Escape from Alcatraz (10 page)

“I know what you men are up to. It’s a damn-fool idea—a lot of you will drown. But I’d like to see it settled, one way or the other, right now. If you’re determined to go, we won’t stand in your way. There will be no pursuit, and no notification of the police.” He gestured toward San Francisco. “Go ahead, swim!”

He turned on his heel and strode back to his headquarters. The men glanced at one another, with a vague misgiving, then glanced at the bay, with a distinct qualm. The water, frosted with whitecaps, suddenly took on a chill aspect. They, as the commandant had, turned on their heels and marched smartly back to their jobs.

Not all the plotters were fortunate enough to have a Colonel Crallé as commandant. In 1918, while the barracks celebrated Thanksgiving, four inmates slipped past the sentries, crept down to a beach, lashed planks together for a raft and shoved off for San Francisco. They vanished as completely as the later Roe and Cole. Three others tied driftwood together and paddled off one night. They rode out the Gate on the current, back in on a flood tide. By dawn, chilled and seasick, they were on their knees praying for rescue. A ferryboat crew picked them up. Another trio tried a new tack—they headed northward for the Marin shore. They too welcomed a rescue party. Their raft had come apart, and they were clinging to pieces, one of them unconscious.

Other escapes were marked by greater artistry and less risk. One prisoner who did clerical work vanished but did not, as Roe and Cole presumably did, go out the Gate on a swift ebb tide. On a day when the commandant was off the island, he simply wrote out an order for his own release, forged the commandant’s signature, put on his cap, trotted down to the wharf, presented it to the sentry, boarded the boat, rode over to Fort Mason, walked down the gangplank, presented the order to that sentry, caught a streetcar downtown.

On another occasion, an officer on the commandant’s staff died, and the widow ordered a mourning outfit from the city. Not long after it arrived, the widow, weeping behind the heavy black veil, appeared at the wharf. The sentry, reluctant to ask her to produce her pass, considerately helped her onto the boat. The dock sentry at Fort Mason, equally sympathetic, helped her off and on her way. Hours later the commandant’s office received an inquiry from the widow—about her mourning outfit.

In all the escapes, and escape attempts, during the Army days on Alcatraz, none led to violence, none to bloodshed, for these inmates were essentially a different breed. The men who came to The Rock as federal prisoners were classed as professional criminals. They made custodial care a far more risky business. Warden Johnston once put it: “The first thing a prisoner does is case the joint. They watch everything, every guard. They look and look for a weak point.”

Such men were Tex Lucas and two other long-term bank bandits, Rufus Franklin and Thomas R. Limerick. They had looked, and looked, and found a weak point. It was Guard Royal C. Cline’s habit of going into his office after counting the crew into the furniture factory on the third floor of the old Model Shop Building. He did this as usual after lunch on May 23, 1938. Franklin and Limerick slipped into an adjacent saw-filing room to prepare a window that opened horizontally, while Lucas sawed a two-by-four brace. A moment later, in an unlucky departure from routine, Cline walked into the smaller workshop. They cracked his skull, fatally, with a hammer.

Lucas came in with the slab of wood. They filled their pockets with short pieces of pipe and bolts, then braced the window open with the two-by-four. Lucas, pliers in hand, stepped out. His foot crashed through two panes, making a noise that apparently no guards heard. Lucas hesitated and Franklin gave him a nudge. He reached up with his pliers, cut the barbed wire edging the roof, then clambered up. The others followed.

They spread out and stormed a gun tower, hurling iron missiles. Guard Harold P. Stites fired his .45 automatic, caught Limerick above the right eye. Limerick looked startled, smiled, and fell. Franklin came at the tower with a raised hammer. Stites, pistol empty, fired his rifle. The slug slammed into Franklin’s right shoulder, and he stumbled backward across the barbed wire, the hammer dropping to the ground. Guard Clifford Stewart, patrolling the far side of the roof, came on the run, saw Lucas trying to force the tower door. Stewart raised his shotgun and shouted, “Hold it!” Lucas flung himself under a catwalk.

Lucas told the FBI: “We planned to grab the tower guard’s guns and make our way to the dock and grab the launch and escape. It was a crazy scheme and I now realize how nutty we were.”

Lucas, already serving fifty years, drew life for the guard’s murder, and Franklin had now achieved perhaps a record: thirty years, plus two life terms. While a lifer in Alabama, he was given a temporary release upon the death of his mother and picked up a thirty-year federal rap by robbing a bank on his way to the funeral.

So far, the two who made a clean break—if being swept to sea can be considered a successful escape—and the bloody break attempt on the rooftop breached the security of the area outside the walls. Soupy fog made the one possible, a guard’s regularity of routine set off the other. The Rock’s cellhouse was something else: all the scientific devices, the intricate locking systems, the toolproof bars, the endless counts and cell checks, the constant shakedowns, the vigilance of the guards—it was inconceivable that any man could best such a formidable array and break out. Yet, as a convict once said, what seems impossible to someone on the outside looks possible to the inmate plotting in his cell, completely surrounded by steel and concrete. Even at Alcatraz, one January morning in 1939 the impossible became the possible—an escape not just from the cellhouse but, more incredible, from solitary. It happened on a Friday the Thirteenth.…

About 3:45
A.M.
Guard Tom Pritchard, on outside patrol, groped along the road above the cliffs, his flashlight poking a ragged hole in the cottony fog. The foghorn behind him at the southeastern tip vibrated mournfully; the one at the north end answered, then distantly the horns at the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate, like croaking frogs around a lake. In one of the seconds-brief intervals of silence, Pritchard heard a distinct call, “Hey!” He stopped, turning his head like a radar antenna. A foghorn blasted the quiet. He hurried onto a blurry patch of light, the south gun tower, flashed a signal beam and shouted, “Just heard a voice. That you calling?”

“No,” replied the towerman. “I heard voices too, coming from the cove. Something going on down there.”

“I’ll go see,” said Pritchard.

“Stay right there, where I can see you.”

About then the cellhouse guard walked into D Block. All had been well at the 3
A.M.
count. He glanced into the cell of Arthur (Doc) Barker, notorious kidnaper and life-termer. He peered closer. The cell was empty. He phoned the Armorer. He checked the cell next to Barker’s. Empty. Then the next, and the next, and the next. Five in a row, all vacant.

Down in the cove below the south gun tower five gray figures worked desperately in the chill fog: Doc Barker; Dale Stamphill, also doing life for kidnaping; Rufus McCain, ninety-nine years for bank robbery, kidnaping; William Martin, twenty-five years, postal robbery; Henri Young, twenty years, bank robbery.

McCain had horned in on the escape by a ruse. He had the job of delivering meals to convicts in solitary on a table with rollers and had intercepted a note from Young to Doc Barker regarding the plot. He then made a dagger, and in the yard on the following Saturday he feigned a fight with a prisoner. As he had foreseen, they slapped him in D Block and, better luck, in a cell next to the conspirators.

And now they were all on the beach, working feverishly, the sound of the siren goading them on. McCain and Young were stripped to their long drawers, and the five were using their other garments to bind driftwood into a raft.

“Shhh!” warned Doc.

The prison launch burp-burped by. Its searchlight, like the mobile searchlights hauled to the cliff above, only whitened the mist, failing to penetrate it. Guards with submachine guns were inching down toward the shore.

Moments later Doc again cautioned, “Shhh!”

A Coast Guard patrol boat came along. Its powerful beam spotlighted a tableau of raft makers. The convicts scattered.

“Halt!”

A fusillade ripped into the flight. Stamphill stopped, slugs in both legs. Doc Barker dropped, a slug in the thigh, another in the neck that came out near the right eye. He died an hour later. Martin stood stock-still, hands high. They found the near-naked McCain, cold-blue, around a jutting cliff, on his knees begging for mercy. A few feet away stood Young in his drawers.

Doc Barker was the youngest of the clan that Kate (Ma) Barker led out of the Ozarks. One, a small-time hoodlum, fell in a hail of police bullets. Another went to Leavenworth for life. Ma, Fred, and Doc, now joined by Alvin (Old Creepy) Karpis, blazed a career that culminated in the $200,000 abduction of Edward G. Bremer, St. Paul banker, in 1934. They took him to a hideout in Illinois and there kept him captive for twenty-one days. Later G-men traveled the route time and again; on one trip they found empty gasoline cans by the roadside, and off a can came a set of fingerprints—Doc’s. This linked the kidnaping to the Barker-Karpis gang. Doc was captured in Chicago, and ten days later G-men fought a pitched battle with Ma and Fred in Florida. She died lying behind a silenced machine gun, he beside an automatic rifle. Doc drew life. Karpis, caught soon afterward, also drew life, and on the morning Doc broke out into the fog to his death, Karpis watched him go from a cell down the row.

At the Fort Mason pier, as Doc’s body was borne on a blood-stained stretcher from the launch to an ambulance, a guard remarked: “Well, he’s a lot better off now where he is than where he was.” Doc was buried in a plotter’s field, the brief services attended only by the prison chaplain, a prison clerk, and four paid pallbearers from an undertaking parlor.

The multiple break from the isolation block of the escapeproof cellhouse brought Director Bennett of the Prison Bureau flying out from Washington for a personal investigation. He then explained to the press how it had happened: The quintet cut through the bottom of a bar in each cell—not with saws, which he felt could not have passed the metal detector, but possibly with a banjo string or piano wire or watch spring or any thin strip of metal, along with an abrasive such as a valve-grinding compound. They then spread the bars of a window, its sill about waist high, with something heavier than a crowbar, presumably a jack. They dropped eight feet to the ground, made their way to the beach and tossed the tools into the bay—again presumably, inasmuch as none were uncovered in the subsequent search.

“Alcatraz,” Bennett said, “houses the country’s most cunning and nervy escape artists, who have plenty of time to think up ways of getting out. And when they go through our first line of defenses, we have to rebuild them. That is what we are doing. We have found nothing to lose any confidence in the prison personnel.…”

At the inquest Associate Warden E. J. Miller, the sole witness, offered this sworn testimony: Smuggling of tools into the cellhouse was possible because the metal detector worked only about 60 percent of the time. The convicts had sawed away for a long period, undiscovered, despite periodic bar examinations by officers experienced in the ways of escape artists. No saws had been found, no trace of filings, no smear used to conceal the progress of their work on the bars. They had wrenched apart the toolproof window bars in spite of constant vigilance. No searchlight on the island was strong enough to pierce fog, but two guards patrolled the north and south halves of the island through the night, passing any given point once every half hour, shoving driftwood into the bay to prevent raft-making. The prison was well manned.

“How many guards were on duty at the time in the cellhouse?” asked the coroner, Dr. T. B. W. Leland.

“Two in the gun galleries, one on the floor,” Miller replied.

“Were they asleep?”

“Possibly,” said Miller. “They definitely were not alert.”

Said the jury: “From the evidence at hand, we believe this escape was made possible by the failure of the system for guarding prisoners now in use at Alcatraz and we recommend a drastic improvement. Further, we recommend … that the citizens of San Francisco unite in an effort to have a more suitable location chosen for the imprisonment of the type of desperadoes at present housed at Alcatraz.”

Said Dr. Leland, closing the case: “The citizens of San Francisco resent Alcatraz. However, as long as it is here, and not a beautiful park as I’d like to have it, we can but hope it will be open for inspection by the public.”

This was January 24, 1939, and Coroner Leland’s hope proved forlorn. The veil remained over Alcatraz, parted briefly for secondhand inspection only when a killing required an inquest or a riot a trial. Associate Warden Miller’s candor seemed to contradict Director Bennett’s earlier comment that he had found nothing to lose any confidence in the prison personnel. Further contradiction came in the firing of a guard, an item withheld from the press.

The jury partly got its wish: the system of containing the desperadoes in solitary was improved, not so much a drastic step as a simple modernization, for the “first line of defenses” was actually a relic of the old Army days. This was the prison’s old D Block, and a year after the flight of the quintet a new isolation quarter, featuring toolproof bars and electrically controlled locks on the dark cells, was built with a WPA appropriation.

In a way, the secrecy of Alcatraz worked to the advantage of the prison administration, for it served as an effective cover on the real story of that break—a story that reveals both the brazenness of the convicts and an incredible custodial laxness. Unlike the new D Block, isolated behind concrete walls in the southwest corner of the cellhouse, the old block had a grate partition. The cell bars were the antiquated, flat, soft-iron. Although Bennett’s investigation indicated that no saw was used, the convicts did use a saw, a two-inch piece of a hacksaw blade. It took them, as Miller testified, a long time to cut through (they had only the one bit of blade for the five bars), but they did not rely on the protection of nighttime for this phase of their project. They chose to work days. Their chief problem was the guard in the west gun gallery, whose patrol took him periodically into D Block. However, a window in the cellhouse run of the gallery overlooked the mess hall, and the guard was stationed at the window during meals. And so the convict in possession of the blade at the moment sawed safely away through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He flushed each session’s filings down the toilet, smeared soap over the cut, then rubbed burnt matches over the soap to complete the camouflage.