Escape from Alcatraz (21 page)

The hospital, the pride of Warden Johnston in the old days, was then accredited and staffed by medical men. In recent years, as the treatment accorded healthy convicts improved, care for the sick declined. Instead of a medical officer in charge, the director now was a Chief Medical Technical Assistant, in charge of Assistant Medical Technical Assistants. Even so, the hospital was staffed only during the day; the duty MTA left at 8
P.M.,
and another came on at 7
A.M.
the next morning. At night the custodial officer doubled in brass as “medical” officer in charge. A private-practice doctor took the nine o’clock boat over in the morning, rode the bus up the cliff, made a swift round of the patients, rode the bus back down, returned on the ten o’clock boat. For serious illnesses or an operation or an emergency such as a stabbing or accident, the medical staff of the Marine Hospital was on call.

Patients receive the same food as that served in the mess hall and, with the exception of dessert and tobacco, have no more privileges than convicts consigned to the Misbehavioral Treatment Unit, i.e., none. This is to encourage a faster convalescence. Patients must keep the wards clean, but if a patient asks for a bucket and brush to scrub the asphalt tile floor, or even a broom to sweep it, or a cloth to dust, he is considered well enough to return to the general population downstairs. Former inmates say the wards lacked the dustless, antiseptic aspect usually associated with a hospital.

Because of his limited time, the doctor could make only a cursory examination. One morning he stepped to the foot of a patient’s bed and inquired, “What seems to be the trouble?”

“Chills and fever, doctor. Retchin’ all night.”

“Well, you’ll stop vomiting in twenty-four hours.”

The patient was then running a temperature of 104° and, as it turned out, had pneumonia.

The doctor moved over to the foot of the next bed and said to that patient, who had complained of chest pains: “I checked your X-rays. You can go back to your job. There’s nothing wrong with your chest.”

“Doc, them X-rays is two years old.”

“Look, boy, I told you, there’s nothing wrong with you,” and he walked out.

Once the doctor almost missed the ten o’clock boat, as an ex-patient relates: “One day he has a con on the table—prostate trouble—and has his fingers up his behind examin’ him when he happens to see the time. ‘Oh, oh,’ he says and yanks his hand out. ‘See you tomorrow,’ and he rushes out.”

An ailing convict must first pass the test at the gate at the top of the stairs. Not every guard is inclined to grant admission, in the belief most convicts are malingerers. Another former patient says, “Some bulls figure like this: if you ain’t bleedin’, you ain’t hurtin’. One night I saw the bull shove a sick con in a bug cage and tell him, ‘I’m gonna give you one week to get well. If you ain’t well then, I’m gonna throw you in isolation.’ After a week in the bug cage he’d welcome TU.

“Another time, a con hurt his back exercisin’ in the yard, liftin’ weights, and they brung him up, lettin’ out a yell every other step. A bull pushes him in the Birdman’s old room and says, ‘Okay, we can stand it as long as you can.’ Then he closes the wood door to drown out the screams. Next morning the doc looks at him and says, ‘Your back’ll stop achin’ in twenty-four hours.’ Only it don’t. Every time he moves wrong, he lets out a bloody scream. They figure he’s a real bug and call over a head shrinker, tellin’ him this con’s a faker. So the head shrinker has it all doped out and he tells the con: ‘What happened is, you made a bet with yourself you could lift that weight and when it fell, you lost your bet. You didn’t want to lose the bet, so your mind makes up an excuse and blames it on your back, and the bet is called off. So you
think
your back hurts.’ The con kept on thinkin’ it was his back.”

In a place where tempers and smoldering hatreds can flare into violence, the absence of a resident physician was deplored by a former inmate: “What can the MTA do? Take the con stabbed in the shower room one day—knife in his back right through the spine. A couple MTAs bring him up on a stretcher, then call a doc in Frisco. The guy has to lay on the table, waitin’ for the doc to catch the next boat, the knife stickin’ out of his back. Cons bleed to death waitin’ for the doc.”

Sometimes a convict with no ailment will make the hospital, or just as likely get his treatment, a forced feeding, in his solitary cell, as an ex-inmate relates: “These are the leaders of hunger strikes. A couple of bulls will hold a man down while the MTA runs a rubber hose in his nose and pours in milk. After a while the fellas decide it’s easier to sit up and eat, and the strike ends.” (This is an old prison custom. Kidnaper Harvey Bailey went on a one-man hunger strike at Leavenworth in 1934 and called it off after taking a gallon of milk a day through his nose for several days.)

There are no reports of such activities during the days when the hospital had a regular medical staff. A guard of that time relates an incident, not so much of custodial callousness as a natural human impulse: “A prisoner in an isolation ward worked loose an iron slat from the bed, wrapped it in a strip of bed sheet, then insisted on seeing the captain about a complaint. He struck the captain a sharp glancing blow that cut open his cheek. We finally subdued him by shoving his elbow down the toilet and holding the wrist over the side until it became numb. He quieted down and we took him into the treatment room for a checkup before bedding him down under a restraining sheet. One of the guards, who had the iron slat in his hand, started out, came back, took two swipes across the prisoner’s rump and walked on out. We all felt better. It was a sort of tribute to the way we felt about the captain.”

Olin Blackwell, the rangy, congenial rancher from Coryell County, Texas, who had spent twenty of his forty-four years with the federal penal system, was associate warden when the tendon-cutting epidemic broke out in solitary in September of 1960. Nine, among them the ringleaders of the “mysterious” lay-in strike, sliced their Achilles’ tendons. A few days later five more hacked their heels. Blackwell said the first batch had used fragments of eyeglass lenses, the second tiny pieces of sharpened metal. But they were “feeble” attempts, the wounds superficial and requiring “only a couple of stitches and a piece of Band-Aid.”

The grapevine hummed. All had been taken to the hospital, sutured, and their legs put in casts. Some had slashed both heels, had both legs in casts. All had been taken right back to their dark cells, and there beaten up. A former inmate says, “They hadn’t used any broken eyeglasses, but sharp pieces of metal sure enough. Razor blades. Man, that shook the bulls up. Bad enough having a razor blade in TU, but blades in the Dark Hole—and after they’d switched to an electric razor. The bulls was really shook. They walloped the bejesus out of the guys, trying to find out where those razor blades come from. Nobody snitched.”

Every prison has a remarkable news service, but The Rock’s grapevine is undoubtedly the most amazing. Attorney Stanley Furman of Beverly Hills, who volunteered his services to Stroud, offers a dramatic illustration. In his last eight years at Alcatraz, Stroud was kept in the special ward built for him in the hospital, behind
two
doors, one solid. He had no radio, no newspapers or news magazines, censored mail, no contact with other inmates, presumably no contact with the outside world, sealed off in a little bug cage upstairs, and what he was reading at the time was 2,000 years old: Latin.

After the third jury had decreed execution, Stroud’s lawyers carried a plea to the Supreme Court that he had been placed in double jeopardy because the second trial jury had recommended against the death penalty. The high court rejected the plea. On one of his visits, Furman found Stroud strangely elated. “I’ve got it made!” the Birdman said, and at Furman’s quizzical look: “Why, the Supreme Court decision in the Green case!” The court had recently ruled such a plea valid. Furman hadn’t heard.

Tendon cuttings kept occurring periodically—and kept, as usual, from the press. On an August night as late as 1961 ten cellhouse convicts, in a desperate try to reach the courts, cut their heel strings. “We were stacked in the Dark Hole like cordwood and not given any medical attention till the next day,” says a participant. The Hole became their convalescent ward, and there they continued their drastic protest. A convict in an open-front cell above called on the sewer line: “I got the thing—drink some red wine,” and flushed down a strip of metal off a coffee can.

Chapter 15

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
1960, when Frank Lee Morris shuffled onto The Rock in leg irons, all the evidence seemed to indicate that Warden Johnston’s buttoning up after the Battle of Alcatraz had made the prison truly escapeproof. Only one serious try had been made during the fourteen years since the desperate and bloody battle, and the results of that one should have discouraged even the most determined.

This attempt took place on the afternoon of September 29, 1958, and the participants were a brace of robbers, Clyde Johnson and Aaron Burgett. Johnson, forty, was serving forty years for the armed robbery with an accomplice of the North Side Branch of the First National Bank of Memphis, a job that netted $43,162 in currency and enabled him to pursue for another two months his dual personality of Clyde Milton Johnson, robber, and John Horace Alexander, bon vivant. He had first tried his hand at crime in a series of chain-store robberies in Los Angles while AWOL from the Army, forays from the barracks that earned him a discharge “other than honorable” and a prison term. In those holdups he had always used a paper bag to carry off the cash from the till and thereafter, in periods of freedom on parole or as an escapee, he had a predilection for the brown paper pokes in stickups of supermarkets, night clubs, and banks across the country. He also had a partiality for flashy cars, whisky mixed with lemon juice, and a plump blonde named Butcher Knife Billie Glaze, whose husband was in prison. The FBI admittedly found his trail hard to follow because he was quiet, well-mannered, courteous. His easygoing, casual way of handing a teller or store manager a paper bag and saying softly, “Fill this with money,” invariably led the victim to laugh it off as a joke—until Johnson backed up his request with a gun. He was shot, the bullet boring just an eighth of an inch from his heart, in the FBI chase that ended his active career in 1949.

Nine years later he was on the garbage detail at Alcatraz with Aaron Burgett, twenty-eight, a rangy gunman doing twenty-six years for the $15.26 robbery of the post office at Banner, Missouri, in May 1952. Burgett was the tenth child of a Missouri cotton picker and had acquired the nickname of Wig as a boy because of long blonde curls. His father said after his capture: “I was father and mother both to him, after his ma died when he was three. He was a mighty good boy, never drank none, went to church, never got in fights, and made an honest livin’ pickin’ cotton till he got mixed up with a no-account woman.” He went off with her to St. Louis and joined a gang, was picked up one night after the postal robbery when a state trooper stopped his car and found eight loaded guns in it. The trooper said Burgett impressed him as “a sadist who doesn’t seem to have any reason for wanting to live.”

Burgett’s blonde hair had darkened to brown, and was crewcut, by the time he had reached Alcatraz and was picking up garbage in the residential area that September afternoon with Johnson. A heavy fog, rare in late September, had rolled in over The Rock; so thick, in fact, that Guard Harold Miller was startled to see a knife inches from his face and to hear Burgett saying, “Be good and you’ll be all right.” Miller was good. They roped him like a steer, tied a strip of cloth tight over his mouth, another strip over his eyes, then lugged him behind the houses and dumped him in a clump of bushes. They gathered up escape gear they had stashed away among other shrubs and made for the shore.

A half hour later the lieutenant of the guards, wondering what had become of Miller and the garbage detail, launched a search. They found him thrashing around in the bushes. The Armorer kicked on the siren. A Coast Guard patrol boat’s searchlight, boring through the fog, discovered Johnson standing waist-deep in the bay, his teeth chattering like castanets. “We made a good try,” he said, “but it just didn’t work.”

For five days, while the convicts were locked up, listening on their headsets to the World Series, searchers poked in the caves at the foot of the windward cliffs. And then Warden Madigan told the newspapers: “I’m satisfied Burgett isn’t on the island. I think he’s drowned. It’s a tough swim, even for an expert.”

On the thirteenth day after the escape, a guard came on duty at 8
A.M.
in the south gun tower. He swung his binoculars around the bay in a routine scanning. He spotted a body, or a log, floating a hundred yards off the southeast tip of the island. It was Burgett. Either the tides had carried him out the Golden Gate and brought him back, or he had snagged on a rock when he went down. That was the normal time for a body to come up.

“If a body doesn’t surface in the first few hours, then it takes ten days to two weeks,” explained Dr. Henry W. Turkel, coroner of San Francisco. “It depends on various factors: what the individual has ingested, the bacteria in his stomach, and whether the crabs get to him. It takes gas to float to the top, and if the body is caught on rocks it will take longer, upwards of two weeks, for the bacteria to produce enough gas to set the body free and let it rise. But if the crabs puncture the stomach and release the gas, the body will never come up. That’s why, in burials at sea, they always make an incision.”

Burgett’s body was considerably decomposed, but there was enough left of a thumb for an identifying print, and his convict number, 991, was stenciled on the belt. His body was still weighted with equipment he had painstakingly gathered, hidden away, then donned or strapped on for the swim to San Francisco. In a pocket was the thin, sharp knife he had made himself, the shiv he had stuck in Guard Miller’s face. Apparently he had lost only his cap in the struggle with the tide rips. He was warmly clothed to endure the cold water, and that ironically may have been his undoing: the weighty garb, once waterlogged, probably made him sink.