Escape from Alcatraz (11 page)

Even though the work was concealed in this way, normal checks would have detected the escape plot, considering the time required to sever a bar in each of five cells. In a check, a guard taps a bar with a rubber mallet. Tampering produces a distinctive sound.

The window operation called for night work: they had to leave their cells. The bars were toolproof: tough alloy steel surrounding a loose rod. Cut the outer part, and that’s it: the inner core simply turns with the saw, or guitar string. The core is brittle. Nightly, like gray-clad brownies, the convicts bent their severed cell bars, crawled out, took turns hacking while one stood watch, crawled back in, straightened the bars. They placed an order on the grapevine for a bar spreader, and when they were ready (the window bar cut full circumference) it was ready, a device of remarkable simplicity: two bolts, with left- and right-handed threads, screwed into the same outsized nut. They set the bolts between two bars and turned the nut. The bolts unscrewed, the cut bar spread, the inner core cracked, and out they went.

(Such toolproof bars are already obsolete. Convicts found they could even get by without a spreader. Cut the outer part as a woodsman fells a tree, at a slant; insert a wedge to hold the core tight; go to the other side and saw right through. Toolproof bars are now more toolproof: a half-dozen hard thin bars set in a steel tube, then steel poured in. Too tough to spread or crack, take forever to saw.)

Plotters fear other inmates more than guards, and the fewer in the know the safer. There’s always the snitcher currying favor, and one tried it on the quintet. He snitched to a guard, “A bunch of cons keep runnin’ past my cell all night.” The guard gave him the eye, then led him to Miller, the associate warden. Convicts loose at night in D Block? The associate warden gave him the eye, then they both led him upstairs and locked him in a bug cage. Three nights later the quintet decamped.

All these episodes, many marked by violence and bloodshed—the Roe-Cole escape and the several other escape attempts, the amazing break out of solitary, the attack on the warden, the incidence of insanity and suicides—suggested a flaw in the conceptual structure of The Rock. Warden Johnston simplified the problem in one comment to the press: “It’s not possible sometimes for men contemplating seventy-five years on Alcatraz to face such a prospect with perfect equanimity. Life is pretty monotonous here. We feed the men well and treat them well, but they just don’t like their surroundings.”

One feature of their surroundings the men abhorred was target practice. In the evenings, after lockup, the cellhouse echoed the rattle of gunfire as guards on the yard wall outside emptied pistols, rifles, machine guns. Sometimes an inmate’s nerves cracked, and his screams of “Stop it! Goddammit, stop it!” heightened the macabre effect. In the morning, when the convicts marched out to the lineup on the way to the shops, they encountered a sight that made some queasy. Strewn about the yard, like bullet-riddled corpses, were dummies in convict garb. Even this grim object lesson failed to deter plotters, intensifying instead the desire to get away, and in time it was stopped.

Johnston tried color psychology to relieve the dull, depressing reality of steel and concrete. He felt it would help those men who had fewer than seventy-five years of contemplation in prospect in return to society with a happier outlook. Color schemes varied: cell ceiling white, walls pale and dark greens; cellhouse walls green, gray, and white (later a startling pink with barn-red trim, still later a deep tan); pink and ivory in the mess hall; other combinations in other areas, including the shops. This brightened up the place, but not noticeably the men; they still did not seem to enjoy their surroundings.

The starvation diet imposed on strikers and other miscreants in solitary was improved. At the time of the early strikes against the severe rules prison officials denied that the warden had issued a no-work, no-eat edict and indicated the men were fed as usual. Much later, the warden offered his own views on dungeons and diets, and the punitive merit of hunger: “People get the wrong idea when you talk of dungeons. We have the dungeons and we sometimes use them. But it is not always necessary to use dungeons to punish a prisoner. You’d be surprised how much enforced absence from a meal or two will do to change the attitude of a recalcitrant prisoner.”
¹

The new diet in solitary called for a minimum of 2,100 calories a day (3,600 in the mess hall), but it did not specify in what form. An ex-guard recalls: “We called it the monotony diet: bread and water in the morning, and in the evening plain boiled spaghetti, no seasoning or sauce of any kind. To make their breakfast more palatable, we’d slap a little mustard on the bread.”

Still trouble brewed on the island, periodically erupted. Johnston attributed it to the inability of some long-termers to embrace a stoic attitude, insisting that the food and treatment were all any incarcerated man might desire. He decried the brutality of a solitary confinement, said it was seldom inflicted. Only when a prisoner became obstreperous was he sent down to the dungeon to cool off. He told a reporter that strong-arm methods were not actually needed on Alcatraz because the “everyday safeguards instill a feeling of helplessness.” Even if the safeguards failed, the regular guards never resorted to bullying or beating to pacify an unruly convict: “Like noncommissioned officers in the Army, they use only moral suasion.”

¹
Warden Johnston’s views on dungeons and diets were told to Alfred P. Reck, North American Newspaper Alliance writer and later city editor of the
Oakland Tribune.

Chapter 9

I
N THE SPRING OF
1941 a murder trial took place in the United States District Court of San Francisco that became celebrated as the Trial of Alcatraz. It began routinely as the trial of Henri Young for the slaying of Rufus McCain, but midway The Rock itself superseded Young as a defendant
in absentia.

Young had engineered the break out of solitary two years earlier, and McCain was in on it. Both landed in the Dark Hole. McCain emerged first and spread word that when Young got out there would, in short time, be only one of them left on the island—McCain. His verbal sniping included what the newspapers referred to as “a revolting remark” about Young’s mother. He flew into a rage when informed his hour of freedom, shivering on the beach in his long cotton drawers, had cost him 11,880 days of good time off, a third of his ninety-nine-year term. He blamed Young for the failure of the escape and branded him “a yellow punk bastard.”

Young attributed McCain’s hostility to various causes. He was chagrined at being found out a coward, on his knees pleading for mercy at the time of the capture. He was sore because Young wouldn’t go along with his desperate plan, once the jig was up, to snatch a couple of wives as hostages. Their feud predated the break: McCain had long harbored a resentment at Young’s response to a homosexual advance with a sock on the jaw.

McCain’s threats to kill him came to Young in solitary by the grapevine. They began to bug him. Everywhere he looked—and everywhere, in the Dark Hole, was midnight—McCain was giving him the evil eye. One morning, not long after his release from solitary, Young slipped out of a third-floor shop, down an outside stairway, into the tailor shop on the second floor. A canvas holster on his belt held a steel blade with a rounded butt. In his hand at his side he gripped a seven-inch, bronze stiletto with a tape handle, honed to razor keenness. He walked up to McCain and rammed the stiletto into his stomach. McCain fell like a sack. Young stood staring at him. Guards relieved Young of the knives, and as they led him away he muttered, “I hope I killed the bastard.” He had, and it looked like the gas chamber at San Quentin for Young.

These details came out at the trial.…

Almost seven years had passed since The Rock became a Devil’s Island, and its mystery-nurtured reputation was such that spectators gasped when the twenty-nine-year-old Henri Young walked into Federal Judge Michael J. Roche’s court for arraignment that April morning in 1941. Alongside the husky guards, he had a gentle, amiable look, the groomed appearance of a shoe clerk in his gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie, dark hair slicked in a meticulous part.

Asked if he desired counsel, the accused slayer, in his fifth year of a twenty-year bank robbery term when he abbreviated Rufus McCain’s ninety-nine-year stretch, put on an act that patently astonished the venerable jurist. He strode to and fro before the bench, like a veteran trial lawyer, as he addressed the court: “May I have two attorneys, Your Honor? Categorically speaking, I have a preference among attorneys. I would like to have for my counsel two young attorneys with no established reputations either for verdicts or hung juries.”

“Rather an unusual request,” commented the judge.

“I want the two most youthful attorneys I can get,” Young said. He grinned. “They probably won’t do any good for me, but maybe they can use the experience.”

On his next trip to court, for plea, Young beamed at the sight of his counsel. Both had a fresh-off-the-campus aura: James Martin MacInnis, in his middle twenties and four years out of Stanford Law School, sporting a derby and double-breasted overcoat; Sol A. Abrams, thirtyish, pink-cheeked, cherub-faced. Young was not aware that MacInnis already had a wide Hall of Justice experience, and that Abrams was a former assistant U.S. attorney. Judge Roche had been deluged with pleas from young barristers clutching law degrees but, for the prisoner’s own welfare, preferred counsel with trial practice.

They came up with a unique defense: Alcatraz, not Henri Young, killed Rufus McCain. Alcatraz had put Young into a “psychological coma” and rendered him “legally unconscious” at the moment of the slaying. Questioning veniremen, they delved into the misty realm of the subconscious, of dual personality, of irresistible impulse, sleepwalking, dissociation of ideas. At length, a jury of six men and six housewives sat in the box, their foreman a cultural leader of San Francisco, Paul Verdier, president of the City of Paris, a pioneer department store.

“Henry Young was only eleven days out of the dungeon, where he had spent three years and two months, when he killed Rufus McCain,” MacInnis told the jurors. “The mental torture he suffered during those years robbed him of his senses. Thirty-two men have gone insane and have been taken off the island in straitjackets and placed in asylums since Young entered Alcatraz in 1935. Alcatraz, not Young, is responsible for the murder of McCain.”

Prosecutor Frank Hennessy called for the extreme penalty, invoking the simple law of the land in homicide, a law that ignores moral insanity, a law rooted in the old British Macnaughten Rule, recognizing insanity only if a man does not know the nature of his act or does not know that the act is wrong.

Warden Johnston took the stand, the image of mildness in antiquated steel-rimmed spectacles. And the page-one story in the
Chronicle
next morning started off: “Out of the mist-shrouded walls of Alcatraz Prison has come for the first time the inside story of life upon the most dreaded island in the United States.”

In his memoirs, Johnston described the treatment of prisoners at Alcatraz: “Privileges are limited, supervision is strict, routine is exacting, discipline is firm, but there is no cruelty or undue harshness, and we insist upon a decent regard for the humanities.”

Under cross-examination, Warden Johnston said the cells lining two walls of an underground area, relic of the old fortress citadel, were abolished as a dungeon in 1938, four years after Alcatraz became The Rock.

“Is it dark there?” asked MacInnis.

“Well, persons confined in the cells had no light.”

“Any sanitation facilities?”

“No.”

The warden admitted men were sometimes lodged in the pitch-black dungeon cells for months with only a single blanket and no bed, sleeping on a concrete floor. Young had been in such absolute darkness for nineteen days at a time without a bath. When the dungeon was abandoned, he was confined in a narrow cell with a solid steel door in the isolation block and, the warden said, was removed once for a period of “thirty to thirty-five minutes” in a year.

“Can any light get in these cells?”

“Some light can creep in,” said the warden. “And creep is the word.”

He said that men in solitary received one meal in three days, with bread and water in between; that straitjackets were never used as punishment, only when prescribed by a doctor.

“Was Floyd Hill in a straitjacket for forty days?”

“By the doctor’s orders,” said the warden.

“Is brew-making an ordinary hazard at Alcatraz?”

“It’s not frequent.”

MacInnis spoke of a maize brew and the exotic drink made of milk and gasoline, then asked: “Was Young ever supplied with such concoctions?”

“It is unknown to me,” the warden said.

They reviewed Young’s record. He had been placed in the dungeon or solitary, and deprived of 2,400 days of good behavior time, for such infractions as not eating all his food, giving a Bronx cheer, having two extra pairs of socks in his cell, agitating a strike, insolence, a fist fight over an umpire’s decision in a ball game in the yard, loud talking, raving in his cell.

“Once,” said the warden, “Young was put in the dungeon for banging his pillow on the concrete floor.”

MacInnis, momentarily taken aback, inquired: “How much noise can such an offense create?”

The warden replied, “Strangely, quite a racket can be made by banging a pillow on the concrete floor.”

A defense request for writs of habeas corpus testificandum to bring over a dozen of The Rock’s most notorious inmates made the headlines and drew even greater throngs. The bailiff posted a “No Standing Room” sign. Spectators had to identify themselves before they could enter the courtroom. Persons in the overflow that filled the long corridor had to produce identification. A score of Alcatraz guards and deputy marshals stood sentry at the doors and mingled with the audience and the crowd outside. Convict witnesses arrived from the island in pairs, manacled and shackled. When called, each was relieved of these restraints, hurried swiftly through a rear door, and the door relocked. The witness then passed by the press table; behind the counsel table at which Young sat; behind the prosecution table at which Warden Johnston and Associate Warden Miller sat; past the front of the jury box to the stand. At either end of the jury box stood a guard.