one of its most formidable figures with the death of Anthony Anastasio, better known on the docks of New York as "Tough Tony." Younger brother of the feared Albert "Mad Hatter" Anastasia, Anthony passed away aged 57, some six years after witnessing his notorious brother's infamous assassination in a Manhattan barbershop chair in October 1957. Where Albert had built his fearsome reputation through murder and mayhem at the head of Murder Inc., Anthony carved out his own deeply entrenched empire along the Brooklyn waterfront.

Anthony Anastasio's power base was the International Longshoremen's Association, where he served as a key official and effectively ruled the Brooklyn docks with an iron fist for decades. His control over who worked, who loaded, and who unloaded along the bustling East River piers gave him enormous leverage over the movement of goods through one of the world's busiest ports. Employers, shipping companies, and union workers alike understood that crossing Tough Tony came with serious consequences. The arrangement made him indispensable to the Gambino crime family, with whom he maintained a close and mutually profitable relationship throughout his criminal career.

Despite never holding a formal position in the upper hierarchy of the Five Families in the traditional sense, Anastasio's grip on the waterfront made him one of the most economically powerful mob figures in New York City. His connections extended beyond Brooklyn, and his influence was felt across the broader American underworld at a time when figures such as Lucky Luciano had long since structured organised crime into its modern corporate form. The docks were the lifeblood of commerce, and whoever controlled them held real, tangible power over the city's economic pulse.

Anastasio had long been linked to widespread corruption, labour racketeering, and extortion, drawing the attention of investigators and journalists, most notably in the early 1950s when the New York State Crime Commission shone a harsh light on waterfront corruption. His testimony and the broader investigations he was caught up in helped inspire Elia Kazan's celebrated 1954 film On the Waterfront, lending his criminal legacy an unexpected cultural dimension.

Anthony Anastasio died of natural causes, a relatively rare ending for a man so deeply embedded in the violent world of organised crime. His decades of iron rule over New York's docks stand as a testament to how the mob's reach extended far beyond the streets and into the very infrastructure of American commerce.