Escape from Alcatraz (12 page)

For days a parade of robbers, kidnapers, murderers took this route to recite chilling tales of Alcatraz. The spectators, and the jurors, sat enthralled.

First came William Dunnock, thirty-four, doing fifteen years for a Baltimore bank holdup. He seemed nervous in his civilian garb, looked tired, had an ashen pallor, coughed frequently. At the outset he waited while objections were made, and sustained, to counsel’s questions, such as: Was he struck across the nose in the hospital with a blackjack, so hard that the nose was broken, and
then
did Associate Warden Miller punch him in the nose? After he had kept silent through a series of questions, Dunnock began snapping out answers before the prosecutor could utter an objection.

“Did Miller tear off your clothes, strike you, and shove you into a dungeon cell without bedding?”

“Yes.”

“Do you expect to be physically punished for testifying here?”

“Yes.”

“Were you in a pitch-black cell for long periods—nineteen days or more—without a bath, without soap, without tooth powder?”

“Yes.”

The court repeatedly admonished the witness to wait for prosecution objections and instructed the jury to disregard these rapid responses. Nonetheless, MacInnis managed to get before the jury by this back-door route the fact that his colleague, Abrams, on his first trip to Alcatraz to consult prospective witnesses had been refused permission to see Dunnock in his isolation cell, where the convict said he was nursing wounds inflicted by a guard with a gasbilly. Abrams had to obtain a court order to interview Dunnock and saw him on the second visit, but the prisoner said he had been hastily removed to an open-front cell “that had a bed.”

To a prosecution protest that such testimony was irrelevant, Abrams replied: “We are putting Alcatraz on trial, but we can’t help that. We must show it in its true light.”

Ray Stevenson, forty-one, Michigan bank robber doing twenty-five years, tall with a good bearing, spoke calmly but with an apparent effort. He corroborated Dunnock’s testimony.

Had he heard Dunnock groaning as he lay beaten on the floor, pleading for mercy, yelling “Stop twisting my leg, for God’s sake!”

Yes.

Long intervals elapsed between pairs of witnesses. Only when the convicts who had testified were safely back in their Rock cells were the next two escorted over. During these breaks Associate Warden Miller was recalled to the stand for rebuttal. He denied ever laying a hand on Dunnock or ever beating an inmate before lodging him in solitary. He admitted that prisoners were not always provided with a blanket in their damp, dark dungeon cells during the day. He admitted too that men were stripped naked before placed in these cells, but he said their clothes were tossed in to them later.

Next came Sam Berlin of Baltimore, doing three to fifteen years for robbing a brewery in the District of Columbia, a first offense. He was forty—a tall, thin, balding man with an eager face and wispy voice. The word about prosecution objections apparently had sped along the Rock grapevine: Berlin, and others to follow, spat out answers.

Was he aware that a convict, Whitey Lewis, had his skull cracked by guards, was later sent to an insane asylum? Yes. Did he recall that a convict named Wutke was driven to suicide by unbearable treatment? The jury saw him nod as an objection was sustained.

Ed Wutke was thirty-six, doing a stretch for murder on the high seas, when he became The Rock’s first suicide. A guard stood over a convict in those days while he shaved, to see that the razor blade was used for the purpose intended. Wutke discovered another means. He extracted the tiny blade from a pencil sharpener and after lights-out one night he climbed into bed and slit his throat. The deed was not discovered until the next morning when he failed to appear at his cell front for the standup count and the guard went in to rouse him.

Abruptly, the prosecutor began allowing the convict witnesses more latitude by raising fewer objections. Thus, when asked if Walter Bearden, an inmate with tuberculosis, had been confined to a solitary cell with him for twelve days, Sam Berlin could reply with more than a fast affirmative or a nod: “Yes, he fainted and slumped to the floor of his cell, but wasn’t given any medical treatment. He was spitting up blood and begged to be sent up to the hospital. He died a month later.” He said Bearden was pushed into the cell stripped naked. His clothes, except for shoes, were later tossed in.

Berlin said it was general knowledge among convicts that Joe Bowers, slain climbing the fence at the incinerator, was daffy. He testified an inmate named Vito Giacaloni, sick in his cell, was so viciously beaten by guards that he died en route to the hospital asylum in Missouri.

Berlin reported a conversation with Young regarding Giacaloni: “I told him that they just beat him (Giacaloni) over the skull and locked him up in isolation. He could not read or write or talk the American language, he is ignorant of what is going on all around him.”

He said that an inmate, Jack Allen, was in agony one night and rattled a cup on his cell bars to attract the guard, who came with the lieutenant and warned Allen they would put him in the hole if he didn’t quiet down. “He kept hollering for a doctor and they put him in the hole and he died fifty-two hours later.”

He described the dungeon cells as damp from water seepage, and drafty. He depicted life in the dungeon darkness: inmates, deprived of shoes, walked the cold concrete floor in stocking feet; they received a cup of water twice a day, a slice of bread once; the bucket substitute for a toilet was not emptied or cleaned in nine days; occasionally a doctor would “peek into the cells.”

“What was he looking for?” asked MacInnis.

“To see if we were dead, I guess. A lot of men have died there.”

Newsmen questioned Berlin as he waited in the marshal’s cage for the return trip to the island. This was in itself a rarity as Bennett, the prison director, forbids the interviewing of any federal prisoner.

Berlin told them: “I’ve been over there six years. I’m going crazy. They talk about that being a prison for hardened criminals. Lot of young kids over there, for minor offenses, and they’re going crazy like I am. Since I’ve been there I’ve seen thirty prisoners go crazy, be put in a straitjacket and get shipped off to some government hospital. There are few visitors. Most of the inmates are from poor families, whose relatives can’t afford to travel this far to see them.”

During a wait for another brace of witnesses, Associate Warden Miller resumed the stand. He said the dungeon toilet buckets were emptied two to four times a day, and inmates had a bowl of water at all times.

Abrams stepped forth, asked a question that focused the eyes of every juror on the prison keeper: Had he, on the night of July 9, 1939, inflicted upon the defendant, Henri Young, brutality of the most savage sort?

Miller said he had never touched Young, nor any other prisoner; that he had never ordered a guard to strike a prisoner; that he had never seen a guard mistreat a prisoner.

Abrams produced prison records. They showed that on the date in question Young was sent to solitary for banging his pillow on the floor and leading the convicts in a song. Were they singing a ballad in reference to him? “They’ll hang old Meathead from a sour apple tree.”

The associate warden replied in a low voice: “They may have.”

In retaliation for that chant, did Miller himself drag Young from his cell, throw him down a circular steel stairway, then jump on his face with both feet, knocking out several teeth? Thereupon, did he look on while two guards beat Young mercilessly with saps, and two stood by in reserve to take over when the first pair wearied? And then did they dump him, unconscious, in a dark cell?

The heavy-set associate warden denied the entire episode, with one exception: he did order Young into an isolation cell. He then volunteered a custodial viewpoint of solitary: some prisoners thrived on such confinement, gained weight, emerged spiritually benefited, with “a better outlook on life.”

Others present a different portrait of Miller. An old-time gangster, who admittedly had been chained more than once to a wall of The Rock’s dungeon says: “Miller was all right. He might beat the hell out of you one day, but the next day you ask him a favor and he did it. He was a good guy.”

A former colleague recalls: “Lefty Egan, one of Capone’s torpedomen, was up near the roof painting with his left hand when the end of the scaffold slips. He grabs at the rope with his crippled right hand but it’s no good. The guard’s an older fellow with a bad heart—he can’t help. Just then Miller comes by. He runs up and catches Lefty. It knocks the wind out of him and he staggers and goes down, Lefty on top. Lefty told me later if Miller hadn’t risked his own neck, he’d’ve been a goner, sure as hell.”

The parade of horror-bearers kept up.

Harmon Waley, thirty, doing forty-five years for his role in the Weyerhaeuser kidnaping, related how he made the dungeon while sick. He had asked for medicine, was told it would be sent to his cell later. He asked for aspirin, again was told he would get his medicine later. “So,” he recounted, with a retrospective grin, “I told the doctor what to do with his aspirin and was thrown in the dungeon. I got sicker, then raving, and they put me in a straitjacket.”

Carl Hood, twenty-nine, a Texan who had stabbed an inmate at Leavenworth, recalled that he and Young, in whispered conversations in the dungeon, had “wondered why the people of the United States let a prison like Alcatraz stand.” He told of an insane convict dying after a blackjack clubbing by guards. He said a male nurse had cruelly wielded a metal pan on a helpless hospital patient, “paralyzed from the hips down.”

Harry C. Kelly, forty-one, a San Francisco mail robber, testified: “Young came to Alcatraz a well-educated, sane young fellow, but after those years in solitary he was about crazy, mentally unbalanced. One morning he started to the dining room without his trousers. I had to help him. I told him he couldn’t go to eat that way. One Sunday we happened to have steak for dinner. He walked right by the steam table and sat down without any food. He didn’t seem to know he was in the dining room. I had to share my food with him.”

To support the claim that an “irresistible impulse,” induced by conditions on The Rock, had driven Young to slay McCain, the defense summoned Dr. Ritchey, Alcatraz psychiatrist. He testified that Young was “emotionally unstable” and had acted under “tension.”

Prosecutor Hennessy produced a report by Dr. Ritchey on Young, eliciting testimony that Young was “rational” and knew what he was doing on December 3, the morning he killed McCain.

“When did you make a report on Young’s condition, Doctor?” asked MacInnis.

“A few days after December 3,” said Dr. Ritchey.

MacInnis then offered evidence that the report was dated April 10, 1941, “a few days before this trial began.”

“Why,” counsel asked, “did you leave out your conclusions that Young was emotionally unstable, that he was acting under tension?”

“I thought it was self-evident,” said the doctor.

Henri Young took the stand. The jury, and the audience, sat rapt as he gave a vivid portrayal of the dungeon on The Rock.

“The cell was all black, the walls painted black. It was nine by five by seven feet high. I was placed in there nude. After my clothes had been searched for particles of tobacco, they were thrown in to me. But not my shoes. I had no tobacco, no soap, no toothbrush. Because of the stink, it was like stepping into a sewer, nauseating.”

Abrams asked about furnishings, food.

“I had no towel. Two blankets were thrown in to me at 5
P.M.
There was no bed, no mattress, no furniture. During the thirteen days I was in there the first time, I had two full meals. In between was bread, three or four slices of bread in the morning. When you get a meal you literally gorge it. It all tastes the same.”

Abrams asked, “Did the winds of the Golden Gate sweep in?”

“The cell I was in is called the ice box. There is an old-type ventilator in the wall. It was open. I shivered all the time. I was in my stocking feet on concrete. At times I would get in a corner and put my coveralls around my head to keep warm. When you walk in the black cell, you have to keep one hand on a wall so you won’t hurt yourself. Often you get dizzy spells. I’d sit in one position until my legs went to sleep, then I’d move. Then I’d lie on the floor. It was cold concrete and damp. You never have a bath in solitary. All the time I was there I saw only one man get a bath. He had a bucket of cold water thrown on him. You hardly ever sleep, only cat naps. You wake up shivering, hardly able to move. You ache. Men were beaten into unconsciousness. I could hear their yells and screams. One boy was beaten after he hadn’t eaten for fifteen days. I could hear Miller cursing and raging like a madman. I was scared to death. Sometimes I got to raving. It was impossible to be calm.”

Abrams asked, “What do you think about?”

“You can only think about your own problems. You wonder how human beings could do that to human beings. It was a pretty heavy penalty to pay for refusing to do some laundry work.… You can’t talk to Warden Johnston, you have to talk to Miller. If you do get to Johnston, he is a master of equivocation. They don’t follow the federal penal laws at Alcatraz. We had a congressional pamphlet showing the rules. We took it to Miller and showed him we had not violated regulations in several respects.

“Miller said to me, ‘You don’t run Alcatraz. I run it. And Alcatraz is not a penitentiary. Alcatraz is Alcatraz.’ ”

Dr. Joseph Catton, noted alienist with wide experience in homicide cases, a witness for the defense, told the court: “Men should not be beaten for their natural reactions to corporal punishment, which should be termed corporal control. After it has served its purpose for subduing a prisoner, it becomes a torture. Prison produces a mental condition not unlike the ‘shell shock’ of war.” As for the Black Hole of solitary:” “God and nature gave us eyes to appreciate masses and forms. We’re supposed to get messages from the things we see. Being alone for weeks in lightless cells works havoc. Man is selfish, sexual, and social.”