to secretary-treasurer Shannon J. Wall. By the mid-1960s, Curran was being criticized for ignoring his members' needs and concerns. His $85,000-a-year salary was one of the highest in the American labor movement even though his union was small and shedding members. He enjoyed an unlimited expense account, and traveled by chartered jet and private limousine. He cajoled the union's executive board into building a massive, Art Deco headquarters in Manhattan, and had the edifice named after himself. In 1966, with the surreptitious help of NMU staffers, union member James B. Morrissey challenged the results of Curran's 1966 re-election as fraudulent. The Department of Labor agreed, but a re-run election did not change the outcome. In 1973, shortly after Curran won re-election for a thirteenth term as union president, Morrissey sued Curran and charged him with misappropriating union funds. In a precedent-setting ruling in Morrissey and Ibrahim v. Curran, 650 F.2d 1267 (1981), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit established a broad right for union members to sue union officers for improper financial practices. Morrissey's barrage of lawsuits against Curran led him to retire suddenly on March 5, 1973. Long-time secretary-treasurer Shannon J. Wall succeeded him as president. Curran retired to Boca Raton, Florida. He died there of cancer on August 14, 1981. Family Curran married Retta Toble, a former cruise ship waitress, in 1939. The couple had a son, Joseph Paul Curran, Jr. Retta Curran died in 1963. In 1965, Curran married Florence Stetler. Notes References Background Profile of Joe Kennedy. June 9, 1948. Contained in Subject: Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government. A. Jones. June 9, 1948. Accessed February 14, 2007 Barbanel, Josh. Joseph Curran, 75, Founder of National Maritime Union. New York Times obituary. August 15, 1981. Butler, John A. Sailing on Friday: The Perilous Voyage of America's Merchant Marine. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 1997. C.I.O. Goes to Sea. Time July 19, 1937. Critchlow, Donald T. Communist Unions and Racism: A Comparative Study of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers and the National Maritime Union to the Black Question during World War II, Labor History volume 17 (1976). Goldberg, Joseph P. The Maritime Story: A Study in Labor-Management Relations, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958. Herbert, Brian. The Forgotten Heroes: The Heroic Story of the United States Merchant Marine. New York City: Forge Books, 2004. Horne, Gerald. Red Seas: Ferdinand