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 is the way of life.

Two captains had quit their jobs on the Lee Hong because of O'Brien during his enforced cruise on the ferry. Last March, after the unwelcome passenger threatened to "break every bone in your lime-juicing body," a third tossed him into the ship's brig, where O'Brien continued to do a profitable smuggling trade through a porthole. But none of O'Brien's peccadilloes could discourage the kindly agents of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees or the National Catholic Welfare Council from busily working for his release. "He's had his punishment," said an officer of the N.C.W.C. as O'Brien at last got a visa from broad-minded Brazil. "Now he's getting another chance."

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