Escape from Alcatraz (15 page)

Fog shrouded The Rock on the morning of April 13, 1943, as the convicts filed down the road to the shops, and Hamilton passed the word to his coconspirators: this was the day, the day they had long waited for and put weeks of careful preparation into, and before that months of scheming. This was no rash, reckless flight planned only to the water’s edge. They had managed somehow to snitch four Army uniforms from the dry-cleaning shop. Once they waded ashore near deserted Fort Point at the Presidio of San Francisco, they would don the uniforms and move freely through the city, thronged with soldiers. They had stuffed the garments into four empty five-gallon cans, which would serve a dual purpose as duffel bags and floats for the swim to the mainland. They marked the cans and scattered them in a supply stack of similar cans in the storeroom off the machine shop. They had also stashed away tools.

They were ready to go after the guard counted them into the machine shop that April morning. But the guard hung around. They scraped barnacles off net buoys and shot glances at the window: the fog was burning off, drifting by in patches. At last the guard stepped into the storeroom. They followed swiftly, dropped him with a blow on the head, bound and gagged him.

They had just picked the cans from the stack when footsteps approached on the stairs. They gathered by the door. An officer entered. They pounced, then laid him, trussed and gagged, alongside his colleague behind a large crate. They dug out the cached tools and spread the bars of a window overlooking the bay. They stripped to their long underwear. Three squirmed out onto an old catwalk used only in emergencies. The fourth struggled to push a can through. A tight squeeze, it took time. After the second can came out, Hamilton said, “Forget the others. Let’s go.” The fourth convict wriggled out.

The barefoot quartet, clad only in drawers, slid over the rail and down an iron post, to the rim of a cliff thirty feet above a rock-strewn shore. They began leaping, one after the other.

By now the fog had lifted and at that moment Officer Frank Johnson in the south gun tower swung his gaze off the bay. He was startled to see the white-skinned figures hurtling through the air. He fired rapid rounds as they disappeared, sounded the alarm, stood braced, rifle ready. Moments later they came into view in the water. One swam free, arms flailing. Another lay along a plank, his arms as paddles. Two held onto the floats, kicking their feet. Johnson’s deadly slugs sent up tiny geysers. The flailing swimmer turned back, vanished behind the jut of the cliff. The one on the plank rolled off, swam back out of sight. One of the two still in the bay used his can-float as a shield against the raking rifle shot. The other tried, but got on the wrong side. He gave a convulsive jerk, and the can bounced aside. His head wobbled, he began to sink. The fourth escaper left his float and raced to his comrade’s aid. Johnson kept peppering the surface.

The Rock bustled. Its siren wailed, its launch set out. Guards herded prisoners inside for a quick count to discover who had gone. The convicts, to distract the guards, set up a bedlam.

Out on the bay the launch pulled alongside a fugitive floating on his back, holding up a limp figure. It was Brest, with Boarman. A thin trail led out from Boarman’s head and tinctured the green water crimson. Brest reached up for an outstretched hand, lost his grip on Boarman. Boarman sank, like a lead weight. They pulled Brest aboard, stark naked.

The launch cruised close to shore. Search parties headed for the water-line caves of The Rock’s weather side. The tide was out, and into each cave crept a wary guard with a flashlight, covered by a rifleman at the entrance. They came upon the graying, slight-built Hunter crouched shivering behind a boulder. He had sprained his back bounding against a jagged rock in his leap to the beach and, his strength sapped by the vicious tide rips, had dragged himself into the cave.

Hunter offered no clue as to Hamilton’s fate. At sundown of the second day the warden called off the search. He assumed that Hamilton had been sucked down by the strong undertow and had drowned.

Late on the third night Hamilton crawled out of the cave in which Hunter had taken refuge. The cave, like others a jumble of concrete blocks and granite boulders to halt tidal erosion, had a series of zigzag passageways negotiable only by a belly crawl, and he had wormed back to the face of a grotto. Weakened by hunger and bone-chilled by the soakings of flood tides, aching with festering cuts, he quaked all the more as he emerged into the night and a cold, misty wind off the Pacific smote him. He staggered round the point to the cove, stumbling over barnacled rocks. He clawed his way up the cliff he had plunged off, climbed the iron post to the old catwalk, squirmed through the bar-spread gap in the window, back to the prison that was now a haven.

They found him next morning, cowering behind the large crate in the storeroom. Floyd G. Hamilton bore no resemblance to the Public Enemy No. 1 who once swaggered, guns blazing, through the Southwest. He was naked except for the cotton drawers, and they were in tatters: his feet were swollen, bruised, blistered; his face and body were lacerated, and scarlet-streaked, from the jagged rocks and the keener scalpels of seashell fragments. Dried salt from the tidal spray in the cave caked his hair and eyebrows. His eyes held the terror of a trapped, wounded animal.

They fed him a bowl of soup, cleansed him under a shower. Later, as they daubed iodine on his cuts in the hospital, the erstwhile outlaw meekly told the warden: “When I got down to the water I grabbed a plank for a getaway. I got out a way and saw I couldn’t make it with the plank, but was afraid to let go. When the shooting started, I did let go, made it back to shore and crawled in the cave with Hunter. I thought I’d suffocate. I was wet and cold all the time. The water came up around me when the tide came in. Last night I saw there wasn’t a chance anymore. So I crawled out and back up the rocks and into the building through the same hole we got out of.”

This was the second time Brest had got off The Rock, much to his regret. Acting as his own counsel, he had won a new trial and had traveled confidently back to Pittsburgh, under armed escort. He was convicted again, and his original sentence of forty-five years boosted to fifty
and
life.

Hamilton’s ordeal proved no deterrent to a former associate in crime, Ted Huron Walters, thirty-year-old Arkansas bank bandit. On a foggy morning five months later he sneaked out of the laundry and over the fence. They found him hiding among the rocks of a cove. He had tested the water with a toe and found it “too damn cold.”

The Rock, busy again with its own war effort, enjoyed a truce that lasted almost two years. But a quiet, model prisoner, John K. Giles, was biding his time, keeping his own counsel as he plotted an ingenious getaway that would bring about a tighter security system at the wharf: no boat or barge to cast off until the dock gang lined up in the sight of the guard in that gun tower, and the remainder of the inmate population had been counted.

Giles, a half-century old, worked on the dock detail but not as a stevedore. Too slight and sickly for heavy lifting, he swept the area and tended the century plants along the path to the long flight of steps to the crest. He was a taciturn man whose mind and eyes abundantly made up for the idleness of his tongue.

At 10:10
A.M.,
on July 31, 1945, the
General Coxe,
an Army boat, eased toward the dock for a scheduled stop on her way to Angel Island, then site of a military installation. As the steamer came alongside the guard lined up his gang for a count. All present. He then caught the line flung from the boat, tied her up, helped with the gangplank, and stood aside to check the supplies as they came off. That done, the guard removed the gangplank, tossed the line to a crewman, watched her cast off, turned back to his detail. No Giles. His glance swept the dock area. No Giles. Then the path. No Giles. Under the wharf. No Giles. He hit the phone.

The warden played a hunch, phoned the Angel Island adjutant to hold the
General Coxe
and anyone without an ID card. Associate Warden Miller hurried to the dock, jumped into a speedboat and raced to Angel. The
General Coxe
had pulled in, its military passengers lined up on the wharf. As Miller walked down the line a technical sergeant, stiff at attention, eyes forward, abruptly held out his hands. Onto the wrists, as the soldiers stared in astonishment, Miller clapped a set of handcuffs. T/S Giles even had a dog tag around his neck.

The taciturn Giles, goaded, talked. He would push his broom nearby as bundles off the
Coxe
were shaken out for contraband, and he would pilfer a garment, tuck it under his jacket, switch to a hoe, cache the item behind a shrub. Eventually, he had an outfit complete with dog tag. On the morning of July 31, he transferred his stockpile, piece by piece, to the rear of a dockside warehouse. He doffed his coveralls, donned the uniform, pulled the coveralls back on, resumed his sweeping. In a pocket were a pad and pencil: he had noted that telephone company and Army Signal Corps technicians, repairing a cable, came over on the 10:10 boat. When the guard turned to tie up the
Coxe,
Giles slipped under the wharf, shucked his coveralls, boarded the lower freight deck. After the steamer pulled away Technical Sergeant Giles emerged topside and stood near the technicians, jotting calculations in his notepad.

Giles, cooped in solitary for his escapade, said he had been plotting ever since he arrived on The Rock, ten years earlier. He was given three years for the attempt, delaying by that long the resumption of a life term in Oregon, itself interrupted by an escape. He appealed, contending he should not have been tried for escape from the prison because he was not in the prison itself at the time and furthermore, he was not technically in custody because the guard was off attending to the boat. He lost the appeal but had argued it so masterfully that an appellate jurist inquired where he had studied law. Giles replied, “For the past year, in Alcatraz.”

In a burst of loquacity, Giles related what had motivated his earlier flight from the Oregon State Prison: “I wrote fiction for magazines and the sources of my literary creation dimmed. I felt the need for new scenes and new faces. A sense of terrible futility came over me. So I went over the wall.”

With the exception of the abortive break of the Hamilton quartet, in which Boarman slipped under the surface of the bay and stayed under, these attempts were not gory affairs, and the guards may have begun to believe that the bloodshed of Alcatraz’s early days was behind them. If so they couldn’t have been more wrong; a violence more terrible than anything they had yet experienced was building up in the persons of six inmates surnamed Cretzer, Coy, Hubbard, Shockley, Thompson, and Carnes.

Joseph Paul Cretzer had a round face and close-cropped hair that gave him, at thirty-five, a deceptively boyish appearance. Dutch Joe and his wife’s brother, Arnold Kyle, had roamed the Far West in the late thirties as the country’s No. 1 bank robbing team. Captured together, they stayed paired up through a turbulent prison-and-escape career until the Battle of The Rock. They landed at McNeil, to do twenty-five years, in 1939, at a time that Cretzer’s wife, Kay, a brothel keeper in the San Francisco Bay Area, was serving a jail term on a white-slave conviction. The next year they sped through the gate at McNeil in a truck, were found three days later in the brush on the 4,000-acre island. During a recess in their trial at Tacoma for that escape, they tried another break by slugging a marshal in the corridor, a scuffle that felled the marshal with a heart attack. They drew five years for the McNeil escape, then life terms for the marshal’s death. They came on to Alcatraz and in a few months tried the escape, with Shockley and Barkdoll, that Captain Madigan convinced them was foolish. They landed in solitary instead of possibly the morgue. While in the Dark Hole, Cretzer hatched a bold blast-out with Whitey Franklin, still there for the slaying of Officer Cline in the 1939 break try. It would belie Cretzer’s boast, when he arrived from McNeil, that he would not end his days on The Rock.

Bernard Paul Coy, rail-thin and pint-sized, only five feet four, in March of 1937 had cockily strutted up to the cashier’s cage in the Bank of New Haven, Kentucky, with a sawed-off shotgun, made off with $2,175 and hidden in a cave along the Rolling Fork River, but not for long. Four months later he was on The Rock. He was in his middle forties.

Marvin Franklin Hubbard, forty-four, dark-haired, rather handsome, wore rimless glasses that imparted a studious look. He had come a long way from the Alabama farm of his boyhood. En route he had kidnaped a Chattanooga cop, stolen his tommy gun, two pistols, and car, and driven across a state line; later had escaped from a county jail; had been shipped to Alcatraz in 1944 after engaging in a mutiny at Atlanta.

Sam Shockley, tall, stooped, pallid, was a man of thirty-six but mentally a child of eight. He began by stealing a chicken and ended by robbing the Bank of Paoli, Oklahoma, of $947.28, and kidnaping the bank’s president and the president’s wife, who was also the assistant cashier. His car stalled on a country road and he fled on foot, leaving his victims behind, unharmed. He was raiding a farmhouse for food when a posse rode up. He went to Leavenworth for a week’s seasoning in May of 1938 before being shipped on to Alcatraz to serve out a life term. His life would end, instead, at San Quentin, up the bay a few miles.

Miran Thompson, twenty-nine, powerfully built, had a hard, square-jawed face and coldly penetrating eyes to match his criminal record and sentences: life for the slaying of an Amarillo, Texas, lawman, plus ninety-nine years for kidnaping. He had chalked up eight escapes elsewhere before being pinned down in D Block at Alcatraz in October of 1945, only months before the battle.

Clarence Carnes, the Chocktaw Kid, an Oklahoma Indian with the temperament of a wildcat, was not yet out of his teens. He was on The Rock, at nineteen, doing life plus ninety-nine years for robbery, murder, kidnaping, various assaults and escapes. He had crowded all this into three short years, starting with the day his father brought a watermelon to him in reform school. In the watermelon was a hacksaw.