Out on the bay the launch pulled alongside a fugitive floating on his back, holding up a limp figure. It was Brest, with Boarman. A thin trail led out from Boarman’s head and tinctured the green water crimson. Brest reached up for an outstretched hand, lost his grip on Boarman. Boarman sank, like a lead weight. They pulled Brest aboard, stark naked.
The launch cruised close to shore. Search parties headed for the water-line caves of The Rock’s weather side. The tide was out, and into each cave crept a wary guard with a flashlight, covered by a rifleman at the entrance. They came upon the graying, slight-built Hunter crouched shivering behind a boulder. He had sprained his back bounding against a jagged rock in his leap to the beach and, his strength sapped by the vicious tide rips, had dragged himself into the cave.
Hunter offered no clue as to Hamilton’s fate. At sundown of the second day the warden called off the search. He assumed that Hamilton had been sucked down by the strong undertow and had drowned.
Late on the third night Hamilton crawled out of the cave in which Hunter had taken refuge. The cave, like others a jumble of concrete blocks and granite boulders to halt tidal erosion, had a series of zigzag passageways negotiable only by a belly crawl, and he had wormed back to the face of a grotto. Weakened by hunger and bone-chilled by the soakings of flood tides, aching with festering cuts, he quaked all the more as he emerged into the night and a cold, misty wind off the Pacific smote him. He staggered round the point to the cove, stumbling over barnacled rocks. He clawed his way up the cliff he had plunged off, climbed the iron post to the old catwalk, squirmed through the bar-spread gap in the window, back to the prison that was now a haven.
They found him next morning, cowering behind the large crate in the storeroom. Floyd G. Hamilton bore no resemblance to the Public Enemy No. 1 who once swaggered, guns blazing, through the Southwest. He was naked except for the cotton drawers, and they were in tatters: his feet were swollen, bruised, blistered; his face and body were lacerated, and scarlet-streaked, from the jagged rocks and the keener scalpels of seashell fragments. Dried salt from the tidal spray in the cave caked his hair and eyebrows. His eyes held the terror of a trapped, wounded animal.
They fed him a bowl of soup, cleansed him under a shower. Later, as they daubed iodine on his cuts in the hospital, the erstwhile outlaw meekly told the warden: “When I got down to the water I grabbed a plank for a getaway. I got out a way and saw I couldn’t make it with the plank, but was afraid to let go. When the shooting started, I did let go, made it back to shore and crawled in the cave with Hunter. I thought I’d suffocate. I was wet and cold all the time. The water came up around me when the tide came in. Last night I saw there wasn’t a chance anymore. So I crawled out and back up the rocks and into the building through the same hole we got out of.”
This was the second time Brest had got off The Rock, much to his regret. Acting as his own counsel, he had won a new trial and had traveled confidently back to Pittsburgh, under armed escort. He was convicted again, and his original sentence of forty-five years boosted to fifty and life.
Hamilton’s ordeal proved no deterrent to a former associate in crime, Ted Huron Walters, thirty-year-old Arkansas bank bandit. On a foggy morning five months later he sneaked out of the laundry and over the fence. They found him hiding among the rocks of a cove. He had tested the water with a toe and found it “too damn cold.”
The Rock, busy again with its own war effort, enjoyed a truce that lasted almost two years. But a quiet, model prisoner, John K. Giles, was biding his time, keeping his own counsel as he plotted an ingenious getaway that would bring about a tighter security system at the wharf: no boat or barge to cast off until the dock gang lined up in the sight of the guard in that gun tower, and the remainder of the inmate population had been counted.
Giles, a half-century old, worked on the dock detail but not as a stevedore. Too slight and sickly for heavy lifting, he swept the area and tended the century plants along the path to the long flight of steps to the crest. He was a taciturn man whose mind and eyes abundantly made up for the idleness of his tongue.
At 10:10 A.M., on July 31, 1945, the General Coxe, an Army boat, eased toward the dock for a scheduled stop on her way to Angel Island, then site of a military installation. As the steamer came alongside the guard lined up his gang for a count. All present. He then caught the line flung from the boat, tied her up, helped with the gangplank, and stood aside to check the supplies as they came off. That done, the guard removed the gangplank, tossed the line to a crewman, watched her cast off, turned back to his detail. No Giles. His glance swept the dock area. No Giles. Then the path. No Giles. Under the wharf. No Giles. He hit the phone.
The warden played a hunch, phoned the Angel Island adjutant to hold the General Coxe and anyone without an ID card. Associate Warden Miller hurried to the dock, jumped into a speedboat and raced to Angel. The General Coxe had pulled in, its military passengers lined up on the wharf. As Miller walked down the line a technical sergeant, stiff at attention, eyes forward, abruptly held out his hands. Onto the wrists, as the soldiers stared in astonishment, Miller clapped a set of handcuffs. T/S Giles even had a dog tag around his neck.
The taciturn Giles, goaded, talked. He would push his broom nearby as bundles off the Coxe were shaken out for contraband, and he would pilfer a garment, tuck it under his jacket, switch to a hoe, cache the item behind a shrub. Eventually, he had an outfit complete with dog tag. On the morning of July 31, he transferred his stockpile, piece by piece, to the rear of a dockside warehouse. He doffed his coveralls, donned the uniform, pulled the coveralls back on, resumed his sweeping. In a pocket were a pad and pencil: he had noted that telephone company and Army Signal Corps technicians, repairing a cable, came over on the 10:10 boat. When the guard turned to tie up the Coxe, Giles slipped under the wharf, shucked his coveralls, boarded the lower freight deck. After the steamer pulled away Technical Sergeant Giles emerged topside and stood near the technicians, jotting calculations in his notepad.
Giles, cooped in solitary for his escapade, said he had been plotting ever since he arrived on The Rock, ten years earlier. He was given three years for the attempt, delaying by that long the resumption of a life term in Oregon, itself interrupted by an escape. He appealed, contending he should not have been tried for escape from the prison because he was not in the prison itself at the time and furthermore, he was not technically in custody because the guard was off attending to the boat. He lost the appeal but had argued it so masterfully that an appellate jurist inquired where he had studied law. Giles replied, “For the past year, in Alcatraz.”
In a burst of loquacity, Giles related what had motivated his earlier flight from the Oregon State Prison: “I wrote fiction for magazines and the sources of my literary creation dimmed. I felt the need for new scenes and new faces. A sense of terrible futility came over me. So I went over the wall.”
With the exception of the abortive break of the Hamilton quartet, in which Boarman slipped under the surface of the bay and stayed under, these attempts were not gory affairs, and the guards may have begun to believe that the bloodshed of Alcatraz’s early days was behind them. If so they couldn’t have been more wrong; a violence more terrible than anything they had yet experienced was building up in the persons of six inmates surnamed Cretzer, Coy, Hubbard, Shockley, Thompson, and Carnes.
Joseph Paul Cretzer had a round face and close-cropped hair that gave him, at thirty-five, a deceptively boyish appearance. Dutch Joe and his wife’s brother, Arnold Kyle, had roamed the Far West in the late thirties as the country’s No. 1 bank robbing team. Captured together, they stayed paired up through a turbulent prison-and-escape career until the Battle of The Rock. They landed at McNeil, to do twenty-five years, in 1939, at a time that Cretzer’s wife, Kay, a brothel keeper in the San Francisco Bay Area, was serving a jail term on a white-slave conviction. The next year they sped through the gate at McNeil in a truck, were found three days later in the brush on the 4,000-acre island. During
a recess in their trial at Tacoma for that escape, they tried another break by slugging a marshal in the corridor, a scuffle that felled the marshal with a heart attack. They drew five years for the McNeil escape, then life terms for the marshal’s death. They came on to Alcatraz and in a few months tried the escape, with Shockley and Barkdoll, that Captain Madigan convinced them was foolish. They landed in solitary instead of possibly the morgue. While in the Dark Hole, Cretzer hatched a bold blast-out with Whitey Franklin, still there for the slaying of Officer Cline in the 1939 break try. It would belie Cretzer’s boast, when he arrived from McNeil, that he would not end his days on The Rock.
Bernard Paul Coy, rail-thin and pint-sized, only five feet four, in March of 1937 had cockily strutted up to the cashier’s cage in the Bank of New Haven, Kentucky, with a sawed-off shotgun, made off with $2,175 and hidden in a cave along the Rolling Fork River, but not for long. Four months later he was on The Rock. He was in his middle forties.
Marvin Franklin Hubbard, forty-four, dark-haired, rather handsome, wore rimless glasses that imparted a studious look. He had come a long way from the Alabama farm of his boyhood. En route he had kidnaped a Chattanooga cop, stolen his tommy gun, two pistols, and car, and driven across a state line; later had escaped from a county jail; had been shipped to Alcatraz in 1944 after engaging in a mutiny at Atlanta.
Sam Shockley, tall, stooped, pallid, was a man of thirty-six but mentally a child of eight. He began by stealing a chicken and ended by robbing the Bank of Paoli, Oklahoma, of $947.28, and kidnaping the bank’s president and the president’s wife, who was also the assistant cashier. His car stalled on a country road and he fled on foot, leaving his victims behind, unharmed. He was raiding a farmhouse for food when a posse rode up. He went to Leavenworth for a week’s seasoning in May of 1938 before being shipped on to Alcatraz to serve out a life term. His life would end, instead, at San Quentin, up the bay a few miles.
Miran Thompson, twenty-nine, powerfully built, had a hard, square-jawed face and coldly penetrating eyes to match his criminal record and sentences: life for the slaying of an Amarillo, Texas, lawman, plus ninety-nine years for kidnaping. He had chalked up eight escapes elsewhere before being pinned down in D Block at Alcatraz in October of 1945, only months before the battle.
Clarence Carnes, the Chocktaw Kid, an Oklahoma Indian with the temperament of a wildcat, was not yet out of his teens. He was on The Rock, at nineteen, doing life plus ninety-nine years for robbery, murder, kidnaping, various assaults and escapes. He had crowded all this into three short years, starting with the day his father brought a watermelon to him in reform school. In the watermelon was a hacksaw.
Chapter 13
IT WAS A FEW MINUTES after one thirty. The date: May 2, 1946, a Thursday. The working prisoners had filed out to the shops, and the drowsy quiet of a cathedral on a weekday afternoon pervaded the huge cellhouse. The only convict moving freely about was Bernard Paul Coy, on janitorial duty, and the swish of his soft-fibered push broom along the waxed floor created less sound than a buzzing fly. The Rock had deflated the braggart ego of this Kentucky bank robber: outwardly, at least, he appeared mild, inoffensive. Beneath the surface, violence was in ferment. Earlier in the day, as he distributed books from the library, he had stopped at the cell of Clarence Carnes, the teenaged, copper-hued Choctaw, and asked, “How much time you doin’? Life?” “No,” replied Carnes, “ninety-nine years.” And Coy said, “Well, I’ll tell you, old man, somethin’s comin’ off. If you want to go, okay, it’s a cinch.” Now, as he pushed the broom lazily down the lateral corridor at the west end of the cellhouse, Coy cast an occasional glance upward. He had an absent air, but the glances encompassed the dark figure of Bert Burch in the gun gallery and noted the progress of the guard’s slow patrol toward D Block.
At the bars of the end cell on the top tier of inside C Block, on Broadway, stood Joseph Paul Cretzer, his sullen eyes also on the gallery guard. He had returned to the general population only a week before after years in solitary, where he had plotted the thing that was about to happen. When the guard in the gallery moved out of his sight, Cretzer shifted his intent gaze to Coy, then to the clock on the wall above the lieutenant’s desk: twenty seconds past 1:38.
Coy, now athwart Broadway, pushed the broom casually. For days he had cased Burch, for days had timed his patrol: at 1:40 he would go through the door into the walled-off isolation section and there spend fifteen minutes. Today, the moment Burch stepped into D Block, Marvin Hubbard would leave the kitchen.
Burch, a lanky Oklahoman, approached the wooden door set in the gallery to stop drafts. He was carrying a Springfield 30.06 rifle on a shoulder strap, a holstered .45 pistol on his hip. Near the door hung a gasbilly and a long cord to lower Key 88, the key to the steel door into D Block from the cellhouse. He shoved through the draft door, saw his lunchbox on the floor, gave it a nudge with his foot, closed the door, and was gone.
Coy, slowly sweeping past C Block, circled toward a point just beyond the door to the mess hall.
At his cleanup work in the kitchen Marvin Hubbard kept a furtive eye on the wall clock. The minute hand jumped to 1:40. Hubbard leaned across the table to mop a stain, slipped a carving knife up his left sleeve, straightened, drawled to the officer on duty, “Finished, goin’ back to my cell.” He moved, not too briskly, up the hall and knocked on the gate.
Officer W. H. Miller, on duty in the cellhouse, stepped out of Broadway and opened it. He leaned over to frisk Hubbard, a routine with all culinary workers. Coy slugged him on the back of the head, and Hubbard’s fist bore into his face. Miller, though groggy, slipped a key off his key ring and into a pocket as they dragged him to Cell 403 on the outside bank of C Block. They tied him up, took his key ring.
They released Cretzer, impatient as a caged cougar in his top-tier cell, then the nineteen-year-old Carnes. With Miller’s keys they opened the door to the utility corridor of C Block, where they had stashed bar-spreading equipment stolen from the plumbing shop: two specially threaded brass pipes, a specially threaded nut, and a pair of plumber’s pliers.
Coy stripped to his long underwear. He climbed onto Hubbard’s shoulders, then stepped on his hands, and Hubbard hoisted him to the gun gallery twelve feet above the floor. Coy, agile as a monkey, swarmed up past a four-foot-high steel-plate shield, on up the bars, up to the roof where the bars flare out like a basket top. He set the spreader between two bars, applied the pliers. The gap widened, he squirmed through and clambered down to the upper deck of the gallery, raced down a stairway to the first level, ran to the wooden door, grabbed the gasbilly off the wall, and crouched. The convicts below kept under the gun cage, out of sight.
Tense minutes passed. Footsteps approached. Coy saw the knob turn, the door start to open. He lunged, knocked Burch off balance, pinned him against the bars. He cracked the metal gasclub against the guard’s jaw. Burch brought up the rifle. Coy clutched the barrel, swung again. Burch dodged, caught the blow on the back of the head. They grappled. Burch tripped over his lunchbox, sprawled backward. The rifle clattered to the floor. Coy leaped on Burch as he hit the concrete. They struggled for the revolver in the hip holster. It bounced free, out of reach. Coy got a hammer lock on the guard, beat him on the head, then worked his fingers inside his collar and twisted it tight, tighter, choking off his breath. Burch went limp, unconscious.
Coy stripped the guard, snatched the long key cord from its wall peg and lashed him to a conduit near the floor. He dropped the pistol and its twenty rounds of ammunition to Cretzer, then Key 88, and Cretzer ran to the door to D Block. Coy passed the club down to Carnes, then the pliers, Burch’s uniform, fifty rifle cartridges. He kept the rifle and passed stealthily into the isolation block.
Cecil Corwin, middle-aged, graying officer in D Block, heard unusual noises in the cellhouse, then the key in the door. He ran to jam the lock. Coy, rifle leveled, barked from the gun gallery: “Open that goddam door and be goddam quick about it!” Corwin moved away, the door swung open,
in barged Cretzer, Hubbard, and Carnes.
Cretzer wanted Whitey Franklin freed, but his dark cell could be opened only when an electric switch was thrown, turning the lock to key position.
“Open that goddam switch box!” Cretzer ordered.
Corwin opened the box and started to reach in.
“Wait!” cried Carnes. “If you pull that lever, does it ring an alarm in the Armory?”
“Yes,” said Corwin.
“Pass it up,” said Cretzer. “We’re behind schedule. Let’s get out to the yard and down to the launch.”
“What about them?” yelled Coy, gesturing toward the upper cells.
They opened those doors by the manual control. Twelve convicts rushed out, saw Coy’s rifle and Cretzer’s pistol, and ran down the circular stairway shouting, “The cons have taken over, let’s go!” Most of them warily stayed in D Block. Two who did not were Miran Thompson and Sam Shockley.
The mutineers put Corwin in Cell 403 with Miller and started for the yard door, to the left of the mess hall. Burch, who had come to and worked the cord loose, peered over the gallery shield, into the startled eyes of Cretzer. Cretzer whipped up the .45 and snapped two quick shots. “Lay down, you sonofabitch!” Burch ducked.
(Burch later testified he had never before been in a gunfight. “I immediately got as close to the floor as I could. Shells were ricocheting a lot. They’d whistle and sing. I couldn’t see any, but I heard them zip.” Why had he not used the gallery phone to alert the Armorer? “I think I had that in mind, but a couple of shots from Cretzer took that out of me—mighty quick.”)
Officer Joseph Burdett, in the kitchen, saw Coy run past the mess-hall door, thought he was in a fight with another prisoner and rushed out. He landed in Cell 403. As the convicts moved out again toward the yard door, Burdett asked Carnes if he might untie Miller. “Go ahead,” Carnes said. The young Choctaw unknowingly prevented a wholesale break. Burdett unbound Miller, and they hid the key to the yard, the key Miller had pocketed.
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