Peter Stein (left, circled) with lifeguards and the head of the Parks Department in 1996. Rockaway Beach lifeguard-competition team (right) in 1984. Joe McManus, third from right in the back. Photo: Courtesy of the Tamiment Library, New York University (Peter Stein)/Courtesy of Joe McManus (lifeguards)
On 106th Street in Rockaway Beach, a lime-green bunker faces the sea. From this concrete outpost, Peter B. Stein oversees the largest lifeguard corps in the United States. His 1,374 guards protect 13.3 million annual visitors to 14 miles of beach and 53 outdoor pools, from Coney Island to the Bronx.
In a city flush with generous contracts for civil servants, Stein, 75, has earned New York Post headlines for his outsize pay. He earns about $230,000 a year combined in lifeguard and union salaries. In the early aughts, when he drew a third paycheck as a gym teacher, Stein made more than the police commissioner.
An empire this lucrative must be stitched together — and then protected. In the 19th century, William “Boss” Tweed created a vast patronage network and enriched himself through kickbacks and bribes. Gus Bevona, leader of the building-maintenance workers union in the 1980s, earned a $450,000 salary and lived in an extravagant Soho penthouse. Like them, Stein relies on a playbook of patronage, power brokering, and intimidation. Since 1981, his supervisors have rigged swim tests, shielded sexual predators, and falsified drowning reports. One lifeguard refers to his crew as “La Cosa Nostra.” Through tabloid scandals, wrongful-death lawsuits, and 79 on-duty drownings since 1988 — at points, the city’s drowning fatality rate has been three times the national average — Stein has hung on like a barnacle from a bygone New York, successfully sidelining anyone who challenges him.
Then last summer, a flyer appeared at Connolly’s, a Rockaway bar popular with lifeguards. It had a photo of Stein. “Meet the godfather and mastermind,” it read. “Let’s make lifeguarding great again.” Only a few people knew who had created the sign, and it wasn’t obvious what was being proposed. But its existence alone sent a clear message: Someone had calculated that Stein was vulnerable enough to be challenged. His Tammany Hall by the Sea was in trouble.
Stein, in the white button-down, when he was a lifeguard instructor roughly 50 years ago. Photo: Courtesy of the Tamiment Library, New York University
In the summer of 1960, Peter Stein was a new 15-year-old lifeguard patrolling Manhattan Beach. The South Brooklyn neighborhood, full of middle-class families and brick buildings, was no Baywatch, and Stein — a squat Jewish kid with caterpillar eyebrows — was no David Hasselhoff. But it was on this sand that he would build his castle.
Stein endured a tough adolescence. His father died when he was 17, and he and his mother lived off Social Security. He was an unremarkable student, kept to himself, and quit the swim team after sophomore year. His lifeguard job was degrading. “The city treated us like garbage,” he later said. On hot summer days, his boss would send him to the parking lot to line trash cans. The indignity chafed.
While classmates became doctors and lawyers, Stein stuck with lifeguarding. He paid for college with his lifeguard salary, became a gym teacher at J.H.S. 223, a middle school in Borough Park, and continued to work the beach. Whatever kept him showing up each summer, it wasn’t a love of swimming. In his 20s, Stein worked at the lifeguard school on East 54th Street in the late winter and spring, teaching young recruits how to spot heatstroke, break free of a panicked drowning person, and revive unresponsive bathers using the Silvester method, a 19th-century precursor to CPR, which was still used at the time. During lunch, instructors ran, swam, and played basketball — everyone except Stein.
“I never saw him even put on a bathing suit,” says Ernie Horowitz, who attended Adelphi Academy high school with Stein and later worked with him at the lifeguard school. Stein arrived every day wearing a white button-down shirt. His training courses started last and ended first — Stein’s main occupation seemed to be arguing with his bosses.
In the mid-1960s, Victor Gotbaum, the table-thumping executive director of District Council 37, was growing this municipal-employee union. He lobbied lifeguards to join. Soon, two new locals were born: Local 508, for supervisors, and Local 461, for rank-and-file lifeguards. That the lifeguards had separate unions for management and labor would be key to Stein’s power. The president of Local 508 needed only to corral a few dozen supervisors in union elections to retain the post, rather than hundreds of unpredictable teenage lifeguards.
Colleagues from that era recall, with varying degrees of diplomacy, that Stein could be difficult. “He had a big mouth,” says Frank Pia, who worked alongside Stein for two decades. “He was very militant, a very tough guy,” says Alan Viani, a top DC 37 negotiator from 1968 to 1985. Horowitz is blunt: “He was a nudnik.”
Even as he alienated his peers, Stein cultivated a friendship with Gotbaum, who had earned the moniker “Mr. Labor” as he tripled DC 37’s membership rolls and negotiated with financiers and politicians to keep a nearly bankrupt New York City afloat in 1975. The exact circumstances of Stein’s ascent are hazy. Some who would know declined to speak on the record for fear that Stein might imperil their pension or a son’s job with the city. The rest are still on the payroll or dead.
By 1981, Stein, then 36, had become the citywide lifeguard coordinator — and the president of Local 508. By stocking the leadership of Local 461 with members of his inner circle, he would eventually control that union, too, in a brazen conflict of interest. Lifeguards who complained to their union representative about their boss found themselves speaking to the same man. Stein finally had real power.