Escape from Alcatraz (13 page)

Prosecutor Hennessy, in his closing argument to the jury, said: “They brought a lot of those lost men over here from Alcatraz. In the catalogue, they pass as men, but they are reckless in everything they do or say. They are at war with society.”

MacInnis summed up for the defense: “Alcatraz is on trial here. It was Alcatraz that killed McCain. It was the cold, sadistic logic that some men call penology that killed him.”

The six men and six women of the jury agreed with the defense. They found Henri Young guilty of involuntary manslaughter, adding a maximum of three years to his term. And then, in an unprecedented action, they convicted Alcatraz of a far graver offense—crimes against humanity. They issued a statement to the press and wired copies to the Department of Justice and Congress.

The gist of their indictment: “That conditions as concern treatment of prisoners at Alcatraz are unbelievably brutal and inhuman, and it is our respectful hope and our earnest petition that a proper and speedy investigation of Alcatraz be made so that justice and humanity may be served.”

As he left the bench at trial’s end, the judge beckoned to a reporter to come into his chambers. There he poured a couple of neat slugs of bourbon and said, “This has been the damndest trial I ever sat on. Drink up.”

Chapter 10

C
OURTROOM VETERANS WILL
tell you there is nothing, not even the weather, so unpredictable as a jury. And yet, to them, the astonishing thing was that the Alcatraz verdict should bear this out—that the word of hardened cons would carry more weight than the word of a warden and his top aide. A warden, to boot, with a fine civic reputation and every appearance of a humanist. And an associate warden with the mien of a parent who was merely nonpermissive.

The credibility of convicts anywhere is normally open to question, and far more so if inmates of Alcatraz. The simple fact of incarceration there—men beyond redemption—would tend to make them unbelievable. And so the grim recitals, while impressing the jury, left the cynical unmoved, except to disgust. Said a court attaché: ‘They were all lying through their teeth. They always do, just to get back at the administration. You can never believe anything they say.” And a former assistant in the U.S. attorney’s office: “A dozen convicts will watch an inmate stabbing, but it’s impossible to get a conviction. They will all swear they didn’t see a thing. Perjury means nothing to them.”

The public for the most part shared the common belief that imprisoned men will perjure themselves at the drop of a shiv. They have nothing to lose. And while the Trial of Alcatraz with its tales of medieval horror held a morbid fascination, the testimony, reconsidered in the cold light of day, seemed just that—tales.

San Franciscans were jolted one morning by a story in the papers. The news was a week old because, police said, the complaint had been filed “by error” in the wrong department. The lead paragraphs in the
Chronicle
’s account went:

“In a lot on Jackson Street a week ago blonde Thelma Fleming went to pick her mother a bouquet of nasturtiums.

“She came out of that lot bloody and bruised, her head lacerated, one eye closed, her face cut. Five stitches were required to close her wounds.”

Miss Fleming was twenty-eight, a secretary for an insurance firm, and she weighed 115 pounds. Her assailant was John F. Gilmore, thirty-three, a husky six-foot-one, weighing 210 pounds.

It was Miss Fleming’s custom each summer to pick wild flowers in the vacant lot for her mother. This Sunday, walking with her dog, she went into the lot again. Gilmore, who lived in an apartment house next door opened a window and shouted, “Get out of there or I’ll kick you out!” She refused, saying she expected “gentlemanly treatment.” Gilmore did not own the lot, nor had he planted the nasturtiums. A woman in an apartment on the other side of the lot yelled to Miss Fleming, “I planted those flowers. Go ahead and pick all you want.”

Gilmore stormed out, began browbeating her, and Miss Fleming threw a bunch of nasturtiums in his face. And then, as she related: “I turned to see where my dog was and his fist caught me on the side of the head. I did not see the blow coming. My hair fell onto my shoulders. I was dizzy and sick.”

She still refused to leave, because: “I didn’t believe he had any authority but the authority of his fists.”

Gilmore, who towered above her, struck again. His fist smashed into her right eye with such force the impact lifted her off her feet and snapped her jaws together so hard it chipped two front teeth. She fell backward. Shaken, half-blinded, she got to her feet, blood streaming down her right cheek. His knuckles had ripped open her face. He offered to wipe off the blood, but she turned from him and called her dog.

She said Gilmore followed her to the edge of the lot, repeating three times: “I hit you in self-defense, you know. You threw the flowers at me first.”

She staggered down the street to the home of a physician, who gave her emergency treatment, then took her to a hospital. She said her eye was black for a week and she had severe headaches.

Gilmore declined to comment, on advice of counsel. His attorney told reporters: “He shoved her—it was a little shove—and she turned and fell and struck something.”

Gilmore was a guard at Alcatraz.

Charged with battery, he appeared before Municipal Judge Theresa Meikle a month later. Miss Fleming requested a dismissal to protect Gilmore’s federal civil service rating.

Judge Meikle turned to him: “Before I dismiss this charge, I want you to promise me you will never again raise your fists except to defend yourself.”

Gilmore solemnly replied: “I promise.”

“You know,” the judge said, referring to his duties as an Alcatraz guard, “people may be deprived of their freedom, but they still retain personal rights. Your actions reflect something in your character that you should correct.”

To his colleagues on The Rock, where he was popularly known as Big John, Gilmore’s behavior came as a great surprise. “Big John was a pleasant, mild fellow,” one recalled. “You know the type: the big, strong guy who is gentle as a kitten.” Big John stayed on at Alcatraz for some years, then left to join the Immigration Service’s Border Patrol on the Mexican border.

The Sunday he beat up blonde Thelma Fleming for picking wild flowers in the vacant lot was not quite three months after the Trial of Alcatraz.

Chapter 11

T
O MOST SAN FRANCISCANS
the Trial of Alcatraz was a spectacle, a Roman holiday. Those who could not squeeze into the courtroom, or even into the corridors, crowded the steps and sidewalk outside, craning for a glimpse of the notorious felons as they came and left in chained pairs, under heavy escort.

To the civic-minded the horrors depicted were a spur to seek anew the removal of this blight, as it was called, from the bay. So incensed was Paul Verdier, the jury foreman, that two days after the trial he began arranging a dinner for the city’s most influential people to build the necessary pressure to speed the investigation of Alcatraz demanded by the jurors.

The
San Francisco Chronicle
commented editorially: “We do not enjoy the possibility of being suddenly invaded by a band of human tigers from Alcatraz … Alcatraz is both a blemish and a menace and needlessly.”

Within a week telegrams went out canceling the Verdier dinner. No reason was given, not another word said about an investigation. Civic outrage subsided, and the trial became a nightmarish memory.

Why had Verdier so abruptly changed his mind? James Martin MacInnis reports: “Two immigration investigators called on Verdier and gave him something to think over if he persisted in annoying the Department of Justice. A question about his citizenship. He was born in Paris of American parents—a citizen of the United States. But he had, unknowingly of course, forfeited his citizenship by joining the French army at the outset of World War I. They could point out that serving on the jury was a criminal act—a juror must be a citizen. And they could threaten deportation proceedings. Out-and-out blackmail. The Department of Justice at work.”

At the time, many doubtless wondered: had Verdier sudden misgivings about the verdict—a delayed doubt the convicts had told the truth? After all, the warden had earned a reputation as a prison reformer by cleaning up Folsom. He would naturally want an associate who felt as he did. (The associate warden is the man who runs a prison—an executive officer, a general manager.) And Associate Warden Miller, dubbed Meathead by the convicts, had stoutly denied their accusations that he was the chief practitioner of The Rock’s dungeon savagery.

At a farewell affair years later, celebrating Miller’s transfer to Leavenworth, Warden Johnston praised him as “a good man for bad men.” Johnston had named Miller associate warden over Captain Paul J. Madigan, who had seniority. A custodial officer of that period recalls: “Johnston wanted somebody who could handle the men the way he felt they needed handling. He picked Miller, though Madigan was the senior officer, because he figured Miller was better suited for the job. Miller was a real tough bastard.”

The verdict of involuntary manslaughter was tantamount to an acquittal of Henri Young; yet, all it did was to save him from San Quentin’s gas chamber. The punishment inflicted was inconsistent with the sentence, certainly not what the jury had in mind. He drew three years, the maximum, to be served
after
completion of his current term. He began serving them the moment he returned to The Rock from court. He went straight into the Dark Hole, and stayed there well beyond the three years.

In that first year—by then Young had spent more than four years in solitary darkness—he again suffered the psychological effects depicted at his trial. He essayed a back-door parole. They found him lying in a pool of blood in his midnight cell, wrists ripped open by a jagged piece of eyeglass. They found him in time; sewed up the wounds, and returned him, minutely frisked, to the darkness.

Three years after that, in 1945, his days on The Rock almost came to a sudden end, with an assist from Whitey Franklin, the double-lifer. The incident also revealed that, by the mysterious processes of prison smuggling, a man confined even behind the solid steel door of the Dark Hole, can acquire almost anything except, perhaps, a used car. Young and Franklin were escorted one morning from solitary to the yard for a rare hour of exercise. They were walking around the enclosure when Franklin plunged a knife into Young’s right shoulder. Young had seen the flashing blade just in time to keep it out of his chest.

Young recovered and went back to the Hole. A few months later reporters on the federal court beat in San Francisco came upon his name again. He had managed to get a petition to the court, requesting that the prison officials be compelled to grant him an hour of light a day to study law. The petition was denied on the ground that the court could not dictate to the warden on administrative matters. (Prior to his trial, in his non-dungeon periods, Young had taken University of California Extension courses. One juror, recalling the trial, said the jury was greatly impressed by Young’s ability as a student. Examination papers submitted by the defense showed an almost straight-A record.)

Henri Young could not claim any special distinction in the suprajudicial treatment accorded him, following his trial. Others have felt the knuckled fist of Alcatraz justice, after a trial by The Rock’s own court. The expression, “taken before the court,” in reference to an inmate charged with a criminal offense such as a stabbing, is common among the guards, but the court they speak of is the prison’s Disciplinary Board. This board is composed of the associate warden and the captain of the guards. A onetime Alcatraz guard explains: “The captain presents the charges to the associate warden, who acts as a sort of judge. In a major case, such as an escape attempt, the associate usually confers with the warden.” In the case of Tex Lucas, who stabbed Al Capone with a blade from the barber shears, the Department of Justice announced that the prison authorities had dealt out punishment and that it was against policy, as the
Chronicle
story reported, to “let prisoners have even the dubious freedom of leaving the island under guard for court appearances.”

Prison authorities defend this policy with the argument that a convict may seek a trip to court as a means to attempt an escape, or simply as a vacation from The Rock. They point to the fact that it did happen on one occasion. An Alcatraz prisoner, escorted to court for a hearing on a petition, slugged a deputy marshal in a break attempt. The deputy slugged back, more effectively. The prisoner did get his vacation—days in court for trial on the escape try.

What astonishes lawyers is the notion of the penal authorities that the verdict of the prison board in criminal cases should supersede the verdict of a trial jury. Prisoners
acquitted
of an offense by a jury in federal court have nonetheless been punished for that offense, before and after the trial, because the prison “court” had rendered a
prior
verdict of guilt.

Jerry W. Clymore, twenty-six, Louisiana bank robber, stood jury trial in January 1961 for the nonfatal stabbing of a fellow inmate. He claimed self-defense and was acquitted.

Warden Madigan told Dale Champion, a
Chronicle
reporter: “I’m amazed at the jury’s action. I just don’t believe it was self-defense. Regardless of the acquittal, Clymore will go back to solitary confinement because the prison disciplinary board has already held him responsible for the stabbing.”

Roland Simcox, a military prisoner, had a similar encounter with Alcatraz justice in 1957. Acquitted by a jury of a stabbing charge, he returned to solitary on a prior conviction by the prison board.

Officials have a defense for this too, a government counsel putting the case: “I’m not at all shocked. These are two quite different sovereignties. For a jury, guilt must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. A warden is not so restricted. For him it’s an administrative matter, and he must do what he feels is best for the conduct of the prison. Also, a convict may be acquitted of a stabbing on a plea of self-defense, but the fact he had a knife in his possession would be a violation of a prison rule.”