The Safest Place In Town

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, he parked his sleek Cadillac in a nearby lot, walked briskly to the hospital with a little black spitz dog trotting beside him on a leash, and sat down in the waiting room. Nobody noticed him, or his customers. He left every evening at 6.

But Bellevue officials began to be puzzled by the fact that narcotics were filtering through the hospital. When they were certain that the hospital's medical supplies were not being tapped, they called in the cops. After weeks of false starts, the police began watching Rubino.

The pattern of his operation began to unfold. A cop dressed as a workman bumped into Rubino one day in a corridor near a dynamo room. "What are you doing here?" the peddler demanded. The 'cop mumbled: "I'm looking for the mess hall." Rubino growled: "Well, this isn't it, so get the hell out of here." The cop left but returned to spy later. Rubino met from three to seven customers a day, walked them around the hospital grounds to the powerhouse and left the buyer holding the dog's leash, while he scuttled inside, mounted the dynamo "like a monkey" and reached into a hole in the ceiling above it.

When he returned, he handed over a package of "horse," as heroin is known to the trade, retrieved his dog and walked calmly back to the waiting room. Last week, however, he kept his'last rendezvous; the cops jumped him, just after he had handed half an ounce of pure heroin to one Arthur Ricardi. Peddler Rubino fell into a writhing fit on the station-house floor, while Customer Ricardi (see cut) watched him with the telltale yawn of the addict who needs a shot. After an injection of heroin, Rubino talked.

By their first hurried calculations, the cops guessed that Rubino had been grossing $500,000 a year--plus $81.80 a month in relief money, which he had drawn from the city during all his months of using its hospital.

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