Escape from Alcatraz (30 page)

Why did such mild offenders, and many others, make Alcatraz? Were they assaultive, troublesome, escape-minded? Take the case of the AWOL soldier. He was at Leavenworth when the inmates went on a hunger strike in 1958. The Sword of Alcatraz broke it up. The warden had the Immigration Service bring up a twin-engined Border Patrol plane from the Mexican border. Then guards went to random cells: “Pack up, you’re leaving.” Within the hour, twenty-eight convicts, among them the AWOL young man, were flying to Alcatraz.

An isolated instance? Apparently wardens—chiefly at the maximum-security prisons of Leavenworth and Atlanta—have for years used Alcatraz as a convenient whip, and used it indiscriminately. Stan Brown, North Dakota mail robber who was in the first “shipment” from Leavenworth, served seven years and upon his release in 1941 said: “Only about fifty of the 300 prisoners rate Alcatraz. You take the thirty-seven hunger strikers they ran in recently from Leavenworth. Most of those boys were in for crimes like car stealing or something like that. Alcatraz isn’t built for those boys. It was made for the big shots like Machine Gun Kelly, Karpis, Cretzer, Bailey, Capone—guys like me. I rate Alcatraz.” And he waxed prophetic: “Alcatraz is a punishment prison. I think in the next few years you’ll see lots of trouble on Alcatraz. When a man’s on The Rock all he thinks about, day and night, is how to get off. The thing that seems impossible to you looks possible to him.”
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Alcatraz has even served vindictive purposes. Bryan Conway gave his own case as one example in his
Saturday Evening Post
article. Conway, while a soldier at a post in Alabama, had killed a sergeant, claimed self-defense and was freed by the civilian authorities for lack of evidence; was later rearrested by federal agents, convicted, sentenced to eighteen years. At Atlanta Conway said he refused to testify “as the Government wanted me to testify” in an inmate stabbing case that ended in an acquittal. Soon thereafter he was packed off, and not until the train was well away from Atlanta did he learn from his guard escort where he was headed. He asked, “What have I done to be sent to Alcatraz? My prison record is good,” and the guard replied, “You are certified as an incorrigible.” Yet the incorrigible Conway was released the very next year, 1937, with six years off for good behavior.

Conway also related that at Atlanta in October 1936 “when the authorities feared a mutiny, they confined eighteen men, shipping them all to Alcatraz on mere suspicion.” Not all were incorrigibles: “I knew, personally, men whose only brush with the law was the single offense which sent them to Alcatraz.” He told of the shipment of fourteen from Leavenworth in the summer of 1936, among them three first-offender Kentucky moonshiners who had not paid their internal revenue tax. These batches came from Atlanta and Leavenworth only two years after Alcatraz was created as a super-lockup.

Floyd Wilson was a thirty-three-year-old jobless carpenter with five children who set out from his Washington, D.C., home in the winter of 1947 with a gun to get $17 to buy a ton of coal “so my kids won’t freeze to death.” He tried to hold up a chain-store manager, sitting in a car in front of the store with $10,000 in a paper bag on the seat; killed the manager, fled in panic, without the money. Wilson, with no prior record, went home and waited for the police, said he had not intended to kill. He drew life, went to Atlanta, then to Alcatraz in what Warden Madigan called a “routine transfer because of his long sentence and the possibility of an escape problem.” So …? So he was put to work on the dock gang and one summer afternoon in 1956 he slipped away under cover of smoke from a trash fire, was found twelve hours later walking along the shore, shivering. Madigan said Wilson, who helped unload a cargo from barges, did not fill a role comparable to that of a jail trusty. “We have no trusties here,” the warden said. “For jobs such as that, we try to select men who are less of a security risk.”

The incident prompted this letter-to-the-editor comment by a San Franciscan, H. T. Reid:

“The temporary disappearance of Floyd Wilson at Alcatraz thoroughly explodes two carefully nurtured myths about that awful place.

“The Bureau of Prisons has long claimed Alcatraz is maintained for the ‘nation’s most desperate and hardened criminals.’ The bureau equally contends that Alcatraz is not ‘a permanent exile,’ that prisoners by a ‘convincing record of good behavior’ can ‘earn their way out … to some institution of less strict regimen and discipline.’ …

“His (Wilson’s) behavior qualified him for work on the dock gang, where he has worked for several years. What became of his opportunity to transfer to some place not so hopeless?

“Manifest abuse by high authorities of such a maximum-security prison, as well as its crushing effect on the human beings subjected to it, cry out for the abolition of Alcatraz as part of the federal prison system.”

Not all Alcatraz inmates are federal prisoners. Felons are boarded there by states that find the federal penal system a handy weapon with which to threaten their own troublemakers. Among these boarders is John Duncan, apparently not considered by the trial judge as a dangerous criminal because he drew only a two-to-four-year term in the Maine State Prison in 1955 for burglary. But the next year he joined six others in an attempt to escape, and Maine farmed him out to the Federal Government.

Director Bennett of the Federal Prison Bureau has himself admitted men are sent to Alcatraz for reasons other than safer keeping. His treatment of Robert Stroud, described by the Birdman’s attorney as purely vindictive, is a case in point. The first attempt to put Stroud on The Rock in the early days was called off after bird lovers raised an indignant storm. He was rousted out one midnight in 1942, taken summarily from his birds and research laboratory at Leavenworth, and quietly hustled off to Alcatraz while the country was busy with World War II. Bennett later told a reporter that Stroud was shipped off to Alcatraz “because he was a nuisance, not because he was a menace,”
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then added, “We do it all the time.” It was done in the case of Cecil Wright, the self-made legal expert, a model prisoner at Leavenworth but sent to Alcatraz for making himself a nuisance by offering advice to others on writs.

For years most of the inmates at dread Alcatraz have been short-termers, and often first-offenders, whose crimes, had they occurred under state rather than federal jurisdiction, would in all likelihood have meant probation with a county-jail term. Sometimes the difference of a few feet, or a few miles, can mean the difference between a jail and Alcatraz. The crime may happen on a sidewalk in front of a post office, keeping you under local jurisdiction; if it happens on the post office steps, it’s federal, and you might land on The Rock as one of those picked by lot. If you steal a car in San Francisco and drive it to Los Angeles and get picked up, it might mean a year in jail, if a first offense, or perhaps several years at San Quentin. If you drive the stolen car to Reno, less than half the distance, it’s across a state line, a federal rap, and.…

To many penologists, the crime of Alcatraz is that it inflicts on such young men, by their very presence on The Rock, a punishment far beyond the penalty intended by the statute. The worldwide infamy of Alcatraz tends to stigmatize them ever after as hardened criminals, to brand them with a new-type Scarlet Letter—
A
for Alcatraz. Even the old practice of never sentencing a man directly to Alcatraz nor paroling him from there, using way stations such as Leavenworth and Atlanta instead, although not always strictly adhered to in former days, has lapsed greatly in recent years. This can add to the young ex-convict’s difficulty of adjustment if, in filling out an application for a job, he honestly sets down his last place of employment as “Glove Shop, Alcatraz.”

Life in a prison of punishment only, such as Alcatraz, was purportedly depicted by an anonymous convict in a prison manual a few years ago:

“Maybe you have asked yourself how can a man of even ordinary intelligence put up with this kind of life day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year. You might wonder whence do I draw sufficient courage to endure it.

“To begin with, these words seem written in fire on the walls of my cell, ‘Nothing can be worth this!’ No one knows what it is like to suffer from the intellectual atrophy, the pernicious mental scurvy that comes of long privation of all the things that make life real, because even the analogy of thirst cannot possibly give you an inkling of what it is like to be tortured by the absence of everything that makes life worth living.

“A prisoner cannot keep from being haunted by a vision of life as it used to be when it was real and lovely. At such times I pay with a sense of overwhelming melancholy my tribute to life as it once was.”

How did Alcatraz fail? The Rock did tame some of those gangsters who, with felons of lesser criminal stature, launched the place. By the time Warden Madigan left in 1961 for the top post at McNeil, he said: “None of the original prisoners is still here. The old gang is gone.” Some served their time and walked away from the Fort Mason dock free men; others made headway toward self-rehabilitation and were rewarded by a transfer, although there is no reason to doubt that these men, such as Chase with his interest in art, could have done the same at any old prison. Many of the old gang left The Rock in straitjackets, deranged by the “exquisite torture of routine”; others left in the coroner’s basket. Roe and Cole first revealed that Alcatraz was not the escapeproof bastille the Bureau of Prisons had proclaimed it to be; then came the bureau-jolting riots and breaks, each followed by frantic efforts to make it, as Bennett said, “impregnable.” But with all the efforts, and the redoubled efforts after the Battle of Alcatraz, it never did become really impregnable. Morris and his coplotters proved that. And Morris was up against the tightest “impregnability” in the history of The Rock: the toolproof cell and window bars, the Chinese-puzzle security of the main entrance into the cellhouse, the other electronic locking and frisking devices, the mesh screen over the gun galleries, the gun ports for armed guards on the outside catwalks, all foolproof systems that supposedly added up to absolute inescapability.

How, then, did Alcatraz fail again? Actually, as in most of those earlier, murderous affairs, the culpable factor was the human element. During his six-year regime as warden at Alcatraz, Madigan cracked numerous cellhouse conspiracies in the hatching stage. He once told curious newsmen why: “The search out here is continuous. We check some of the cells every day, as a matter of routine. The men in here keep their heads working every minute, trying to think of something, of some way out.…” Madigan knew the value of alertness: he came up through the ranks, guard to warden.

Guards who had served under Wardens Johnston and Swope recalled similar vigilance. One described the graveyard shift, midnight to 8
A.M
.: “I made the rounds every twenty to forty minutes. You had to stay alert—the lieutenant kept his eye on you. Some prisoners slept head at the front; others, bothered by the cellhouse lights, with their feet at the bars. It was important to know their sleeping habits: you could tell that was Pete in there by the position or the snore. Often I’d make a round and peer in a cell and think, ‘Hmmm, George hasn’t moved.’ I’d look for a sign of breathing, or I’d reach in and tug the blanket to make him stir.”

“What did you suspect—a dummy?”

He nodded.

“Any other security measures?”

“Weekly checks. Every Saturday, when the prisoners were out in the yard, we’d check the bars on the windows and cells, and shake down the cells.”

“Then this last escape [of the Morris trio] should not have occurred?”

He considered a moment, said quietly, “No, never.”

“Incompetence?”

He smiled. “They were at it every night for months.”

What about the suspension of two guards?

“Scapegoats. The blame goes higher. Dollison, the associate warden, was moved into that spot from an executive post, manager of the industrial shops. Not coming up through the custodial ranks, he lacked the sense of urgency, of constant alertness, you need up there. If the man at the top is relaxed, the men under him become lax, all down the line. It’s only natural.”

Warden Blackwell and Bennett’s associate, Wilkinson, who flew out from Washington after the Morris-engineered break, had a different, and rather astounding, theory. They invited newsmen over for an official explanation of the escape—why three convicts could dig their way out of impregnable Alcatraz with spoons. (Newsmen were never told of the nailclip attachment, and their request to see the spoons was denied.)

“Alcatraz is old,” Wilkinson explained. “It’s in a debilitated condition.”

Blackwell concurred: “The concrete wasn’t crumbling, but there was some erosion in it. It could be ground down with the spoons.” He had an admiring word for the trio’s artistic talents: “The dummies sure looked lifelike. The faces wee painted flesh color.”

Dollison on the morning of the escape admitted the convicts had been “at it a long time—at least, six months,” and Blackwell, rushing back from vacation, agreed: “With spoons it takes more time than if you had a jackhammer. It could have taken months.” Still, the warden insisted there was no custodial lapse. He said the guards made hourly bed checks through the night and periodic shakedowns of the prison, although he could not recall, offhand, when the escaped convicts’ cells had last been checked.

Wilkinson said, a bit wistfully: “Morris and the Anglins would not have got out on Monday night if they had been shifted to new cells on Sunday. All that time they had spent in preparation for escape would have been wiped out.”

Blackwell said: “You must remember, the officer is making the count at night in a very subdued light. It has to be subdued so the inmates can sleep.” (Convicts often read till past midnight by the cellhouse light.)

As for the ventilator hood clattering to the roof, he said: “The prison is full of noise at night and we investigate every sound. If the wind blows over a bucket and it sounds like a bucket, we still investigate.”