Alcatraz (59 page)

For the next three years Grove continued to accumulate misconduct reports for offenses such as shouting and beating on his cell bars, using abusive language, and possessing and passing contraband items. In June 1953 he sent another letter to the NAACP complaining about conditions in Alcatraz as they related to “colored inmates”:

Dear Sir:

This is not an appeal to secure my release but rather a letter explaining existing conditions in Alcatraz as they relate to colored inmates. . . . From May 1st to 13th I was subject to the most inhuman, brutal treatment ever thought up by prison officials. I had no bed, shoes, the windows were kept open, the heat turned off, and what food I had was not fit for a dog. . . . At this date I am still treated worse than any inmate, I do not have sheets for my bed . . . books or magazines to read, no smoking tobacco, for seven months I have had no sun or fresh air. . . . Congress approved these things, even for a colored man.

In regard to his attack on the officers in the mess hall, Grove wrote in the letter: “There is always two sides to every story. . . . I was out of my head at the time, and have felt mighty sorry about it sense
[sic
] (But being colored perhaps you understand).” He closed the letter by pleading with the NAACP to investigate the treatment he was receiving and to help him.
¹⁴

By the end of 1953 James Grove had the dubious distinction of having the lowest number in the convict population, meaning he had been on the island longer than any other prisoner. He had received no letters, and during two decades on the island he had only one visitor—an attorney who came once in 1951. His activities in the D block unit were limited to reading; his earnings from prison labor up to that time amounted to $1.25. A special progress report in 1954 noted that although the officers regarded him as helpful and hardworking, they considered his motives devious:

One of the most accomplished connivers in the institution. His ability to steal, hide and transport food from the food cart to restricted inmates in the Treatment Unit is efficient and effective beyond belief. On the other hand, he likes to work . . . so that he is, aside from his conniving, a valuable
man as orderly in the unit . . . he helps the officers and in turn gains opportunities to assist inmates in illicit activities.
¹⁵

After his return to general population, Grove spent his time quietly playing handball and reading a variety of magazines including
Argosy, Ebony, True Life
, and
Saturday Evening Post
. Due to his improved conduct, 295 days of good time were restored. His military sentences were considered completed by the Department of the Army and because “his emotional conflicts had become less with age and his adjustment to close custody and environment seem to have made progress,” he was recommended for transfer.
¹⁶

In April 1959, after almost twenty-one years on the Rock, Grove was moved to Leavenworth. He became eligible for parole on his civilian sentence in July 1960 and began an effort to hasten his conditional release by appealing for restoration of the last forfeited good time. In June 1961 he won back five hundred days of good time, his conditional release date was moved up to August 1962, and planning for his release got under way. With no living relatives to assist him, a place to live and a job in San Francisco were to be arranged with the help of a former Alcatraz Catholic chaplain. His release after almost forty years of military and federal imprisonment was finally in sight, but James Grove did not live to return to the free world.

On the morning of August 11, 1961, Officer C. J. Mitchell found Grove dead in his cell. In a letter addressed to James V. Bennett, the warden, and a lieutenant, Grove described the reasons for his action:

Gentlemen: My life cannot continue under the pressure and strain now placed upon me. I have nothing but (my) life to take, my years in prison have taken any hope for a free clean life outside the Walls. I have no kinfolks, no one will cry over me but a few sincere inmate friends. . . . I have nothing to leave, only regrets that I am one colored man who will not shine a guards shoe. Rather than do that as I am being forced to do, I take my own life. It was not hard to smile, keep a civil tongue, and even take care of the officer’s dirty and clean clothes. But the shine
one damn pair shoes
(No) Not Jimmy Groves. And the only way I can win is to taking my life. . . . My friends who know (but don’t believe my sincerity) tell me how foolish I am not to take a couple officer’s life along with mine. I even had several wanting to help me after they found out how I was being forced to shine shoes. And these were (white)
folks
. But no! I won’t hurt any-one but myself: Even though they are right. Lt. Concannon said, “Why Jim colored people always shine shoes. Colored people always like to shine shoes.” Very nice thinking
on his part. I am sure he will find the colored man who
likes
to shine shoes.

Given the limited options he believed were available to him, James Grove employed suicide as the ultimate form of individual resistance. There were moral considerations in this choice, such as his decision not to take the lives of one or more employees along with his own, and the need to take a stand that other black prisoners would avoid. Grove’s final act of protest was driven by what sociologist John Irwin has described as the prisoner’s need to maintain his “integrity”—to stand up and make a statement or take a position the prisoner believes is right, despite the cost. James Grove had been paying the costs of resisting in prison for thirty-seven years before he decided not to bend any longer to government authority.

Harmon Metz Waley spent twenty-two years at Alcatraz, the longest continuous period of incarceration on the island among all Alcatraz prisoners. (Alvin Karpis spent a total of twenty-five years, but his time on the Rock was broken by a transfer to and return from Leavenworth.) Waley’s crime—the ransom kidnapping of the seven-year-old son of a wealthy lumber baron—provided a perfect match between the federal government’s war on the “gangster element” and Alcatraz, the highly publicized repository for such offenders. Tried, convicted, and sentenced to forty-five years on June 21, 1935, Waley was sent to McNeil Island Penitentiary on the same day he was sentenced—but he did not stay for long. Less than four weeks later he was personally escorted to Alcatraz by E. B. Swope, then McNeil’s warden. By the time he returned to McNeil Island more than two decades later, in February 1957, Waley’s forty misconduct reports covered every means of resistance and protest save one—he did not try to escape.

For his first six months, Waley quietly did his time, encouraged, he said, by Swope to believe that if he “kept his nose clean” he would soon be returned to McNeil Island. When it became apparent that no such transfer was forthcoming, Waley began to direct his anger at Alcatraz and Bureau officials. “I told them ‘you are a dirty bunch of sadists,’ ” he said. “I wrote a five-page letter to James V. Bennett and I told him ‘You got us out here and you don’t even want to give us any candy bars because
you are afraid we will jump over the walls from the added energy. You sent us out here to get some publicity for yourselves.’ ”
¹⁷

Another reason for the deterioration in Waley’s behavior was the hostile reception he received from other prisoners because he had kidnapped a child. In the view of the staff, Waley’s misconduct stemmed also from his inherent criminal nature. Captain Philip Bergen recalled,

Waley was crazy as a bedbug. Too bad they didn’t shoot him when they arrested him . . . he was not psychotic he was just an advanced criminal sociopath. He was always in trouble and he had a big mouth and illusions of grandeur. The inmates didn’t like him because they knew he was the one that put his wife into the penitentiary on that Weyerhaeuser kidnap rap. They used to throw it up to him, “No good son of a bitch.” She almost had a pass on that thing until he included her in. He didn’t want somebody else having intercourse with her while he was doing time. Of course you’re not supposed to do that. Your girlfriend in the criminal echelon is supposed to be out there making money for you while you are in prison. So he was looked down upon by the others.
¹⁸

A prison doctor described him as “the loneliest man on Alcatraz.”
¹⁹

In order to gain some respect from other convicts, Waley joined striking kitchen workers, for which he was locked up in open solitary, A block. This was the first of a long series of confinements in disciplinary segregation that extended over the next fifteen years. Two weeks after his return to the general population he demanded admission to the hospital, complained that the doctor didn’t know anything and that he was “getting tired of this god damn shit around here.” He was promptly locked up in an isolation cell. A few months later he fought with another prisoner but after both agreed they were at fault and held no “ill feelings against the other,” they received only reprimands.

Although it was never noted in prison records, Waley next got into a fight with Al Capone:

I was fooling around with a saxophone down in the music room and he’s got a mandolin in a case and somebody hits me in the back and it’s him. He hit me with his mandolin case. He said, “You son of a bitch. I’ve been looking for you for a long time.” I stood up and thought about hitting him with the saxophone but I didn’t want to hurt the sax. . . . I said, “Well I’m here” and he walked on off.

Waley solicited the help of convicts McDonald and Conroy to get back at Capone, who he knew would be constantly guarded by at least “two
or three spaghetti benders.” The next time Capone came into the band room, Waley said,

I walked over to him and said, “Okay Capone you got me.” I knocked him on the jaw and knocked him a little silly. He grabbed me by the hair; first he tried to bite me. He’s trying to pull me down and lifting his knee trying to get me. I got a good sock in his stomach. Conroy grabbed a spaghetti bender by the name of Delbano, but he let him get away and he ran across the band room and hit me on the jaw.

The brief skirmish ended with Capone fleeing the room, then five minutes later sending Delbano back, saying, “Al doesn’t want any trouble with you.” Waley told Delbano, “If you people don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.” After the incident, according to Waley, “Capone didn’t say anything to me for three months, then he said, ‘Hi.’ ”

Shortly after this altercation, Waley was charged with “insolence” for telling a doctor to “stick it up his ass” when the doctor denied him treatment for a cold. Two days later he refused to work and was placed in solitary. The following day he was written up for singing very loudly “They’ll hang Jim Johnston in a sour apple tree.” Told he was disturbing the cell house Waley replied, “I can’t get in any deeper, so why stop?” That proved not to be the case.

Four warnings later he was taken down the stairs in A block to lower solitary, where he remained for two days. In a memorandum to Bureau headquarters reporting that lower solitary was being used, Warden Johnston explained that Waley “became noisy . . . he persisted in deliberately whistling and hollering and making noise in an endeavor to attract attention and disturb others in the cell house. It therefore became necessary to move him downstairs . . . that is basement solitary . . . for one day and 21 hours . . . until he promised to behave.”
²⁰
A few weeks later Waley was in an A block solitary confinement for disobeying a direct order.

His hostility toward the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons was relentless throughout his many years at Alcatraz. Claiming to be the government’s “favorite whipping boy,” he filled his letters to his mother and his wife with tales of his persecution.

On September 27, 1937, after being placed in isolation for participating in a strike, Waley was charged with agitating and creating a disturbance. After repeated warnings to keep quiet he was forcibly removed for the second time down to lower solitary.

Lt. Culver, an ex-jar-head [marine], thought he was tough. He had a guard hold each one of my hands and he hit me in the stomach and in the cheek. But the next time I saw his hand coming, I stuck my head down so he hit my forehead and broke his thumb, or else he faked it.

This time he remained in a dungeon cell for thirteen days.
²¹
When he was moved upstairs to a D block isolation cell he was limited to one meal each day, with bread and water for the other meals. A month later he was charged with ripping up his bed sheet and promising more of the same until he received food. While in D block, Waley continued to protest:

I said why don’t you just take my mattress and all my bed clothes and clothes too. So I took them, threw them out there. That was one of the reasons they thought I was crazy.

Then Waley refused to eat. His lengthy hunger strike was graphically described by U.S. Public Health Service physician Milton Beacher, who worked on the island for several months in 1937 and 1938:

[Waley] became listless, indifferent. Rebelling against the entire prison setup, he bluntly announced he didn’t care what happened to him, life was too miserable at Alcatraz. First he went on a hunger strike. For seventeen consecutive days he steadfastly refused to eat. We finally resorted to tube feeding.

On the seventeenth day, I visited Waley. “How about eating, Waley?” I asked. “This isn’t doing you any good. If you don’t eat, we’ll just have to give you the tube and pour it down.”

Waley grimaced weakly. “I don’t care. You can hose me with that tube day and night. The tube going into my nose and down my stomach doesn’t bother me like it does other guys. I’m not eating.”

I inserted the tube and poured down a pitcher of hot broth. Several times Waley paled and became nauseated and regurgitated. As the broth bubbled up, the guard holding the pitcher caught it and poured it down again, saying, “As many times as it come up, it will go down again.”

“I don’t give a god dam. You can give it to me with vomit puke, snot and all. What the hell do I care? I’m not eating until I get what I want. If it takes forty years, too. I’ll tell you what I want. I want out of this god damn stinking joint. I want to go back to McNeil—that’s where I was sentenced. There was no damn reason to transfer me here. I’m tired of the agitation and persecution here and getting the glassy-eye.” . . . In the midst of his hunger strike, Waley announced he positively would not budge from his bed. He made that clear to the guards one day when they approached him prior to another tube feeding.