Authors: Joe Urschel
Each time, Warden James Johnston, reading from the Bureau’s playbook, told them essentially the same thing.
“No one is going to know the identity of the prisoners housed here, nor even the numbers they go by … We are not even going to let the outside world know to which duties they have been assigned … [the inmates] are not even going to have an opportunity to know what goes on outside … These men were sent here because the government wants to break their contacts with the underworld. That is going to be done.”
Once on the island, Kelly and the rest of the inmates were marched into a yard and taken two by two inside, where they were allowed to shower. They were then inspected by the medical staff, which probed and prodded, looking for evidence of contraband and drugs. They were given clean clothes, their prison numbers and marched off to their cells.
After their days-long ride through the Midwest and the western plains in the beastly hot railcars, the prisoners were freezing in the damp, windy weather on the island. When they assembled for their first meal, they were locked into the mess hall, where machine-gun-wielding guards walked the catwalks above and tear-gas canisters hung above the tables ready to be triggered if trouble broke out. They were allowed to eat, but not to talk.
Among Kelly’s new neighbors were Al Capone, five members of Roger Touhy’s gang, two from Bugs Moran’s, five from Dutch Schultz’s, ten from the Barker-Karpis collective and guys who’d ridden and worked with John Dillinger, George “Baby Face” Nelson and Bonnie and Clyde. Among the notables was Gordon Alcorn, who’d kidnapped Charles Boettcher. Union Station massacre conspirators Frank Mulloy, Richard Galatas and Herbert Farmer were there. So were Jim Clark, who had busted out of the Kansas State Pen with Harvey Bailey, and Tommy Holden and Francis Keating, who Kelly had sprung from Leavenworth.
The old crowd was back together, but their life in Alcatraz would be decidedly different from their previous incarcerations. Alcatraz was the prison for the inmates that society had given up on. There was no effort made at rehabilitation, because the country had decided that the people sent to Alcatraz were irredeemable and, thus, they never were wanted back in the general population. Alcatraz was simply about punishment and confinement.
The prison strove to isolate its population from the outside world under a level of security theretofore unseen. Their interaction with the outside world would be virtually eliminated. All prisoners were equal and anonymous. There was no way to curry favors or game the system.
The guards were new and newly trained. They and their families were required to live on the island, but in the midst of the Depression, the Bureau of Prisons had little trouble finding men willing to live in such a godforsaken place.
The Justice Department imposed the rules at Alcatraz, and they were draconian and unambiguous.
Escape would be virtually impossible. Inmates would be deprived of opportunities for interaction with one another that might provide opportunities for collusion. There would be no special accommodations for rich celebrity prisoners. Information in and out of the prison would be strictly controlled. The regimen at Alcatraz would represent real punishment. In effect, the government was saying that it did not care if the inmates there were ever returned to society. In fact, they would prefer that they weren’t.
The inmates at Alcatraz were informed that they were entitled to food, clothing, shelter and medical attention. Anything else was a privilege that had to be earned. On Alcatraz there were no newspapers or radios; there was no commissary where inmates could select items to purchase, like candy or cigarettes. Their days were regimented to the minute.
For the rebellious, there was solitary confinement in the prison’s “dungeon.”
Life in the dungeon was a special form of hell, completely unknown to the outside world until it was described in testimony by inmate Harry Young, who was accused of murdering another prisoner with a home-made shiv:
Its size was approximately that of a regular cell—9 feet by 5 feet by about 7 feet high—I could touch the ceiling by stretching my arm … You are stripped nude and pushed into the cell. Guards take your clothes and go over them minutely for what few grains of tobacco may have fallen into the cuffs or pockets. There is no soap. No tobacco. No toothbrush. The smell—it is like stepping into a sewer. It is nauseating. After they have searched your clothing, they throw it in to you. For bedding, you get two blankets around 5 in the evening. You have no shoes, no bed, no mattress—nothing but the four damp walls and two blankets. The walls are painted black. Once a day I got three slices of bread … I got one meal in five days and nothing but bread in between … In the entire thirteen days I was there, I got two meals.
He described the air fouled by the stench of human waste in the metal bucket that serves as the cell’s toilet, and damp air from the large vent through which the winds blow constantly, making it impossible to stay warm.
Standing in your stocking feet on that concrete floor is not conducive to health … I tried to huddle in the corner and took my coveralls off and used them to try to keep my shoulders warm. Then I shifted and wrapped them around my legs to try to keep my legs warm. That went on day after day … I have seen but one man get a bath in solitary confinement, in all the time that I have been there. That man had a bucket of cold water thrown over him.
The monastic regime and hellacious conditions drove some inmates insane, but others learned to accommodate and accept it. They adapted and survived. George Kelly was among those in the latter group.
He entered Alcatraz at age thirty-four, and he would never again walk the earth as a free man. He was resigned to his fate. Initially, he would support the other inmates in their hunger strikes and fruitless protests for easier conditions. But after a few tours in the dungeon, he gave up on that and tried to make the best of the situation and live his life as well as he could. He would “do his own time” in the parlance of the inmates, enjoying the few breaks in the work routine, when he could play cards and dominoes in the prison yard with Bailey and Bates, Keating and Holden and some of the other bank-robbing pros from his gang days.
The prison psychiatrist described Kelly favorably in his reports, saying he fully accepted responsibility for his criminal actions, was smart, insightful and did not display signs of resentment. On the Stanford–Binet tests given by the prison, Kelly scored as “highly intelligent.” The doctor wrote that he “shows a fairly normal reaction to a difficult situation … does not appear to worry too much.” The doctor did not consider him “psychotic in any way.”
For Kelly, the torture of Alcatraz was not the spartan conditions, the monotonous routine and the lack of any special privileges, but the deprivation of news from the outside world—the lack of newspapers, radio and correspondence. To keep his sanity he enrolled in several correspondence courses from the University of California, checked out books from the prison library and read constantly. (Al Capone, an accomplished mandolin and banjo player, convinced the warden to allow him to start a prison band. He recruited Kelly to play drums and Alvin Karpis to play guitar. Years later, Karpis would be released to the maximum security federal penitentiary in Washington state, where he taught fellow inmate Charles Manson how to play.)
Bates took a similar tack, consuming three to four books of nonfiction a week and outperforming Kelly in friendly competition in their correspondence courses. In fact, one of his teachers noted that his work in grammar and composition was “probably the best submitted at this institution thus far.”
But Bates, whose take from the kidnapping was still largely unrecovered, was constantly being hounded by prison officials and federal agents for information about its whereabouts. With the agents constantly making a public show of pulling him off work details and out of his cell for interrogations, Bates feared he might be marked as a stool pigeon by the other inmates, who might assume that he was giving up information about them or their partners on the outside. And that was a particularly dangerous reputation to have in a federal prison, especially one housing known murderers and assassins.
Ultimately, he refused to meet with any agent unless he could bring Bailey with him as a witness. Bailey’s reputation among the inmates was so stellar that if he vouched for Bates, that was good enough. Bailey would never violate the prisoners’ code. He practically wrote it.
Annoyed with the constant harassment, Bates wrote to the warden complaining that he’d been having “unwelcome visits” that were causing him apprehension:
I endeavored to impress upon the first visitor that I have no desire to discuss any phase of my affairs now or in the future with the Dep’t of Investigation. I have never, since being in their custody, encouraged them to believe that I could or would divulge any information that would be of the slightest interest or benefit to them, nor has anything occurred since my arrival here to alter my attitude … I would appreciate very much if you will please enforce the order that you made known to me upon my arrival here Sept 4
th
, that I would be allowed no visitors.
While the Bureau of Prisons was filling Alcatraz with incorrigibles, Hoover’s men continued their pursuit of other Public Enemies.
They would never get the man whose reckless act had started the whole crime war with his bold slaughter of lawmen in the parking lot in Kansas City. The “heat” had simply gotten to Verne Miller. Hoover’s men found themselves racing against the forces of organized crime, who were also hunting Miller to eliminate him in the hope of getting the feds off their backs as they tracked him through his usual network of criminal hideouts and safe havens. Miller had planned to leave for Europe after saying farewell to Vi Mathias in Chicago when the Bureau’s agents botched his attempted capture. The Bureau’s subsequent hunt, and the problems it was creating for organized crime up and down the East Coast, had made him a marked man.
Agents had interviewed gang leader Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, head of Murder Incorporated, one of the nation’s most notorious killing syndicates and one of Miller’s earlier employers. He told the feds that “no one will have anything to do with Verne Miller now … If Verne Miller shows up you will know about it.” In other words, we are hunting him too. If we find him, you won’t have to worry about any legal technicalities.
On November 29, 1933, a motorist discovered a naked, mutilated, unrecognizable body on the side of the road on the outskirts of Detroit and notified the authorities.
They determined that the dead man had been struck in the head thirteen times with a hammer. His skull was crushed and flattened. His cheeks and face had been punctured multiple times with an ice pick. He’d been choked with a wire.
The body was so pummeled and mutilated that police had to identify it using fingerprints. It was Miller.
His body was shipped back to his hometown in South Dakota, where he was buried with full military rites, his casket draped with the American flag. Uniformed servicemen carried his casket through the overflowing crowd that had flocked to his funeral.
Hoover had concluded that Miller’s partners in Kansas City had been Pretty Boy Floyd and his partner, Adam Richetti. The search shifted to them and the nation’s new Public Enemy Number One, John Dillinger. With his bold and bloody bank robberies and daring jailbreaks, he’d become the new fascination of the nation’s headline writers.
After his release from Indiana State Prison on a minor robbery conviction, Dillinger robbed his first bank in June 1933, about a month before the Urschel kidnapping. Then he and his gang went on a tear, robbing a half-dozen more before being arrested and jailed in Lima, Ohio. Members of his gang broke him out, shooting a sheriff in the process. Purvis and his team bungled an attempt to trap him at a gangland “resort” called the Little Bohemia in northern Wisconsin, resulting in a wild shootout and Dillinger’s escape. Purvis and his Chicago agents later redeemed themselves in the public’s mind when they famously shot and killed Dillinger while he was leaving the Biograph Theater in Chicago.
Purvis and his men also tracked down Pretty Boy Floyd and shot him in an Ohio farmer’s field as he tried to escape. As he lay on the ground bleeding to death, they tried to extract information and a confession for the Kansas City Massacre.
“Fuck you!” was all he would say.
Agents captured and convicted his partner, Adam Richetti, who would be executed in 1938 for his alleged role in the Kansas City Massacre. He maintained his innocence to the end.
Doc Barker, Harry Dutch Sawyer, Volney Davis and Bill Weaver drew life sentences for the kidnapping of Edward Bremer Jr., the heir to the Schmidt Brewery fortune, and had joined Kelly on Alcatraz. So had Alvin Karpis. (Ma Barker and Doc’s brother Freddie were killed in a six-hour gunfight with federal agents in Florida.)
Purvis solved the Charles Boettcher II kidnapping, the one that had inspired Kathryn Kelly, when he tracked down and captured Verne Sankey and his partner, Gordon Alcorn, in February of 1934, interrupting their plans to kidnap Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. Sankey hung himself in a Chicago holding cell. Alcorn pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life.
The days of criminals racing across state lines into the friendly protection of mobbed-up towns had ended. There was a new sheriff, and he sat behind a desk in Washington, DC. But his agents were seemingly everywhere, and, for the most part, were incorruptible. Empowered by new laws, courtesy of Attorney General Homer Cummings and the Roosevelt administration, the Bureau of Investigation had tamed the Wild West after eighteen hectic months of on-the-job training. The spate of high-profile kidnappings of wealthy individuals by gangsters and racketeers virtually disappeared, and although no reliable records were kept, kidnapping in general was reduced by an estimated 80 percent.