Escape from Alcatraz (5 page)

Art as therapy was clearly discernible in the development of Chase as an artist. At the outset he leaned bitterly toward prison scenes, unrelenting in their harsh lines; as his skill grew he lifted his vision beyond his bleak environment. He captured on canvas all that his eyes could behold: a series of thirty-five oils that formed a continuous panorama of the San Francisco Bay Area, as seen from Alcatraz Island.

Machine Gun Kelly, for all the hard ring of the name, settled quietly into the routine of The Rock. He and Harvey Bailey strode one summer evening in 1933 onto the porch of an Oklahoma City home where Charles Urschel, an oilman, and his wife were playing bridge with friends. The gunmen abducted both men, freeing the guest when they made certain which was Urschel. Handcuffed and blindfolded, the millionaire rode all night on the floor of a car to a hideout, where he was held until payment of a $200,000 ransom nine days later. Here too a small detail led to capture. Urschel had noted the time of day a mail plane flew overhead, twice daily, and that it had skipped a trip. FBI agents, checking which plane had flown off course that day, tracked down the hideout, a farm near Dallas.

Kelly, a college man, became a cobbler on The Rock, later a shop bookkeeper. “He was tall, well built, a little gray when I knew him, and he walked very erect, a distinguished air about him, like a banker,” says a former guard. “I got a kick out of him poring over his ledger. Once he came up three cents short, spent hours going over the figures and we had to drag him off to his cell. Next day he was at it again. Found the three cents, by God.”

In those days, The Rock’s most notorious tenant was Alphonse Capone, dethroned czar of the Chicago underworld. For years Scarface Capone had gotten away with murders, but not until he stopped off in Philadelphia one day en route from his winter palace in Florida did he see the inside of a jail. He drew a year, for a rap that had him bewildered: carrying a gun. This was a tool of his trade, like a plumber carrying a wrench. Equally bewildering was the ten-year federal rap as a tax dodger. He pouted, entering Atlanta, “This is a funny kind of justice.”

For Capone, the move to Alcatraz was like checking out of the Waldorf into a cave. No Corona Coronas; only roll-your-own, and he had fat thumbs. No old cronies to visit him; only Mae, his blonde wife, once a month for forty minutes, the time limit then; and she would squeeze in two visits on each trip from Florida, by arriving in San Francisco toward the end of a month. None of those niceties that $20,000,000 could buy. Sanford Bates, then federal prison director, called Warden Johnston one day: what was this he heard on the radio?—Capone ordering silk underwear from a London haberdasher. “That’s funny,” said Johnston. “I just left Capone and I distinctly remember he was wearing regulation long johns because they were held up with a safety pin.”

The food was all right, but not what
he
would order, none of the gourmet dishes he sent for at Atlanta. And the job, a real laugh. Dry cleaning and laundry. He’d got his start in the Chicago rackets by organizing the dry-cleaning industry—
his
way. Alcatraz did that work for military posts in the area and soldiers began bragging in letters home how Al Capone was doing their laundry. The warden, who knew that any detail relating to his charges was grist for columnists and strove to keep their activities a secret as part of the ego-deflating process, heard about that. He promptly reassigned Capone to mopping up the shower room and toilets.

The thing about Alcatraz that bugged Capone most was the enforced silence. He had been a compulsive talker, a big, expansive talker, around a cigar. At the outset, walking into the mess hall, he began jabbering over his shoulder to the convict behind him. Ten days in the dungeon. He began talking about that experience when he got out. Ten more days. This time he kept quiet for almost a week before spouting off. Ten days. He shut up, for a long time. And then, missing the radio he had at Atlanta, he talked again, but to a guard. He offered a bribe for a bit of news of the great outside. The guard informed the warden. Nineteen days in the dungeon. Three years later the bribe attempt leaked out to the San Francisco papers. The
Chronicle
reported: “And ironically enough the information sought by Capone was not information from any of his underworld playmates. The dreaded silence rule had merely incited a gnawing passion for news from a world of which he was no longer a part. All he wanted was to be brought up to date on current events.”

Capone’s illicit millions were as valueless here as stage money. At the beginning, when he dared to join the population in the yard on Sunday afternoons, he was disturbed at seeing softball outfielders bumping into trotting exercisers. Later he told Johnston, “Warden, that yard ain’t half big enough,” and liberally offered to have it enlarged. The warden said Uncle Sam would take care of the prison’s building needs.

His bootleg wealth did enable him to acquire several items that lent him distinction among the convicts. Gifts were verboten, but a request that his wife bring him a new pair of glasses seemed reasonable. She did—a pair with gold rims. Equally reasonable seemed a request for a musical instrument, which convicts were permitted to buy. She brought a $1,500, gaudily bejeweled banjo. Thereafter, during the Sunday recreation period, he joined an orchestra, of sorts, in an abandoned shower room in the basement. A robber, identity long since lost, banged a battered upright piano as if it were a custodial officer; Harmon Waley, lanky, pale kidnaper who had a quick smile and eyes that gleamed with mischief, played a saxophone; Frankie Vasconcellas, a melancholy kidnaper, picked at a mandolin; Machine Gun Kelly, erect, looking everywhere but at the instrument at his knee, beat a rat-tat-tat on a drum; Scarface, gold specs imparting an odd dignity to the flabby features, twanged his $1,500 banjo. Capone, not entirely pleased with what he heard, went to the warden and offered to buy new instruments all around, including a grand piano. The warden shook his head, firmly.

Hatred of Capone grew. Bugs Moran, erstwhile boss of Chicago’s North Side rumrunners, and a few of the defunct Tuohy gang, all doing long stretches, begrudged Capone his easy ten years on a tax rap. Others had a special gripe: their pals had been rubbed out by Al’s boys. He was a suspect as a stoolie for not joining strikes against the rules. He was hated for his wealth. The orchestra was an escape; he dared not mingle with the men outdoors, for fear of getting a shiv in his ribs. He was given solitary jobs, mopping the latrines, toting books and magazines from the library to cells, sweeping the cellhouse and the yard. A convict at that time could subscribe to nine of a list of one hundred magazines, from which stories of crime and Alcatraz inmates were excised, but he had to keep them to himself. In a rare concession, Capone was allowed to order the full list and donate them to the library, in a bid for good will. If anything, the gesture heightened the ill will. There was even talk of hustling him off to McNeil before they had to summon the coroner. Arthur D. Wood, chief federal parole officer, queried about that, told newsmen: “Capone has been one of the best prisoners on Alcatraz, and he has earned the consideration of the government on the question of transfer.”

For a man who did his best to keep out of trouble, Capone was always up to his fat neck in it. Before placed on solo jobs, he was feeding a machine in the laundry with a bank robber named Bill Collier on the other end. “Crisake, slow down!” Collier ordered. Capone, not accustomed to taking orders, speeded up. Collier flung a role of wet wash in his face. Fists flew; both got ten days in the dungeon.

One Sunday in the music room the playful Waley kept his sax almost smack against Capone’s head until the mobster turned in a rage and shouted, “You dirty, goddam babysnatcher!” Waley, a six-footer who towered over Scarface, said nothing. The band played on. At the proper moment, Waley took a baseball bat grip on his sax and whacked Capone across the back of the head, knocking him off his stool, the $1,500 banjo banging on the cement floor. Fists flew; once again the dungeon.

A more serious demonstration occurred in the laundry room. J. P. Chase, the Nelson henchman who later turned artist, had been out of the dungeon for just one day. He was furious with Capone for refusing to take part in a revolt some while before, and easily persuaded a confederate to attract the guard’s attention while he worked his revenge. If the gentle Roy Gardner had not happened to be present, Capone would almost certainly have been killed; but just as Chase hurled an iron sash-weight at Capone’s head, Gardner glanced up, made a flying tackle, and knocked Capone backwards. The missile struck the mobster on the arm, and the plot to kill him misfired. Chase went back to the Deep Hole. It is a tribute to Gardner that the convicts held him in such respect that neither Chase nor his friends ever sought revenge for his interference in their plot. And it is also a tribute to him that he dared to befriend the friendless Capone.

Capone’s money, ill-begotten, became an ironic source of trouble. Convicts, in clandestine whispers, told of hardships back home and Capone directed his wife to see that the families were cared for. A guard monitoring one of these conversations reported the matter and Warden Johnston, fearing a mob in the making, ordered the largesse stopped. One day scrappy James (Tex) Lucas sidled up to Capone and said he had a good thing going in the courts—a life term awaiting him down in Texas for the same bank holdup that landed him on The Rock—and how about the dough to see it through? Capone related what the warden had said: lay off, or else. Lucas, thinking it was a stall, stalked off seething. A week later Lucas was walking into the barber shop, then in the basement, when he saw Capone emerge from a room down the corridor. He grabbed up a pair of shears, deftly separated the blades, wrapped one in his handkerchief and, as Capone passed by, stepped out. Capone sensed something, whirled just as Lucas was about to strike. Fast as a boxer, Capone went into a clinch, and the blade plunged into his back. He grunted, pushed Lucas away. Lucas lunged again. Capone raised his arm to fend off the blow. The blade sliced into his left thumb and broke in the middle. Capone shot a short right to Lucas’s jaw and laid him out cold, then went to the hospital upstairs for a week. Lucas was tried in The Rock’s own court—prison officials doubling in brass as judge, jury, prosecutor, with no defense counsel—and confined to the dungeon for a series of nineteen days.

Alcatraz being a world apart, all these incidents leaked out weeks, months, even years later. The story of the stabbing broke out of Washington, far from the scene, secondhand, and garbled. The account in the
San Francisco Chronicle
said:

“In line with the strict secrecy maintained concerning happenings on Alcatraz, first reports of the outburst reached here in dispatches from Washington, with the announcement coming from the Department of Justice.…

“Instead of a trial for Lucas, the prison authorities dealt out punishment. It is against the prison policy, it was announced, to let prisoners have even the dubious freedom of leaving the island under guard for court appearances.”

Capone’s attempt to bribe the guard remained a secret for three years. When the Chase sash-weight-hurling episode came to public attention, Warden Johnston denied it happened. As for the scrap in the music room, Johnston told newsmen: “I first heard the story from you newspaper boys. There wasn’t anything I could find to verify it. In fact, I think I can say that Capone doesn’t even know what Waley looks like.” (The press was not aware, of course, that Capone and Waley were fellow musicians.)

The badgering and veiled threats by the other convicts, the attacks and fights, the spells in the pitch-black dungeon began to take their toll. Capone sought solace in religion, sang in the choir on Sunday mornings. It was too late. There were now days he kept to his cell and when the guards tried to coax him out for a meal, he backed into a corner, staring in terror. Other days he was a child at play, making and remaking his bed, prattling to himself. Or again, he would stand at his cell front and lustily sing “O Sole Mio.” At length, he was locked in an isolation ward—bug cage, to the convicts—in the hospital upstairs. His wife read about it, a month later, and rushed out to San Francisco. She was forced to wait until he had one of his lucid days, when he could be brought down to the prisoners’ side of the visitors’ room to stare through the bulletproof pane recessed in the three-foot-thick wall.

Rumors began flying off The Rock early in January of 1938 that Capone was insane. Attempts to reach prison authorities were unavailing, but the reports had enough substance to make headlines. And then, in February, the Department of Justice in Washington broke official silence, announcing simply that Capone was in the prison hospital and that no insanity hearing was contemplated. Warden Johnston now talked to the press by phone: “I don’t propose to issue hourly bulletins on Capone’s temperature and pulse. He is being given the usual care and there is no intention to remove him. We have just as good a hospital here as the U.S. Medical Center at Springfield, Missouri.” He admitted that Capone’s wife had not been informed: “But she must know of his illness. The papers have been full of it.”

Two weeks later the Justice Department issued a bulletin: Capone was suffering from “mental disturbances.… His condition is in no wise due to his confinement, but grows out of conditions originating prior to his incarceration.” There were vague hints of paresis, resulting from syphilis contracted in his youth. The Justice Department lapsed into another silence that endured until December, when it began employing paresis as though it were a diagnostic fact. Dispatches said Justice officials were debating whether to keep Capone at Alcatraz “for his own good, so he can continue under treatment there for paresis.” He was scheduled for release the following month, January 1939.

One night early in January Capone was taken secretly off The Rock with six weights on each leg and escorted by three armed guards to the new Federal Correctional Institution on Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor, there to serve out the extra year he was originally sentenced to serve in the Cook County jail in Chicago for contempt of court. Warden Johnston wrote long afterward that Capone had spent his final year at Alcatraz in the prison hospital, and that upon his departure the psychiatrist then heading The Rock’s medical staff reported he was “in good physical condition, in good spirits, that he appeared to understand his difficulty, and that his speech was entirely relevant and adequate.”