Customs needed the manifests nominally to track tariffs, collect duties, and prevent smuggling of any illegal material into the country—though with fewer than a half-dozen agents in Boston, there was no way that the agency could actually keep track of the contents of the more than two million shipping containers unloaded every year on the docks in and around the city. Everyone knew that the agency had more or less given up on any sort of effective monitoring.

Historically, the harbormaster oversaw all traffic patterns and dockage in the harbor, and needed the manifests to figure out when to schedule arrivals and departures, how to allocate dock space in port, and the best way to ensure that traffic lanes stayed open. In practice, however, as the ships became larger and fewer over time, the need for the kind of coordination required in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries no longer existed. The position of harbormaster had devolved into a patronage job controlled by the mayor’s office, requiring little actual skill, knowledge, or competence. It was rumored that none of the past six harbormasters had ever been on a boat before taking office.

The only copy of the manifests that served a practical purpose was the one delivered to the head of the CUPD. The CUPD was the union to which all of the workers within the harbor system belonged. The system included the pilots of the tugboats that guided ships and barges all the way from the Atlantic, through the quirky passages of Boston’s outer harbor, to the tight lanes of the inner harbor, to the docks. It included the deckhands who worked the tugs and who were responsible for ensuring a smooth transition for ships from sea run, to tug, to dock. It included the dockmasters who oversaw the operations onshore, and the stevedores who unloaded the ships, as well as all of the workers within the storage and holding facilities along the shoreline. The CUPD used the manifests to direct the human resources necessary to keep the blood of commerce coursing through the harbor’s arteries in a reasonably efficient manner.

As a result, the president of the CUPD had an enormous amount of power, and endless opportunities to line his own pockets, as well as the pockets of others. Shipping companies were always willing to pay to have their cargo unloaded more quickly; importers were happy to pay to have their goods undercounted so that the tariffs they had to fork over to the government would be reduced; local politicians and power brokers were always looking to have sons or nephews of influential friends given their union cards and steady employment; and smugglers of everything from gray-market Asian goods to counterfeit products, to drugs, to people were always looking to strike a deal to make passage all the easier.