Escape from Alcatraz (7 page)

This was the way it was in the early years of Alcatraz, a brooding and grimly forbidding island prison in the bay, shrouded in fog and secrecy. And then came rumblings that this pet project of the Department of Justice was not an original experiment in penology after all, but an idea borrowed from the Middle Ages, a horror chamber Torquemada might have dreamed up. Bryan Conway, a released convict, reported: “Men slowly go insane under the exquisite torture of routine.” Al (Sailor) Loomis, counterfeiter and onetime boxer, set free in February 1936 after sixteen months on The Rock, told the United Press that a suicide watch was even maintained while a man shaved. A guard twice a week handed a convict a dull blade, gave him two minutes to shave, then stood by to prevent any attempt at self-destruction. Loomis said: “Many almost succeeded by slashing legs and arms. It’s hell there. Life gets so monotonous you feel like bucking the rules to break the monotony. That’s it—the monotony. It’s driving the men screwy.” He said the one-man cells were maddeningly simple: “The walls were the barest things I ever saw. No pictures. Nothing. If a con tried to put up the photograph of his mother he was headed for the hole.” Loomis summed up life on The Rock: fog, sand fleas everywhere, unceasing scrutiny, censored mail, utter lack of hope, no amusement, no relief from boredom. “They never give a guy a break.”

Conway, writing in the
Saturday Evening Post
(“20 Months in Alcatraz,” February 19, 1938), reported that in his last year on The Rock fourteen prisoners went “violently insane” and “any number of others” were isolated as stir crazy. In a period of three years thirty-five inmates reportedly were packed off in straitjackets to the Federal Prison Bureau’s asylum at Springfield, Missouri.

The Department of Justice ignored these reports with a loftiness that indicated they were the mere ravings of ex-convicts. However, in 1938 the physician in charge of the medical staff (the prison hospital was then staffed and accredited, but no longer is) was abruptly replaced, without explanation, by a psychiatrist, Dr. Romney Ritchey.

It was about then that Roy Gardner, the train bandit, came off the island to report Capone a madman: “Al’s mind is gone. His enemies and the hell nights did it.” He described hell nights as the nights made sleepless for a convict by anxiety over family affairs, or a long term awaiting him in some state prison when he leaves The Rock, or enemies on the outside waiting to fill him full of slugs; or by the screaming wind and blasting foghorns. Almost nightly the wind funneling through the Golden Gate shrieks down the ventilator shafts of the cellhouse. On foggy nights, and it’s more often foggy than clear, the horns at each end of the island set up a strident reverberation, one every twenty seconds, the other every thirty seconds.

The evidence seemed clear that hell nights alone had not deranged Capone. The “exquisite torture of routine” played a part, and the minor infractions, such as talking, that put him so often in the dread dungeon. What apparently tipped the scales, a convict later testified, was a medieval display of punishment in which Capone was forced to squat for days in a cage three feet high.

Other stories, some shockingly grisly, of inmates being driven to suicide or self-mutilation by the rigors of The Rock began coming to light, either through coroner’s inquests or tips to newspapers long after they had happened. There was the suicide-by-flight of husky, forty-year-old Joe Bowers, described by Warden Johnston as a man of more brawn than brains. He was serving a twenty-five-year term for the $16.63 robbery of a store in the mountain hamlet of Isaiah in the Feather River country of the High Sierras—a federal offense because the post office was in the store.

Joe Bowers worked alone at the incinerator on a lower level of the island’s west side facing the Golden Gate, next to the cyclone fence. He burned trash and mashed tin cans and sent them rattling into the bay down a chute through the fence, a chute too small for use as a slide. The fence bordered a cliff with a sheer drop of sixty feet to jagged rocks.

His job came under the surveillance of the south gun tower. On duty that bright April morning of 1936 was Guard E. F. Chandler, whose keen custodial eye pivoted from incinerator to the yard, to the steps from the yard, to the vehicles on the winding road from the shops to the wharf, on around to the bay where a boat might venture within the buoyed boundary and need a warning shot. When he heard the 11:20 whistle, the signal for all workers to return to their cells for the pre-lunch count, Chandler glanced down to watch Bowers head up the road. He was astonished to see the convict dash to the fence and start climbing.

Chandler grabbed up his megaphone and shouted, “Joe! Get down out of there! Joe! Stop …! Get back down, Joe!” Bowers kept climbing. What happened in the next few seconds, Chandler described to a coroner’s jury:

“I picked up Mary Ann and fired a couple of low ones, thinking I might get him in the leg. When he kept on going and went over the fence I leveled Mary Ann and let him have it. I knew if he got to the bay, God knew where he’d go next. He might be robbing banks in San Francisco. I had my orders and I followed them. That’s what I’m there for.

“Bowers was over the deadline. He knew what he was doing, and I couldn’t get him without wings.”

Bowers was at the top, picking his way over the barbed wire, when Chandler leveled Mary Ann and let him have it. A single bullet sped from the tower, on target. Bowers leaped convulsively, plunged to the rocks. The prison launch recovered the body. He had been shot through the lungs.

The general belief among the inmate population was that Bowers, growing stir simple and bent on ending it all, had taken this means to circumvent the canon against self-destruction.

John Stadig, counterfeiter isolated in a bug cage upstairs when he began acting a bit wacky, exhibited a gruesome cunning. A guard handed in lunch one day and then, instead of standing watch, let Stadig alone behind the locked, solid door. Stadig bent a prong of the fork and jabbed it in his wrist, worked it under the big vein and pried the vein out into the open. Then he bit it in two. He was prying the vein out of the other wrist when the guard returned for the luncheon tray. Besides his wrist, Stadig punctured a hole in the concept of Alcatraz as a super-lockup for troublemakers: too much of a trouble on The Rock, he was shipped back to Leavenworth. The day he arrived there, safely locked away in a cell, he broke a lens of his eyeglasses, took a jagged piece and sliced his jugular vein. He had at last found release.

One night in 1937 the
San Francisco Chronicle,
a morning paper, received a tip of an incident on the island and, unable to get verification, ran a vague account of “a prisoner, last name of Percival,” that read, in part: “A story of horror, almost unbelievable, came out of the prison fortress, Alcatraz, last night. It rivaled in grimness some of the tales of Poe and, although shrouded in a close veil of secrecy, it remained undenied … Warden Johnston would neither deny nor confirm the story.”

Washington conformed it the next day. The episode had occurred
a month earlier.
The convict who played the Poe protagonist was one Rufe Persful, Arkansas robber. He was working with the dock gang. He laid his left hand on a block and chopped off the fingers with a hatchet, one after the other, like a butcher cleaving chops off a pork loin. He then offered the hatchet to a gaping convict, laid his right hand on the block and said, “Chop them off, too!” The convict flung the hatchet aside and ran shouting to the guard.

A question naturally arises: How many other incidents of men driven to appalling self-mutilation by The Rock’s refined system of medieval torture have been successfully covered up?

For three years the grim rule of silence gave The Rock the strange aspect of a prison for the dumb, convicts untutored in sign language. Warden Johnston contended the rule was not so severe as it sounded, that the men could talk in the shops during a three-minute rest period in the morning and for three minutes in the afternoon; that, at meals, one might say, “Pass the sugar”; that they could chat in the yard on Sunday afternoons, except that the guards zealously kept the men separated to prevent the hatching of plots. In 1937 Johnston announced to the press he had rescinded the rule as a step in easing the rigidity of discipline. The action was commended as a humanitarian gesture.

Convicts who were there at the time offer another version. Johnston, dubbed Salt Water for a reputed practice of hosing down unruly inmates, had a habit of coming into the mess hall at lunchtime to sample the fare. He would then stand near the door as the prisoners filed out. The dining room had the subdued, almost sedate atmosphere of a gentlemen’s club, the polite requests for salt or pepper arising like the murmur of cultured conversation. Suddenly, above the murmurous quiet sounded a clear, strong talking voice, distinctly not saying, “Sugar, please?” The effect produced was that of a rattle of gunfire. The warden glanced in surprise at the captain. A guard headed for the culprit. A voice broke forth in response to the speaker, then a convict piped up at another table, then another. Within moments the place range like a boilermakers’ banquet. The guards were helpless. There wasn’t room in the eight dungeon cells to hold everybody. The rule of silence on The Rock had come to an end, by the simple expedient of talking.

Years afterward a sartorial change was effected by a similarly spontaneous, but much more dramatic, action. One evening a convict flung his coveralls out onto Broadway and shouted to the officer on the floor, “You can shove ’em!” Soon the hated garments were flying from all the tiers. Artists shook out bottles of turpentine, then a convict threw a flaming roll of toilet paper from a top-tier cell. Broadway blazed merrily, bright as its namesake. And the men were measured for trousers.

Weapons at their disposal to protest conditions, when verbal pleas fail, are cellhouse rackets and strikes, a refusal to work or to eat. Publicized hunger strikes imply dissatisfaction with food, which is sometimes the case but not always; more often, these are merely a means to an end. Even an industrial strike takes on a hunger aspect: the men are locked up and kept on bread and water, a no-work, no-eat management countermeasure that invariably proves effective. In a hunger strike pure and simple, the men refuse to leave their cells for the mess hall.

In 1940 the strangest strike of all occurred at Alcatraz. No violence of any kind, no shouting, no banging on the cell bars at night. By choice they invoked silence. They did their work in the shops without a word. They filed mutely into the mess hall and on past the steam tables without touching the hot food. They sat down and silently dined on a slice of bread and coffee. Word of the novel action leaked out and the papers, enchanted by the passive, Gandhi-like behavior of the nation’s toughest criminals, played up the story as the Mystery of The Rock.

Warden Johnston felt impelled to comment, and his words were in tone with the bizarre quality of the affair: “It’s the reaction of frustrated men. You lock a man up in a hotel for sixty, seventy, even ninety-nine years, and every so often he will seek to gain the attention of the world outside.” The silent strike lasted a week, ending as abruptly as it had begun; to the press still a big mystery. Actually, the men
were
seeking to gain attention, but not so much the attention of the world outside as the attention of the federal jurists in San Francisco. Convicts there at the time report that petitions were not getting off the island and the strike, its purpose no mystery to the officials, was called to protest that denial of access to the courts.

Monotony dominated life on The Rock, but there were moments of relief. Work offered physical activity and a companionship of sorts: you were in a room with others; and in the three-minute conversation breaks in the forenoon and afternoon, you could hear your own voice in natural talk. Religious services—Saturday, for Jewish inmates; one Sunday for Catholics, the next for Protestants—provided both spiritual solace and a break in the grinding monotony. So bent was the warden on punishing that equal time was deducted from recreation—surely the only place in America where prayer drew a penalty. The warden theorized that, without such an option, all the convicts would want to attend chapel simply to get out of their cells for an hour. (It could be argued that long exposure, even on this basis, to the teachings of the chaplains might well prove beneficial.) This theory was disproved years later when, at the insistence of a priest, the penalty for church attendance was removed. The convicts did not all suddenly get religion. Chapel attendance continued as it had been, and as it has been through the years: an average of 10 percent of the inmate population.

Convicts devised their own ways to ease the lonely solitude of their monastic cell life. They made pets of mice that crept timidly into their cells. (Rats also skulked the tiers at night, but they were less attractive as cellmates.) The prisoners made nests in their bathrobe pockets for the mice, even took them on journeys to the basement on shower days. They fed the pets bread snitched at meals at the risk of solitary confinement, some daring to take them along, under their shirts, to the dining room and feed them furtively at table. Once a guard-foreman of a shop saw a convict catch a fly and slip it in his pocket, then another fly, and another. Curious, he kept an eye on the convict as they went along the road after quitting time, saw him step lightly on a beetle, then pocket it. Later, he slipped up to the convict’s cell and saw him feeding the beetle and flies to a pet lizard. The guard, a sympathetic sort, quietly retreated, smiling.

As in all prisons, the convicts of Alcatraz managed in the ingenious ways of imprisoned men to brew alcoholic beverages. In the federal penitentiaries intoxicants, whatever their nature, go by the generic name of pruno. The most exotic concoction of The Rock in the early days was a pruno cocktail: milk and gasoline. (Mention of this drink was made during a federal court trial, but its effects not discussed.) On occasion, whisky was smuggled in by kind-hearted guards, but generally the convicts had to make their own booze, and the best place for such an illicit operation was the bakery in the basement beneath the kitchen. Here the yeasty aroma of a fermenting brew was so akin to that of rising dough that the making of pruno went undetected for a long time. Until a couple of drunks spoiled things, the bake shop was perhaps the one spot on the island where the inmates were really happy at their work. The recipe was simple: put raisins and other dried fruit to soak in a crock, add yeast to speed up the fermentation, and cover the crock with flour sacks. The bakers, realizing they had a good thing going, drank in moderation, an aperitif before meals. One afternoon a couple of bakers dipped into the crock too early, and too often. They became spiflicated and, as drunks anywhere, fell to boasting, then to arguing, then to fighting. The guard on duty in the basement heard the commotion, came running, moved in to break it up. He seized the convict he thought was the aggressor—and then saw, too late, that the other had a knife. The guard held his breath as the other convict started to lunge. Luckily, the convict recognized the uniform in time to divert the blade. He meekly handed the knife over to the guard, one of the most respected officers of The Rock. Thereafter, bakers confined their art to bread, rolls, and pastries.