Escape from Alcatraz (14 page)

Foreseeing such practices accounted in part, perhaps, for the grave misgivings voiced by penologists when the idea of Alcatraz was first broached by the Department of Justice. Their voices have been raised over the years against the philosophy of The Rock, but in vain. The notable Osborne Association of New York, which surveys impartially the nation’s penal institutions, inspected Alcatraz in 1942 and urged its abandonment, after the war, as an outmoded concept. Its report said:

“Anyone who has been on Alcatraz Island when the almost ever-present fog has shut down and cut it off from the world, when the low groan of foghorns and the cry of sea gulls vie with the moaning of the wind for supremacy in macabre effects, has had an experience reminiscent of prisons of the Middle Ages.…

“Alcatraz stands today, not only in the United States, but throughout much of the civilized world, as the symbol of crime control through fear of severe punishment.… The purpose in establishing Alcatraz, publicly expressed by the Department of Justice at the time, was to strike terror into the hearts of potential offenders.

“If this type of punishment had demonstrated its efficacy in controlling and reducing crime, few would argue against its use, but leading criminologists today … question the efficacy as a deterrent.

“The Alcatraz Penitentiary was established during a period of public hysteria on the subject of crime, engendered in part by publicity and propaganda of the highly inflammatory type. Such hysteria and the laws and procedures which usually result from it tend to postpone rather than hasten the day when crime will be substantially reduced by an intelligent and sustained attack on the problem.”

The report suggested as a “practical solution” that trouble-makers at Atlanta and Leavenworth, chief sources of tenants for The Rock, be confined in “a type of segregation unit which would be, in effect, a small but complete prison attached to and operated as an annex.”

Prison people felt otherwise. Ten years after the Osborne report, Warden Swope said: “If these men were scattered out through the prison system, they could cause a great deal of difficulty, and perhaps loss of life.” And Paul Madigan, who followed him as warden of Alcatraz, insisted: “We are a vital link in our prison system.”

Not the men, but the officials themselves, have generated a great deal of difficulty at Alcatraz—bitter strikes, even the wholesale slashing of heel tendons, over the periodic suppression of petitions to the courts. Or an official will assume a judicial role and decide on the merit of a petition, a practice frowned upon by the courts.

Henri Young’s request to study law and equip himself to seek judicial relief in a question of possible denial of Constitutional rights was not unusual. Many Rock convicts became students of the law, some even arguing their way to freedom on fine legal points. Under normal conditions, a prisoner scrawls a petition, then has it notarized by the captain of the guards. The petition is typed up and dispatched to the court. If the judge considers it proper, he will set a hearing; and if, after arguments, he rules against the petition, the prisoner has the right of appeal.

Undoubtedly the smartest lawyer The Rock ever contained was Cecil Wright, who was forty-one when he stepped off the island—for the second time—in November of 1948, a tribute to his self-acquired legal skill. He had the look and bearing of a successful barrister, dapper in a gray pin-striped suit custom-made by a convict tailor in payment for a writ. He had paid eighteen years for joining three others in a $2.43 stickup of a drugstore in Strasburg, Illinois, in 1929. He drew two terms: one year to life in the state prison at Joliet, and a fifteen-year federal rap because the pharmacy was also a post office. A model prisoner at Joliet, he was paroled in 1938. Federal authorities, waiting at the gate, hustled him on to Leavenworth. He was a model prisoner there too, but was shipped off to Alcatraz the next year because he was considered a nuisance. He had given legal advice to other inmates and the warden frankly said he “didn’t like it.”

During his years in prison—Joliet, Leavenworth, Alcatraz—Wright, whose law school was a cell, estimated he had prepared some six hundred writs and motions to vacate. At Alcatraz alone his legal talents had won shorter sentences for at least forty prisoners, some unable even to sign their own names. He rendered this gratuitous help on the sly, at the risk of solitary confinement.

Wright first freed himself from The Rock in 1943 by a habeas corpus writ, contending his federal sentence should not have begun until his parole from Joliet had terminated, that technically he was still an Illinois prisoner. He went to Danville, Illinois, and set out to make a new start in life. He got a job and was planning to marry. And then his state parole ran out.

Department of Justice agents bounced him back on The Rock. Dismayed, but undaunted, Wright resumed his cell law practice. His thirteenth petition paid off. Granting of this writ of habeas corpus indicated he had served those eighteen years in prison possibly without justification, for it was based on this ground: that his constitutional rights had been denied at his original trial, in 1929, because his attorney also served as counsel for three codefendants who had turned state’s evidence. When he bade farewell to The Rock he told reporters he had left behind a personal library of some four hundred lawbooks: “They may help someone else to get out sometime.”

At the Fort Mason dock to greet the handsome, graying ex-convict was Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Karesh, who had lost the legal bout before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. They shook hands warmly, and Karesh later told reporters: “Wright is the world’s greatest authority on habeas corpus writs. In fact, I’m damned glad to get him off that island because he’s been writing writs for all the other prisoners. They’re smartly done and they’re a headache.”

Wright told the newsmen: “They’ve got nothing over there but a bunch of young boys. Brutality? Sure, there’s brutality. But to tell the truth none of the guards ever picked on me. If they shook my cell down, I gave them a little soft soap. Because I had a lot of papers in there relating to other men and that’s good for solitary.”

Not all of Wright’s pupils made good. Most of their prayers to the court were distinguished chiefly for their oddities. One convict requested $1,000 a day for each of the 165 days he had done in the Dark Hole, claiming it was not a healthful place. Another sought “warmer underwear because when night falls, the fog rolls in on Alcatraz, and it gets mighty cold.” He kept his cotton long johns. A prisoner contended the denial of tobacco in the isolation block was “a psychological torture even a so-called communistic system has never been accused of using in slave-labor camps.” A kidnaper doing 104 years wanted the warden restrained from “the cruel and unusual treatment of unlawfully and unconstitutionally depriving petitioner of certain rights guaranteed by United States law; specifically, of food, to wit: ice cream, cake, pie.”

A convict named Dorsey McMahan, apparently coached by Wright, sought a writ of mandate to compel Warden Johnston himself to pull an aching molar or have a dentist yank it, stating that the warden’s refusal to do either was a “malicious and capricious denial of my constitutional rights.” Caries was not the cause of the ache, he said, but a guard who “busted petitioner in the jaw in solitary and broke a jaw tooth.” McMahan scribbled a postscript: “When it gets so a poor convict can’t get a tooth pulled, he might as well be dead or in hell.” (The need for this action was never made clear, for in those days a dentist was on duty in the prison hospital. In recent years, a San Francisco dentist has visited the prison twice weekly.)

For eleven years a Kentucky bank robber endured the strict discipline of Alcatraz without a murmur until, he claims, they went too far. They took away his Cavanaugh Method book, which teaches piano playing without a piano, and he was no longer able to play a toneless “My Ol’ Kentucky Home” in his cell. His petition, demanding return of the instruction book, solemnly set forth: “Of all the suffering I have gone through in prison, the greatest blow of all was being deprived of the opportunity to educate myself in the finer points of harmony.” The judge dismissed the plea with the wry comment: “Prison officials are vested with a wide discretion in the safekeeping and securing of prisoners.”

Two convicts filed separate petitions with identical requests in identical words: that a guard be examined by a lunacy commission. Petitions denied, without comment.

Richard A. Numer, midway through a forty-five-year stretch for bank robbery, appeared before Federal Judge Roche in 1947 to argue his petition to compel Warden Johnston to let him take a course in English. His application had been denied when, in the space designated “Reasons for wanting this course,” he wrote: “To fit myself to expose the brutality and vile conditions prevailing at Alcatraz Penitentiary.” Judge Roche, intrigued by the applicant’s candor in such circumstances, voiced his curiosity. Numer’s reply was equally startling: “To conceal or distort the truth in this matter would be contrary to my early upbringing and repugnant to my conscience.” The court, with seeming reluctance, ruled it had no jurisdiction over the prison’s administration.

Such pleas may indeed be frivolous, but to the convicts they represented what they considered at the time real grievances. Warden Johnston himself spoke of the difficulty a prisoner often has in contemplating years of The Rock’s monotony. An inmate who tries to whip that monotonous grind by an escape into the enchanting world of music, then finds his means of flight, his lesson book, snatched away, might well be vexed. If he can go beyond his keepers and air his problems to the court, that action itself can afford a psychological relief, a getting things off his chest. But if even that recourse is denied him, as has happened at Alcatraz over the years, it tends to widen the gap between convict and guardian, to create friction that can explode into violence.

It may be notable that Numer’s astonishing petition, seeking the right to equip himself by the study of English to expose what he called the brutality and vile conditions on Alcatraz, was considered worthy of a hearing. Further, no question was raised that he was indulging in fantasies or that his brazen candor made him a proper subject for an insanity hearing instead. It might certainly have been assumed he was a bit wacky, or that if he had instances of brutality to expose they would have been the mere ravings of a convict who did not, as Warden Johnston put it, like his surroundings.

Just a month after the Trial of Alcatraz an incident occurred that dramatically portrayed another side of the custodial picture. No guard wants the convicts to like him: as keeper and captive, they are natural enemies. But that does not rule out respect, the thing a conscientious guard does desire. This incident clearly indicated Captain Madigan had such respect, to an enviable degree.

Four desperate convicts, all lifers, set a flight plan in action that had the making of a slaughter. They were Joe (Dutch) Cretzer, an instigator of the Battle of Alcatraz yet to come; Sam Shockley, a maniacal actor in that bloody drama; Arnold Kyle, Cretzer’s brother-in-law and crime partner, and Lloyd Barkdoll, young bank robber from Coos Bay, Oregon. They pounced on the mat-shop foreman and dragged him, bound and gagged, into a corner. They began prying the bars of a window but were interrupted at intervals by the arrival of three other officers, among them Madigan. They too were trussed up and lugged to the corner. The convicts struggled to widen the bars. Madigan worked his gag loose, then spoke in a quiet, avuncular way: “Boys, it’s just about time for the officers here to report to the Armorer and if they don’t, you’re going to have a flock of officers storming in with machine guns. So you might as well give yourselves up before this goes too far.”

Cretzer debated a moment, said “Okay, Mr. Madigan,” and nodded to the others. They untied the officers and went meekly along with the captain, to solitary.

Chapter 12

D
ESPITE THE JURY’S
unprecedented action in the Trial of Alcatraz—its blast at The Rock overshadowed its actual verdict in the case—life at the island prison went on much as it had before. There had been no investigation of conditions at Alcatraz, as the jury had requested in wires to Congress and the Department of Justice. And so there had been no shakeup in personnel, the customary consequence of any publicized inquiry into sensational charges of brutality in a prison.

World War II broke and most of the best guards at Alcatraz—able-bodied and intelligent men, good officer-candidate material—went off to the fighting. Replacements were recruited off the street, for the most part rejects by the military, men without prison training. The custodial staff sort of fell apart. In normal times, this would have presented a serious problem, but these times were not normal. The war spirit reached into the prison, and the convicts, imbued with patriotism, rallied to do their part. The laundry did mountains of wash for the military: San Francisco was a teeming port of embarkation for the South Pacific Theater. The tailor shop turned out tens of thousands of trousers for the Army. Convict machinists and welders did repair work for the Navy, particularly on the buoys for the antisubmarine nets in the bay. Many prisoners, due for parole in a relatively short while, volunteered for the Armed Services; some, with maritime experience, for the badly needed crews to run the ships fast being built. Warden Johnston agreed, but Director Bennett of the prison bureau vetoed the idea.

All this did not mean that Alcatraz had been turned into a big, happy camp where the men toiled feverishly and the guards stood around like straw bosses. It was still Alcatraz; the guards—the new ones out of fear of these “most desperate” felons, if not out of custodial training—still kept a wary eye; the convicts still dreamed of freedom, and some plotted.

Among the plotters were four who rated the description of “most desperate.” They were Harold Brest, thirty-one, a handsome, cold-blooded Pennsylvania bank robber; Fred Hunter, forty-three, stoop-shouldered henchman of the Old Creepy Karpis gang of Midwestern kidnapers; James A. Boarman, twenty-four, ruthless Indiana bank bandit, and Floyd G. Hamilton, thirty-six, who once briefly wore the nation’s crime crown as Public Enemy No. 1. Hamilton was a member of the Hamilton-Barrow-Parker outlaw band that roamed the Southwest in the early thirties, though not a full-fledged corporate partner. The Hamilton of the firm name was his brother, Raymond, the chieftain, who was executed after their two-year rampage came to a blazing end in an ambush by Texas lawmen in 1934 that mowed down the other partners, Clyde Barrow and his stogie-smoking, shotgun-toting moll, Bonnie Parker.