April 17, 2004 |
| Film Fest Opens Today |
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The Roosevelt Island Film Festival opens this afternoon at 2:00 at Manhattan Park Theater Club for a three-session look at Roosevelt Island in the movies, sponsored as a fundraiser by the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. Selections range from an early Edison Company panorama of the east side of the Island through Spider-Man, scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. One feature, scheduled for tonight’s program, is Blackwell’s Island, originally planned as a Warner Brothers B movie, but expanded with additional footage because John Garfield was on the cusp of stardom. The real story behind the movie story made news in 1934, as described below. Facts
Behind Hollywood Fiction
It was Welfare Island then. The raid took the City’s notorious penitentiary back from mob bosses who had ruled the roost, exploiting their fellow prisoners with the tacit permission or active cooperation of its warden and deputy warden.
But the real story was dramatic enough. Arthur Flegenheimer had died just two years before the raid. Under the name Dutch Schultz (which he had adopted from a deceased gangster of the 1800s), Schultz had ruled Prohibition-era beer distribution in New York City, viciously doing away with any threat of competition. By 1934, one of Schultz’s lieutenants, Joseph Rao, was an inmate here; rumor had it that he had arranged to be incarcerated on the Island in order to run the prison drug racket. He was identified in news reports on the raid as the head of “the Italian mob” in the institution. Another inmate, Edward Cleary, had “the Irish mob.” Between them, they essentially ran the Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary, at least at the inmate level. Cleary and Rao and some 66 members of their gangs had passes allowing them the run of the Island. They were billeted in the prison hospital in relative luxury, their quarters known among inmates as “politician’s row” because a former Queens Borough President, Maurice Connolly, had served time there. By 1940, the story of the Blackwell’s Island prison corruption was the currency of pulp detective magazines. Cleary and Rao each had a pigeon cote, and the claim was that they were using the birds – as many as 100 in one flock – as drug couriers. Rao had a pet German shepherd, named “Screw Hater,” rumored to be a jealous guard of his master’s possessions and living space. But the stench of corruption on Blackwell’s Island had to be addressed. MacCormick found a way to make a splash. He invited reporters from the City’s many newspapers of the day to his office, inviting them to join him on a tour of the new Riker’s Island facility. Meanwhile, he phoned Welfare Island, telling Deputy Warden Daniel Sheehan and told him to lock all 1,600 prisoners in their cells, saying the count had shown one man missing. As The New York Times reported it, “Just before leaving the office the commissioner called the raiding party together and issued brief instructions. ‘No rough stuff unless it’s necessary,’ he warned, ‘but if it is necessary make it good and rough. If you have to smack a man, smack him so hard the other prisoners can hear the blow. Don’t touch off any powder magazine, though. God help the man who does that.’” MacCormick issued orders denying Island access, via the warehouse elevator from the Queensboro Bridge, to anyone whose destination was the prison. At the prison, MacCormick put the deputy warden under arrest, later explaining, “I can’t trust him for a minute.” With David Marcus, his first deputy, and squads of guards, MacCormick then led a cell-by-cell search, uncovering contraband weapons ranging from a surgeon’s scalpel through razor blades and sharpened butter knives, plus “radio sets,” rugs, canes, glass-topped tables, and electric stoves. Bread, canned food, and an eight-pound piece of corned beef were found, too; MacCormick later suggested they were stolen by inmates, then traded to gang members for drugs. (A year later, mature marijuana plants were found growing on the Island; they had probably been cultivated by prisoners assigned outside duty.) Marcus led a party into the dormitory hospital, Cleary’s quarters in the prison’s workhouse building, then did the same in Rao’s digs in the prison hospital. The Times listed “boxes of expensive cigars, silk shirts and underwear and costly dressing gowns” among the items found there. MacCormick ordered narcotics addicts out of the prison’s west wing, transferring them to the Charity Hospital on the Island, then discovered “a considerable quantity of paper soaked in what was believed to be a heroin solution.” Of the dozens of gang members, The Times wrote, “It was the first time that most of them had seen the inside of a cell during their stay on the Island.” The Times reported, “Mr. Marcus and his squad went to a cell block in the south part of the prison where a search brought to light an altogether different line of contraband. Rouge, powder, mascara, perfume, even a woman’s wig, were confiscated. Several of the inmates of this cell block affected long hair. Silk undergarments were found in the cells.” All in all, MacCormick’s raiders found all they needed to justify a statement by a former Commissioner of Corrections, by then a National Broadcasting Company executive, who said, “For a matter of fifteen months there has been little discipline in the prisons.” Perhaps the only disappointment was Rao’s guard dog, Screw Hater. The animal turned out to be a frightened German shepherd puppy. More on this aspect of Roosevelt Island history, including pulp-magazine treatment, is available online at nyc10044.com/wire/2120/history/ettman.html, nyc10044.com/wire/2120/history/hist2120.html, and nyc10044.com/timeln/timeline.html. |
Five years later, John Garfield starred in a fictionalized version of the
story, playing a crusading reporter who is fired by one newspaper for probing
too deeply, then hired by another. The movie shows Hollywood’s talent
for turning a scattered and somewhat undramatic set of facts into B-movie
drama.