Monday, Feb. 05, 1934
"World's Worst"
Between Manhattan and smoky Queens lies a thin strip of grey land with grey buildings in the middle of the sludgy grey waters of the East River. It used to be called Blackwell's Island. In 1921 its name was changed to Welfare Island. Motorists crossing the Queensboro Bridge span it in daily thousands. Wealthy socialites in their riverfront apartments pay big money to look at it. But Welfare Island is not a nice place to visit and nobody would want to live there. It is the site of the New York County Penitentiary.
Early one morning last week several carloads of men, led by New York City's thin, purse-lipped new Commissioner of Correction Austin Harbutt MacCormick and his stocky aid David Marcus, descended the elevator from the Queensboro Bridge, made Welfare Island a surprise visit. By sundown Commissioner MacCormick had lifted the lid off Welfare Island and given city. State and nation a terrifying glimpse into the nether depths of prison life. "The worst prison in the world," pronounced Commissioner MacCormick, whom new Fusion Mayor LaGuardia had enlisted from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to clean up penal scandals left by years of Tammany rule. "The most corrupt prison in the country, physically and from every other standpoint. . . . A vicious circle of depravity that is almost beyond the ability of the imagination to grasp!"
First stop on the itinerary of Commissioner MacCormick's raiding party was a cell-block largely tenanted by narcotic addicts who whimpered in their blankets, begged their visitors for "just a little shot." In their littered cells were found electric stoves, pots, pans, hatchets, butcher knives, lengths of lead pipe, needle-pointed stilettos (see cut). Some narcotics were discovered, a complete hypodermic set, blackened spoons in which "dope" had been cooked, needles and gouges with which inmates without syringes gashed themselves to let the precious drugs into their veins. To the police it looked more like a hop house than a prison.
The dregs of the prison's life were still howling disconsolately among the debris of their possessions when the raiders turned their attention to the prison's hierarchy. Sixty-eight prisoners, the Commissioner found, virtually ran Welfare Island. They cowed their guards through outside political influence. They sold to some 500 inmates the best of vegetables and meats. Star boarders prepared this food in their own cells, and the prison library of more than 1,000 volumes had entirely vanished as cooking fuel. Since the food was looted from the prison commissary, the other 1,200 prisoners virtually starved on greasy cold stews.
In addition, the ring sold narcotics, provided monied prisoners with clothing filched from newcomers, even had a strong voice in the granting of paroles. Divided between an Irish and an Italian gang, the hierarchy lived soft in two hospital wards, while men who should have been hospitalized--100 drug addicts, more than 100 venereal cases, 13 insane patients and one man suffering with sleeping sickness--roamed at large through the prison spreading demoralization and infection.
Irish leader was Edward Cleary, a "graduate" of Sing Sing. He was found drunk in bed. In his dormitory and in the cosy little study he had fitted up for himself and his staff were three 10-gal. milk cans of home brew, a "deck" of heroin, a refrigerator bulging with contraband provisions which he sold or bartered for services.
Italian leader was a big swarthy gunman named Joie Rao, kept sleek and well-pressed by his underlings. Rao, onetime boxer, was shaving when Deputy Commissioner Marcus ordered him to get along with the rest of his henchmen to solitary cells. Prisoner Rao insolently remarked that he would when he finished his toilet. Deputy Marcus, a boxer in his time at West Point, made short shrift of that kind of talk.
Both Rao and Cleary, it soon developed, were animal lovers. Cleary had a police pup chained to his bed. The dog wore a harness on which was graven the name "Screw Hater" ("screw" = guard). The Irishman also had a cote of 100 pigeons in his dormitory. Rao maintained a flock of 200 more on top of the prison storage house. Also his criminal lackeys had built him a little fenced garden, with flowers, benches and a milch goat. Both Cleary and Rao had passes permitting them to roam the island at will.
But Commissioner MacCormick had not sounded the most deplorable depths of Welfare Island until he went to the mess hall at noon. In fluttered a huge chorus of perverts, their lips and cheeks blushing with rouge, their eyes darkened with mascara, their hair flowing long. In their cells were found heaps of feminine underclothes, nightgowns, perfume, lipsticks, suntan powder. They were confined to the laundry during work hours, but at other times were not segregated. Unless close watch was kept on these tainted characters, other prisoners would fight as desperately for their favor as they would for a woman's.
Commissioner MacCormick could not change Welfare Island overnight from a crowded, filthy firetrap to a model institution, but he could and did put Cleary, Rao & Co. in solitary confinement to await possible dope-peddling trials. The Commissioner sent narcotic addicts and diseased prisoners to the hospital, while young prisoners were segregated. He took from the perverts their frippery, sent them squealing to the barber to have their locks trimmed, saw that they remained alone in their own eating and living quarters. He charged the deputy warden with breaking almost every rule in the city's penological code, stripped Warden Joseph A. McCann of authority. Warden McCann's reaction was a feeble protest that, while Cleary was a "yellow rat," "Rao is the most valuable prisoner we have. Why, he's better than a deputy warden. When trouble developed, I could always go to Rao and get things quieted down."
Obviously Prisoner Rao had not set up his dominion over administrators and inmates of Welfare Island by sheer weight of personality. His outside backer, it appeared, was a certain Tammany district leader, identified by the Evening Post as a poker-faced man named James J. Hines, powerful throughout Harlem and Times Square as well as in his own Morningside Heights district. Hines was responsible for John Francis Curry's advance to Tammany leadership.
No sooner were the first incredible reports of the MacCormick visit to Welfare Island announced than half a dozen agencies preened themselves on having instigated the raid. Among them were the Daily News, the World-Telegram, the New York Foundation, which had paid for an investigation begun two years ago, a grand jury which had recommended an investigation of the prison's "gross mismanagement" last year. Plain, however, was the fact that it took an anti-Tammany administration to dig to the bottom of Welfare Island's cesspool of corruption.
Commissioner MacCormick's clean-up was a windfall for Vanity Fair which got its February issue on the newsstands six days before Welfare Island made big black headlines. In that smartchart was an article about the prison which knowingly described most of the evil conditions uncovered by the raid. Its author was a onetime deputy Commissioner of Correction, Joseph Fulling Fishman, who calls Welfare Island "the hardest prison in the world to manage." He points to its unparalleled turnover of 30,000 inmates a year, remarks that it harbors more drug cases (1,200 a year) than all Federal prisons combined,* more homosexuals (200) and alcoholics (1,500) than any other U. S. penal institution. Only untimely bit in Mr. Fishman's article is the cachet he gives Warden McCann for the small number of escapes from the prison. "Such an escape record," says Mr. Fishman, "could be achieved only by a warden dog-like in his devotion to his job."
*Last week Surgeon General Hugh S. Gumming asked the House Appropriations Committee to change the name of the U. S. Narcotic Farm at Fort Worth, Tex. "The name would indicate," explained the Surgeon General, "that it is a farm on which we raise narcotics."
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