Alcatraz (42 page)

Some time, some day, there will be a serious outbreak which will be possible because it is planned with full knowledge of all the Island’s protective devices, including the routine involving use and storage of the launch and custodial routine in the prison area. I think that the Bureau should insist on establishment of a different procedure and . . . I would recommend we give positive orders that the Warden break up his own routine. At the present time the prisoners could almost bank on knowing where the Warden would be at any given time and it creates a ridiculous situation to have the principal officers of the institution taken into custody by the inmates.
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A few months later, in September, another escape attempt did take place, this time a one-man affair. John R. Bayless had begun his years in the federal prison system with a two-year sentence to the federal reformatory at El Reno, Oklahoma. After the staff received a report that he had become active in planning an escape, he was transferred to Leavenworth. Conditionally released in July 1937, he was soon back for a twenty-five-year term for robbing the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Mansfield, Missouri, of $606 and stealing an automobile at gunpoint from a garage attendant. After he was identified as plotting with three other Leavenworth inmates to secure knives, overpower the cell house guard, and take the associate warden hostage, he was shipped to Alcatraz at age twenty-two.

At Alcatraz, Bayless did quiet time and earned an assignment working with another inmate outside the walls. The two gathered refuse and garbage from various points around the island and, accompanied by an officer, trucked the debris to an incinerator. On September 15, 1941, a supervising officer noticed that when his crew and the inmate stevedores
who worked on the dock lined up for a count, one man was missing. The control room was notified and the escape siren sounded. As one of the dock officers ran in the direction where the missing prisoner had last been seen, he encountered Bayless on the road dressed in his underwear, soaking wet, and bleeding from abrasions on his knee and feet. Bayless had simply walked away from the work area, climbed down, and stumbled over the slippery rocks until he reached the water’s edge. Once in the bay he was so shocked by the frigid temperature of the water that he quickly concluded that he could not survive very long; he swam back to shore, climbed over the rocks, crawled up the hillside, and made his way to the road. Bayless was sent to isolation in the newly remodeled D block and tried by a good time forfeiture board. The board found him guilty of escape and took away 3,000 days of statutory good time.
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The entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941 altered operations at Alcatraz in a variety of ways. On the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, Warden Johnston set up a blackboard in the yard to keep inmates informed about the war in the Pacific and in Europe. It relayed headlines from local newspapers, such as “Singapore in Grave Danger—Japs only 48 Miles Away and Striking Hard” and “RAF Smash at Axis and Slow Them in Their Drive in Libya.”
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A number of guards were called to military duty, and concerns were raised about the location of the prison near the entrance to one of the major harbors on the West Coast. A submarine net was installed to protect the entrance to the bay, and large numbers of Coast Guard vessels and navy ships from the nearby Treasure Island airbase began regular patrols in the waters around the island.

The inmates began to worry that Japanese planes might bomb the prison along with everything else in San Francisco Bay, and that in such an attack they would be left to die, locked up in their cells. In June 1942 four antiaircraft guns were brought to the island. One was mounted on the roof of the old model building, two were located on the cell house roof, and the fourth on the roof of the guards’ apartment building. Locating these guns over their heads did little to assuage inmates’ or employees’ apprehensions about an air raid. The guns were removed in July 1944.

Like other federal prisons, Alcatraz took on war-related work, which included doing the laundry for many military posts throughout the Bay
Area and manufacturing rubber mats and cargo nets for naval vessels. In a report on the federal prisons’ role in the war effort, the Bureau of Prisons noted, in an attempt to demonstrate the patriotism of even the most desperate and “unregenerate” federal prisoners, that Alcatraz convicts had purchased $3,250 in war bonds, donated blood, and “stepped up their industrial activities to meet the [laundry] needs of the many governmental agencies in the vicinity.” In addition to describing Alcatraz’s war contributions, the Bureau also demonstrated some defensiveness about the Rock:

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Alcatraz is no “haven of the damned,” no American Devil’s Island. It is an institution with a necessarily strict regimen and discipline. It does house criminals whose past acts classify them as vicious and whose long sentences render them classifiable as desperate. But in all other ways and aside from the restraints necessary to the custodial security of such men, Alcatraz shares all of the benefits and amenities to be found in the other federal institutions. The food is good. The inmates receive humane and understanding treatment. There are opportunities for recreation and facilities for education and intellectual advancement. And practically any man on Alcatraz may earn his return, by good conduct and proper adjustment, to institutions where the strictures are less rigorous. . . . Alcatraz exists not only as an incarceratorium for the vicious but it, no less than the other federal prisons, functions as a rehabilitative agency, for few men—even those regarded as “the worst”—are completely unregenerate, and, with increasing frequency, “corrected incorrigibles” are transferred from “the Rock” to be given new opportunities in the other prisons of the system.

The report also noted that in case of an attack on the Bay Area by Japanese planes, plans had been made to move the inmates into “virtually impregnable air raid shelters”—in other words, the cisterns and dungeons below the floor of the cell house. It concluded by observing that as war was unfortunately the best means of dealing with “international thuggery,” Alcatraz was the best means available to deal with domestic thuggery.
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The presence of military personnel on the island and the flotilla of ships guarding the bay added an additional layer to the prison’s security. While the Alcatraz staff was feeling more confident and most inmates were doing their part in the war effort, a handful of inmates made their plans to take advantage of the distractions of the war to take an early, unauthorized leave from the island.

The first of these escape attempts involved Rufus “Whitey” Franklin,
a central figure in the failed 1938 model building breakout. Convicted of the murder of Officer Cline, Franklin had received a life sentence to go along with his original thirty-year term. He had lost 3,600 days of good time and was living on a permanent basis in D block disciplinary segregation, where his “adjustment” was not good. On one occasion, he had assaulted an officer who opened his cell door to retrieve a book, and on another occasion a brass plunger rod, sharpened at one end, was found in his cell. But by August 1942 Franklin was being allowed out of his cell to do cleanup jobs and to help serve meals to other inmates.
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As he did so, he worked out an escape plan: cut several of the bars that enclosed the gun gallery (also called a gun cage), crawl inside it at the ground-floor level, climb the stairs to the second floor, and then surprise the armed guard who patrolled D block when that officer came back through a door after supervising inmate movements in the main cell house. The plan fell apart when an officer discovered him sawing away with a file on a gun-gallery bar.

Franklin’s abortive attempt did not alert staff to this potential flaw in the cell house security system. No effort was made to cover the bars of the gallery on the floor level of D block with heavy wire mesh or metal plates to reduce the risk that an inmate could get inside the gun cage. And no change was made in the procedure that allowed the gun gallery guard to leave either the main cell house or D block unsupervised when he was on the other side of the door that separated the two units. (These weaknesses would prove deadly in May 1946.)

By 1943 the new industries building, set against the hillside on which the prison perched, housed almost all of the workshops. The old model building remained in place, however, with the guard tower in operation and the anti-aircraft gun emplacement manned by soldiers on the roof. The second and third floors of the building were no longer used, but several operations continued on the first floor. Three inmates worked in the carpenter shop; the paint shop employed two inmates; and in the old mat shop two men were assigned to make concrete blocks for use in building retaining walls at various points around the island.

The men assigned to make the concrete blocks were Floyd Hamilton, who had escaped detection as a participant in the May 1941 breakout attempt, and forty-three-year-old Fred Hunter, who was serving a twenty-five-year term. Hunter’s hands were twisted from arthritis, and he
weighed only 118 pounds. A staff report had stated that his body was “frail to almost childlike proportions” and that he would be unable to undertake “swimming or any strenuous exercise.”
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Despite his poor physical condition, Hunter joined Floyd Hamilton in plotting a breakout that would entail navigating the rough waters of San Francisco Bay.

The model building was still the best location from which to launch an escape. It remained as a large obstacle between the bay and the sight lines of the guard towers on the hill above and the road leading to the cell house, and it backed up to the edge of the cliffs. A daylight escape attempt from the building in the absence of heavy fog was considered too risky—not only was there the guard on the roof, but now there were soldiers with weapons and the entire harbor was filled with naval boats scurrying back and forth, and at night picket boats with floodlights illuminated the entire area along the submarine net. Escape would require a heavy cover of fog to have any chance of succeeding.

Two other men who worked in the Model Shop—Harold Brest and James Boarman—were let in on the carefully conceived plot to overcome all these obstacles. Brest was serving a life sentence for kidnapping, along with two concurrent twenty-five-year terms for interstate transportation of a stolen automobile.
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The length of his sentence had been the reason for Harold Brest’s transfer to Alcatraz and it was also the reason he was now ready to try to reach the bay.

James Boarman, serving twenty years for bank robbery, transportation of stolen securities, and interstate auto theft, was a volatile and aggressive prisoner. When sentenced in Owensboro, Kentucky, for his offenses, the U. S. marshal had stationed fifteen officers in the courtroom as a precaution; when his sentence was pronounced his mother started screaming and Boarman began fighting with court personnel in an attempt to reach a door fifteen feet away. Deputies grabbed him immediately but his brother rushed in to help him, and the two fought until they were subdued and dragged cursing and shouting from the courtroom. The U.S. marshal wrote to the attorney general to warn that Boarman was “the most desperate prisoner we have ever had in our custody” and that he intended after serving his time to “come back and kill everyone connected with the Federal Court.”
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At Leavenworth, Boarman was soon identified as a “leader of the younger radical element” and within a few months he was on his way west. When he arrived at Alcatraz he was twenty-one years old.

With Boarman providing energy and enthusiasm and Hamilton providing experience, the four men began their preparations for an early
departure. Remembering that the drill had been too slow to cut the bars in his breakout attempt two years earlier, Hamilton looked for the parts of a better cutting device in a pile of burned out motors and other junk piled near the Model Shop. He found a motor “that looked like it was burned all to pieces” but took it back to the shop and succeeded in getting it to run. Hamilton and his fellow plotters then convinced an inmate in the machine shop to steal three “regular cutting wheels” that could “go through any kind of steel,” and from an inmate in the paint shop they received “some paint and putty.”
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The guard who supervised the men was gone during regular intervals each day, but he counted the inmates in the shop every thirty minutes. Between his rounds, the inmates worked on cutting the bars. To keep the guard and soldiers on the roof from noticing the noise, they would “get Harvey Bailey in the carpenter shop to run some lumber through the planer and that’d kill the noise.” Knowing that swimming all the way to the mainland wasn’t possible, they also began making flotation devices that Hamilton referred to as “surfboards.” Using scrap lumber that Bailey planed down to a quarter of an inch in thickness, and watertight glue from the paint shop, they put together three surfboards with a three-inch air space in each, a twelve-foot board for Hamilton and Hunter, and a six-foot board each for Boarman and Brest. The plan was not to float on top of the boards, but to hang underneath them in “cradles” made of copper wire. A hole was bored in each board through which a rubber hose was inserted so they could breathe under water. Inside the board they stored army clothes and shoes. Finally they attached wooden paddles for rowing. Then they painted the boards blue to match the color of the water, using paint provided by an inmate in the paint shop.

Instead of trying to hide the boards from the guards, the would-be escapees camouflaged them by hanging them on the wall as shelves on which pieces of hardware were placed according to size and type. Recalled Hamilton, “Captain Weinhold came by one day and seen all them fittings and bolts and nuts and everything and the sizes and he complimented us on the neat job we were doing. And that was our sailboat home.”