Escape from Alcatraz (9 page)

The next day woodworkers in one of the shops gave a warmer demonstration of their sympathy. They lit a stub of a candle behind crates of desk trays ready for shipment, then went artlessly about their work. In time, the candle burned down, and the flame ran along a trail of paint thinner to a rubber glove filled with the inflammable fluid—whoosh!, and the crates and freshly shellacked trays were soon ablaze.

An Alcatraz guard, aware of the infinite cunning of the inmates, knows the need for steady vigilance. “They had another little fire trick that worked now and then,” says a former officer. “This was a gadget with rubber bands on a small cylinder timed to run down in half an hour and explode a bunch of matchheads. They’d set it going when they knocked off work in the afternoon, and they’d be sitting in the dining room when a fire’d break out in some shop. They were always figuring angles. When the men were passing through the Snitch Box from the shops, for instance, I’d never let a whole batch go through free. They’d think the thing wasn’t working and next time they’d be carrying up half the shop tools. Every so often I’d hit the buzzer button and yell, ‘Hey, come back!’ just to keep them leery. They were always suspicious of one another too and when we ‘shot’ a man—that is, reported him for some infraction—he had to make the hole for his own safety; otherwise, the others would peg him for a stoolie.”

Sometimes several prisoners will stage a phony fight in a section of the yard or mess hall to distract the guards from real trouble, such as a stabbing, in another part. A routine check turned up a pair of screwdrivers and a brace and bit fashioned out of half-inch pipe fittings. Although not found in his cell, they were linked to Teddy Green, the convict who once led an uprising in the Massachusetts State Prison.
¹
Green went to TU, and the guards went to work on the cellhouse, giving it a fine-tooth shaking down. In many of the cells they found cleverly contrived secret hiding places in the hollow bases of the toilets. With great pains the convicts had cut out small holes, just big enough to reach in a hand and hide a gun or a knife or other contraband. They covered the holes with paper, stuck on with white glue snitched from the brush shop, and painted the paper white to blend with the white toilet base.

Hide a
gun
in a cell cache? A gun stolen or smuggled in? A gun manufactured right in the cell. To a “free-world man,” as the prisoners term a person on the outside, the very tightness of The Rock’s security system would seem to preclude such a possibility. Bill Mahan, alias Bill Dainard, an accomplice in the Weyerhaeuser kidnaping in the lawless era of the thirties, proved that the impossible was possible on The Rock. He made
two
guns, not as fancy as the Colt models but no doubt as effective. They were muzzle-loaders, with copper tubing for barrels and rubber bands for triggers. He even made ammunition: matchheads for powder and little pellets of lead. Warden Johnston found the guns and supply of ammunition stashed under a mattress in an empty cell next to Mahan, after another convict had snitched. This was not proof they belonged to Mahan, but a search of his mattress disclosed a hole big enough to receive the guns. Still only circumstantial evidence, but there was a clincher: with the weapons were instructions—in Mahan’s own handwriting.

For some custodians of The Rock in the early days alertness had a strange companion, tedium. A duty that called for proximity to the prisoners—in the cellhouse, the mess hall, the yard, the shops, on the dock detail—generated wakefulness. But a guntower was a lonely watch, a perch loftily removed from contact with inmates, and this remoteness gave convicts the impersonality of ground squirrels or gophers. A guard going on duty picked up a key from the Armorer, climbed the tower, opened the trapdoor, then turned the key over to the guard going off duty, who locked in his relief and delivered the key to the Armorer. In a sense, the guard was akin to a convict: he was a prisoner of the tower for eight hours. Tedium set in, the hours dragging as monotonously for him as for a convict in solitary. As a result, a onetime guard reports, they were subject to a peculiar occupational affliction: they became “tower happy.” To while away the time, some took to scribbling doggerel on the walls, along the line of “The sky is blue beyond the Gate/The life of a guard is a helluva fate.” The former custodial officer reveals how boredom can spur a natural desire for action in a robust man: “I was on a catwalk passing the time of day with a tower guard and after a while he yawns and stretches and says, ‘I wish to hell one of them bastards would stick his head up so I could take a pot shot at him.’ I could understand how he felt. Eight hours up there gets you sort of on edge.” Later, the tower guards achieved a bit more freedom of movement. They locked themselves in, could stroll along a catwalk for exercise.

Their lookout post was an important one in the security scheme of The Rock. They kept a wary eye on virtually every inch of the island, kept the convicts under surveillance when they moved to and from the shops or the dock area. With their binoculars they brought under close scrutiny suspicious objects drifting by on the tide. They were armed with a pistol and a high-powered rifle to warn with a near miss, if a megaphoned warning went unheeded, any boat that strayed within the buoy-marked boundary—and to pick off any convict fleeing to a cliff’s edge or swimming away from shore.

But all the stress that made the life of a guard “a helluva fate” seemed, in those early years, worthwhile, for none of the big-time criminals and escape artists the prison housed succeeded in getting away. On April 1, 1936, a calendar date cherished by children as April Fool’s Day, Congressman Wright Patman of Texas, in a speech to the House, said he had inspected Alcatraz and was impressed by “the absolute impossibility of prisoners escaping.”

¹
Teddy Green led the desperate but futile Massachusetts Prison revolt in January 1955. The convicts surrendered to a seven-man civilian committee headed by Erwin D. Canham, distinguished editor of the
Christian Science Monitor,
in the hope the group could help obtain prison reforms.

Chapter 8

R
ALPH ROE AND TED COLE
were from Oklahoma, as their easy, drawling speech suggested. Roe, thirty-two, a lanky, friendly sort, serving ninety-nine years for bank robberies, once escaped from McAlester Prison in Oklahoma by riding out on a truck hidden in a crate. Cole, seven years younger, runt-sized but hard and crafty, was a murderer at seventeen, saved from execution by his mother’s eloquent appeal. He later killed a cellmate at McAlester, then managed an escape as uncomplicated as Roe’s from that prison, in a laundry bag. Picked up on a federal kidnap rap and awaiting trial, he fled the county jail in a garbage can. He was easily recaptured, but continued to saw cell bars and, on trips to court, to wriggle out of leg irons. When he landed on The Rock, to do fifty years, he boasted, “Don’t think I’ll like it here. Doubt I’ll stay long.”

On December 16, 1937, a tulle fog, a motionless mist, clung to the bay. Roe and Cole worked in the ground-floor mat shop on the north tip of the island, making rubber mats for the Navy out of used tires. The guard counted in the crew at one o’clock, then went to the adjacent machine shop. Roe and Cole ran to a window where they had already cut two bars, concealing their handiwork with a smear. They now bent the bars, broke two panes (the sound apparently drowned by the noise in the machine shop), sawed a sash, and slipped out, taking along a Stilson wrench. They moved through the fog, invisible to the tower guards; smashed a gate lock in the cyclone fence and tossed the wrench aside; groped to the edge of a cliff and jumped twenty feet onto a mound of discarded casings from the mat shop. They plunged on into the bay.

At one thirty the guard returned to the mat shop for the half-hour count, found Roe and Cole missing, discovered the smashed window, phoned the Armorer. For the first time since Alcatraz became a superbastille, the warden heard the rising wail of the siren. It was a signal to herd the prisoners back to their cells; a summons to off-duty guards to grab a rifle from the armory and get with it; a call to the skipper of the launch to cast off and warily circle the island.

Throughout the afternoon and night the cellhouse rang with a great clamor as the convicts celebrated. Roe and Cole had proved that the unbeatable Rock could be beaten. An escape was such an unthinkable occurrence it seemed to baffle the warden, who ran from tower to tower with binoculars, trying to scan the bay through the woolly fog. First inkling to the press was a tip that the warden had requested aid from the Coast Guard, whose spokesman, apparently in the dark himself, could only say, “Yes, we sent some patrol boats over there.” Late editions banner-lined trouble at Alcatraz, vaguely hinting at a possible escape. The hint justified extras: the mystery of Alcatraz, the uncommunicative warden, the call for Coast Guard help on a densely foggy day all added up to sensational news.

Not until that night was official word of the escape released—from the other side of the continent, by James V. Bennett, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington. Not until then were law enforcement agencies of the Bay Area notified, and roadblocks set up. San Francisco police prowled the shoreline opposite the island. Coast Guard cutters halted and boarded all small craft.

The fog lifted the next day. San Franciscans, alerted by press and radio, were understandably tense. An escape from Alcatraz! The phrase had a fearful ring—Alcatraz felons at large. Bank managers were alerted for a possible holdup. Police stopped all cars with Oklahoma license plates. FBI agents swarmed over Fisherman’s Wharf crab boats. Alcatraz guards poked cautiously into water-line caves that honeycomb the cliffs on the windward side. Patrol boats searched for bodies or clues.

As always, tips kept authorities hopping. Anyone who saw two men in an auto phoned police. Enough phantom yachts were reported to hold a ghostly regatta. For weeks every stickup man in California fit the description of Cole or Roe. They kept materializing as hitchhikers throughout the West. Two boys found a skull on a lonely seashore and pried loose two gold teeth. Roe or Cole? Neither had gold teeth. Four years afterward the
San Francisco Chronicle
carried an exclusive story that the fugitives were luxuriating in South America, a story that to this day remains exclusive.

Did they survive? At the time they struck out, an ebb tide was racing past Alcatraz and out the Golden Gate at seven knots, about eight miles an hour. “Small boats could not have bucked that current,” said Lloyd C. Whaley, a San Francisco city engineer. “A strong swimmer starting at Alcatraz would have found himself going out the Gate in the fog before he had expended sufficient energy to reach shore in still water.”

Thus the first breach of The Rock’s security stirred its hour of intense excitement. It shook the prison people, but their dismay quickly turned to new determination. Bennett, the top man, announced: “We intend to make Alcatraz as nearly impregnable as the mind of man can conceive.” This assurance served both to shore up his own, and Warden Johnston’s, shattered faith in Alcatraz and to allay the revived fears of San Francisco that it might expect an invasion of cutthroats any night. San Francisco women’s clubs had raised a shocked outcry when the Department of Justice first disclosed that it was going to crowd the nation’s toughest killers, robbers, and rapists onto the little island. No need for anxiety, the Department replied in effect; nature itself had supplied perfect security: no man could conquer the vicious rip tides that swirl around The Rock.

The women’s clubs came up with a dramatic answer. A teenage girl swam over to the island in forty-seven minutes. Just to drive the point home, another girl in her teens swam over, circled Alcatraz, then swam on back to San Francisco, looking as if she had taken a turn around a swimming pool. For years there was a midwinter swim contest across the Golden Gate, a much more arduous course, with its strong currents, to negotiate. And then there’s the San Francisco swimming club whose members, getting permission to start in close at Alcatraz, make a sport of streaking over to Angel Island, a mile-and-a-half swim, in about twenty minutes. Convincing support for the women’s side came a few years ago when a physical culturist swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco handcuffed. It should be pointed out, however, that all these swimmers were experts, in prime condition. Still, some insist, an escaping Alcatraz convict has one big factor in his favor: incentive.

The very fact that men are imprisoned under any circumstances implies that some will try to escape. Even when Alcatraz was a military prison and then a disciplinary barracks, its inmates lavished great energy, ingenuity, and courage on attempts to get off the island. The first recorded escape from Alcatraz took place during the Civil War when three Confederate prisoners rowed away in a boat, but the record fails to state how far they got.

Ingenuity once served as a deterrent, in the fall of 1926, when the disciplinary barracks held about five hundred prisoners. For days the grapevine hummed of a bold plot for a wholesale break. At a signal, every prisoner would quit work, make a wild dash for the cliffs, leap into the bay like a horde of lemmings, and head out in all directions—for San Francisco, the East Bay, past Angel Island to Marin County—to confuse the gunning guards and hamper the hunt by boat.

The ringleader estimated their chances bluntly: “Some of us will drown, some will be shot, some will be recaptured—but
some
will make it.” An attractive gamble, and these were soldiers disciplined to the gamble of war itself: each felt
he
would be the lucky one. It also held the enormous appeal of a venture that would go down in penal history as the most daring, most dramatic mass break of all time. Reckless excitement infected the men.

The grapevine whispers came to Colonel G. Maury Crallé, who had recently taken over as commandant of Alcatraz. He was a handsome, scholarly man who wore a pince-nez. For some time he paced his office, then summoned his aide. He ordered the prisoners assembled on the parade grounds—guarded by only a handful of officers and men, bearing no arms. After a deliberate delay to heighten the prisoners’ bewilderment, Colonel Crallé strode forth, an imposing figure. He looked over the assembled plotters, adjusted his pince-nez, then delivered a farewell address: