I am sixty-seven years old and I still smell the dock before I see it. Diesel and tar and the sour breath of a thousand fish waiting to rot. It is November in Red Hook and the wind off the bay cuts through three coats but I do not close the bar window because closing it means the smell stays inside with me.

I have been coming to this bar for forty years. Forty years since Jack Callahan made me his first mate, thirty years since I watched him stand in this very booth and order a whiskey and not drink it because he was too busy watching every face in the room to see who was coming for him.

Jack Callahan was the greatest shipowner Brooklyn ever produced and the dumbest bastard who ever stepped on a gangplank. He died in a two-room apartment in Queens with nothing in his pockets except a pocketknife and a photograph of a woman whose name I still don't know.

Let me tell you how it started.

It was 1924, and I was nineteen, son of a dockworker who had broken his back on the Brooklyn pier and spent the last ten years of his life in a wheelchair, staring at the ceiling, wishing he had never learned the difference between a crate of apples and a crate of something else.

Jack Callahan was twenty-six, which in the world of the docks made him a boy. He stood maybe five foot eight in his stocking feet, wore his hair slicked back with something cheaper than pomade, and had a face that could sell you a used car or punch through a brick wall. You never knew which one he was going to do.

I was standing on Pier 63, watching a Navy patrol boat drift past the mouth of the harbor, when I saw Jack Callahan direct a submarine cable car into the warehouse like he was moving a shipment of oranges. The crates were the same size. The smell was wrong. And Jack's crew moved fast.

"Who's that kid?" Jack asked, nodding at me. He was speaking to himself, not to anyone else.

"Fresh meat," said the foreman. "Davey O'Shea's boy. He wants work."

Jack looked at me the way a man looks at a ship he is thinking of buying - assessing the hull, checking for rot, measuring the hold.

"You swim?" he asked.

"I was born in a tenement," I said. "Swimming is what we do when the fire comes."

He hired me on the spot. That was the first mistake either of us made.

By 1929, Jack had a fleet of six cargo ships and a reputation that reached from Boston to Baltimore. He moved things that were illegal and made money that was legal and paid his crew in both. The men who worked for Jack called him "Cap" with respect and "Boss" with fear. The men who worked against Jack called him dead.

I was his first mate, his shadow, the guy he sent to talk to people who did not want to be talked to. I was proud. I was hungry. I was twenty-six and I thought I was going to be him.

But around 1935 I started noticing things.

Jack would arrive at the warehouse two hours late and his hands would shake. Not from cold - it was July. He would pay a crewman double his wage and then watch him like he expected the man to run. He stopped sleeping. He stood on the roof of his office building every night and stared at the harbor the way a man stares at a question he has forgotten how to ask.

"Cap," I said one evening in October. "You alright?"

He turned his head slowly and looked at me with eyes that had gone somewhere I could not follow. "You ever think about what happens to a man when he gets everything he wanted, Tommy? Not what happens after. What happens in the moment, right when the thing you've been chasing finally touches your hand?"

I didn't have an answer for that.

"The hand closes," he said. "That's what happens. You grab it and your fist closes around it and then you can't give it back even if you want to."

He went back to staring at the harbor.

Jack's undoing was not a dramatic event. There was no great battle or a dramatic betrayal. It was a man named Frank DeMarco - twenty-eight years old, sharp-eyed, sharp-dressed, sharp-tongued. Jack promoted him to second mate in 1947, the way a man promotes a dog he hopes will bark louder than the one he already has.

Frank DeMarco barked louder. He also talked to the federal investigators when Jack's fleet was seized in 1950 over a deal with a Greek shipping magnate who turned out to be connected to the Calabrian Mafia. Jack's ships were impounded. His accounts frozen. His crew scattered.

At the hearing, Frank DeMarco sat in the front row and testified that Jack Callahan had known about the illegal cargo. Jack sat in the back row and did not look at Frank once. He just stared at a crack in the wall where the paint had peeled, and I could have sworn he was still there, in that wall, still trying to measure the hold.

I visited him in Queens six months later. Two rooms, a kitchen that smelled of boiled cabbage, a photograph of the harbor on the wall where the paint had peeled in the exact shape of a question mark.

"You know what I was, Tommy?" he said. He was speaking quietly, like a man speaking to someone lying in a hospital bed.

"I know what you were, Cap."

"I was alive. And you're still alive, but you're not living. That's the difference."

I left without answering. I have never answered.

Today I sit in this bar in Red Hook and I watch the ships come and go. Container ships now, not the old cargo vessels Jack built his empire on. They come from places I cannot pronounce and carry things I cannot imagine. They do not stop at the pier. They do not send men with crates.

The harbor is clean now. The smell is different. But when the wind comes from the northeast at exactly the right angle, at exactly the right hour, I can still smell it. Diesel and tar and the sour breath of a thousand fish waiting to rot.

I close the bar window anyway. The smell stays inside. I do not complain.