Escape from Alcatraz (6 page)

(Certain factors, in medical opinion, suggest paresis was perhaps a convenient coverup. Capone’s quick recovery, permitting removal to a minimum-security facility, contradicts the diagnosis: in those days before penicillin there was no reliable cure for syphilis or paresis. And if indeed paretic, he would have been sent to the Springfield Medical Center for the drastic treatment then employed, along with arsenicals: an induced malarial fever to burn out the syphilis—and no more than 20 to 30 percent ever showed any improvement.)

In 1940 he was taken to a rendezvous in the Midwest and released to his wife, who took him to their walled hideaway in Florida. Here in 1947, at the age of forty-eight, he died of a complication of heart attack, stroke, and pneumonia. Scarface Al Capone, who in his hoodlum heyday had lavished $25,000 funerals on underlings slain in the Chicago gang wars, was given a simple burial.

Only a few years earlier, the one Alcatraz inmate who had befriended him, Roy Gardner, had also regained his freedom. Early in 1937, headlines reported Gardner’s departure from The Rock. His time served, he was released through Leavenworth. Alcatraz by now had become an island of mystery, and Gardner drew the veil aside with “Hellcatraz,” as told to James G. Chesnutt, in the
San Francisco Call-Bulletin.
It was a grim portrayal that, as such exposés often do, soon faded. He sold his life story to the movies (
I Stole a Million
starring George Raft) and for a time lectured to women’s clubs. At the 1939 World’s Fair on Treasure Island he ran a concession, admission ten cents, on the theme: Crime Doesn’t Pay. Neither did the concession. He stopped by a mortuary, selected and paid for a coffin. He hung a sign on the hall door at the hotel to warn the maid: Danger, Stay Out, Call Police. Then, mixing the same ingredients used at San Quentin, he transformed the bathroom into a lethal gas chamber … his last headline.

Chapter 5

T
HE COUNTRY’S MOST VICIOUS
and desperate criminals share The Rock with children of all ages, infants to teenagers. Most of the custodial and clerical staff commute from San Francisco, but about a third, bachelors and fifty-seven families, dwell below the prison heights on four acres terraced into the island’s southeastern tip—the slope blasted by the Army Engineers in the 1850s to provide a protective cliff on that side. Theirs is a strange sort of village life, in the shadow of gun towers, under the brow of a brooding prison that once did, and might again at any moment, explode into murderous mutiny. Ever present is the menace of being taken hostage by armed escapees; but they live a normal life, just as other San Franciscans go about their daily affairs without a neurotic fear that the San Andreas Fault underfoot might at any moment slip a bit and shake the city’s cornices loose.

In some respects, the Rock dwellers can boast the choicest residential site in the Bay Area, as picturesque as any isle in the Mediterranean. To awe-struck tourists, purchasing an intimate glimpse at rows of binoculars on Telegraph Hill and the end of a pier near Fisherman’s Wharf, the island, much of the year a vivid splash of ice-plant pink, bears the deceptive appearance of a precipitous Capri minus castellated villas and bikinis. Weathered, red-roofed cottages set in flower gardens line one edge of this terrace or middle level; and on the south side two modern apartment houses with picture windows and balconies stand above the rocky shore, not so magnificent as the apartment towers along Rio’s Copacabana but offering an unsurpassed panoramic vista: the Golden Gate span and its after-dark strands of sodium-vapor lights, the serrated skyline of San Francisco, the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, the landmark Campanile of the University of California and the cities crawling up the surrounding hills, the verdant mass of nearby Angel Island. Only a section of the Marin County coast to the north is invisible, blocked off by the prison crest.

A path leads down through a grove of eucalyptus trees to an esplanade along the leeward shore, a few feet above the surf, with benches to enjoy the flat marine view or wait for a striped bass to strike. Color abounds on all sides: the greens of a few hardy scrub pines on the windward, and the eucalypti on the leeward; the rosy blossoms of the creeping ice plant; the bright yellow flowers of oxalis, related to the sour grass family; even the dull red faces of the arid cliffs. Many succulents, such as the century plant, border footpaths. These trees, shrubs, and flowers—planted in soil brought over from the mainland—thrive on the moisture of the summer fogs. Water is barged over by Army tugs, 170,000 gallons at a time, two or three loads a week.

Some of the seventy-five children were born here, knowing no other home than The Rock. Daughter of the guards grow up to be wives of guards. The island once had a kindergarten class; now all the children go to public or private schools in the city. Pupils caught up by a favorite television program at night catch up on their homework on the twelve-minute ride to the mainland on the prison launch, the
Warden Johnston.
Before dashing down to the wharf, one lad delivers the morning papers. Occasionally, on the return trip after school, there may be a convict aboard, but he is shackled and out of sight in a sealed-off cabin.

The youngsters of Alcatraz lead a life very much like that of their urban classmates, even to a curfew that sends them home at nine o’clock week nights, eleven o’clock Saturday and Sunday. They play ball beneath the frowning prison cliff, fish off the shore, shoot billiards or bowl at the Officers’ Club, where teenagers gather at a replica of a drugstore fountain.

Only in one regard is a boy’s life different on Alcatraz: he cannot own a rifle to hunt or sieve tin cans on a fence post. Nor a cap pistol. Nor a rubber knife. When they play cops-and-robbers, forefingers serve as revolvers and lusty “Bang! Bang!” for shots. And they must never step outside the fenced-in limits of the family acres.

Humor resides here with grimness, and the personnel christened the new staff dining room up at the prison The Top o’ The Rock. The Officers’ Club down below is the social and cultural center of the civilian colony: here old-fashioned square dances make The Rock sing on Saturday night; here the Alcatraz Women’s Club holds meetings, bridge parties, an annual Yule bazaar; here too the Alcatraz Ballet—girls four to fourteen, taught by a guard’s wife who had been reared on the island—stages performances.

Alcatraz was once the setting for nuptials, when a light-keeper’s daughter married a classmate at Utah Agricultural College. The Coast Guard still operates the light, a new light mounted on an octagonal column towering 214 feet above sea level, with a flashing beacon visible twenty-one miles at sea. While on duty the Coast Guardsmen—a married man and a bachelor, who occupy two of the three apartments in the lighthouse—are under the control of the prison authorities.

Rock families enjoy all the freedoms of the mainland. They can have guests at any hour of the day or night, and parties till dawn, subject to the same rules as party-givers anywhere: if they get too rowdy, they are told to pipe down. Residents are responsible for what their guests carry onto the island.

“We hope they’re sensible enough not to bring any firearms,” says Warden Olin D. Blackwell. “We’re particularly anxious about ammunition. The inmates can make guns, but it’s harder to make cartridges.”

Blackwell, fourth and current warden of The Rock, is a rangy, amiable, middle-aged, onetime Texas rancher who still wears an imprint of the open range: a western Stetson; on occasion, a bolo or cowpoke’s string tie; a tooled leather belt with an outsized buckle of Navajo Indian silver, turquoise adorned; a Navajo open bracelet on the left wrist, silver inlaid with turquoise stones. He feels that The Rock is an ideal place to live: “We have more privacy than people in the city. A lot safer at night, too. We never lock our doors.”

Like the islanders, guests need not pass through the metal detector. They reach the four-acre settlement by a private stairway to a footbridge over the dock area, then through a gate controlled by the tower guard. On departing, they stand at the gate until the guard opens it—after prison visitors are aboard the boat, after the five convicts on the dock detail line up in his sight, and after he has been assured that all the other prisoners are accounted for.

When the doorbell rings, an Alcatraz wife knows for a certainty it will not be a salesman, for this is one territory even the Fuller Brush man cannot penetrate. Rock wives do their shopping at their own “co-op” on the island or at markets in the city, either in person or by phone. They are no farther from downtown San Francisco department stores than women in residential areas such as the ocean-fronting Sunset district—perhaps closer, with no traffic lights on the bay segment of their trip to town. Normally, it’s a twelve-minute run from the island to the Fort Mason dock, where the Alcatraz wife takes either a bus downtown or the family car, parked in the huge pier shed. Rock residents can have a jolly night in town and catch a late, or early, boat back. The boat makes twenty-two trips a day, the first at 5
A.M.,
the last at 2
A.M.

Although the children share this tiny island with about 260 convicts, they seldom see any at close range except those who collect the garbage or tend the gardens and the sharp-spiked century plants along the paths. The older children ignore the inmates, but the tots sometimes grow curious, such as the preschool child who once asked her mother why a playmate’s daddy (a guard) watched over the gardeners so closely. After a moment’s perplexity, the mother answered: “They’re bad men—they’re being punished for not eating their spinach.” Later the child hop-skipped up to a domesticated gunman kneeling at a shrub and scolded, “Shame on you! Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t eat your spinach?”

The penal concept that created Alcatraz ruled out the trusty, the model prisoner trusted to perform duties outside the walls. Associate Warden Lawrence Delmore once explained: “Trusties get the idea they are privileged characters and expect the run of the place. Besides, guards are apt to turn their backs on them because they think they are safe. You can’t do that here.”

Warden Blackwell, who occupies a three-story, eighteen-room house on the edge of the bluff a few steps from the prison building, voiced a regret on that score: “It’s hard to find a prisoner to work in the house because if they can be trusted to do that, they don’t belong on the island.”

During the regime of Warden Johnston, in a day when the felons were regarded as far less trustworthy, a dinner guest at the mansion, aware of the reasoning that gangsters made unreliable trusties, was astonished to discover the butler was a convict. He was even more astonished to learn the chef was an armed robber.

“We’ll soon be losing our cook,” the warden said. “He’s coming up for parole.”

Barbara, the warden’s eighteen-year-old daughter, protested: “Oh, Daddy, you can’t let him out—he’s the only cook we ever had who could make
Bar de Luc!”

Chapter 6

A
RAUCOUS BLAST, THE CELLHOUSE
alarm clock, jars you awake at 6
A.M.
Twenty minutes till the head count. You wash up at the cold-water tap, comb your hair, brush your teeth. (If sensitive, you might vary the routine by brushing your teeth first, or putting on your right shoe first, but as you wear into the set ways of an automaton you skip these small variations.)

You get into the gray shirt, the gray trousers, the sturdy shoes. You make your bed, tidy up your cubicle, then take your position at the bars of your cell front. After the stand-up count, you hear the lieutenant call: “Ring in outside B!” A dozen cell doors slide open. You step out, march along the tier gallery, descend the circular steel stairway. As you approach the mess hall you remember and quickly button your collar. (This becomes automatic, for an open collar at mess lands you in solitary.) You file past the steam table with a compartmented tray, picking up your breakfast—rolls, dry cereal and milk, coffee, and you know the day is Tuesday: menus are your calendar.

Twenty minutes to eat. A whistle, you stand up; a whistle, you turn; a whistle, you check in your flatware and march out, up the winding stairway, along the tier, into your cell. Another count, then the command: “Ring out B!” Cells open, you march along the tier, down the circular stairs, through a metal detector into the yard. You stand on a yellow line until all convict workers come out. Then, “Brush shop!” You are checked off as you go through a gate, down a flight of steps in the cliffside to a landing, through another Snitch Box, down another flight, along a road to the shops.

At 11:20, you come back up the road, back up the flights, back through the yard, back up the steel stairway, back along the tier, back into your cell. A head count, the lieutenant’s command. You go along the tier, down the stairs, into the mess hall, eat, obey the three whistles, march back to your cell. Another count. You walk along the tier, descend the stairs, go into the yard, stand on the painted line, file through the gate, down the flights, along the road to the shops.

At 4:30, you come back up the road, back up the flights, back through the yard, back up the stairway, back along the tier, back into your cell. A head count, the lieutenant’s command. You go along the tier, down the stairs, into the mess hall, eat, stand, turn, march back to your cell. The door clangs shut, stays shut for thirteen hours. At 9:30, your cell light winks out.

At 6
A.M.,
a raucous blast.…

In the timelessness of The Rock, an hour thins out into a day, a day lengthens into a stretch, and even a term with a fixed end seems endless. You pass through day after day after day with the feeling that somewhere in the past life came to a stop. Only Sunday offers a rupture in the routine, and after a time Sunday takes on a routine within routine: an hour at chapel in the morning, two hours in the yard in the afternoon (one hour, if you went to chapel). For this gift of Sunday you pay extra in solitude: lockup comes earlier. Twice a year you get an extra Sunday, Christmas and New Year’s, unless they fall on a Sunday; but there is no yuletide. All other holidays are routine days.