The jagged skyline of New York on one side and the smaller rises of Long Island on the other, are the gaping jaws of a Metropolitan monster vomiting sewage into the bay.  And in the middle, cleaving the rushing river with its fin, Welfare Island is a scavenger shark feeding on the festering stream of filth and pain and heartbreak that the city spews out of the bottomless depths of its spleen.

For a hundred and thirteen years, Welfare Island has been a strip of Hell in mid-channel.  Now, with the harpoon barb of the Queensboro Bridge sunk into its back, and with a vigilant Department of Correction on its tail, the shark has tamed down.  But still it feeds on dirt and sorrow and human garbage from the sidewalks of New York.

Years ago, the shark used to be known as Blackwell's Island.  Squalid buildings sprawled along its length, housing the short-term Prison, City Hospital, the Reformatory, City Home, the Workhouses.  It was heart-break house, the lower depth, the miserable sewer into which New York dumped its pitiful sweepings.

The years have brought some change.  The Penitentiary is up on  Riker's Island now.  The Reformatory is down on Hart's.  But Welfare Island still remains the slag-hole of the Melting Pot.

As late as 1935, the Welfare Penitentiary alone had a turnover of thirty thousand men a year.  Petty thieves, vagrants, homo-sexuals, drunkards, rowdies; the les miserables of a metropolis, all poured in and out of the Welfare Pen at the rate of eighty-three a day.  It was an unsanitary, vicious firetrap where polyglot vices met and mingled and gave birth in kind.

The men who went there didn't have a chance.  The prevalent penal psychology was to keep a prisoner in the lock-up until his sentence was served, and then out of the can and into the world and into some crime again.

With thirty thousand prisoners coming in each year, the penal board had no time for individual cases.  There were no such things as segregation, special attention, constructive rehabilitation.  A prisoner was bathed and shaved and examined.  His clothes were fumigated and locked up against the day when he would need them once again.  And then he went into stir to mingle with all sorts and types of men, to teach and be taught, to make some pretense at work or else get put on bread and water.

If an inmate was willing, he could learn a trade.  Soap- making, machining, cobblery.  But nobody really cared, and a man was a number that cost the State some twenty-cents a day for food.

It was hobo heaven in the old days.  When the winter winds blew and the hand-outs were scarce, a vagrant could apply for thirty days.  And he would be fed and clothed and bunked in a warm flop without even raising a hand.

The drunks used to come in to take the cure and to weep out their woes on the shoulders of friends.

All that has changed.  River House belongs to the past.  The drunks and the junkies still are there.  You can see them in the concrete court hooting cat-calls at the nurses in the Metropolitan Hospital yard.  But the bundle-stiffs and convicts all are gone.

This much is the same.  The quickest ticket to the Island is dope.  Even today, thousands of addicts are sent there yearly to be cured.  In the old days, under a regime of corrupt prison management, some of the greatest narcotic rings in the country fought each other for the smuggling concession at Welfare Island.

Dope was brought into the prison by scores of ingenious methods.  Note paper was saturated in heroin.  Cocaine was needled into cigarettes, pressed into handkerchiefs, sewed into seams of clothing.

Agents posing as visitors made the "switch" right under the noses of the guards.  Sadie Horn, for instance, who used to work for the Beaumont ring.

Sadie was a good sister.  She was blonde and fat and affectionate.  Put the dough on the line and you could be her brother for a day.  That's what they tipped the boys who took the cure.

First you saw the man with the hoe.  That's what they called the little guy who worked near the south fence of the prison farm.  You dropped a pack of butts or something like that, so he could get it.  Your name was inside on a piece of paper wrapped around the cash.  The rest just happened.

On visitor's day, they called out your name.  You walked up to the mesh grate that divided the gab-pen in two.  Guards moved back and forth across the enclosure.  There were others who walked around outside.  But the screws didn't know.  Or maybe they did, and didn't say.

Sadie would be there, and you would sweat.  Suppose they caught her with the stuff?  Suppose they nailed you on the "switch"?  Your feet were cold, your hands were wet, your lips were dry.

But Sadie was O.K.  It was an art with Sadie.

"Hello," she said.  "You're looking fine."

And you said:  "Quick... Fork over."

And Sadie'd smile and say:  "Don't you love me, honey?  Ain't you gonna kiss your best girl?"

And then you'd look at her like she was nuts and say again:  "Come on!  Fork over."

It was an art with Sadie.  She'd push her face against the cage and purse her lips.  You moved your mouth to hers.  Her lips would part, and then her tongue would push a little aluminum pellet from her cheek into your mouth.

The guards moved back and forth and didn't say a thing.  And pretty soon you'd say goodbye to Sadie, and beat it back to your cell to take the pill.

There were many Sadies.  The narcotic rings on the outside had a hundred different set-ups for a "switch".  A veritable river of dope moved in successive waves across the iron grill of the gab-pen.  It still gets into Welfare Island now.

The cure is hard on the inmates down in "snow-man's land."  It's hard on the doctors, too.

Commissioner of Hospitals Dr. Sigismund Goldwater has a well- stocked file on the subject of "Addict Hospitalization."  The Medical Board refers to the treatment as "The Fourteen-Day Reduction Cure.  Decreased dosage every twenty-four hours."  The inmates call it "a trip up Limbo Lane."

In the hospital corridor known as "The Shooting Gallery," the addicts who are taking the cure are lined up every morning at nine.  Their faces are haggard and etched with the lines of their vice.  If the doctor should happen to be late, their faces are those of the distorted sinners who line the grotto walls in Dante's "Inferno."  They fight and cry and scream; and the doctor comes running on the double.

They watch his face.  If they can search out one look of sympathy, they have him licked.  They whine and weep and beg for "just a little more, doc.  Nobody's gonna know."

Each day the dose gets less.  Each day their faces mirror their despair.  Each day their torture is more terrible to see.

Sometimes they feign hemorrhages by holding chemicals in their mouths that look like blood.  Sometimes they demand operations just to get an extra shot.  Their cunning is diabolic, for their needs are not the needs of men.

Just fourteen days.  But they count every hour, and they go through hell.

But dope is only one of the many vices that cast human driftwood ashore on Welfare Island.  There are twelve hundred narcotic addicts a year, fifteen hundred chronic drunkards, two hundred homo-sexuals.

It is only recently that perversion has been given psychiatric and medical attention.  Only in the past few years has the Department of Correction come to the conclusion that a sex offender is distinctly a different type of public charge than is a would-be hold-up man.

It wasn't so long ago that homo-sexuals were put into the same lock-up with petty criminals.

Men without women have long probed among their number to find there members of the third sex.  A comparatively recent clean-up over at the Island revealed dresses which had been smuggled into the pen; high-heeled shoes, mascara, lipstick, rouge, even a long blond wig was found.  Prisoners have been caught fighting duels among themselves for the attentions of their favorites.  In 1932, one man was stabbed to death.

In late January of 1934, an investigation into conditions at Welfare Island blew the lid off one of the most sensational political scandals ever exposed to the American public.

It all started when a flight of pigeons from an East Side fancier's coop brought down a carrier with a cryptic message on its leg.  The bird was turned over to the police and the message was deciphered.

The matter was referred to Austin H. MacCormick, Commissioner of Correction.  The Commissioner decided upon an immediate course of action.

In the company of a squad of burly patrolmen, he paid a sudden visit to the Island.  He wasn't expected.

The prison warden, Joseph A. McCann, was away from his desk when MacCormick arrived.  In his absence, the Commissioner picked up the telephone and ordered that every prisoner drop what he was doing and at once proceed to his cell.

Then MacCormick snooped around and began to ask a few pertinent questions.

From the deputy warden, he learned that Warden McCann was probably down in the kitchen.  "Looking for lemons," the deputy said.

The commissioner looked at him.  "Lemons-?  What for?"

The deputy explained.  "For Joey," he said.  "Joey wanted some lemonade."

Commissioner MacCormick nearly fell off his chair.  "Who the blazes is Joey?" he demanded.

It developed that Joey was Joseph Rao, an ex-Dutch Schultz lieutenant who had been sentenced to serve a term in the Welfare Island Pen.

After a thorough search of the grounds, MacCormick found Rao in his quarters, located in the prison hospital.  McCann was with him.  The commissioner nodded to his men who grabbed the warden's arms.

"If Mr. Rao can spare you, Warden..." he began.

Joey Rao, dressed in a crimson silk dressing gown, was as brazen as brass.  He lit a cigar and offered one to the commissioner.  "Havana," he said.  "The best.  I get them imported special."

MacCormick looked around the suite which had been placed at Rao's disposal.  There were pictures on the walls, flowers in a vase, a radio.  Even a telephone!

"Just what in the world goes on here?" the commissioner demanded.

Piece by piece, he got the whole astounding story.  It seemed that Rao was the uncrowned king of Welfare Island.  He had converted the prison into a combination country-club and business organization!  He had a wardrobe closet stocked with everything that well-dressed gangsters wear.  There was silk underwear, fancy shirts, shoe trees trimmed with silver studs.  He also owned a pet goat and had a private fenced-in garden.

Rao's elaborate system of graft and corruption was built on a concession to sell dope to the inmates of the Welfare Island Penitentiary!

He had a flock of carrier pigeons which transported messages that were too hot to handle on the telephone.  As the head of a prison group called the "Italian Mob," he controlled a gang of armed henchmen who ran at least a dozen rackets right inside the prison walls!  Food was sold to paying customers among the prisoners.  Four hundred were well-fed while the rest of them were half starved.  He awarded easy jobs and granted special privileges to those who paid the price.

He even had women brought into the jail for the convenience of the inmates... and for a cut in the take.

Commissioner MacCormick discovered also, that there was a rival gang within the prison walls.  The "Irish Mob", under the generalship of Ed Cleary, ran the liquor concession.

Cleary was also a "guest" in a special suite in the prison hospital.  Altogether, there were ninety-three patients in the hospital.  Only 18 were actually ill!

When the police broke into Cleary's dormitory, they found a German shepherd pup chained to the bed.  The dog answered to the name "Screw-hater".

Commissioner MacCormick walked through the tiers of cells in the prison proper and had his men search each compartment.  The prisoners hammered on the bars of their cell-doors out of protest to the searchers' efforts.  The commissioner was astounded by what was uncovered.

Weapons of all sorts had been smuggled into the cells.  There were narcotics, hypodermic-needles, intoxicants, indecent photographs, pornographic literature.

Later, one of the work-houses was found to be the hideout of a small army of drug addicts, living together under such conditions of sordidness and degradation as to turn the stomachs of the most calloused officers.

On the basis of Commissioner MacCormick's findings, a series of sweeping changes was instituted which has since nearly completely reformed many of the existing evils.  But even in the light of public investigation, the whole reeking unpardonable mess festered and spumed for months.

Of course Warden McCann and his deputy were promptly removed and an entire new administration put in charge.  Also a movement got under way to relieve the overcrowded conditions on the Island by transferring many of the prisoners to new penal institutions.

The home for the Aged and Indigent is on the Island.  The old folks come to warm their  bones in a steam-heated room, to sit for a while in the sun, and then to die.

Over on the Island, they still remember old Ike Kober, who spent his life in the service of his fellow men, and who served them even in death.

They tell the way old Ike used to say things like:  "It don't pay to be poor.  There ain't no money in it."

He must have known, for he was poor.  But he was rich in spirit.

He gave two sons to the war when Uncle Sam asked for volunteers to "Remember the Maine."  Those boys were killed.

There's a window's pension for Gold Star Mothers, but Ike's old wife was dead.  He was alone in the world, and nobody cared.

Before Ike came to the Island, he had a hobby.  He used to talk with young men.  They came to him with their troubles and he would listen sagely and speak when they were through.  And there was something about the way he spoke that did them good.

Ike had a little land.  It brought him an income.  Not much.  Maybe two-hundred dollars a year.  When he came to the Island, he used to spend that money to buy tobacco for the "boys".  Just things like that to make them happy.

He made friends with an old fellow who had a son.  At least he said he had a son.  He used to sit around with Ike and a couple of doubting Thomases who never believed a word he said.

"My boy is good," the old man said.  "He's agoin' to make some money, sometime, and then he'll send for me.  You wait and see."

There's nothing else to do but wait, in the old folks home.  But that "good boy" never made any money, for all hi father said "Someday he might."

The old boys began to kid him about it after awhile.  And when they did, the father's face was pretty sad to see.

"Go on," they said.  "Why don't he write?  I bet you never had a son."

That's when Ike played his hand.  He took five dollars out of his land money, and then he walked over to one of the nurses for a little chat.

"I want you should write me a letter," he said.  "And I want it should go something like this.  'Dear Father, I think of you often.  Times are hard and it's not easy to save that money like I said.  But I will... someday.  Meanwhile I want you should take this five dollars that I can spare and buy yourself a cigar.  I want you should know I think of you often..."

The nurse's lip trembled.  "You - want me to send this to you?" she asked.

Ike avoided her eyes.  "To my friend," he said.  "It's from his son."  And he walked away, never seeing the tears that came to glisten in the nurse's eyes.

The letter came, and the old man had his day.  But when night fell, he wept.  And he confided brokenly, hesitantly to Ike that he never had a son.  "But it was so nice to talk and make believe I had."

Ike died one day, and when he did, his friends wondered what had happened to his money.  When they found out, there was a new superintendent installed at the Welfare Island Home for the Aged.  The nurses and the doctors and the men all petitioned the Mayor when they determined that for some years the supervisor had managed to have himself appointed beneficiary in "wills" of his deceased charges.

Ike Kober's passing marked the end of a vicious regime, and now the money from his estate still buys tobacco for the "boys".

Maintained by the Rockefeller foundation, the Hospital for Cancer Research is on the Island too.  Its creation is part of the new era which has come as a result of public investigation.  Now the Island is the scene of the accomplishment of much valuable work toward the alleviation of human suffering.

The City Hospital is there; also the Metropolitan Hospital and Training School, the Neurological Hospital, the Reception Hospital, and Welfare Hospital.  The Island has changed.

It's different from the way it used to be when Junky Willis saw it back in 1927.

They picked him up in a railroad yard that time, and they gave him thirty days for sleeping off a load of canned heat right smack in the middle of the tracks.

Last Fall Junky was hanging around the yards again.  He was watching the sunlight dancing along the rails and glinting warmly in the crisp November air.  In the distance, a freight piped a melancholy toot.

To Junky Willis, crouched in the shadows of a railroad siding, the whole thing was a poem.

That's because Junky Willis is a poet.  On the police blotter, they have it down in black and white that he's a hop- head.  They have a card in their files with his name and finger-prints and a lot of words about his being "a vagrant and an incorrigible addict", convicted and committed time and time again.  But he's a poet none the less.

To Junky, that train-whistle was the sweetest music in the world.  It was the song of the Open Road.  And the sunlight glinting down along the tracks was the bouncing ball that showed you how it went.

"Go South," it sang.  "The Winter's here again."

Junky sniffed and rubbed his nose twice with the flat of his thumb.  He did it out of "habit" and because he was moved.  The train-whistle tooted again and Junky, moved even further, began to quote himself:

"It's time to be grabbin your coat. bo,

When you hear the low musical note, bo

It's time to get ready to go-"

South!  Junky smiled and sniffed again.  He turned impatiently to the train chugging slowly down the rail.  "Come on," he yelled.  "Come on, you ashcat... Shoo that glory!"

Aboard the train, the fireman kept shoveling coal, unaware that Junky was entreating him to make more speed.  The fireman had a job to do.  The locomotive needed plenty of steam to keep rolling at thirty-five miles an hour.

There's a lot of pulling-power in a freight with steady steam.  Enough to pull a glory chain of empties, two blocks long; enough to pull a stumble-bum's arm right out of its socket and keep on going.

Junky wasn't strong.  The "stuff" cut into his pep.  He was running a losing race from the time he darted out of the siding shadows till he grabbed hold of a box-car ladder rung with his right hand.

The fireman kept shoveling coal, and the freight kept chugging along at thirty-five miles an hour.  Junky just didn't have the strength to do anything more than hang on.  He sniffed and tried to keep his feet from banging up against the ties.

There was a switch-block up ahead.  Junky didn't see it.  But it was there.

It caught his shoe, and the fireman kept shoveling coal, and the train kept on going, and Junky heard the wrench the minute he felt the pain in his arm.

That was Junky's ticket to the Island.

He's there today.  He's a great favorite with the gang.  The internes slip him a pack of cigarettes now and then, and Junky likes it there.  He sits and smokes and sniffs and watches the steamers plowing up the River to the Sound.

But sometimes, the mournful wail of a train-whistle drifts over from the shore, and Junky listens.  And he sees in his mind's eye a ball of sunlight dancing down the rail, and he sniffs and tries to rub his nose twice with the flat of the thumb that isn't there.

The Island is different now, but it hasn't changed.

The scavenger shark is only tamed, it has not disappeared.  For New York is the same, and Life and Death still bend like alchemists over the melting pot which seethes and brims and boils over in a stream of heartbreak and pain and sorrow that washes its flotsam ashore that little strip of hell in the middle of the East River.

Headquarters Detective
October, 1940