Shut out of port, firm cries foul

Stevedoring is a rough business, rougher still for John Gorman Jr., who has battled Miami-Dade County for over a decade to obtain a permit to load and unload cargo at the Port of Miami.

``It's called politics and good old boys,'' says Gorman, a tall, mustachioed man of 65, who runs Florida Transportation Services in Fort Lauderdale with his wife and son.

``It's called hardball.''

Gorman's quest to stevedore at the county-owned port has been thwarted over the years amid various appeals to the Miami-Dade County Commission, an administrative hearing and state circuit court. In recent years, the county began citing work safety issues, including fatalities at Port Everglades.

In April 2008, the tough-talking New York native finally prevailed: U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan ruled that the port's way of doling out permits illegally protected the incumbent stevedores -- ``creating a handful of entrenched privileged companies.''

This March, following a two-week federal trial to consider damages, a jury awarded Gorman's company $3.5 million for lost business.

Though the county intends to appeal, the case offers a rare look into the world of doing business on the Miami waterfront, the nation's ninth largest port.

For years, the Port of Miami had the same nine stevedoring companies moving cargo on and off ships. A handful of those stevedores also jointly own POMTOC, the Port of Miami Terminal Operating Co., and they do most of the stevedoring for POMTOC's customers, the shipping lines that lack their own storage space and facilities at the port.

The case turns on a Miami-Dade ordinance that empowers the port director and the county commission to issue -- or deny -- stevedore permits, based on whether the port needs more firms to handle the volume of cargo.

``The port director, with the acquiescence of the Board of County Commissioners and the County Manager, has in essence used the ordinance to protect a group of entrenched stevedores and bar the entry of new competitors to the stevedore market,'' Judge Jordan wrote in a 23-page order.

The judge, who could change the jury's award, set an Aug. 27 hearing to hear from both sides before ruling.

Steven Bass, an assistant county attorney, views the jury's award as based on ``unpermissible speculation.'' Bass hopes to get the judge to throw out the award.

`OLIGOPOLY'

Gorman, whose father worked the Brooklyn docks, labored for years in unionized stevedoring operations.

Then in 1982, he started Florida Transportation Services, which uses nonunion labor.

In the 1980s, the nonunion stevedore's entry at Port Everglades was met with pickets, work stoppages and tense confrontations with union members from the International Longshoremen's Association.

Gorman stuck it out and built a prosperous business with revenues totaling $19 million by 2005. He's pushing to do the same in Miami.

``Financial gain is the motive,'' says Gorman, who listens to CDs of opera arias while driving his pickup truck. ``I'm a businessman.''

Nearly every year since 1999, Gorman applied for a stevedoring permit in Miami. The rejection letters would come back citing a lack of need for additional firms. The incumbent stevedores at the port, all unionized, could handle the volume of cargo, he was told.

Port officials heard from incumbent stevedores and the longshoremen's union, urging against giving Gorman a permit.

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