Alcatraz (51 page)

Many officers criticized the lengthy and indiscriminant firing of bullets and shells into the cell house during the siege and were clearly angered by the fact that this “friendly fire” had killed one officer and injured several others. Philip Bergen focused on staff carelessness:

We knew who killed Stites, and we thanked our lucky stars that he [guard on roof] didn’t have his rifle leveled when we went through that same damn place that Stites got killed a few seconds later, he coulda got us too. What was supposed to have been a pushover turned out to be a pretty dangerous operation, although we didn’t have sense to realize it was dangerous until it was about over. It was dangerous for all the wrong reasons. There was no gun in D block and no shots were fired from D block, not at that point. . . . The guys in the segregation block told me later that they chased
Coy out of there because every time he fired a shot they would get about a thousand shots coming back from the outside.

They were scared to death that they were going to get hit, they were all at the back of the cells behind as many mattresses as they could pile up in front of them. Actually nobody in that block was hit, nobody was injured in any way, shape or manner. It’s incredible. . . .

All the precautions that they set up for keeping contraband out of the cell house are easily rendered null and void by some dumb or inattentive officer, and we had enough of them to fill a barrel. You ask how you do it? Well, you put a false bottom in the garbage can. You send a push broom down to the shop to be repaired and you hollow out a place in the top part of the push broom where it comes together and you put your contraband in there. There’s as many different ways of smuggling contraband in and out as there is of identifying contraband. And no matter how carefully you indoctrinate these [officers], the incidence of people who don’t give a damn or who are careless or indifferent or whatever, will always confound you and defeat you. So that’s how contraband got into the cell house, piece by piece.

Robert Baker, one of the injured hostages, made similar points:

Everybody was shooting. There were guards that got buckshot in their rear ends—the convicts didn’t have any shotguns, so how’d that happen? Stites was shot getting into the west gun gallery . . . it came from the roof. The direction of the bullet that went through him, was from the guy on the roof. . . . The same with the two men . . . that had [been hit by] the buckshot—that was caused from the roof shooting down into anything. . . . This fella Burch who was in the west gun gallery, I’d heard that he said he fought for his guns, he fought this Coy, who was a little bitty man. He said he fought for his life to keep the guns from going down into the cell house. So he come into visit me [in the hospital] and I was laying there with a cast from [my waist] down. They’d found that other bullet hole, patched me up, and I was in no pain. So I looked him up and down and I said, “Where’s all the black eyes and busted nose if you fought for your guns?” He had fifty rounds of 30.06 and then he had forty rounds for the .45 automatic. I says, “Where’s all your hits?”

And if Stucker had told Fish [in the control room] that the guy had a gun, that would have made a big difference. We would have tackled the whole thing from a different angle. We’d have gone outside and looked in instead of going in naked, with no gun.

Finally, officers observed that escapes would always be possible as long as ingenuity and careful observation on the part of inmates were combined with lax attitudes, regular routines, and carelessness on the part of the custodial staff. According to George Boatman,

[The inmates] spent all their time thinking of ways to escape . . . they never quit. They were always looking . . . they watched the guard if he switched his routine, if he had a little weakness, they would capitalize on it. That was the story in that breakout of the Model Shop when Cline was killed. They noticed the guard in the hill tower, the one that looked down [on the model building], every afternoon as soon as the inmates went in, he went to the toilet, and there was a curtain you could pull around so that you’d be hidden from view. [The inmates] noticed that.

Boatman went on to give grudging praise to the conspirators:

This escape was ingenious; the inmates looked and looked for one little weakness and took advantage of it. Coy found that somebody had the brilliant idea that those bars of the gun gallery ought to be dusted and he was the cell house orderly so they sent him up there to dust the bars and he found that place where they didn’t join and then somebody observed that Burch went over to D block and visited every afternoon and that was the two things they needed.

Staff mistakes aside, the breakout attempt nevertheless demonstrated the difficulty of actually overcoming the entire range of security measures on the island. Although the prolonged military-style assault left two officers and three inmates dead, several officers seriously wounded, and the prison badly damaged, no prisoner had succeeded in getting off the island.

On June 19, 1946, a federal grand jury indicted Shockley, Thompson, and Carnes for “committing murder on a federal reservation,” assaulting federal officers, and violating the federal Escape Act. The defendants pleaded not guilty in federal court in July; their cases were bound over for trial in the fall. The court appointed attorneys for Carnes and Shockley and finally allowed Ernest Spagnoli to defend Thompson. Spagnoli tried to meet with Carnes and Thompson but was rebuffed by the federal district court and by Warden Johnston. His request was referred to Director Bennett, who after consultation with the attorney general’s office, denied Spagnoli permission to visit the island or to bring members of the press with him. On June 21, however, a district court judge ordered Warden Johnston to allow Spagnoli to visit Thompson.

Meanwhile, James Bennett asked the attorney general to designate a
special attorney to handle the prosecution because, in his opinion, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, Frank J. Hennessy, “has not been successful in the prosecution of Alcatraz cases.” Bennett had not forgotten the success of inmate Henry Young five years earlier in overturning the government’s case against him and putting the prison on trial instead. BOP headquarters did not want to provide another opportunity to the prisoners and critics of Alcatraz to provoke more calls to close down operations on the island.

As the date for the trial drew near, the
San Francisco Examiner
described the defense strategy. For the Bureau of Prisons it had a familiar sound, but Attorney Hennessy went ahead with the prosecution.

ATTORNEYS PLAN PROBE OF ALCATRAZ BRUTALITY

DEFENSE COUNSEL FOR RIOT TRIO
SLATE EXPOSURE OF PENAL TREATMENT

Sam Shockley, the Alcatraz convict scheduled to go to trial November 20 with two fellow inmates on charges of murder, may never reach the prosecution stage. Defense counsel for the trio, convinced that the rigors of confinement on the Rock have “washed out” Shockley’s mind, plan to request that a court-appointed psychiatrist examine the Oklahoma kidnapper-robber before the case goes to trial. . . . Meanwhile, court appointed Defense Lawyers Archer Zamloch (for Carnes), William A. Sullivan (for Shockley), and Ernest Spagnoli and Aaron Vinkler (for Thompson), it was learned, are prepared to probe the whole Alcatraz system “down to its roots” once the trial begins. Tentative plans call for parading a virtual “Who’s Who” of the nation’s onetime toughest criminals, including one set of witnesses to “alibi” the roles of Thompson, Carnes, and Shockley in the riot, and another set to testify to these defense allegations: 1. That “psychological brutality” has left many inmates “stir crazy” and has plunged others into actual insanity. One convict, going over a tentative witness list for defense counsel, crossed off 60 percent of the names. “You can’t use these guys, they’re insane,” the convict, Ray Stevenson, told defense lawyers Spagnoli and Vinkler. 2. Failure of a prison doctor to treat six inmates in D block on the night of April 27, after they claimed to have become ill from the food they were served, produced a demonstration in which fourteen block members wrecked their cells.
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Among those who would be called, the newspapers reported, would be Floyd Hamilton, Thomas Robinson, and George Kelly, all former stars on the FBI’s list of “public enemies,” along with the “Birdman,” Robert Stroud. Other witnesses for the convicts would include Whitey Franklin, who had killed a guard himself, Harmon Waley, one of the prison’s major
troublemakers, and Ted Walters, who had also tried to escape from the Rock. Even J. Edgar Hoover was impressed: “This will be some aggregation if it is ever assembled. See that we play no part in ‘security.’”
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But the inmates, the press, and the critics of Alcatraz would be disappointed if they expected a replay of the defense strategy employed in the Henry Young trial. Judge Louis Goodman excused the jury from the courtroom and then warned the attorneys for the accused that convict witnesses would be allowed to testify only to issues in the case and not to “extraneous matters,” such as discipline on the island, the management of the prison, or comparisons of Alcatraz to other penitentiaries.

The trial began on November 20, with rumors persisting that the defense would put witnesses on the stand who would provide alibis for the defendants and “expose the brutalities that caused the men to want to escape.”
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The prosecution began with testimony from guard Ernest Lageson, who explained how he had written the names of six convicts on the wall of the hostage cell, names that identified the defendants in addition to the dead ringleaders. Cecil Corwin and other officers ended their testimony by leaving the witness stand, walking over, and placing a finger on each of the defendants as participants in the revolt. Guard Joseph Burdette explained how the key to the yard had been hidden from Coy:

When Miller walked into the cell [where Burdette had already been placed], his thumbs were tied together behind him. I asked Carnes, “Alright to untie Miller’s hands?” Carnes said, “Yes” and I untied him. Mr. Miller then gave me key 107. That was the key to the outside yard. The seat in the cell had been let down against the side of the wall. I hid the key behind it.
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Lt. Joseph Simpson testified that Thompson, with the rifle, was the convict who took him hostage, and Burdette said that Carnes looked into the cell after Cretzer had fired at the hostages and said, “They’re all dead—let’s go.”

Deputy Warden Edward Miller had a difficult time on the stand. Defense attorney Archer Zamloch asked him if he was “the most hated and feared man on Alcatraz” and if, “on the second day of the Alcatraz breakout, he and another guard had taken Carnes out of his cell, stripped him naked, and incarcerated him in a small storage room.” Miller denied taking such action, but Zamloch demanded, “Didn’t you, on the third
tier of the cell block, mercilessly beat and kick Carnes, and isn’t it a fact that you put this knife [Miller’s pocket knife] against his throat and said, ‘I’ll put a scar on you here that you’ll have the rest of your life’?” Miller replied angrily, “No, I treated Carnes just like any other prisoner.” “Then the Lord help the prisoners,” replied the attorney.
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Captain Henry Weinhold was brought to the courtroom from the hospital at the Presidio. The jury was told that he was being retired from the prison service as a result of having been shot through the chest. Weinhold testified that Cretzer had fired at him just after the prison siren sounded and that Shockley had yelled, “There goes the siren. Go ahead and kill them,” after which Cretzer shot him.

The defense introduced Shockley’s mental health into the proceedings. Seven inmates, including Henry Young, Louis Fleisch, and Whitey Franklin testified that they considered Shockley to be “stir crazy.” Shockley took the stand and told the jury that he received “radio voices” that “stayed on all night” communicating “evil words,” telling him that he had been born on another planet, and that he was subjected to mental control by false accusations.
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Spagnoli asked Thomas Robinson, a former Public Enemy no. 1, about the mental condition of prisoners, and Robinson began to reply that Alcatraz was so badly managed that men were being driven crazy. The judge, however, cut his testimony short, warning defense attorneys that if more attempts to introduce “extraneous matters” were made, no further inmate witnesses would be allowed.

Henry Young, identified by the defense as a man who had spent “nine years in isolation at Alcatraz reading and studying psychiatry,” testified that he had been helping Shockley with his mental problems: “I told Sam the sadistic environment in the institution was the direct cause of insanity here.”
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The prosecution objected to this line of questioning, but Judge Goodman allowed it. Then attorney Spagnoli, co-counsel for Thompson, angered the judge by “demanding a court order that Warden James A. Johnston produce Alcatraz hospital records to show how many convicts had gone insane.”
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Eight of Clarence Carnes’s fellow prisoners tried to help him after he followed Thompson in the dock. James Audett told the jury that he was working in the kitchen area when Coy and Hubbard came in, and that as Coy began shooting through the windows at guard towers, he described Carnes, “as a puppy tailing the heels of the tough guys, who nevertheless pushed Hubbard when he tried to shoot the deputy warden as Miller ran back down the cell block main corridor.” Audett claimed that
Hubbard was angry with Carnes but did nothing about it. He further testified that Carnes was with him in the kitchen when shots were fired at the hostage guards. Carnes took the stand himself, claiming that he didn’t want to hurt anyone but did want to escape from the island through “walled-up tunnels of the ancient Spanish dungeons.” He admitted that he saw Shockley strike several of the guards, but that Shockley was running around, talking to himself, and Hubbard told him, “That’s Sam. He’s crazy.” Carnes concluded his testimony by asserting that he had told Officer Lageson to lie low, and that he saw other officers breathing—“some were groaning”—but told Coy, “They’re all dead.”
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