HONG KONG: All Ashore

The "endless ferryboat ride" was over. Last week, after 296 round trips, Michael Patrick O'Brien, the "stateless Irishman" who had been forced to ride the Hong Kong-Macao ferry continuously since Sept. 18, 1952 (TIME, Oct. 13 et seq.), was whisked ashore and shipped off to Brazil. As O'Brien departed amid general sighs of relief, the Hong Kong police revealed that he was no Irishman at all, but a Hungarian named Istvan Ragan, whose youth had been passed largely in U.S. jails and reform schools, whose manhood was spent mostly in Shanghai's Blood Alley, where procuring, white slavery and dope peddling...

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