Alcatraz (38 page)

After years of hearing Alcatraz characterized as this country’s version of Devil’s Island, the public and the press were predisposed to interpret acts of violence on the island as a product of a repressive regime that drove men mad. Thus when one prisoner killed another in December 1940, the ground was well prepared for Alcatraz and its officials to be questioned, along with the perpetrator, Henry Young, in the trial that followed.

In the prison tailor shop on a Tuesday morning in early December 1940, Henry Young began walking briskly in the direction of Rufe McCain, attracting the attention of several other inmates. George Kelly noticed the intense expression on Young’s face and, remembering that Young had attempted to stab McCain some months earlier, called out, “Rufe! Rufe!” McCain turned around, but not soon enough to defend himself; Young was already next to him and drove a prison-made knife deep into Mc-Cain’s abdomen.

Senior officer Frank Mach was giving instructions to a new guard when he heard the commotion behind him. As he turned, he saw Young, knife in hand, standing over McCain, who was lying on the floor bleeding from the stomach. Mach ran over, grabbed Young’s arm and pinned it to his side until the other guard wrested the weapon from Young’s hand. The knife, a blade taken from a plane used in the prison’s furniture shop, had been sharpened to a point at one end; tape was wrapped around the other end of the blade so that it could be held without cutting the user’s hand. The officers searched Young and found a second knife stuck in a crude scabbard attached to his belt. As he was escorted out of the tailor shop, Young muttered to no one in particular, “I hope I killed the son of a bitch.” McCain gasped, “I think he got me good.” Other guards arrived with a stretcher and transported McCain up the hill to the prison hospital.

While McCain was on the operating table, Deputy Warden Ed Miller asked him what happened. McCain replied, “Looks like I got stabbed!” Miller asked, “Who did it?” to which McCain responded, “Why ask me? You know the son-of-a-bitch that did it; he did a fair job too.” McCain refused to make any further statements.
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The doctor on duty worked to close the gaping wound, but McCain lapsed into unconsciousness and died.

Deputy Warden Miller interrogated Henry Young as soon as he was brought up from the tailor shop to the cell house. Asked why he attacked McCain, Young replied, “They were fixing a trap to get me and I sprung
the trap before they got me.” He refused to identify the persons he referred to as “they,” and after stating that he “found” the knives in the workshops, Young would answer no further questions. He was placed in solitary confinement.

Four and a half months later, on April 15, 1941, Henry Young’s murder trial opened in the federal district court of Northern California. After the jury had been impaneled and the proceedings initiated, it became evident that something unusual was going to occur. Henry Young was in the dock, but because the judge had allowed a novel defense strategy, Alcatraz was going to be on trial as well.

Before the trial began, Judge Michael Roche asked Young if he had legal counsel; Young replied, “I have a preference in lawyers. The more youthful my lawyers are the better. I should like to have two attorneys of no established reputation.”
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When the newspapers reported Young’s request, Judge Roche was said to have been deluged with offers from young lawyers asking to be assigned to the case. Roche selected Sol Abrams, a former assistant United States attorney in his early forties, and James MacInnis, twenty-seven, only four years out of Stanford Law School.

Abrams and MacInnis, after a short meeting with Young, announced that Young was going to plead not guilty. They also said they would offer no evidence to prove either self-defense or traditional insanity. What they would seek to prove was that Young was in a “psychological coma” when he stabbed McCain—a kind of temporary insanity brought on by his confinement in the toughest prison in the world. The issue in the case, Abrams and MacInnis asserted, would be the psychological consequences of being locked up at Alcatraz.
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To provide evidence for this unusual defense, the attorneys asked the court to allow two dozen convicts to be brought over from the island to give testimony, even though none of them had witnessed the assault on McCain; they would be asked on the stand to describe life on the Rock.

The judge granted the request, setting the stage for one of this country’s most sensational trials involving penitentiary life. Not only would the courtroom drama include a cast of notorious bank robbers, kidnappers, and escape artists, but for the first time the outside world would be able to hear about life on Alcatraz directly from the mouths of its inhabitants. The Bureau of Prisons was about to begin paying the price for its policy of denying the press any access to the prison and creating the “air of mystery” over the island.

When Judge Roche agreed to allow testimony from twenty-two convicts
about conditions at Alcatraz, reporters covering the trial apparently assumed that testimony given in a court of law—even testimony from some of the country’s most sophisticated and notorious lawbreakers—would be truthful. With this naive assumption in place, the trial began.

Warden Johnston was the first witness called by the prosecution. He was asked to explain the types of punitive measures used at the prison. He reported that the cells in the solitary confinement unit had no lights and no beds, but that mattresses were issued at night, and if the occupants behaved themselves, they received a single blanket. As to the diet, Johnston testified: “It’s the usual rule now that men in solitary get three meals a day, but there was a time when they got only two, there was a time when they got only one a day, and there was a time when they got only one meal in three days.”

Defense counsel MacInnis queried Johnston to establish the length of time Young had been in the isolation unit: “If I said he [Young] had never been taken out between September 1938 and November 1941, would you say I was correct?” Johnston replied, “I wouldn’t dispute it” but later commented that he thought that Young had been removed from isolation for a period of “30 to 35 minutes” a year.
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Questioning witnesses about the use of lower solitary was, as the Bureau of Prisons should have expected, an important part of the effort by the defense to create in the jurors’ minds a picture of a sadistic staff brutalizing prisoners for minor breaches of prison rules. On the witness stand, Warden Johnston stated that “the so-called dungeons” had not been used since early 1938. He did admit that “persons confined in the dungeons would not have any light” and that because the dungeon cells “were not equipped with the usual plumbing equipment,” prisoners were “furnished with only a bucket.” When he took his turn on the witness stand, Deputy Warden Miller denied knowledge of any “Spanish dungeons” but confirmed the use of the eight basement cells. Asked if it was true that the buckets used as toilets had not been emptied “for as long as nine days,” Miller answered no but entered into the court record the fact that Henry Young had never been confined in these cells.
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The twenty-two convicts selected by Henry Young to rebut the testimony of Johnston, Miller, and other prison officials came from a much wider pool of men anxious to testify for the defense. A story in the
San
Francisco Chronicle
under the headline “Hard Rock Criminals to Attend Trial” framed the upcoming testimony in a way that supported the defense strategy:

For the first time in the grim history of Alcatraz some of the most savage and brutish criminals behind bars will be taken off the Rock and brought into a federal courtroom here. Heavily guarded, bound with chains and manacles, they will be taken off one by one . . . and grilled by defense attorney James Martin MacInnis. Through them MacInnis will try to probe the sullen whirlpools of passion that, this time, blazed into murder, and the timeless attrition that frays the minds of men into madness on the Rock.
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Thus began a parade to the witness stand of Alcatraz cons, some grim and subdued, some smiling and confident. They all took the oath to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about their experiences and those of the other unfortunates confined on the Rock. With sentences of twenty-five years, fifty years, and life, these men were hardly fearful of a puny two- or three-year conviction on perjury charges. The opportunity to take the boat trip over to the city and testify in the trial was a welcome break from the prison routine and carried with it the added bonus of being able to crucify the prison staff. Abrams and MacInnis helped this process along by asking leading and provocative questions of their very willing witnesses. The prosecution registered strenuous objections and Judge Roche often ruled the questions out of order—but the jury and the reporters listened as the inmates answered them anyway.

An important witness for the defense was kidnapper and longtime troublemaker Harmon Waley. By the time of the Young trial, Waley had spent not days, weeks, or even months in the various isolation units at Alcatraz, he had been locked up for years. He had been sent to a dungeon cell and had been subjected to every other form of punishment, from isolation in total darkness on a diet of bread and water to being forcibly restrained in a straitjacket in the prison hospital while food was forced down his throat. On the stand Waley listened carefully to a series of leading questions by defense attorney MacInnis. U.S. Attorney Hennessy objected to each question, but before Judge Roche could rule on the admissibility of the questions, Waley provided the answers in a loud voice. “You wait until I rule on the question,” admonished Roche, but Waley continued to answer the questions immediately, finally turning to the angry judge and asking “What can you do? I’ve already got forty-five years—are you going to slap my wrists or something?”
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The
San Francisco Examiner
described Waley’s performance before a courtroom crowded to capacity with spectators who listened “wide-eyed to the first sizable chunks of Alcatraz local color.”

In every way the star of the day’s courtroom performance was Waley, tall and not unhandsome 30-year-old convict who is “doing” 45 years. It is for some reason not discernible to lay observers, he was permitted to testify on matters that other witnesses have touched upon only through the “bootleg” method of answering above the objections of Frank Hennessy, United States Attorney. Waley made the most of his chance. From the very outset, when he announced he has been in isolation for the last nine months, to the finish, when he sneaked over a response indicating he expected to be punished for his testimony, he was of obvious comfort to defense counsel. At some length and with considerable enjoyment, he related that he had been confined to the Alcatraz dungeon twice. Once, he related, he “made” the dungeon because he was sick, and applied for medical treatment, and was told he would receive medicine later; he insisted on aspirin at once; he was told he’d get his medicine later. “So,” he recounted, grinning in retrospect, “I told the doctor what to do with his aspirin and was thrown in the dungeon.” Then his mood changed abruptly. He became grave and obviously bitter as he was asked if he was ever beaten; words rushed out in a torrent over the objection of Hennessy, and everybody heard his answer, “Yes, I was beaten and taken to the hospital and put in a straight jacket and was half crazy.” The court ordered that answer stricken. He was grinning again, however, as Sol A. Abrams of defense counsel inquired if he had ever heard McCain discuss Young. . . .[He answered that] he saw McCain one day shortly after McCain was released from isolation, and congratulated him. . . . The witness testified “[McCain] said Young had snitched on their escape attempt. He was very angry and said he intended to kill Young just as soon as Young got out of isolation.” With language admittedly supplied by Abrams, Waley also testified that McCain had spread word about the prison concerning alleged depravity involving him and Young.
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The ability of MacInnis and Abrams to lead their witnesses, combined with their witnesses’ desire to be led, produced a string of highly sensational story lines in San Francisco newspapers, most of them favorable to the defense side:

Secrets of the “Rock” Told Death Jury: Details of “Solitary” Revealed by Warden (
San Francisco Examiner
, April 17, 1941)

Brutality at Rock Charged: Young Beaten by Alcatraz Guards, Witness Declares (
San Francisco News
, April 23, 1941)

Witnesses in Alcatraz Case Fear Reprisal (
San Francisco News
, April 24, 1941)

In making the case that confinement at Alcatraz was driving men to acts of desperation, the defense attorneys elicited testimony from the convict witnesses that guards had beaten inmates so severely that in one case a man’s skull was fractured, that some prisoners lay for days in solitary without medical attention, and that others resorted to the ultimate escape—suicide. The will to endure crumbled for some inmates, according to inmate Samuel Berlin, who testified that he knew of thirty men who had been transferred to the federal prison hospital at Springfield, Missouri. These men had been driven insane at Alcatraz, said Berlin, due to a “fear psychosis” produced by the brutal beatings administered by guards and by Deputy Warden Miller. Although U.S. Attorney Hennessy objected to almost every question asked of Berlin—objections that were sustained by Judge Roche—the answers were heard clearly by the jury and reported by the press. Defense attorney Abrams led Berlin through a series of inflammatory questions about lower solitary: