Abstract   Ports are spaces in which a certain degree of informal – or strictly illegal – governance might emerge. This can involve different activities, from drug trafficking to corruption and different actors, from port worker to terminal owners. Through the collection of qualitative data, this study aims at exploring if and how organised crime is present in the port of Montreal and in that of New York/New Jersey. The paper will investigate the “institutional narrative” of organised crime in these two ports, by particularly focusing on the survival of a paradigm of ‘traditional-ethnic organised crime’ which has been (re)producing by several law enforcement agencies. Our empirical findings show that the duplex nature of ports, both gates to the sea as much as spaces of global trade, allows reconstructing different manifestations of organised crime on the waterfront that go far beyond the institutional narratives of traditional-ethnic organised crime.