Alcatraz (17 page)

The opportunity to transfer a large number of troublemakers all at once to another prison came infrequently in the careers of federal prison administrators, so the wardens were no doubt enthusiastic about filling the director’s request. Knowing that their performance was judged not on the success of their industrial or work programs, or on their prisons’ recidivism rate, but on whether they could maintain order in their institutions, they were happy to remove from their responsibility the prisoners they believed were most likely to cause riots, escapes, deaths, and unrest.

At Bureau headquarters, Bates and his deputies reviewed the lists submitted by the wardens. They rejected many of the candidates proposed by the wardens of Atlanta and Leavenworth on the grounds that they were exhibiting evidence of mental health problems or had been selected only because they were nuisances. The Bureau officials sent the lists back to the penitentiaries with requests for revisions or further justifications. The wardens provided better arguments for the inclusion of certain prisoners and substituted the names of other candidates. By the time the refurbishing of Alcatraz neared completion in the early summer of 1934, upward of two hundred federal prisoners had been identified as Alcatraz transfers.

Each warden had to provide adequate justification for including an inmate on his list. Typically, the wardens cited such personality traits as “desperate,” “constant troublemaking,” “agitator,” and “unruly.” Here is a sampling of recommendations from the wardens at Atlanta, Leavenworth, and McNeil Island:

a dangerous, mentally not normal, prisoner who has already stabbed one inmate with a pair of shears . . . claimed he was sorry that he did not kill the man [and] threatens when he comes out [of isolation] he will come out cutting.
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was recently searched and shotgun shells together with a piece of pipe designed for a shotgun were found. He had planned a mass escape by shooting a tower guard and taking the power boat.
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slippery as an eel, escaped three times from U.S. Marshals on way to prison. Was in plot for mass escape. Will make a break any time, a very dangerous man.
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these men are all potential killers and have been actively engaged in a conspiracy, to smuggle guns into the institution for use in carrying out their plans of escaping.
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this inmate is plotting right now . . . to seize our locomotive and escape by crashing through the east gate.
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Most of the prisoners selected for transfer to Alcatraz were indeed bona fide security risks, but other issues influenced wardens’ choices. Wardens tried to take advantage of the transfer opportunity to get rid of prisoners whose behavior indirectly threatened order, including men (particularly if they were physically powerful) whose bizarre, unpredictable, or assaultive behavior jeopardized the physical well-being of staff or disturbed the peace and quiet of cell blocks. It was difficult to draw the line in some cases between custodial risks and those who were suffering genuine
breakdowns in mental health. In any case, wardens and their subordinates were appreciative of the opportunity to put their problem inmates into the care of another warden.

Foremost among prisoners who made nuisances of themselves were the “writ writers.” They annoyed wardens by filing briefs in federal court questioning elements of their arrest, conviction, or sentence, or they filed complaints about prison conditions and the actions of prison staff. These complaints brought the institution’s business, the staff’s behavior, and the warden’s judgment into question before attorneys and judges, whom BOP staff regarded as ignorant and naive about prison management. Similar troublemakers sought to communicate their complaints about the treatment they were receiving to newspaper reporters, members of Congress, and even to Bureau of Prisons headquarters. Also in the nuisance category were a small number of “aggressive homosexuals” who needed to be controlled for the protection of younger or weaker inmates.

Finally, there were the big shots of organized crime or gangland, figures who could use their status, substantial financial resources, power of personality, and connections with associates on the outside to manipulate or seduce staff into providing favors or privileges not granted to the general inmate population. In most cases, the inclusion of these inmates on the transfer-to-Alcatraz lists was already a foregone conclusion.

Each federal warden had little trouble finding a place on his proposed transfer list for all the notorious gangsters, bank robbers, and kidnappers in his custody. But in each penitentiary such prisoners filled only a small percentage of the available slots. For the most part, therefore, the wardens offered up the names of convicts who were known only to other inmates and their own employees.

Press speculation about the identities of the prisoners to be transferred focused on the big-name offenders, and in some cases they were correct—Al Capone was included in the list of men to be shipped from Atlanta, Machine Gun Kelly headed the Leavenworth list, and Albert Bates and Harvey Bailey topped the list of transfers from the U.S. Penitentiary Annex at Fort Leavenworth.

Wardens and Bureau officials debated about the best way to transport the chosen prisoners to Alcatraz. Some wanted them moved in small groups in prison cars that would be attached to trains on their normal runs; Assistant Director Hammack and others believed the prisoners
should be sent in large groups on special prison trains. Hammack was worried about using regular trains because information about the trains’ routes and stops would be too easily acquired by associates of the transported prisoners and by reporters. He compared the transport of prisoners in many small groups to “dropping our marbles all over the lot.”

Hammack believed that transport by special train could be accomplished without publicity and in virtual secrecy: “I would be willing to guarantee the whole special train could move from Atlanta to Alcatraz with less publicity than you would be able to accomplish if you sent Al Capone on the same trip by regular service with any number of guards you chose to select.”
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The relative security of the special-train method hinged on the ability of the BOP to work with the railroad companies to control the conditions of transport. The final plan proposed by Hammack reflected extensive negotiations with the railroads:

The railroad authorities have promised us there will be no publicity. They hope to get more business out of us and you could be sure they would live up to their agreement in that respect. Not only that, but the railroad authorities have agreed they will not stop the special train at regular stations, and, in fact, the only occasion for stopping the train would be to change the crew, take on water or fuel, or perform some regular service. This would be done in the yard or at some point distant from the regular passenger station. Nobody but the train crew would know where the stops were to be. To safeguard this phase the railroad companies have agreed they will have a sufficient number of special agents and detectives in the yard or at the service station to insure no unauthorized person even approaches the train. It would be impossible for anybody to know who was on the train unless the information was given out at Washington or at the institution from which the transfer originated. If the prisoners were selected before hand, the train placed in the prison yard, carefully searched, the prisoners moved in and properly shackled, then the entire party could move out without anybody knowing anything about it except the officers inside the institution.
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Director Bates approved Hammack’s plan, and specifics were arranged with the rail companies. Although the trains would have to make stops at regular locations in order to take on water and ice, they would not stop in the passenger areas of stations, and no information would be issued beforehand about the location of stops for fuel and servicing. Instructions for the secure keeping of the prisoners called for sixteen guards to accompany each shipment. Prisoners would be shackled and handcuffed for the duration of the trip; two guards were to be stationed behind heavy
wire enclosures installed at the ends of each car. One guard, armed with a pistol and submachine gun, was given the following instructions: “Each time it is necessary for a prisoner to go to a toilet or wash room, or whenever necessary to open the screen door between guards and prisoners, [the armed guard] must go out on the car platform and lock the door from the outside before the unarmed guard unlocks the inside screen door.”
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Both shifts of guards were to be at their posts whenever the train stopped; when meals were served, extra guards would carry out the actual serving of food; prisoners were to remain in their seats for the duration of the trip except when they needed to go, one man at a time, to the toilet; tear gas guns were to be stored in two cars, and no railroad employees would be allowed inside the cars that carried prisoners.

In early August, before the first special train was scheduled to leave from Atlanta, the Southern Pacific Railway carried fourteen men from McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington State to Alcatraz in a prison car with barred windows. This first shipment of transfers arrived at Alcatraz on August 11 under the supervision of six guards, a lieutenant, and McNeil Island’s warden. It was accomplished with no press or public notice. These prisoners were kept out of sight when Attorney General Cummings, with a contingent of reporters, toured the prison on August 18.

In the meantime, arrangements were made for the much larger Atlanta and Leavenworth shipments. The Bureau of Prisons asked that FBI Director Hoover have several of his agents accompany each shipment, but Hoover denied the request, asserting that his agents were “too busy with other duties.” (In reality, Hoover was of the opinion that using his men as aides in a Bureau of Prisons operation was demeaning and would detract from the FBI’s primary focus.) A medical officer with first-aid supplies was assigned to each train, and after a flurry of letters between Washington, D.C., and the prisons, four more guards per train were added, making a total of twenty on each train.

It was agreed that the arrangement of coaches containing the prisoners would call for them to be located between the sleeper cars (for off-duty staff) with the dining car to be situated in the middle of the train. The armed guards in the sleepers and in the dining car would thus be in positions to back up the armed officers stationed on the platform at each end of the prisoners’ coaches and “provide an ideal disposition of officers for defense against outside interference. An attack from the outside can thus be met by a cross fire from front, rear and center of the train.”
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Director Bates suggested that a pilot locomotive precede each train but this idea was discarded when Warden Zerbst noted that use of a pilot
locomotive would “create wonder and gossip along the line of station agents.” Zerbst assured Bates that the trains would be well protected against the most likely form of attack:

Any organization attempting to liberate our prisoners would not use explosives, but will flag the train to stop and then attempt to attack it. We will be amply prepared to meet such an attempt. There will be two railroad special agents on the locomotive all the way and the Chief Special Agent will be on the train to see that his agents adequately protect the train at service stops.
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On August 19 at 6:00
A.M.
, the first prison train, traveling under the code name “Bamboo Cosmos,” left the Atlanta Penitentiary. It also carried transfers from Lewisburg penitentiary in Pennsylvania, who had been moved by prison bus to Atlanta. Ruey Eaton, who traveled with Al Capone on this train, described the uneventful trip:

On the way out, we sat in the same seats day and night. It was almost unbearably hot. You may remember that this was the year of the great drought in Texas and other Western states when so many cattle died of starvation and lack of water. On the trip out the guards were pretty good to us. We had food, and they changed our leg irons once. The train stopped in every city of any size along our route. . . . Everyone in the crowd wanted to see Al Capone and they would holler out “which one is Al?” Well, it happened that he was not in our car at all but in another one. But we would point out some guy in the crowd, and they were just as pleased as if they had seen Al.
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The trains were scheduled to arrive in the early morning in the Bay Area so that the transfer of inmates to the island could be completed in daylight. Despite the effort to keep all the arrangements secret, the train’s movements had not escaped the notice of news reporters. Officers armed with rifles and submachine guns had been evident at every station on the train’s route, so it was not difficult to track the train’s progress. Reporters were waiting in large numbers when the train passed through stations in the Bay Area early on August 22. Even when the train was diverted from the logical terminal in the East Bay, Oakland’s Southern Pacific Station, to a spur unused for twenty-six years on the west side of the bay, the press was waiting. As the train pulled into the small village of Tiburon, railway agents moved through the crowd of photographers and reporters, confiscating some sixty cameras. The agents and armed guards kept the crowd at a distance as the cars containing the convicts were shunted onto a large railroad barge. The barge was towed out into San Francisco Bay
and escorted to Alcatraz by a Coast Guard cutter with armed sailors standing at its rails. Reporters and photographers had anticipated this move, and they crowded onto private boats and shot photos with telescopic lenses as the barge made its way to the island.

When the barge reached the island’s wharf, the Coast Guard boat positioned itself to block the view of the photographers in their launches. Guards removed the leg irons from the prisoners, handcuffed them in pairs, and marched them along a heavily guarded route through the rear gate and into the yard. One by one, each pair was called into the cell building, where Atlanta Warden A. C. Aderhold and Alcatraz Deputy Warden C. J. Shuttleworth identified the men and assigned them identification numbers and cells. Each prisoner was escorted by a guard to the bathhouse, stripped of clothing, and his orifices examined by a doctor. After bathing, he was given a uniform stamped with his number and then taken to his assigned cell. That afternoon, Johnston wired Bates: “Fifty Three Crates Furniture From Atlanta Received In Good Condition. No Breakage. All Installed.” In the early evening, the prisoners were taken to the mess hall and served their first meal on the Rock.
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