Escape from Alcatraz (8 page)

The bakery was not the only place where brew-making went on. One day the foreman of the furniture shop reached into a barrel of grommets, used to make wooden mats for the Navy. His fingers struck something solid, and he pulled forth a gallon jug of raisin pruno. He dug into other barrels, found another jug of fermenting grog. The men had brought the raisins down in their pockets a few at a time, slipped to them by a pal in the kitchen crew as they moved along the mess hall steam table.

Reading a letter was a more frequent diversion than writing one, for a convict could send out only two a week but receive seven. Writing was restricted to one side of the paper, and correspondents were warned not to refer to any person by nickname or initials, nor to make any cryptic remarks. At the beginning, a convict could correspond only with an immediate member of his family, the restriction later eased to include a fiancée or old friend—but not an ex-convict nor an inmate at another prison. Mail privileges began three months after the convict arrived on The Rock, to provide time for an FBI check on the listed pen pals. These investigations still occasionally turn up an old acquaintance who backs off upon hearing the letters will bear an Alcatraz postmark (although the island lies within the city limits of San Francisco).

All mail, outgoing and incoming, is censored. This prevents the hatching of plots but also tends to dampen a convict’s ardor to a girlfriend when he knows his protestations will first be read by the mail officer. Suspect portions of a letter to a convict are not snipped out with scissors; the missive itself is typed, and a carbon copy given the inmate, for a special reason: the original might be saturated with dope—a letter both to mull over and chew on.

The limitation on correspondents is sometimes misunderstood by the public. During the regime of The Rock’s second warden, Edwin B. Swope, a special-delivery letter came for Robert Stroud, the celebrated authority on bird diseases, from a woman in Southern California, seeking advice regarding her sick canary. It was returned with a notation that regulations prevented its delivery to the prisoner. Not long afterward the warden received a package by express marked “Personal.” It contained a tiny coffin, and in the coffin the canary. He gave the bird a burial.

The chief diversion of the convicts in the early years of The Rock was the two-hour recreation period outdoors, if the weather permitted. Blustery weather was a thing to dread, for it meant confinement to a cell with little to do from 5
P.M.
Saturday until 6:30
A.M.
Monday, a stretch of monotony broken only by treks to the mess hall and the hour in the chapel for the churchgoers. Those who prayed prayed often for a clear Sunday and a period in the yard, an area roughly the size of a football field, extending from the angle of the T-shaped prison looking toward San Francisco and the Golden Gate. Twelve concrete steps, serving as bleachers, rise against the mess hall, the stem of the T, and from the high steps the view can be spectacular, especially if rains or high winds whipping through the Gate during the night have swept the atmosphere clean. To the west the convict sees the majestic sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge, its towers orange-red against the azure sky, Sunday motorists streaming along its deck. A fresh breeze comes off the Pacific, just spanking enough to gratify the weekend skippers, their small craft, white sails full, skimming along the blue surface of the bay. Beyond rises the green patch of the Presidio of San Francisco. Pull the gaze to the left and San Francisco, dazzling in the cleansed air, seems unreal, a scene in a stereoscope. The apartment skyscrapers on Russian Hill, the streets like rows in a hillside vineyard, Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, the spatulate-fingered piers spreading out from the Embarcadero—all so startingly close. A cable car is clearly visible clambering up the Hyde Street hill. A mile and a half away? Why, you could ricochet a flat stone to the San Francisco shore!

And then the convict looks near at hand, to the yard enclosing him. Along the top of its twenty-foot wall runs a gunway with parapet, and at the three corners squat gun boxes. A catwalk links the wall to the south gun tower, and another catwalk, like something built with an Erector set, extends to the gun tower atop the shop building. The convict looks again at the life teeming just beyond—on the bay, on the Gate span, on the hills of San Francisco—and the truth of the Rock saying jolts home: It take ten minutes to come over from San Francisco, ten years to get back.

The wail of the wind in the ventilators at night may disturb the convicts’ sleep, but it gave many a military prisoner in the Army days the shudders. For there was a superstition then that the prison was haunted, a superstition that had a tragic basis. Back in the nineties, an apartment upstairs where the chapel now is located was occupied by an Army doctor, his pretty young wife, and their baby. One morning their Chinese houseboy found the baby sitting up in the crib, playing, and in the bedroom the wife murdered, the doctor a suicide, the pistol in his hand. No one knew why; they had been a devoted couple.

There is no evidence that the Spanish explorers ever set foot on The Rock, nor the Mexicans after them. Certainly the Indians, before either of them, did not. But the Indians had a special reason to shun the island. They considered it a dwelling place of evil spirits.

Chapter 7

A
FEW YEARS AGO
a marshal escorted an Alcatraz convict to the Federal Prison Bureau’s hospital asylum at Springfield, Missouri. Word had spread, and a score of guards gathered to stare at the prisoner—a man from The Rock. It was striking evidence that guards as well as convicts at other penal institutions hold Alcatraz in awe.

You are a rookie guard at Alcatraz, a place
Time
once described as “the human zoo of the ‘world’s most dangerous men.’ ” You had been aware of its reputation for years, and your very training for the job had heightened that awareness. And now for the first time you walk into the cellhouse, unarmed. The muscles around your stomach knot up. You walk down Broadway outwardly cool and unconcerned, but inwardly keyed to a high pitch, every nerve alive.

A former guard says: “I never lost that feeling. In time I got to know the convicts and as individuals many of them were pretty good guys. Really surprising, a lot of them, after what I’d heard: polite, intelligent, no trouble, like fellows you might run into anywhere. But there was that wall between you, an invisible wall; you could sense it in their courtesy, in the way they addressed you, always as Mister. Something uncanny about it. This feeling could bug you if you let it, for wherever you were—the cellhouse, the mess hall, the yard, the shops—you knew that eyes were on you, watching, speculating. And every morning as I walked into the cellhouse, my stomach muscles tightened up. I always had the thought: maybe today’s the day it’s going to happen.”

Another former guard says: “I got a kick out of the men. They were like kids, in a way, up to some prank or a bit of mischief, and real clever about it. Such experts at casing, if you moved something two inches, next time they came through they knew it. My shop had a partition with a window so I could keep an eye on the men in the next room. One day Tex Lucas winked at Machine Gun Kelly, then slipped up and laid a shiny green wrapper off a typewriter ribbon on the window sill. Kelly tipped me off, and we watched out of the corner of our eye. Pretty soon a prisoner in the other room hurried by the window, did a double take, moseyed back, shot a glance around to see no one was looking, then peered over his shoulder at the green wrapper. He started on, came back again, glanced carefully around, then peered closer. He went across the room. A moment later one of the other men comes over as if he’s got important business, but as he passes the window he slows down and, making sure nobody’s looking, takes a quick gander at the wrapper. He goes back. A third man saunters across, as if he hasn’t got a thing on his mind, but as he gets near he glances around, then sidles up and peers, shoots another quick look my way, then peers down close. That thing really bugged them—some sort of signal sure as hell, maybe for a break. They were a kick, all right, but you had to keep your wits just the same, always a jump ahead of them. I’d look at a man and think: ‘Now, if I were him, just what would I be plotting?’ It was no place to be caught napping.”

That’s the way it was with the guards: perhaps amusing moments, yet a constant vigilance against a constant danger. At any moment of the day, or night, anything could happen—and often did. It happened one day at the noon meal, a sudden and savage attack, not by a big-name gangster but a studious young inmate.

Trouble had been long brewing. For a year and a half the convicts had endured the crushing grind of relentless routine, and then on January 22, 1936, they revolted against the rigid rules, the rule of silence in particular. It was the first known disturbance on The Rock and the participants, about half the population of 250, were put on bread and water. Warden Johnston described the affair, a strike, as a “test of strength between the prisoners and the Department of Justice as to who is going to run the prison.” The Department of Justice won. At the strike’s end, after three days of the spare diet, the warden announced that the rules remained “exactly the same.”

Tex Lucas, the strapping Texas Badman who did thirty days in the dungeon as a leader of that affair, spent three months the following year, 1937, organizing a second strike. His lieutenant was Burton (Whitey) Phillips, twenty-five-year-old Kansan doing life for bank robbery and kidnaping. One autumn morning Lucas gave the signal in the machine shop, and the men dropped their tools and began shouting, “We want to talk! We want newspapers! We want radios!” Soon the cries rang through all the shops. Notified by phone, Warden Johnston said: “Give them a half hour to get back to work.”

Jeers and curses greeted this ultimatum, and the warden issued an edict: no work, no eat. They were locked up, and placed on bread and water. For days the cellhouse reverberated with shouts, tin cups banging on bars, steel table tops slammed against steel walls, iron beds dropped on concrete. By the end of a week most of the convicts, tiring of the skimpy diet, returned to their jobs. Lucas, Phillips, and a dozen other suspected leaders made the dungeon. A guard inquired daily if the holdouts were ready to work. On the fifth day Whitey Phillips meekly gave in. He seemed thoroughly repentant as he ate lunch, stood up with his tier group at the first whistle, turned at the second, and at the third filed past the steam table to check in his flatware.

Warden Johnston chatted with the captain near the door, his back to the convicts. Guards stood idly at their scattered posts. The armed guard on the gun balcony outside kept a wary eye on the room. All was quiet, except for the shuffle of heavy shoes and a muffled clatter in the kitchen. As he approached the door, Phillips bolted from the line and crashed a fist behind the warden’s right ear. The warden dropped unconscious, as if struck by a mallet. Phillips kicked his face, then straddled him and rained trip-hammer blows. The guard on the catwalk rammed a machine-gun barrel through a port but dared not fire. It took five guards to drag Phillips off the warden and subdue him.

Johnston spent a week in the Marine Hospital in San Francisco. A prison official told the press Phillips was hospitalized on The Rock but declined to state the “nature of his ailment.” In the rescue of their warden, and aroused to a cold fury by the viciousness of the attack, the guards had requited blow with blow in generous measure. P. F. Reed, a counterfeiter who witnessed the scene, described it after his release in a series of articles, “Alcatraz is Hell,” in the
San Francisco Examiner
in October 1938. He related that Phillips was floored with a gasbilly and then two guards took turns playing croquet on his head with their metal clubs, driving him, inches at a whack, halfway across the dining room.

The impression gained at the time was that Phillips’s wild attack was motivated by anger over the warden’s action in starving out the strikers. James Martin MacInnis, San Francisco lawyer who later conferred with Phillips on a writ, said the convict revealed a deeper motivation.

“Phillips was a victim of the hysteria of the early thirties,” says MacInnis. “He was a young fellow who got in with bad company and joined in robbing a small-town bank in Kansas. They took the manager as hostage, drove down a country road and let him out, unharmed. This was Phillips’s first offense, but he drew a life term. Driving down that back road they happened to cross a state line, and he was the first to be tried under the new Lindbergh Law, making it a federal offense to take a kidnap victim across a state line.

“A bright, sensitive kid, Phillips took a philosophical view of Alcatraz, became interested in the people and started writing a book about life on The Rock. He heard the warden had published a book and requested an interview. He asked the warden if he would look over his manuscript and perhaps offer his criticism. The warden agreed, and Phillips handed it to a guard. Weeks went by. He saw the warden again and asked, hopefully, ‘What did you think of my book?’ The warden replied, ‘I read that manuscript and decided it’s not the kind of material you should have, so I confiscated it.’ That changed Phillips’s whole outlook, and he began to brood.”

A violent incident such as Phillips’s attack serves to widen the gap between inmate and keeper at a place like Alcatraz, designed primarily to punish, not reform. And when punishment is the aim of incarceration, any further punitive action taken against a few wins the sympathy of all. The culinary crew struck when their work was abruptly reclassified as a nonpaying household chore. They were slapped in D Block, an isolation section the prison command euphemistically calls the Treatment Unit, where convicts are treated for misbehavior. The grapevine carried the news. That night a muted howl, like the mournful cry of a coyote on a far ridge, drifted out of the concrete-walled D Block, then answering howls. A signal from TU, as the prisoners call the unit. Convicts in the outside bank of C Block, across from TU, picked it up, began howling. In a short time the whole cellhouse was a bedlam as the inmates shouted, chanted, banged tin cups, beat their beds down in a sympathy demonstration.