Escape from Alcatraz (4 page)

Everyone from felon’s mother to the attorney general must undergo an electronic frisking in the metal detector at the dockyard. He first steps into an adjacent office to register in a big ledger, along with the exact time of arrival, and to empty his pockets of all coins, keys, fountain pens. If he wears glasses, they come off. He then goes out to the shelter, walks through the frame and back again. Inside, an officer watches an oscilloscope for a dancing green line and listens for a raucous buzzer—signals that somewhere on or in the visitor’s body a metallic object still resides.

At the cellhouse, the visitors’ room is pleasant enough, but there is no mistaking the nature of the institution. Along the prison side runs a low, wide shelf with a half-dozen armchairs spaced about a foot apart, and there relatives talk to inmates and lawyers confer with clients. At each place, set off by wedges of plate glass, is an intercom box, and above it, deeply niched into the thick wall, a small window with a bulletproof pane, through which the caller beholds the convict and a monitoring guard. In the early days a visitor spoke through two perforated strips of steel set in the base of the window, the tiny holes offset to prevent passage of contraband. A metallic diaphragm transmitted only firm voices so that no whispered message got past the eavesdropping guards.

This necessarily strict routine could sometimes be disconcerting. Al Capone’s mother once paid a call. As she stepped through the metal detector the green line danced and the buzzer sounded. The officer took her purse and directed her to try it again. The reaction was just as frantically telltale. He summoned the associate warden’s wife, who escorted Mrs. Capone to a room where it was discovered she was wearing corsets with metal stays. She removed them, and the electronic eye let her pass. Bewildered, she rode up to the prison where she seemed even more confused by the guard standing over her, urging her to speak louder—and in English only. She never came back.

The process of ego deflation that reached into sports began with the “dressing in” ritual upon a prisoner’s arrival, as related by Johnston: “I never saw a naked man yet who could maintain any sort of dignity. There is very little egotism left in a man when you parade him before other men in his birthday suit.”

In his memoirs, Warden Johnston wrote of the Federal Government’s expectations of him: “They wanted everything tight, firm, strict, but they wanted to make sure that we could at the same time be just, decent and humane in our treatment of inmates. What it boiled down to in essence was that Alcatraz would be a prison of maximum-security custody with minimum privileges.”

Three years after The Rock’s founding, Johnston, perhaps in a delayed response to the critics of this penal concept, told a reporter in a rare interview: “Alcatraz as a civil prison is an experiment which may have its effect on prison systems throughout the world. We get only the most perplexing problems—problems for the most part which cannot be solved in other prisons.”

The dungeon—in convict jargon the Dark Hole—was one solution to these problems at Alcatraz. Johnston wrote that the brick walls of these rough-floored basement cells “were often damp,” due to their proximity to the old water cisterns. “They were dungeons,” he said, “but they were not Spanish, though they were bad enough and I did not like them. They were badly located, poorly constructed and unsafe, because they were easy to dig out of and in the few instances when we did use them we had to chain the men to keep them from breaking out and running amuck.”

Even though the men had to be chained to the cold, damp walls of the dungeon—painted black to deepen the inkiness—there remained what the warden termed “a decent regard for the humanities.” No man was kept in a dungeon cell for more than nineteen days at a stretch. At the end of that period, he was removed for a day, to break the monotony, and to get a shower, before resuming his solitary confinement.

The Rock, then, was created as a laboratory for an experiment in penology: to reduce to the size of ordinary people the era’s arch-desperadoes, felons labeled by the old
Literary Digest
as “the most incorrigible incorrigibles.” Johnston felt the experiment was a success from the start, as he related in the three-years-afterward interview: “We have some tough customers, but I believe we have whittled them down to their proper size. We have brought all of them to the realization that they are not as big as they thought they were.” A random sampling of the whittling would seem to bear him out:

Harvey Bailey, who drew life with Machine Gun Kelly for the Urschel kidnaping, boasted: “Everything’s okay, just as long as they didn’t crack my neck. No prison will ever hold me.” Alcatraz did.

Al Capone came defiant from Atlanta, where he had fattened on special foods and smoked his favorite cigars, enjoyed a radio and conferred with his underworld henchmen. He left a babbling idiot.

Alvin (Old Creepy) Karpis, of the Midwest’s Barker-Karpis kidnap gang, bragged he could break his way out of bars anywhere. After a quarter century on The Rock, he went to McNeil Island Penitentiary near Tacoma, a reward for good behavior.

Getting The Rock and its custodians ready for the remnants of the gangster era was an arduous task, but at length inaugural day came, August 18, 1934. On that sunny morning Attorney General Cummings and Warden Johnston co-hosted an open house for the press—a limited hospitality before Alcatraz was closed to public scrutiny. (No newspaperman was permitted on the island again until a late Saturday night twelve years later, at the end of the Battle of Alcatraz.) At a brief ceremony on the steps to the entrance of the prison, Johnston, as newsreel cameras whirred, said to Cummings, “Mr. Attorney General, Alcatraz is ready.”

Cummings told the reporters: “Alcatraz is a necessary part of the government’s campaign against predatory crime. Certain types of prisoners are a constant menace. They create an atmosphere of tension and unrest whenever they are confined. They break down the morale of the more promising inmates and are constantly plotting violence, sabotage, riot, or escape.” And, in prophesy or in reply to the penologists, he said: “This prison is one of our pet projects … a vital part of our work of segregating prisoners. We are looking forward to great things from Alcatraz.”

Newsmen were impressed with what they saw. One account ran: “Alcatraz, at last transformed into the impregnable fortress it always had appeared to be, is Uncle Sam’s most potent answer to the crime wave. This new and astonishing prison is designed to subjugate a new type of criminal.… It was made clear that the prisoners, the most vicious and desperate in the country, will not escape from Alcatraz.”

¹
This letter was quoted by Warden Johnston in his book,
Alcatraz and the Men Who Live There,
published in 1949, after his retirement. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons).

Chapter 4

T
HE FIRST SHIPMENT
of convicts to Alcatraz packed all the drama inherent in any hush-hush operation. Newsmen at the island that August day when Warden Johnston pronounced The Rock ready could elicit no hint as to when the new tenants might be expected, their identity, or from what prison they would be drawn.

That same midnight, on the other side of the continent, a special train backed into the yard of the federal penitentiary at Atlanta. It was a short train: a baggage car, diner, Pullman, club car, two coaches with barred windows. One at a time, the chosen convicts were routed out of their cells, hustled into the visitors’ room, stripped, searched orificially from ears to rectum, garbed in loose-fitting outfits that included beltless trousers and backless slippers, manacled to a chain girdle, fettered in leg irons, then prodded aboard the coaches. In all, fifty-three. The train pulled out of the Atlanta yard before dawn on its long, secret journey. Guards patrolled the aisles; others manned machine guns at the vestibules. The convict train roared past stations. To change crews, or take on fuel and water, it rolled into a yard well away from any depot. Even then guards patrolled both sides to keep the curious, attracted by the window bars, at a distance of twenty yards.

Warden Johnston said these elaborate precautions were amply justified. Many of the passengers had escape records, even to leaping from trains. Fresh in memory were the exploits of Roy Gardner, the mail bandit, who on two occasions, while being escorted with another felon to McNeil Island, managed to swap roles with the deputy marshals and jump from the Pullman compartment, leaving his dismayed guardians in manacles and Oregon boots.

More compelling, Johnston said, were rumors that mobster pals of the Rock-bound convicts planned to ambush the train. Only ten months earlier gunmen tried to free gangster Frank Nash at Kansas City’s Union Station, slaying four federal agents and Nash. Harvey Bailey, implicated in the massacre, had as a federal prisoner broken out of the Dallas jail with a saw and pistol smuggled in to him. Bailey was aboard the next special.

At Benicia, on the Carquinez Straits, the train swung onto a seldom-used branch line to Tiburon, north of Alcatraz. There the two coaches were shunted onto a railroad barge and towed under Coast Guard convoy to The Rock in what became known as a “store door” delivery. The convicts trudged up the winding road to the prison, some on bare feet too swollen for the loose slippers. They arrived, as Johnston put it, “hot, dirty, weary, unshaved, depressed, desperate, showing plainly that they felt they were at the end of the trail.” And when the last of the batch had been locked into a cell, Johnston shot off a cryptic wire to Attorney General Cummings:
FIFTY-THREE CRATES
FURNITURE FROM ATLANTA RECEIVED IN GOOD CONDITION, INSTALLED, NO BREAKAGE.

Several weeks later the special train came in from mid-continent, and Johnston’s coded wire announced:
ONE HUNDRED THREE CRATES FURNITURE RECEIVED FROM LEAVENWORTH IN GOOD CONDITION, NO BREAKAGE, ALL INSTALLED.

Alcatraz was in business, to test a penal theory the French were already considering a failure at Devil’s Island.

Among the convicts who broke in The Rock were names once emblazoned across front pages—Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, Roy Gardner, Bugs Moran, John Paul Chase. Despite the elaborate precautions to assure secrecy, press boats hovered as near as Coast Guard cutters permitted that morning the group arrived from Atlanta. News services had spotted the train roaring through Texas and had reported Capone aboard: his well-publicized face had been recognized, grinning, at a barred window. Queried about the Chicago mobster, Attorney General Cummings had said: “That’s one point on which all the newspapers are wrong. Capone is not headed for Alcatraz. That’s all I can say at this time, since we never discuss such matters.”

Roy Gardner, mail-train bandit, made The Rock not because he was vicious, a troublemaker, or a long-termer, but as a tribute to his escape artistry. A stocky, muscular man seemingly without nerves, Gardner, for all his headlined notoriety, had a surprisingly gentle nature. Even in his train robberies, among the more spectacular of criminal pursuits, he backed the railway postal clerks into a corner with a revolver that held imitation, pinewood slugs. Between prison terms Gardner plied his mechanic’s trade, a model family man, until seized by an impulse to rob a train, aberrations attributed to a piece of shrapnel that pierced his skull in France during World War I. When shipped to Alcatraz, Gardner had less than three years still to serve. He was perhaps the one inmate most respected by other convicts.

Gardner in all likelihood was the only convict who ever helped tighten the security setup of The Rock. He invented a receiving cage in the vegetable room below the kitchen that made escape from the basement impossible. Vegetables and other supplies came down a chute from the outside. Gardner rigged up a device like a crab trap that allowed things to come down but nothing, including a convict, to go up.

In a sense, Alcatraz was a homecoming for John Paul Chase. On clear Sunday afternoons in the yard he could gaze to the Marin shore at hilly Sausalito, whose streets he roamed as a boy. A product of Prohibition, he grew up with a feeling for adventure. He went to the mountains to work in a state fish hatchery near the hamlet of Mt. Shasta, but found nursing baby trout too tame for a restless nature. Returning to the Bay Area, he became a rumrunner, an exciting and, in the warped thinking of that extremely wet Dry Era, a romantic calling. Then came the gangsters and Chase jumped into the big time as Baby Face Nelson’s lieutenant, the restlessness of youth now an arrogant swagger. Two G-men died breaking up that gang at the Battle of Barrington, a Chicago suburb, in November 1934. Nelson was slain. Chase, a Public Enemy, his fingertips burned by acid to mar prints, slipped through a massive dragnet, hitchhiked west by the northern route and reached Mt. Shasta the day after Christmas—as Mr. Elmer Rockwood, tourist. A small lapse tripped him up. He went out to the hatchery to borrow twenty dollars from an old coworker. The foreman spotted him, tipped off the police chief.

A federal court jury in Chicago convicted him of murder on the night of March 26, 1935. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was whisked away, destination a secret. Newspapers hinted he had gone to Leavenworth for “seasoning” before removal to Alcatraz. This was the announced policy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, as restated by Warden Johnston to an interviewer in May 1937: “No prisoner is ever sentenced directly to Alcatraz. All have been transferred from other institutions as incorrigible or to break up prison gangs.” Chase had apparently slipped his mind: four days after his sentencing Chase was on The Rock.

A year later, still untamed, Chase was a leader in the first revolt of The Rock. Many sojourns in solitary, and long years of the exacting Alcatraz routine, went into the deflation of the Chase ego. And then one day in 1951, in a San Francisco department store, his boyhood Sausalito friends saw evidence of a remarkable change in John Paul Chase. On exhibit were art works offered for sale as a contribution to the American Cancer Society, and a particularly arresting self-portrait captivated patrons—arresting because of the unconventional pose: an artist awkwardly painting in handcuffs and wearing, not the traditional smock, but a gray shirt with a number. The signature, J. P. Chase. John Paul Chase, Public Enemy, had become J. P. Chase, artist, donating his handiwork to the cause of cancer research—five canvases that netted about $300.