Escape from Alcatraz (29 page)

The Anglin brothers brushed by without a word. Clarence started up.

“Wait for me!” came a muffled, anguished cry.

John dropped to his knees and muttered angrily, “Christ sake, West, can that racket! You’re gonna bollix things!” He started up.

Morris knelt at West’s exit hole. “Snap it up, man! But wait till the bull goes by before you get your dummy. See you on top.”

Morris climbed the pipe, rubbed smooth by trouser legs. West’s digging echoed dully, ominously, in the dark tunnel. He hesitated on the third-tier catwalk to listen: no sound of digging, nor of West coming up. Here the gloom was less dense, and the jumble of pipes, some carrying salt water to the toilets, had a marine decay, like that of a tramp ship about to be scrapped. A dark lump on the catwalk stirred: a rat watching. At the top, with the guard off the gun gallery, he walked boldly, and silently in this socks, to the mesh cage. The Anglins were waiting, water wings like stoles around their necks. At their feet were rolled-up rafts and oars. They spoke in whispers.

“We need both rafts?” asked Clarence.

“Hell, no,” said John.

“I’ll lead the way,” said Morris. “Be careful you don’t bang a knee goin’ up. Once outside, no talkin’. Voices carry at night. All set?”

“Let’s go,” said John.

Clarence, with a boost from John, followed Morris into the shaft and lay in the crook until Morris could clear the exit. John slid an oar into a folded raft and reached it up to Clarence. He stayed in the cage; at a signal he would grasp his brother’s ankles and as Clarence hoisted himself to the bars—one bent inward—he would haul John into the shaft.

Morris, astraddle the bars above Clarence’s head, deftly picked off the spurious soap bolt heads and, to dispose of them, thumbed them hard against the shaft wall. One after another, he eased the six flat iron uprights free, careful not to dislodge the rivets. He brought his feet up onto the double bars, then raised himself until his head touched the crossbarred grid. He pushed on upward slowly, into the dazzling flashes of the Alcatraz light towering above the southeast corner of the prison. A cold wind was blowing off the ocean. He kept easing upward, gently, and the contraption—the grid, the rainhood, the six supports—came out of the shaft. He leaned over to lay it aside, a gust of wind snatched it, and it clattered to the roof. He checked an impulse to scramble out, ducked back into the shaft. A muttered curse rose from the Anglin below him. All three held still, straining for the sound of pursuit, waiting for the siren to kick, on. Nothing happened. Only the hubbub of convicts still settling down for the night, mingled with the wind whistling shrilly through other ventilators, came to them. Morris felt this racket had absorbed the clatter on the roof. Still …

The officer on the floor, making his first patrol of the night, was walking along the outside of B Block, pat the cells with the bedded-down dummies, when he heard an unusual noise. He looked up, cocking his head. He hurried back to the lieutenant’s desk.

“Just heard a funny noise, up there,” he said.

“The roof?” asked the lieutenant, instantly alert.

“No, sounded more like it came from the hospital.”

The lieutenant went up to the hospital, returned shortly. “All quiet up there,” he said. “Somebody must’ve knocked over a bucket.”

Up in the shaft Clarence Anglin jabbed at Morris’s foot and called in a hoarse whisper, “Get goin’!”

Morris eased himself out of the shaft, which rose a foot or so above the roof. He turned, and a beacon flash blinded him. He shut his eyes tight for a moment, then, shielding his face with an arm, peered into the shaft. Clarence clambered to the bars and reached up the raft roll. Morris took the roll and, bent low, ran a half-dozen steps and crouched beside a raised skylight.

As he waited for the others, Morris studied the weather. One moment the night was black; the next, incandescent. The Alcatraz light did not rotate; it flashed every five seconds, each flash lasting three-tenths of a second. Morris knew their chances of being spotted by the lighthouse keeper were remote; it was unlikely he was even up there. Danger lay to the north and south: the two main gun towers. On the roof they were visible to the guard in the north tower—unless they kept low. Descending the far wall of the mess hall—and a vent pipe from the kitchen was their only means of descent—they would be in clear view of the guard in the south tower.
Clear
view? Overhanging lights floodlit that wall like day.

He observed the sky again. A high fog raced overhead, no more than a hundred yards. In the intermittent beacon flashes he could see the wind snatch a handful of cottony mist off the bottom and fling it along. A few more hours and the fog, pulled down into the airstream funneling through the Gate, would shroud The Rock—and obscure the kitchen wall. But these were precious hours, a head start.

Clarence climbed out of the shaft and crept to the shielding skylight. In a moment John’s head crept up, and he fell in behind Clarence. Morris, hugging the skylight, dragging the raft roll, crawled to the edge of the cellhouse roof. He slipped over onto the roof of the mess hall and crept along a fire wall. He waited in the shadowy far corner for the others, moving like salamanders. He led the crawlers toward the silhouette of the kitchen vent, protruding above the roof about midway along this side. He stopped at the pipe, and the others pulled up behind. They now faced their greatest peril, the fifty-foot descent in the glare of the floodlight from the lamps projecting from the edge of the roof.

Morris, lying against the fire wall, tied the raft to his belt at the left side. Face averted to cut the risk of reflection, he moved over the rim as slowly as a slug, kept to the side away from the tower and slid down the pipe with the same even movement, as less likely to catch an eye than jerkiness. He touched ground, slid onto his knees, then down sideways in a gentle continuing motion. He crawled on his stomach into the shadows at the end of the building. He lay back and watched the others descend as he had.

Morris led the way, still crawling, across a short open space to the cyclone fence. They were now in the range of the north gun tower but at a distance that diminished the glare of its searchlight. Morris scaled the fence, picked his way over the barbed wire and let himself down. The Anglins clambered after him. They kept at his heels as he skirted a terrace and the high water tower, then slanted down a cliff covered with ice plant. He suddenly froze, and they froze behind them. Then all three dropped, burying their faces in the flowers.

A guard came along the road ten feet below them. His footsteps receded in the direction of the shops. They scuttled across the road, into the shadow of the powerhouse. They were out of sight of the gun towers, and the patrol had gone by, their last worry erased. They ran down a slope to the shore of a cove. Off west the amber lights of the Golden Gate Bridge glistened under the fog.

“Made it,” said Morris, breathing deep. The cold wind felt good. He untied the raft. “Let’s get a few boards.”

“Hell with boards,” said John. “Let’s shove off.”

“They’ll stiffen the raft. Some stacks of lumber up the road a short ways. Unloaded the other day, still on pallets.”

“I’ll go along,” said Clarence. He drew a dark object from his jacket and handed it to John. “Hold this.”

“What’s that?” asked Morris.

“Some pictures and things. Let’s get them boards.”

They went back up the incline, a shallow ravine between the steeper heads of the cove, and returned shortly with four boards. They inserted them in the raft. Then they put the finishing touch on the improvised life preservers. They pulled each sleeve open-ended and rapidly through the air to inflate it, tied that end to the other to for a ring, then slid the ring on like a bandoleer—several to each shoulder.

“Where the hell’s the other oar?” asked Morris.

“Christ,” said John, “I forgot it.”

“Never mind, let’s shove.”

They carried the raft to the surf, climbed on, and pushed off onto the dark, wind-roughened waters. They soon blended into the night, and the slapping swish of the paddle faded toward the black mass of Angel Island, a mile and a half away.…

West chipped madly at the cement he had spooned onto his escape hatch, sealing himself in more effectively than the original concrete had. He estimated the times of the patrol and took breaks, climbing into bed, to let the guard pass by. It was after midnight when he made it to the corridor, up to the top, into the workshop. He found an unfinished pontoon, a plywood paddle, three “sleeve” life preservers, his own fake head staring up at him. He peered up into the dark shaft, felt a chill draft, shivered. He stared out across the top of the block. The only sound was the moan of the wind. For a moment he felt terrible alone. Then he grew panicky.
Hell with the dummy.
He dragged over the raft, folded it several times, knelt on it, then raised himself into the shaft and desperately clawed his way on up, past the dog-leg, over the crossbars. He emerged into the blinding flash of the beacon—and a sudden, screeching clamor.

He froze for a terrified instant, then ducked back in. He slid down the shaft, crawled out of the mesh cage, over the edge, down the pipe, into his cell, on into bed, exhausted, knowing that, for him at least, the jig was up.…

West’s head bobbing out of the ventilator shaft had frightened seagulls roosting nearby. They took off shrieking, alarming gulls all along the parapet. Soon the sky rang with the raucous
awrk-awrks
of gulls wheeling above the roof.

The guard in the south tower wondered about the commotion and called the Armorer, who dispatched guards. They searched the ground behind the prison and reported, “Not a thing—must’ve been a rat that scared them.” By now the gulls had settled down again, and nothing further disturbed the night.

Maybe

DID THEY MAKE IT?
Maybe.…

Fog and tide are the meshes that most often entrap Alcatraz escapers. They can flounder in a dense fog, all sense of direction lost; and a swift current can carry them through the Golden Gate, out to sea. On that score, luck was with the Morris trio. At the time of the departure, the fog was high, visibility good; and during that night of June 11, 1962, the ebb tide at its peak ran only 2.2 knots, about two and a half miles an hour.

As usual, the escape generated a feverish hunt, by air, sea, land. Soldiers from the Presidio of San Francisco, carbines in hand, combed every foot of Angel Island, turned up no clue. For weeks every burglary and robbery in Northern California was carefully checked out, but none traced to the fugitives, who would need food and a change of clothing.

On Wednesday, the day after the break was discovered, the trio’s prison-made oar was found bobbing two hundred yards off Alcatraz, toward Marin county. On Thursday afternoon a debris boat with a scoop net, employed by the Army Corps of Engineers to clear the bay of objects hazardous to navigation, was chugging past Angel Island when a load was dumped on the afterdeck. A crewman picked a black plastic bag out of the dripping mass—actually, two bags, one within the other, for better waterproofing, both improvised out of the same polyethylene material of the raincoats. In the inner bag, still dry, were about sixty photographs, mostly snapshots of the family-album type, including fifteen of an attractive brunette; also, a list of names and addresses; also, a receipt for a $10 money order, cashed by the mail clerk at Alcatraz and made out to Clarence Anglin.

This seemed proof positive to prison authorities that the escaped convicts had drowned. Their theory appeared to be bolstered by the muscle-cramping coldness of the water,
if
the fugitives’ raft capsized and dumped them in the bay. The average June temperature of the water around Alcatraz, and between Alcatraz and Angel Island, is fifty-five degrees.

To others, a factor supporting a contrary view—that the convicts made it—seemed equally compelling; if all three went down, the odds were that at least one body would come up. None had. A dramatic boost to speculation that they got away came in mid-December when an escaper actually swam to the San Francisco shore.

At any rate, nine months after their flight the fate of the trio remained an enigma.

Why?

FROM THE DAY IT SWALLOWED
up its first gangsters Alcatraz has had a reputation, fostered by the Department of Justice, as America’s most dread prison. The very name, Alcatraz, has become a synonym for a Devil’s Island, a penal rock harboring the worst criminal element, often chained to the wall of a dark, dripping dungeon, with only unseen rats for companions. A sort of Ile d’If incarnate. And to this day, a quarter of a century after the G-men ended the gangster era, that myth has endured as a fact.

In the early years, Associate Warden Miller made it clear to a prisoner: “Alcatraz is not a penitentiary. Alcatraz is Alcatraz.” Years later Warden Swope said: “There is always that small minority needing an Alcatraz.” And after him Warden Madigan said: “The men who come here have less prospect for rehabilitation than the men in the rest of our prison system.” The refrain kept up into the 1960s with the lament by Warden Blackwell on the difficulty of finding convict house servants because if they could be trusted to act as trusties, “they don’t belong on the island.” In such ways was the myth of Alcatraz nurtured.

Why? To hold as a Damoclean gasbilly over federal prisoners elsewhere: be good, or you go to Alcatraz. The myth also helped justify the extravagant cost of The Rock’s upkeep.

Has Alcatraz really housed only the “incorrigible incorrigibles”—only those with long terms that make them potential escape problems—only the troublemakers who stir unrest? Earl Taylor was an accountant serving
five
years for tax evasion, and he was given five dollars and an on-the-spot, unconditional release straight off The Rock, fifteen minutes before he was due in court to argue his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Allen Clayton West, who cemented himself in, was serving ten years for car theft. In 1962 a man was doing time at Alcatraz for stealing a pig—a federal rap because he stole it on an Indian Reservation. Another Rock felon’s offense: theft of two cases of cigarettes from a boxcar in Oklahoma. A military prisoner landed on The Rock for assault and a $1.50 robbery. To Alcatraz went another military prisoner who never stole anything, whose only offense was that he had gone AWOL; he gave himself up, later escaped, was sent to Leavenworth.