One of the first things retired jails guard Gloria Murli tells Rikers visitors is to watch where they walk. “Just be careful,” she says, “They leave you little presents.”
These presents are from the feral cats that live in alleys between trailers, under crawlspaces and inside emptied jail complexes across the island’s 413 acres.
As Murli drove by on a mid-December morning, two cats watched from outside a handbuilt shed, their four front paws sharing a cinder block.
Her silver SUV was approaching a trailer when a black-spotted white cat, startled, scurried up a set of stairs to retreat into hiding. Nearby, a small grey-and-white furry lay atop a cushion pad on a patio, unbothered and dozing off under the warmth of the winter sun.
“That’s one of our babies, and this shed is their house,” Murli said as she pulled into a parking spot next to a small hill looking out on a barbed-wire fence and barred-windows buildings backdropped by the Manhattan skyline.
Most, if not all, of the 300 to 350 cats Murli estimated to be on the island rely on her and a handful of volunteers at the Rikers Island Cat Rescue for food, water and medical care.
“Here’s one of our clients, looking for a little food,” Murli said as she pointed to a tuxedo cat heading toward a feeding station outside the George Motchan Detention Center, a jail-turned-staff training annex that’s home to a colony of about 50 to 70 cats. The feeding station is one of 27 the rescue group has set up across the island, Murli said: “There are so many cats spread out — the island is huge.”
A decade after retiring as a special operations captain on Rikers after 27 years on the job, Murti returns to the island at least twice every weekend to care for cat colonies that have been there since before her time.
“When I was working on the island, it was a lot easier… But if I don’t do it, who’s gonna do it?” she said. “I have nightmares that these cats are going to be out here starving, nobody’s gonna give a shit, and they’re just gonna die.”
Along with the half a dozen calls a week Murli receives from Rikers staffers alerting her to sickly ferals, she also tries to find suitable homes for adoption-ready cats.
“I make them come here to meet them,” Murli said of prospective adopters. “They don’t expect there to be so many cats, and they’re like, ‘Why?’ Why? Because we can’t get to every cat to fix them.”
The Department of Correction couldn’t say exactly how the island got its feline squatters. But Murli said a number of them were dumped there by visitors, contractors and even staff and officers. Those abandoned cats reproduced, causing the population to balloon to around 1,000 at its peak in the early 2000s, many of them sick and starved.
A trap-neuter-return program that started at around the same time helped shrink the population down to its current size. Murli recalled how inmates, confused by what they were seeing, raised alarm bells.
“They were at their windows yelling at me, asking us, ‘Where are you taking all the cats?’ They thought we were gonna just take them and euthanize them,” Murli said. “It used to make me laugh because some of them cared, and others just had nothing else to do.”
Other Rikers Island critters were not so lucky. The island was once home to a family of seven coyotes, Murli noted — two parents and five pups. But just one, named Frankie, managed to survive on the island after the rest of his family was put down by the Port Authority.
“We have a cat that lives right over there, and Frankie goes right by the cat,” Murli said. Because people feed the coyote, she continued, “he doesn’t bother the cat.”
Now, as the city is moving slowly towards closing Rikers, Murli is pushing for the department to build a sanctuary where the remaining cats can be gathered, spayed and neutered. The cats in that colony would then either get adopted or live out their last years on the island. Detainees and inmates, for their part, would get to participate in a program to train in veterinary technician skills and care for them.
The idea, she said, is to make it easier to identify new cats on Rikers and to prevent more homeless kittens from being born.
“It’s still in a baby, infant stage,” Murli said, noting that DOC is warming up to the idea, having recently allotted the rescue mission a plot to maintain and to plan for the sanctuary.
“It’s the lowest thing on the totem pole,” Murli said of the sanctuary. “But it’s a problem,” she continued, referring to the feral cats.
“And if you don’t take care of this problem, it is just gonna get worse and it’s gonna multiply and multiply.”
The Department of Correction did not comment on the sanctuary, but spokesperson Shayla Mulzac-Warner said it is “working with local non-profit organizations to provide facilities that get our local cat residents the medical care they need.”
‘They’ve Got to Eat’
Murli joined the department in 1979 as one of its first female guards, after a hiring freeze at the NYPD put a pause on her ambition to become a police officer.
She was the first woman to join the department’s emergency service unit, she said, and dealt mostly with male inmates throughout her tenure, responding to riots and facilitating transports of high-profile criminals.
“It was not an easy job for a woman or for anybody, let’s put it that way,” Murli said. “I worked in the interior of the jail. Once you’ve worked in this kind of environment for so many years, you become institutionalized.”
She began caring for Rikers’ cats back in the mid-90s, she said, after a retiring colleague asked her to promise to do so. In those early days, Murli said, she often paid for medical care and food out of pocket — a cost that quickly mushroomed.
“I hate to say it, but I’m probably more sympathetic to animals than I am to some of the people here,” Murli said. “I have sympathy for them, but it’s not like these poor things — they can’t do anything for themselves. But with any problem that you have, you have to fix it. You can’t just say, ‘someone else will fix it.’ It doesn’t work like that.”
She recalled a time early on when she found a white kitten caught in a barbed wire. Murli took the rescue to a local vet in Astoria, and that visit motivated her to carry on.
“The vet said to me, ‘I wanna tell you, this is gonna be a drop in the bucket for you. I’m not gonna walk away from this. I’m gonna keep doing it,’ and that’s exactly what happened,” she said. “So I kept doing it out of empathy, because I thought, ‘Oh my God, they’ve gotta eat.’”
These days, the costs are mostly covered by donations, and Murli runs a trailer on the east side of the island, where a feral colony of about 30 cats live outside and about 20 adoptable rescues live indoors in eight rooms.
As Murli approached the trailer, two feral cats looked up furtively from a wooden plank where they perched, while others began to lurk around the door as if knowing that feeding time was imminent.
The trailer can fit up to 25 cats and is usually at full capacity, Murli said. But lately, she added, the group hasn’t been able to fill the space up as much as they would like to.
“We’re backlogged on medical. And we can’t bring them in unless we can treat them, or unless they’re really sick,” she said, noting that she relies on the Humane Society of New York to spay, neuter and provide other medical services. “The biggest problem is veterinary care… it’s expensive.”
Once inside, Murli moved from one room to another to greet the cats.
“I got escapees in here. This guy there, oh my God, he just waits for the door,” Murli said, smirking. “Soprano, come out and say hello!”
Then there was Black Lips, a meowing, toothless black cat (“Ok, honey, you’re hungry?”); Blue, a grey cat with hyperthyroidism (“Oh, Blue, don’t run away!”); Cruella, a grey tabby with a tilted head from an old inner-ear infection (“You’re showing off today, huh? You’re being a good girl and not showing your evil side?”); and Patrick, a tuxedo cat with an amputated tail and in need of dental care (“Patrick, I’m gonna go get you some food in a few minutes.”).
A black cat named Sphinx moseyed around the corner to pay Murli a visit.
“You’re gonna love this guy. He’d make a great pet. He likes other cats,” Murli said before turning to address her four-legged friend. “Sphinx, I don’t know if Patrick wants you in here. And don’t let Cruella see you — you can’t be in here.”
The walls in the trailer are adorned with cat-themed decorations: A canvas print of a tabby cat dressed as Rosie the Riveter, a plaque under a clock that reads “YES, I REALLY DO NEED ALL THESE CATS,” and a piece of paper pinned to a bulletin featuring an illustration of a seal-point cat dressed as Uncle Sam. It reads: “I WANT YOU. Volunteers Needed for on-island Cat Care.”
“That’s all Barry,” Murli said, referring to Barry Hyman, a Rikers optometrist responsible for the decorations. Hyman also cares for the cats on weekdays, she added, and helped handbuild cat shelters and feeding stations from scrap and leftover materials alongside some of Rikers’ maintenance staff.
“These guys, they may not like the cats but they know that we have a purpose. And what are you gonna do? Have them starving?” she said, referring to the maintenance staff. “Volunteering is difficult for us. We’d like to bring people to the island, but the problem is security clearance.”
The only consistent volunteer these days is Vanessa Gomez, a 42-year-old airport supervisor, who’s been helping Murli every weekend over the past four years.
“I’ve never missed a day with the exception of when I had a flu,” Gomez said. “But on my actual job where I actually get paid, I have no problem calling out.”
The cat rescue operation goes through about 12,000 pounds of cat food a year, and packages of dry and wet chow lined the walls — much of it donated by the city’s Office of Emergency Management at the end of the year.
As meows grew more demanding, Murli put on plastic gloves to prepare their daily feeding, cracking open a can of wet food for each cat and mixing in water and supplements to help boost their immune health and ward off fleas.
She was careful, too, to separate out feedings for cats who require daily medication, including Blue, who gets three pills a day for his hyperthyroidism.
“We have to sneak it in,” she said. “We did give him the whole pill, but then all of a sudden we moved his blanket, and we found all the pills under there. He had picked them out — little bastard.”
‘There’s No Other Way’
At a little past noon, with the cats near and in the headquarters well-fed, Murli headed toward the proposed site of the cat sanctuary near the now-shuttered Anna M. Kross Center, which had housed sentenced men until 2023 and spans 40 acres — the largest facility on Rikers.
“How are the cats doing?” a guard asked.
“They’re doing good,” Murli responded, before taking a left turn to arrive at an empty plot surrounded by barbed-wired fences, which once held a recreational space for inmates.
Standing before the dirt-covered lot, Murli envisioned what a sanctuary on Rikers could look like: Rugged feral cats accustomed to outside living could be kept in outdoor housing, while sick and adoptable ones could be kept inside.
“I see these cats being happy and living out their lives, where they can get food, shelter and medical care — and hopefully some attention, and that’s where these programs come into play,” she added. “What they need is attention.”
Pet cats and dogs visited Rikers Island once a month to assist with counseling for teenage boys awaiting trial in the 1990s, according to a Daily News story at the time. Now, Murli hopes to install a similar program with the sanctuary, with inmates caring for the space and its inhabitants.
“I have found through the years when I was working inside the jails that the inmates — some of them react very differently with animals,” she said. “There’s always a spark in somebody’s heart. I always think there is. I’ve dealt with the biggest, baddest guys, and I always think that there’s something you can find there.”
Many of the inmates Murli worked with over the years were simply “products of their environment,” she said, including some who “were turned out on the street when they were seven, eight years old to rob for their junkie mothers, and that’s how they ended up here.”
“These are people that came in here that I wasn’t used to their lifestyle, so you have to adjust yourself and understand a person’s lifestyle. Does it always work? It doesn’t always work. But it’s a matter of respect,” Murli continued. “It’s a mutual respect and that’s the way it goes. And that’s the way it has to go, you know, because there’s no other way.”
Murli said she hasn’t quite figured out the details of the program yet, or how it would relate to the city’s plan to replace the island’s jails with new ones in the boroughs.
She hoped that inmates in the program would be able to receive training in veterinary technology skills they can use to take care of the cats and find jobs once they return to life outside, maybe even with a furry friend.
“They’re not gonna be a millionaire, but maybe they can get a job and like it — and to have something to live for,” Murli said. “People might think I’m crazy to think that, but I don’t think I’m crazy.”
“If you’re alone and you don’t have anybody and now you’ve got Sphinx, you think, ‘Hey, Sphinx is waiting for me at home, I’m not by myself,” she continued. “It’s two forgotten souls finding each other.”
