Island of the Damned by Alix Kirsta Read Free Book Online Page A

so the prisoner will understand that he is still a prisoner,” said Fishman, who had written an article revealing the full extent of the illegal activities on Welfare Island, published two weeks after the raid in the February 1934 issue of Vanity Fair . Former U.S Attorney George Medalie, for whom David Marcus had previously worked as an assistant, claimed publicly that outside corruption lay at the root of the current crisis: “A major contributing cause to what occurred on Welfare Island was politics. I know from an investigation I made last October, with the connivance of the warden and his assistants, of eminent politicians who used to go to visit prisoners without ever having been recorded. Why did they go there and what was their influence with the warden?”
    Further damning evidence emerged from an unexpected inside source. A Texas newspaper, The San Antonio Light , ran a series of sensational articles by a former New York journalist, Joseph Clark, who had been sent to the workhouse on Welfare Island five years earlier for failing to pay support to his wife and children because he had fallen on hard times.
    “In 1929 I served four months in the workhouse of the prison. Let me tell you, it wasn’t bad. I lived like a king. I saw and did things on Welfare Island that sound like an opium smoker’s wildest dreams,” wrote Clark in his first report. “I went to steak parties in fancily decorated cells where big shot gangsters lived with all the comforts of a high class hotel. I was the pal of Jimmy the Wop, the convict boss of the workhouse who threw a party every night - and cursed some keepers as if they were slaves.”
    A shocking aspect of Clark’s reports is the amount of inhumanity he witnessed among prison staff. “I saw ten prisoners kick another convict into insensibility while a guard stood idly by. I saw six men try to kill themselves by jumping off tiers or slashing their wrists with jagged knives made out of tin scrap. I have seen drunken men reel about a cell block, watched drug addicts hop about the premises, crazy with the white stuff as all prisoners call cocaine. Guards saw all of this. They never did a thing.”
    Clark also admitted, sexual relations between male and female prisoners, including his own relationship with “the most beautiful brunette I have ever seen”, were commonplace while staff turned a blind eye. Nor was there any need to smuggle in booze or drugs Clark explained, because “civilian employees trafficked in booze. Drugs were sold as openly as coffee or tea in a cafeteria. I know that if I was a junkie I could have bought dope more easily on Welfare Island than I could in New York.” Lies and theft seem to have been the order of the day. While working as a bricklayer to build a garage on another part of the island, when the labourers ran out of bricks and cement, the guards ordered Clark to steal a new supply from another building site: the stolen bricks and cement were then paid for by another department. Because many construction workers were alcoholics, bootleggers were attached to the teams to peddle alcohol to addicts throughout the working day. Meanwhile, big shot prisoners lived an easy life said Clark: “Maxie Klein, a big tough ex-pug from the East Side, seemed to be the white haired boy of this end of the prison. Maxie spent all his time lying in the grass in the sun. He was called “the butcher” because he had access to the kitchen and made a good living peddling steaks to other prisoners.”
    In subsequent articles, Clark described serving a second term in 1930 at the institution he described as “New York’s Devil’s Island”. “But this time I was a ‘trustie’..…an OK guy, a big shot, a pampered prisoner who ate and drank the best. I had the best job on the island for six months. I was chief clerk of the recently opened men’s ward in the correction hospital. I lived as we prisoners believed the ‘rich guys’ lived in the apartments across the