Alcatraz (46 page)

Then the inmates obtained chisels and hammers from Ray, who smuggled them to the kitchen area using a system that involved hiding the items in garbage barrels. A flashlight was obtained from an inmate in the hospital. Quillen and 1700, along with Quillen’s rap partner Jack Pepper and an inmate identified as “T,” began working in the tunnel digging out bricks. The intense heat from the pipes was so debilitating that a man could be down in the tunnel for no longer than twenty minutes, and the
workspace was so claustrophobic that no more than two men at a time could be in the tunnel. These efforts took place while the officer assigned to supervise the kitchen crew was stationed on the floor above during the serving of the evening meal. After working in the tunnel, the men had to be helped out, rushed to a nearby shower to cool down, and their soiled pants and shirts replaced by a clean set of clothes. The dirty clothes were placed in the laundry basket used by all kitchen workers.

While the digging proceeded, other kitchen crew inmates came down to the basement to use a toilet and on numerous occasions saw Quillen and the others climbing in and out of the hole in the floor. With members of the kitchen crew and other convicts in the shops aware of the plot, Quillen knew that even though none of these men would be likely to rat on them, someone might make comments to other convicts who might talk. Eventually, someone did.

One afternoon in mid-April as he returned to the cell house from the yard, Quillen was ordered to go to his cell instead of his job in the kitchen. A few minutes later, guards took him before a disciplinary court comprised of the deputy warden, the captain, a lieutenant, and the kitchen officer. He was charged with attempting to escape and told that the hammers and chisels, which were left each night in the tunnel, had been found wrapped in a sock that had Quillen’s number on it. Quillen knew the claim was false. He told Deputy Warden Miller:

I’m not so dumb that I would get into an escape plot and put something in a sock that had my number on it. . . . Damn, you’ve known me long enough to know that if I was doing that I sure as hell wouldn’t put it in my sock.

Quillen and Pepper—the only ones of the four involved in the plot to be charged—suspected they had been “fingered” by an informant and that the sock story was just a way of hiding that fact.
³⁹

Alcatraz officers found an impressive number of contraband tools in the tunnel: two hammers, two chisels, two knives, two pieces of pipe each eighteen inches long, three homemade keys that were nearly finished and an eighteen-inch steel hook. Quillen and Pepper found it very strange that neither of them was questioned as to how all of this escape paraphernalia had been obtained.
⁴⁰
Quillen was relieved, however, to learn that while he drew nineteen days in solitary confinement followed by indefinite segregation in D block, he did not lose any of his 5,400 days of good time.

Soon after they were locked up in D block, Quillen and Pepper became
involved in a protest. This disruption was initiated by a man who had become well known at Leavenworth for killing a guard in the dining hall. During the years this prisoner had spent in disciplinary segregation, he had begun raising canaries and other birds and writing articles about their diseases. As bird fanciers learned of his studies, they began a campaign to lighten his punishment. The growing publicity and demands for his freedom from persons outside the prison became a major nuisance for the Bureau of Prisons, and in 1942 Robert F. Stroud, without his birds, was sent to Alcatraz. To continue his punishment for killing the officer, he was confined to D block.

On the evening of April 28, 1946, according to the account Quillen provided later, Stroud “started moaning and groaning and carrying on that he was sick” and asked to see a doctor. The guards called a medical technical assistant, who took Stroud’s temperature and told him nothing was wrong. The other inmates in D block demanded that a doctor be sent. When a doctor failed to arrive, the inmates threatened to “tear this place up.” With Stroud “egging” them on, the inmates made good on their threat:

It was probably about midnight by the time we really got around to wrecking the place. You took paper and you wadded it all up in your toilet. You flushed it and pushed all the water out that you could . . . you could make it go over the top and then you dried the bowl out—you got all the water out. You took paper or magazines or whatever the hell you could get that would burn and you wadded it all up and lit with a match and then you flushed it. And when you did the toilet just went—bang! It just shattered. Then you took a big piece of that and broke the sink. Then you cut the mattress up—tore it up. You’d set fire to it and throw it off the tier. Then you’d take your clothes off and you throw them out. There’s water running everywhere. Oh, everybody was freezing their ass off! I was buck naked. I didn’t have nothing on. None of us did. Everything in the cell went.

We thought everyone participated. With everybody saying, “What are you doing, Stroud?” “I’m ripping this to pieces.” “How’re you doing, so and so?” “Well, I’m tearing this place apart.” So the next afternoon about two o’clock they come in. We hadn’t had anything to eat. We are cold and we are miserable and by then all this gung-ho spirit is gone. I don’t know why I took my clothes off and threw my shoes out. Anyhow, they came up and they take you down to court. Well, I had fifteen years good time and I lost half of it. I lost seven and a half years for that caper. I had 5,400 days and I lost 2,700 of them. And you know who didn’t break his cell up? Stroud—the guy that was sick.
⁴¹

The escape attempts that occurred during the war years—none of them successful or resulting in staff injuries—were nonetheless cause for concern in Bureau of Prisons headquarters. All of the attempts involved deficiencies in staff training, supervision, or security procedures, somewhat consistent with J. Edgar Hoover’s comment, “This prison outfit is certainly a mess.” Even though Warden Johnston had lost a number of his experienced officers to the military services and many of the wartime replacements were not regarded as equivalent, the senior administrators—Lieutenant Paul Madigan, Captain Henry Weinhold, Deputy Warden E. J. Miller, and some other senior officers—had continued working on the island through the war years. Responsibility for the security breakdown thus appeared to be located at the top of the staff hierarchy. But because none of the escapes had been successful and the nation’s attention was on foreign, not domestic, issues, sufficient grounds for removing Warden Johnston did not present themselves until another breakout attempt in early May 1946.

On the afternoon of May 2, 1946, one of the most dramatic prison escape plots in American penal history began to unfold on Alcatraz Island. In this bold attempt, a group of prisoners planned to achieve what was said to be impossible: obtain guns behind prison walls, take guards hostage with the weapons, and capture the prison launch to get to the mainland. It was an ingenious but very dangerous plan, requiring precision, luck, daring—and, most of all, speed—if it was to succeed. Instead, the attempt triggered a two-day military siege of the island, with automatic weapons and grenades and military forces deployed against the prisoners. Before it was over, two officers had lost their lives, thirteen had been injured, and three inmates had died from gunshot wounds in the cell house. Two more were later executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin while Alcatraz officers watched.
¹

The escape was planned by four inmates, all serving long sentences: Joe Cretzer, Marvin Hubbard, Miran “Blackie” Thompson, and Bernard Paul Coy. Of these four, Cretzer, Hubbard, and Thompson were experienced escape artists. Coy, younger than the others, nevertheless seems to have been considered the group’s leader. Like most Alcatraz escapees, Coy was not regarded as particularly troublesome or violent. Serving a twenty-six-year sentence for bank robbery, he had accumulated only two disciplinary reports over a nine-year period on the island, one for joining in the September 1935 strike, the other for fighting with another kitchen worker. Coy had served sentences in Wisconsin and Kentucky state prisons and earned a transfer to Alcatraz because the staff at the Atlanta penitentiary had concluded that “he is possessed of superior intelligence, is prison-wise, reckless, impulsive, and erratic . . . the possibility of any reconstructive therapy of a permanent nature is very remote.”
²

Joseph Paul Cretzer had been involved in a series of escapes since his federal sentence began in February 1940. In a breakout attempt with his brother-in-law and crime partner, Arnold Kyle, at McNeil Island (described in
chapter 8
), the two blasted through a prison gate in a dump truck. This was followed by the attempt to break out of a detention cell in the federal courthouse in Tacoma, which resulted in the death of U.S. Marshal A. J. Chitty. In May 1941 Cretzer had participated in the attempt to cut the bars in the model building. His only comment after being caught was “I had a lot of time to do and could not see how I could do it; I might just as well get bumped off attempting escape than stay here until I die.” In May 1944 he had been caught in a conspiracy with Kyle and another prisoner to escape from the disciplinary segregation unit by boring holes in the back walls of their cells. In an interview with the author Kyle said of his partner’s final, fatal attempt to escape: “Cretzer had a life sentence and not much hope of getting out. He was young and when you’re young like that a few years ahead seems like a lifetime away.”

Marvin F. Hubbard was thirty-four years old and illiterate when he arrived on the island in December 1944. The reason for the transfer was his involvement in an escape plot at the Atlanta penitentiary.
³
Two years after his arrival at Alcatraz, he was involved in another escape plan that was never put into effect because an inmate informed on Hubbard and another plotter. The plan had called for constructing a ladder to go over the wall and taking several yard guards as hostages. For his role in this plot, Hubbard forfeited 730 days of good time. A psychiatric evaluation concluded that with an IQ of 65, he was “definitely on the defective side of the scale” and that an impulsive nature caused him to give “little heed to the consequences of his misdeeds until it is too late to rectify them.”

Before he arrived at Leavenworth in June 1945 to begin a ninety-nine-year sentence for kidnapping and motor vehicle theft, Miran “Blackie” Thompson had eight successful escapes on his record—five from a boys’ reformatory, two from the Alabama state prison at Kilby, and one from a county jail. Thompson had also served a one-year sentence at Atlanta and a two-year term at the state prison in Huntsville, Texas. At Leavenworth, a psychiatric evaluation found that Thompson “has no insight into the seriousness of his aggressive criminal activity and sees himself as a victim of police and the law.” The classification committee unanimously concluded that Thompson’s transfer to Alcatraz “would appear to be justified” because of his “long sentence,” his “record of eight escapes,” and the psychiatrist’s conclusion that he was “a desperate individual who would take any opportunity to try to escape.”
⁴

Clarence Victor Carnes, one of the first convicts to be released from his cell by the others, and Samuel Shockley, who was being held in isolation in D block, were also identified as being closely involved in this breakout attempt. At sixteen, Carnes had shot and killed an attendant during a gas station robbery. He received a life sentence and was sent first to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and subsequently transferred to the state reformatory.
⁵
Carnes received a ninety-nine-year federal prison term for kidnapping and escaping from the custody of the U.S. marshal and arrived at Leavenworth on April 24, 1945, at age eighteen. The psychiatric evaluation described him as “a desperate, cruel, aggressive individual who would not stop at anything to gain his own end. It is believed that he will find it impossible to make a good adjustment here. . . . He knows that . . . [he will] have to spend all or most of his life in this prison and in the state prison and will remain a desperate man for years.”

As noted in
chapter 8
, Samuel Shockley was erroneously identified as a participant in Cretzer, Kyle, and Barkdoll’s May 1941 escape attempt, but in 1946 the staff still believed he had been involved. Because of his emotional and erratic behavior, combined with his “mentally deficient” IQ of 54, staff vacillated between regarding Shockley as mentally ill or as a troublesome and potentially dangerous malingerer. He was described by a fellow inmate as being “batty as a loon.”
⁶
Four days before the break began on May 2, Shockley participated in the general disturbance in the disciplinary segregation unit described at the end of the previous chapter, in which fourteen inmates in D block trashed their cells. Shockley smashed the toilet and washbowl in his cell, set his bedding and clothing on fire, and tore the clothing hooks off the wall.