Authors: Joe Urschel
“Guess I’ll have a pretty hard time making it,” he quipped. Despite the humor in his remark, few doubted the seriousness of his intent.
On Friday, October 13, Kelly was placed in a barred, bulletproof prison coach hooked to the Katy Limited and carted off to Leavenworth guarded by eight Bureau agents, all wielding machine guns.
Kelly was more succinct than Bailey on his way in. He looked at his guards and announced, “I’ll be out by Christmas.”
After Kelly had been carted off to Leavenworth, Kathryn was forced to face the reality that she might never see him again. On the Saturday morning after his relocation, she sat down and wrote him a love letter.
My Dear Husband:
No doubt you are back at Leavenworth by now. I really had my misgivings yesterday tho’ it being Friday, the 13
th
I was sure the train would wreck, or you’d get hurt. You know my superstitious nature.… I will be awfully glad when I leave here. Anything for a change, however two of the jailers here have been awfully kind and nice to me, the others hate me, I suppose.
It is much more lonely for me Dear, since you left. Just the thought of you here in the building was worth a lot. I do hope I can be with mother to cheer her up. I am going to try my best to be a model prisoner with her, and perhaps she can make parole, if I can’t later. As for me personally, I’d just as soon be inside as out without you, and you know that. So don’t worry about me Honey. My life is so wrapped up with you I wouldn’t enjoy my pleasures outside without you anyway Dear. I do hope you will try to be a good prisoner sweetheart. The cards are stacked against you, so be man enough to realize it and don’t give them a chance to murder you, that’s what they want. I know how good and sweet you are Dear, and I will always adore you, and that’s all that really matters. You have been and will always be, the one great love of my life, and if it is God’s will to separate us forever, that cannot destroy our love, and I don’t believe that is his will for he alone realizes that you and I never harmed anyone and that we’ve helped hundreds of the needy and I think we will again be together in the future. None of the accused have been given Justice here, you know. And a very bad picture has been painted of us, and poor old sweet mother, but honey the public doesn’t know so don’t feel hard about it. I am glad you were man enough to keep the other two fellows out of it. Nobody likes a squealer and altho’ they deserved it, let the smart guys figure it out if they can. They could have cleared me, but rather than talk, I’d rather be here. Think of me, Sweetheart, and I shall be thinking of you constantly. Try to be satisfied and don’t worry. Just remember the happy hours we’ve enjoyed together. Nobody can take those away and we have been happier in the past three years than most people have through a lifetime, Darling.
With a heart full of love, and a big Kiss, until death us do part, your very own,
Kathryn
The letter was intercepted and held as evidence because of its reference to the two other gang members whom Kelly had not given up. It was never forwarded to Kelly at Leavenworth.
* * *
Hoover had just put the Bureau on the national map with its stirring arrest and conviction of Bailey, Bates, Kelly and his gang, and he wanted to make sure they didn’t make a mockery of it by walking out of a federal prison only a few short months later. They had the money, the influence and partners on the outside that could easily make it happen.
Hoover wrote to Director of Prisons Stanford Bates and warned him not to compromise his finely crafted image of the Bureau’s invincibility by letting their captives escape. He reminded the Director that Bailey, Bates and Kelly were “desperate and dangerous.” He reminded Bates that their fellow gang members—Tommy Holden, Francis Keating and Frank Nash—had all escaped from Leavenworth, that Kelly and Bailey were both suspected in the Kansas City Massacre and that Kelly had “boasted that he could not be held in a penitentiary and that he will escape.”
After Bailey, Bates and Kelly had been transferred to Leavenworth, Cummings wrote a cautionary letter to Warden Robert H. Hudspeth:
Because of the especially fine work of the Federal officers in capturing and prosecuting Harvey Bailey and (Albert) Bates and the notoriety given to the case … I consider that it would be a shock to the country should either of these men escape. I shall expect, therefore, that you give personal attention to these men. I am informed that you have ample means to keep them in confinement. I shall hold you personally responsible for their safekeeping.
Director of Prisons Bates sent special instructions about Kelly to the warden, ordering that he “should be held incommunicado and no messages or letters should be delivered to or from him. He should be permitted no visits, not even from lawyers, except with the special permission of the Attorney General. He may be seen by the Doctor or by the Chaplain if in your judgment that is wise and safe. I suggest that he be placed in one of the cells in the segregation building; that he be permitted under no circumstances to communicate with other prisoners or to mingle in the yard. He will, of course, be given exercise but in the small exercise yard connected with the segregation unit. He will have regular food, tobacco, books and newspapers but no other privileges.”
Hoover still worried about his trophy captures and sent agents into the prison to check on the conditions. He was not impressed. He sent a scolding letter off to Director of Prisons Bates, who, taking umbrage, fired back, “Who’s running the prison anyway?”
Hoover, Cummings and others at the Department of Justice knew that the only way to control and punish the celebrity gangsters they hoped to round up was to create a new facility where influence peddling and special privileges did not exist. And, most especially, a prison that was escape-proof.
What they had in mind was something akin to the notorious French prison known as Devil’s Island, a brutal penal colony located off the coast of French Guiana in South America, surrounded by fast currents and shark-infested waters.
Cummings had the perfect spot in mind. On October 13, two weeks after Kelly’s conviction, he announced that the federal government was building a new prison on Alcatraz Island, off the coast of San Francisco, which had been used as a military prison since the days of the Civil War. The barren island, known even then as The Rock, fit perfectly with the militaristic theme of Cummings’s War on Crime. He would describe and promote it in such a way as to counter the public’s image of the coddling of gangsters in the federal prison system. He wanted the public to believe that the most dangerous criminals in the prison system were being sent to a brutal penal colony where they would be punished inhumanely and from which there was no escape possible.
Hoover held special contempt for the country’s penal system, with its coddling wardens, loosely purchased pardons and—the worst sin of all—parole. He had a litany of phrases to describe them that he would throw around whenever he got the chance: “criminal coddlers,” “shyster lawyers,” “convict lovers,” “legal vermin” and “swivel-chair criminologists.”
The island prison, said Cummings, would be for convicts with “advanced degrees in crime.” It would house the “habitual and incorrigible … the irreclaimable.” Consequently, the prison staff would waste no time on rehabilitation. The prison would exist solely to punish its inmates and deter others from joining their ranks. It would be reserved for less than 1 percent of the prison population—the worst of the worst.
“Here may be isolated the criminals of the vicious and irredeemable type … so that their evil influence may not be extended to other prisoners who are disposed to rehabilitate themselves,” he said. This was the place where he said he hoped to lock up the likes of Harvey Bailey, George Kelly and Al Capone.
Less than a year later, he would.
* * *
The assistant director of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, William Hammack, believed the prisoners ought to be sent to the island in large groups on special trains—heavily guarded, armored and moving in secret. He was convinced he could make his plan work, but it would require tight coordination and the cooperation of the railroads. He outlined his plan in a memo to Director of Prisons Bates.
The railroads agreed not to stop the special train at regular stations, and in fact the only occasion for stopping the train would be to change the crew, take on water or fuel, or perform some regular service. This would be done in the yard or at some point distant from the regular passenger station. Nobody but the train crew would know where the stops were to be. To safeguard this phase the railroad companies have agreed they will have
[a]
sufficient number of special agents and detectives in the yard or at the service station to insure no unauthorized person even approaches the train.
It would be impossible for anybody to know who was on the train unless the information was given out at Washington or at the institution from which the transfer originated. If the prisoners were selected beforehand, the train placed in the prison yard, carefully searched, the prisoners moved in and properly shackled, the entire party could move without anybody knowing anything about it except the officers inside the institution.
On September 4, 1934, Bailey, Bates and Kelly were removed from Leavenworth to be transferred with 101 other incorrigibles to Alcatraz on the heavily guarded railroad train. The plan was as audacious as it was precedent-setting. More than one hundred of the most dangerous and violent criminals in the federal penitentiary system would be loaded collectively onto a single train and transported across the Western badlands to an island prison in San Francisco Bay. The opportunities for mishap, escape and assault from outside forces were multitudinous. Still, it was decided that it would be safer to move the group collectively, rather than one at a time.
Hoover assigned Gus Jones to guard the cargo.
Kelly and company were on the largest—and last—run of the Alcatraz Express. Two other shipments of “furniture” (code for the inmates) had preceded them as the Bureau of Prisons tested its transportation plan with smaller loads of less-dangerous celebrity prisoners. They feared the dire consequences of losing the likes of Kelly or Bailey in some calamity—a rescue attempt, a train wreck or an outright assault. The Bureau also feared loose-lipped railroad workers or the eminently bribable rail yard guards who might assist the gangster crowd to somehow free the whole bunch or divert the train into some trap.
Although the first trains had delivered their cargo without incident, they were less successful in eluding the press. Photographs of the Alcatraz Express had been taken and stories about its cross-country trip published. Jones told his guards that this, the last trip, would be the most dangerous of all.
“We got away with the first bunch because they didn’t have any idea of what we would do. But now they know it will be a rail move and they’ll be ready for us if they intend to make an effort to break these men out,” he said.
“There well could be an attempt because these men we are taking are connected into every bandit, stickup, and kidnapping gang in the country. Anywhere along the line they could derail this train … and hope their men would live through it and they could get them away—and they have damned little to lose if they don’t.”
The cross-country train ride was a special torture itself. There were to be sixteen guards accompanying each shipment. The ends of each car were enclosed with a metal mesh sheeting and the windows were barred and locked closed. The inmates were shackled together in pairs. They remained in their seats for the entire four-day trip, drinking water from pails with dippers and eating in their seats. The only time during the trip they were permitted to leave their seats was to use the restrooms, which they would do while bound to their partners. The trains raced across the country, with rail switchers clearing the tracks ahead of them. They refueled and changed crews in the rail yards rather than in the stations. The yards were cleared and guarded by armed guards until the trains could tear out and resume their journey.
As Jones walked through the railcars with his finger on the trigger of his submachine gun, surveying the scene, he thought of an incident from early in his career as a Texas Ranger, when he and his partner were about to enter a seedy Mexican bar to arrest a cattle rustler. His partner had turned to Jones and said, “If trouble starts in there just pull your pistol as fast as you can and shoot everybody in sight except me—they’re all bound to be guilty of something.”
Good advice in his present situation as well, he thought. And these men all really
were
guilty. He’d personally arrested a good number of them, and knew them all by name and reputation.
As Kelly’s train raced through the drought-plagued Midwest he watched the wastelands of the territory he used to plunder fly by. The parched wheat fields, the rotten corn, the carcasses of dead cattle that had starved in the heat and were left rotting in the fields. The wind blew the dust off the barren fields and into the railcars on the rare occasions when Jones would allow a door to be cracked open for some brief ventilation. The dirt caked on the sweaty faces of the inmates until they were almost unrecognizable. When the train would stop, the heat in the car would rise. Rivulets of sweat carved tracks in their dusted faces, and the stench intensified as the men cursed and threatened their tormentors.
Kelly’s train arrived at 6:00 a.m. at Ferry Point on the East Bay. From there, the prisoners were taken by barge to Alcatraz Island escorted by a Coast Guard cutter and a prison launch. The final 103 pieces of “furniture” had arrived. The Alcatraz population of 210 was complete.
The press had foiled the Bureau’s attempts to keep the shipments secret, and each of their arrivals was greeted by throngs of reporters wanting to know who was on the trains that required such heavy protection, and who was being shipped to Alcatraz.