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Irish leader was Edward Cleary, a "graduate" of Sing Sing. He was found drunk in bed. In his dormitory and in the cosy little study he had fitted up for himself and his staff were three 10-gal. milk cans of home brew, a "deck" of heroin, a refrigerator bulging with contraband provisions which he sold or bartered for services.
Italian leader was a big swarthy gunman named Joie Rao, kept sleek and well-pressed by his underlings. Rao, onetime boxer, was shaving when Deputy Commissioner Marcus ordered him to get along with the rest of his henchmen to solitary cells. Prisoner Rao insolently remarked that he would when he finished his toilet. Deputy Marcus, a boxer in his time at West Point, made short shrift of that kind of talk.
Both Rao and Cleary, it soon developed, were animal lovers. Cleary had a police pup chained to his bed. The dog wore a harness on which was graven the name "Screw Hater" ("screw" = guard). The Irishman also had a cote of 100 pigeons in his dormitory. Rao maintained a flock of 200 more on top of the prison storage house. Also his criminal lackeys had built him a little fenced garden, with flowers, benches and a milch goat. Both Cleary and Rao had passes permitting them to roam the island at will.
But Commissioner MacCormick had not sounded the most deplorable depths of Welfare Island until he went to the mess hall at noon. In fluttered a huge chorus of perverts, their lips and cheeks blushing with rouge, their eyes darkened with mascara, their hair flowing long. In their cells were found heaps of feminine underclothes, nightgowns, perfume, lipsticks, suntan powder. They were confined to the laundry during work hours, but at other times were not segregated. Unless close watch was kept on these tainted characters, other prisoners would fight as desperately for their favor as they would for a woman's.
Commissioner MacCormick could not change Welfare Island overnight from a crowded, filthy firetrap to a model institution, but he could and did put Cleary, Rao & Co. in solitary confinement to await possible dope-peddling trials. The Commissioner sent narcotic addicts and diseased prisoners to the hospital, while young prisoners were segregated. He took from the perverts their frippery, sent them squealing to the barber to have their locks trimmed, saw that they remained alone in their own eating and living quarters. He charged the deputy warden with breaking almost every rule in the city's penological code, stripped Warden Joseph A. McCann of authority. Warden McCann's reaction was a feeble protest that, while Cleary was a "yellow rat," "Rao is the most valuable prisoner we have. Why, he's better than a deputy warden. When trouble developed, I could always go to Rao and get things quieted down."
Obviously Prisoner Rao had not set up his dominion over administrators and inmates of Welfare Island by sheer weight of personality. His outside backer, it appeared, was a certain Tammany district leader, identified by the Evening Post as a poker-faced man named James J. Hines, powerful throughout Harlem and Times Square as well as in his own Morningside Heights district. Hines was responsible for John Francis Curry's advance to Tammany leadership.