Escape from Alcatraz (32 page)

The bankrupt penal notion that gave rise to Alcatraz exacted a tragic toll over the years: the guards and convicts slain in revolts against its rigors, or efforts to escape them; the suicides, the self-mutilations, the men driven insane. Some of these horrors became known long after they occurred, in tips to newspapers; and this situation suggests that many others remain grim secrets of The Rock. For Alcatraz, a symbol of the Dark Ages, always operated on the theory that it was a principality unto itself, behind a veil thicker than the fogs that swirl through the Golden Gate. Even escapes, which San Francisco newspapers often learn about through their police-beat reporters, might not become known if the prison did not feel impelled to enlist the aid of the Coast Guard or the police. There’s an inherent danger in such an operation: a government agency can conveniently cover up its incompetence, its mistakes; even, in the case of a prison, its brutalities. Ernest Besig, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, comments: “When government officials operate in secrecy—when they do not have to account for their actions—they become immune to criticism. This is an invitation to mismanagement.”

Why has Alcatraz stood so long? For years responsible critics and San Francisco civic groups have chipped at it, but The Rock held firm. Did the power structure of the Justice Department or public apathy preserve it? Both, very likely. The department let the storms blow over, and the average San Franciscan took a grim sort of pride in this marvel that every out-of-towner wished first of all to see. Blame must also be shared by the San Francisco news media and the news services for their willingness to accept only handouts regarding Alcatraz, and the secrecy, the no-comments, the half-truths, even the outright lies. A factor too was the bureau’s view—a potent budgetary weapon—that Alcatraz was a “vital link,” or in the words of Warden Swope: “There is always that small minority needing an Alcatraz.”

To many, Bennett’s adherence to this outdated philosophy has seemed a paradox. In recent years he has favored abandonment of the place—not of Alcatraz, the symbol, but of Alcatraz, the island—on the practical ground that it is “an administrative monstrosity.” Yet, with the exception of this link in the San Francisco Bay, he created during his quarter-century tenure as head of the bureau a federal penal system that is considered a model. His own views, expressed in 1962, might well be taken as an indictment of Alcatraz: “What a society does with its convicted law-breakers reflects in large measure the philosophical underpinnings of its criminal law. In the United States, as in most other Western countries, the old doctrine that the purpose of the criminal law is to exact from the criminal a retributive suffering proportionate to the heinousness of the offense, if not completely discarded, has been fairly successfully dissipated. In its place, the administration of criminal justice has been searching for a more rational approach to the disposition of the convicted offender in an effort to combine the principles of deterrence and public protection with the objective of restoring the offender to a more self-sustaining status in the community.”

Ironically, after all the decades of tumult over Alcatraz, the men who doomed The Rock were a burglar and a pair of sibling bank robbers. For soon after Morris and the Anglins crawled out—and the bureau’s discovery why their feat was possible: the place was falling apart—Attorney General Kennedy announced that Alcatraz would be “phased out” during 1963. (The Department later set the closing date at July.) Theirs, then, became a farewell to The Rock with a wry double-entendre.

Kennedy, who in all his trips to San Francisco never visited the island (unless secretly), takes an economic view of Alcatraz. Discussing its abandonment, he said: “It would be a saving to the taxpayers because it’s so much more expensive to feed prisoners there than at any other federal prison.”

Later, Bennett said Alcatraz could start winding up its turbulent career as The Rock after completion of an Alcatraz Inland—a new, $10,000,000 maximum-security prison near Marion, Illinois, in a wildlife refuge in the southern tip of that state—in the spring of 1963. However, the phasing out of Alcatraz began quietly in the fall of 1962 as convicts were moved out in driblets. Warden Blackwell said they were being transferred to Leavenworth, Atlanta, Terre Haute, “and other prisons.” This seemingly was a tacit admission that Alcatraz had, after all, harbored men of lesser criminal stature than the “nation’s most hardened.” Terre Haute is a medium-security prison.

¹
Stan Brown was interviewed by Stanton Delaplane, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, later a syndicated columnist.

²
Bennett’s “nuisance” comment on Stroud was quoted by Paul O’Neil,
Life
staff writer, in “Prodigious Intellect in Solitary,”
Life,
April 11, 1960.

³
Anthony M. Turano described “America’s Torture-Chamber” in the old
American Mercury,
September, 1938.

⁴
The quote by Barnes and Teeters is from their
New Horizons in Criminology,
considered a bible in the field (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1959,

The Veil

RESEARCHING THIS BOOK
was in some ways more difficult than the trio’s escape. They, at least, got through the thick concrete of The Rock. The stone wall of bureaucracy proved impenetrable.

At the outset, when I mentioned the project on the phone, Mr. Bennett, director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons, said: “Fine, that’s a dramatic story. Let us know when you’re ready; we’ll be glad to help.”

With this encouragement, when ready I contacted Edwin A. Guthman, public-information director for the Justice Department. At his request, I wrote a letter detailing the scope of the book and my needs, among them a visit to Alcatraz to absorb atmosphere and interview guards and the convict West. There was no response. More phone calls; another letter. Still no response. I flew to Washington to plead my case.

Mr. Guthman said, “Bennett isn’t very anxious to have you publish this book.” But why, in view of his offer to help? “He’s changed his mind.” That meant no cooperation? “That’s right. No cooperation.”

A session with Mr. Bennett substantiated this. He could not permit a talk with West even for a background fill-in on the plot, and as for the guards: “I can’t let you talk to guards and take up their time and waste taxpayers’ money.” Reminded of his offer to help, he said: “Oh, I thought you meant a mystery thriller!”

Mr. Bennett said he was not aware that West had spilled details of the plot, a fact already reported in the press. I saw his associate, Mr. Wilkinson, who said: “Yes, I talked to West, but he told me nothing I didn’t already know.” Oh …?

It took ten weeks to get to Alcatraz. Warden Blackwell said he would show me “a little bit of the place.” He was a man of his word. There was no parting of the veil. I learned that on Saturday nights at the Officers’ Club they hold square dances, but—What was Morris’s job? “I have no idea.” What did the Anglins do? “I have no idea.”

Several former prosecutors said the West report should be available if no prosecution was planned, and they felt that was remote because of the difficulty of getting a jury to convict the man who didn’t get away. Letters-to-the-editor sentiment was reflected in a
San Francisco Chronicle
editorial: “A large body of public sympathy (wearing a shamed face and expressing itself apologetically) has discovered itself in their behalf ever since they turned up missing in the steel-barred cells of the concrete cell block of the maximum-security prison on escapeproof Alcatraz.… If Morris and the brothers Anglin have in fact gotten away with it and stultified all the art, science and penological abracadabra that went into making Alcatraz ‘escapeproof,’ we offer them a silent cheer for having at last destroyed the myth of its inviolability.”

A session with Cecil Poole, U.S. attorney in San Francisco, was encouraging. He also felt prosecution of West would be a wasted effort and suggested a call in two weeks. I happened to mention the segregation of black convicts, and he said: “I’m going to break that up!”

The call back brought an instant response: “I can’t let you see that West report!”

“But you said prosecu—”

“I have six years to prosecute. That report’s staying in the vault. Anyway, it belongs to the FBI, not me.”

“What about the segregation at Alcatraz?”

“Look, I don’t want any publicity on that. I’m going to handle it quietly, within the department.”

It was quite clear by now that the department was a closed corporation.

By a long-established principle, the FBI never discusses a case in which it is engaged. One cannot quarrel with this policy, because it is based on the fact that the FBI is an investigative body. J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, holds the position that information gathered by his agents should be evaluated by the judiciary.

However, the Bureau of Prisons is not an investigative body. It keeps men in detention, and the public is entitled to know in what manner. The bureau, either by design or delusion, mistakes its role for that of national security. Even so, at Alcatraz the secrecy has always been tighter than the security.

From quite a few confidential sources came the pertinent facts of the escape—the jobs Morris and the Anglins held, so convenient for their purposes; the tools and how they did, or could, acquire them; the hours they worked on the plot, and their methods; even to the fan motor that, after all the trouble of getting it up there, was shy a fraction or two of horsepower; the long, tedious task of removing the rivet heads of hand tools, and the professional burglar’s caution that substituted painted-soap rivet heads in such an out-of-the-way spot.

All these, and more, were facts of the Morris plot. As it turned out, they provided not only a structural basis for that escape chapter but in addition a conclusion far more inescapable than Alcatraz: the veil of secrecy hid nothing mysterious, only incompetence.

J. Campbell Bruce

Berkeley, California

November 1962

Epilogue

THE ROCK IS
ten years gone.

The escaped trio, eleven. And no more a maybe. Morris, the quiet loner, could slip into obscurity and stay there. Not the Anglins. Born braggarts, they could hardly be expected to sit forever on
that
feat. Silence seems evidence their cleaned bones lie beyond the Golden Gate, down among the whiter bones of Roe and Cole, first off The Rock.

On that present tense: the book was written in 1962. Alcatraz still had a family neighborhood, and some lad a paper route; guards still kept a wary eye in the gun towers; convicts still lived the long hours plotting; the warden still gave newsmen only the time of day, if asked. In a
New York Herald Tribune
review, John K. Hutchens took note of that tense, and the obvious reason, saying it imparted “the immediacy of the historical present tense.” By then that’s what it had become. (Publication date was announced for April 5, 1963. Two weeks earlier the last felons filed off Alcatraz, in handcuffs only, while television cameras rolled. And next day The Rock was a thing of the past.)

Now it can be told: how those convicts in D Block (see
this page
) came by the razor blades to send down by the sewer-pipe dumb-waiter to the tendon cutters in the dark cells. Mr. Bennett, head of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons, had said in 1962 he could not shut down The Rock until he had a secure place to store the men—and the super-superbastille in Southern Illinois was far from ready. (It was completed in 1964.) That being so (presumably),
Escape from Alcatraz
would appear well before The Rock went out of business. My informant had my assurance the book would not reveal the secret of the smuggled blades, for disclosure would obviously halt the traffic—and deprive others of the opportunity to slice their heels. But the unkindest cut of all would be dealt the dealer in used blades, readily identifiable by the method of delivery. Within minutes after the warden’s eye landed on the page, the smuggler would land in the Dark Hole—a candidate for his own, and now unobtainable, contraband.

How was it done? Quite slyly. With the easing of the D Block regimen went reading privileges for the men in the gate-front cells. The inmate on library duty made deliveries there—except to those in solitary. That meant close scrutiny—even closer after the cuttings began. The guard in D Block inspected the cart’s contents, then tagged along. He could testify under oath, without perjury, that he saw only books or magazines passed through. Yet there was something else. A wink. It went with a book at a certain cell. And the bibliophile within, once they had moved on, opened the volume wide and shook well—and out of its spine fell a piece of blade. (One thin blade, broken lengthwise and the halves snapped in two, could supply four dark cells.)

The empty island was turned over to the General Services Administration for disposal as surplus property. John Hart, a big amiable man who had been a guard for fifteen years, and his wife Marie stayed on as caretakers. Their four children grew up on Alcatraz, and two daughters were married there. The Harts continued to get the
San Francisco Chronicle
every morning—dropped at their door (or thereabouts) by a helicopter on a commuter-hour traffic check for a radio station. They retired after the Indian invasion in the fall of 1969.

These were not the first Indians to scoff at the ancient myth that evil spirits dwelled on the island. In March of 1964 five Sioux, doubtless believing the evil dwellers had departed two years earlier, landed and staked a claim under an 1868 treaty giving their tribe the right to claim federal property “not used for specific purpose.” This was not a seizure. They offered $5.64 for Alcatraz—47 cents an acre, the same price the Federal Government had agreed to pay California Indians for lands seized by the whites after the Gold Rush. The GSA ignored the claim, and they went away.