Authors: Alan Jacobson
November 21, 1960
United States Penitentiary – Alcatraz
San Francisco Bay
Alcatraz, California
The cold, damp fog blasted MacNally’s face as he debarked from the white wooden launch inscribed with the name
Warden Johnston
. The boat rocked a bit as he stepped onto the swaying gangplank. Ahead of him, a large black-on-white sign stared at him, informing him of the obvious:
UNITED STATES PENITENTIARY
ALCATRAZ ISLAND
ONLY GOVERNMENT BOATS PERMITTED
There was other text on the sign, but the rest of it did not matter. He was here. On an island, in the middle of the Bay in the Pacific Ocean, a long way from shore. One of the officers onboard the ship told him there were sharks in the choppy, gray waters, but MacNally did not care to look. It was an ocean; he did not doubt it.
Ahead of him stood a five-story cream-colored brick structure—an apartment building, he guessed. To his right, a black steel guard tower rose from the dock. An armed officer stared down at him, a high-powered rifle cradled in his hands. Daring MacNally to try something. By the look on his face, his morning had been as exciting as the desolate waters around him, and a little action would be welcome. MacNally decided to move along as instructed and not give the hack any chance to relieve the day’s boredom.
Then again, he was wearing leg irons and handcuffs, and he was surrounded by three officers. If he was going to attempt an escape, this would not be the time or place he would choose.
From the Bureau of Prisons’s perspective, Walt MacNally was a man who had robbed two banks at gunpoint, kidnapped a child, participated in one escape attempt at Leavenworth, engineered another, and had been strongly suspected in the brutal attack of two other inmates.
MacNally did not blame them for moving him to a prison island and taking stringent precautions. To them, he was a dangerous convict capable of heinous things. And he had to admit, who he was a year ago and who he was now were as different as summer in Spain and winter in Siberia.
“Move it,” the officer said with a shove.
A transport bus’s rough diesel engine idled impatiently as MacNally ascended the steps as best he could with his ankles fastened together. He took a seat and the vehicle lurched forward. A moment later, it strained to climb the steep switchback roadway that led to the prison building.
Seagulls swooned and dove above and around the truck, and their droppings littered the pavement and penitentiary’s exterior brick facing. Even inside the bus, he heard the large birds’ screams. He had a feeling this was a sound with which he would become intimately familiar.
Through damp and dirty windows, the institution loomed before him. He craned his neck and looked up at the building. Three or so stories. Barred windows. The design was not as elaborate or grandiose as Leavenworth. More stark, prison-like. Dreary.
Vegetation was everywhere, however. The hillsides were well planted and lush, and as the bus chugged up the incline, he saw a garden of some kind along the roadway. The transport hooked another left, and then headed up again, toward the entrance to the penitentiary.
Finally, the bus screeched to a halt.
“Up,” the guard said.
MacNally pulled himself from the seat and slowly stepped down the stairs, stooping his tall frame to avoid striking his head while taking care not to trip over the leg irons. The wind was blustery, fiercer here at the top of the island. He took a moment to glance at the Bay view.
“Get a good, long look. That’s what you’ll be missing out on.”
“Incentive to keep your nose clean here,” one of the other guards said. “We don’t tolerate bad behavior, MacNally. We’ve seen your sheet at Leavenworth. That shit won’t fly here. You’re on The Rock now.” The officer gave him a shove forward.
MacNally walked into the sally port and stood before a barred metal gate.
“Opening up,” the duty officer said.
A buzzer sounded and a metal plate slid aside electronically, baring a lock mechanism. The guard removed a key and inserted it into the opening.
The uniformed men led MacNally through an additional gate and then down a hallway before turning left into a large room. To his side stood a long row of shower heads; in front of him, a caged area where two men folded clothes.
One of the guards pulled a key from his pocket and gestured to his feet. “Be still. No fast moves. Understand?” MacNally agreed, and the officer crouched down to unlock the irons. He handed them to his colleague, who headed off the way they had come.
MacNally and his escort continued ahead about thirty feet, stopping at a wire mesh gate with a pass-through opening.
Two trustees dressed in denim shirts and white pants asked him his shoe and clothing sizes, then turned to the wood wall-mounted bins and selected the appropriate items. The inmate tossed it into a neat pile, then added a shaving kit: mug, brush, and soap. “You gotta shave three times a week, no exceptions. No beards, moustaches, sideburns. Nothing. From 5:30 to 8:30, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, guards’ll come around and pass out razors. They collect ’em when you’re done.” He grabbed a printed booklet from a stack and slapped it atop the pile. “It’s all in here. These are the rules. Read ’em. Learn ’em. Things go easier that way.”
He handed it all to MacNally through the opening in the metal mesh wall. MacNally took it and looked down at the thin blue-on-white printed manual titled
Institution Rules & Regulations.
“Your new name’s AZ-1577,” the trustee said. “You’ll be in cell C-156.” He turned and walked back to the bins.
MacNally took a moment to glance around. “You been here a long time?”
“Five years, nine months. Six days.”
“How is it?”
The man glanced sideways at the correctional officer. “Some guys here call it Devil’s Island. How do you think it is?” His eyes slid over again to the guard, then back. “You’re in the middle of one of the most beautiful places on earth. Most of the time, you can’t even see it ’cause you’re either locked in your cell or you’re workin’ in Industries. But you can hear it. When the party boats pass by on New Year’s, you can hear the people laughing. When you go out to the yard, if it’s a clear day, you’ll see all the pretty women in bikinis cruise by in them fancy boats. You can look but you can’t touch. You’re stuck here. On a fucking rock in the middle of the goddamn ocean.”
He looked at the officer again, then leaned in closer to the mesh wall. “Watch yourself, MacNally. Evil lives here, always has... There’s a reason why these guys are on The Rock.”
“One inmate, he called it Hellcatraz,” the other trustee said from across the room. “Seems about right to me. The boredom, day after day, the same routine.” He nodded slowly. “You’ll see.”
“Enough.” The officer grasped MacNally’s left arm. “Let’s go.”
MacNally looked the guard over as he led him out of the room, then up the mint green metal staircase to the main cellhouse. He wore a charcoal double-breasted suit, baby blue shirt and red tie, with a matching gray pentagonal policeman’s hat. A silver badge was pinned to the front of his cap—but otherwise, there were no nametags or other designations on the uniform.
“What’s your name?” MacNally asked.
The officer gave his arm another yank, leading him up the steps. “What do you care?”
“Just two people talking.”
“You ever kill anyone? ’Cause if you did, this conversation’s over. I’m the CO and you’re the convict, you do what I say, and that’s that.”
MacNally stopped. The officer did, too—and he quickly swung his head toward his prisoner to see if he was going to have a problem.
“No. Never killed anyone.”
The man nodded slowly, examining MacNally’s eyes. Then he said, “Name’s Jack Taylor. Call me Officer Taylor, or officer or Mr. Taylor. Never Jack. You got that?”
“Got it,” MacNally said.
Taylor led him up the steps and through another locked gate beneath the West Gun Gallery at B-Block. “Over there’s the dining hall,” he said, tilting his head to the right at the gated room. An officer was sitting at a duty desk a few feet away.
“Hallway here’s Times Square,” Taylor said, “because of Big Ben up there.” He motioned MacNally along. “On your right, that metal door there goes to the rec yard. You get two and a half hours Saturday and Sunday. Softball, handball, shuffleboard, weights. If you sit up on the top of the stairs, you get a view of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. What 1161 was talking about in processing.”
MacNally said, “1161?”
“The inmate. That’s who gave you your stuff.” He led MacNally down a main corridor between the cell blocks. The floors were spit-shine clean and glossy, and the area was unusually quiet save for the hacking cough of a man who was lying on the bed of his ground-floor cell.
“This is Broadway,” Taylor said with a nod of his head. “Next block over to the right, Seedy Street and Park Avenue. To the left is Michigan Avenue.”
“Seedy?”
“It’s where C and D blocks are. C, D...Seedy.”
“The cells are locked during the day?” MacNally asked. At Leavenworth, the doors remained open, allowing prisoners freedom to roam the cellhouse.
“Unless you’ve got a work detail, that’s where you spend twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. Don’t wanna go stir crazy, get yourself a job. Otherwise, those cold, shark-infested waters will look mighty inviting after a few months.”
As they continued down Broadway, MacNally glanced into each of the cells. Along the bottom, a dark green stripe served as a baseboard. Gloomy mint paint extended halfway up the wall, and white finished it off, up to and including the ceiling.
Some cells were stark, with no personalized décor—just a white towel, a shaving kit, a toilet paper roll, and a chocolate brown wool blanket thrown across the bed. Each cell had two small metal shelves, mounted in tandem one above the other, placed opposite the mattress, with another two above the toilet, which sat beside a compact porcelain sink and a cross-hatched air vent opening in the cement wall.
“Are all these singles?” MacNally asked.
“That’s all we got here. Some think having your own cell’s better than a place like Leavenworth where you always got five or ten cellies living with you. Others think it’s more lonely.”
MacNally knew which he preferred. If he’d had a single at Leavenworth, things may’ve turned out differently for him. And he would not now be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, over a mile from land in a place known for its cold, foggy, and windy weather. An institution considered the last stop, living amongst the most incorrigible, most dangerous, and most unruly criminals the United States’ criminal justice system possessed.
As MacNally walked past a few more cells that were unoccupied, he slowed as his eyes locked with a man sitting on his bed.
John Anglin.
MacNally did not know if he should acknowledge him—if Anglin had been a model prisoner at The Rock during his brief tenure, associating with him would be a positive; but if he had been a troublemaker, the opposite would be true. He decided on a gentle lift of his chin, then brought his eyes forward and continued walking beside his escort toward the far wall.
They hung a right and came upon another series of cells. “Welcome to C-Block and Park Avenue. Your new neighborhood.”
“That a library?” MacNally asked, gesturing ahead and to the right.
“Off limits. You want a book? A trustee’ll bring by a push cart filled with ’em. You can have three in your cell at a time. Well, three and a Bible. Magazines, too.
Popular Mechanics, Time, Life, Popular Science,
that kind of stuff. You want, you can buy a subscription.”
“You said this was Seedy Street. C-and DBlocks. This is C. Where’s D?”
“Glad you asked.” Taylor grinned. “D’s in the room next door. Our Treatment Unit.”
“Hospital?”
“Hospital’s upstairs, above the dining hall. No, Treatment Unit’s solitary confinement. Segregation. The Hole.” Taylor stopped in front of C-156. “Best you stay out of there, MacNally. Trust me on that one.” The officer leaned back and faced another guard, who was standing a hundred or so feet away, at the end of the cell block. “Rack ’em, 156!”
A moment later, the officer pulled out keys and appeared to be accessing what MacNally assumed was some sort of control box. The man reached inside and after a series of arm gyrations—he pulled down, then up, then grabbed something else—a
click
sounded above the barred door for C-156. A loud
clunk
echoed, followed by the gate in front of him sliding to the right.
“In,” Taylor said. “Morning gong’s at 6:33. At 6:50, second gong goes off. Stand right here, by your bars, fully dressed, facing out. At the whistle, the lieutenants and cellhouse guards do a standing count. Next whistle’s at seven sharp. That’s when you’ll be turned out to the dining hall for chow. Rest of the daily schedule’s in your book. Page four and five. Oh—and pay attention to the diagram on page eight.”
MacNally stepped into the confining, five-by-nine foot chamber. “Diagram? Of what?”
“Your cell. Everything’s got a place. Towel, jacket, toilet paper, books, calendar, soap. Shows you where everything’s got to go.”
“You’re joking, right?”
Taylor’s face thinned, his jaw muscles flexing. “No. I’m not.” He turned to his colleague and yelled to the far end of the cell block. “Rack ’em!”
More clicks...a solid metallic crunch...and then the door slid closed in front of MacNally. A lonely, bone-jarring slam echoed through the cellhouse.
Taylor’s shoes crunched quietly on the polished cement floor as he walked away. MacNally watched the officer’s shadow disappear, a chill shuddering through his body.
Despite its reputation among cons, MacNally could not imagine how Alcatraz could be worse than Leavenworth. But he had a feeling he was going to soon find out.
Vail handed the note to Price, then pulled out her BlackBerry. “That text—who was it from? The one that said he’s tied up.”
Burden looked at his phone. “Robert. Why am I not understanding what’s going on—”