It takes 5,500 doctors, nurses, orderlies and laborers to operate Manhattan's vast (four square blocks), city-run Bellevue Hospital; 3,140 patients occupy beds in its endless wards and rooms, and 300 more get emergency treatment every day for physical and emotional injuries incurred in the great city's endless conflicts and accidents. Bellevue's dingy, echoing waiting room, a place of long, hard benches and endless anxious faces, is always crowded.
Looking it over one day early this year, a hard-eyed little dope peddler named
Mariano Rubino decided that Bellevue would be the safest place in town for his headquarters. Every morning at 10:30,...
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