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While International Longshoremen’s Association representatives sit down with individual terminal operators along the US east and Gulf coasts to ratify the ILA-USMX master contract, a lawsuit is working its way through a Manhattan district court that accuses ILA leadership, and naming current president Harold Daggett, of racketeering charges. Claiming $160m in damages, American Stevedoring, the former operator of New York’s Red Hook Container Terminal, alleges that it was put out of business because it refused to go along with the ILA’s money-making schemes, even claiming that company chairman Sabato Catucci was told that unless his company withdrew from the port “he would be carried out in a box”.