Escape from Alcatraz

by J. Campbell Bruce

  He was Earl (Writ-a-Day) Taylor, an accountant who had been sentenced to five years in Leavenworth for tax evasion, then shipped to Alcatraz. He had no sooner settled in his cell at Alcatraz than he began firing off petitions, almost daily, thereby earning his nickname. He charged that his removal to The Rock was “a bum beef,” and at length a federal judge set a hearing for 10 A.M. Wednesday, February 3. At 9:45 a guard came to Taylor’s cell and said, “Get your things together, you’re getting out.” Taylor later told the press: “They handed me five bucks and rushed me down to the boat. I didn’t want to be discharged. I had this petition for a writ of habeas corpus pending and I was supposed to be in court to argue it.” Taylor said he was convinced he was liberated, without parole restrictions, as a means of “beating that court order.” Prison officials declined comment.

  Before that, in 1948, Warden Swope won a petition bout with Robert Stroud, the Birdman, but not before the judge offered a stinging reminder about the rights in general of men imprisoned. Stroud had petitioned the court to compel Swope to permit him to correspond with a literary agent and during one of the hearings Federal Judge George B. Harris commented, “To deprive a man of the fruits of the industry of his mind is to completely destroy that man.”

  Said the prosecutor: “But a criminal is civilly dead.”

  Retorted Judge Harris: “He may be civilly dead, but he’s not buried.”

  Even with Warden Madigan’s excellent background at Alcatraz, and his experience with these very men, the old petition grievances kept recurring. After a prolonged dry spell, a flood of legal paper rolled over to the federal court during a fortnight in June of 1960. Madigan seemed hard put to explain the sudden rash of actions. “Perhaps it’s just a way of passing the time,” he told reporters.

  Curiosity was not confined to the reporters. E. Herbert Schepps, law clerk of Federal Judge William T. Sweigert, likewise wondering about the tide of pleas, went to Alcatraz on his own initiative to discuss the matter with Madigan. He said the warden appeared evasive regarding the previous silence of the convicts but at one point let slip a remark: “Well, we sometimes consider a petition too scandalous and send it back to the prisoner.” This put the warden in the role of jurist, ruling on the merits of petitions. Schepps explained that federal judges were concerned about an individual’s constitutional rights, that men in prison have access to the courts.

  “Wardens usually recognize these rights, even though convict petitions may mean extra secretarial work,” he said. “Many petitions may be frivolous, but what of the one with merit, the one that should be heard?” Men on Alcatraz have won their release by the time-honored habeas corpus process, by a showing they were held there unjustifiably.”

  In September 1960, just months after this conference between law clerk and warden, a mysterious “lay-in” strike hit Alcatraz. The entire felon population refused to budge from their cells. It lasted more than a week and came to an end after a dozen suspected leaders were lodged in solitary, where they somehow managed to get hold of razor blades and slashed their heel tendons.

  Madigan said convict tailors, paid seventeen cents a garment for making Army bakers’ pants, had started the trouble in a bid for higher wages but had never made any formal demand. Federal beat newsmen in San Francisco received reports, unconfirmed, that the strike and tendon cuttings were in protest against a denial of access to the courts.

  This form of protest, common among chain-gang convicts in the South, broke out at Alcatraz in the fall of 1958 with a few scattered cuttings, then a batch of seven in one day, all kept secret. The first intimation to the press came after a rash of slashings that Thanksgiving. Warden Madigan said this is what happened: Razor blades were passed out in D Block around noon for the thrice-weekly shave. Three men, protesting the ban on desserts and smoking in solitary, severed their Achilles’ tendons and several others “scratched” their heels. For the next three weeks they enjoyed hospital privileges of sweets and cigarettes. Thereafter, electric shavers replaced blades in the isolation block. Nevertheless, a few weeks later two more took that drastic means to get their desserts and smokes, and the warden said it was a mystery how they came by the razor blades.

  Actually, the Thanksgiving Day carvings reached an appalling toll. One of the surgeons summoned from Marine Hospital says, “Yes, I recall that Thanksgiving well. A real bloody holiday. Fourteen cut their heel cords, and four of us spent the day repairing the damage.”

  Former inmates offer still another contradiction. Blades were not passed out in D Block three times a week. The men were permitted to shave only after a twice-weekly shower in the block’s own shower room. A guard stood by as the naked convicts shaved—with a locked safety razor, such as those used in mental hospitals, to prevent removal of the blade.

  Early in January 1959, newspapers heard of more tendon slashings, and Madigan said two convicts again had obtained razor blades in some mysterious way. This will clear up that enigma, and the riddle of the blades in subsequent cuttings: They were smuggled to the men in the dark cells by the occupants of the light cells directly above. How these convicts acquired them cannot now be disclosed.

  To understand the smuggling maneuver, consider certain features of the cells. The upper ones had a wash basin and toilet; the lower ones neither, only a hole in the floor connected to the same outlet that served the basin and toilet above, and flushed by the guard in the corridor. Before passing down a blade, the man above talked to the man below over probably the world’s most novel telephone system. He tapped a signal on the floor, and the man below bailed the water out of the hole with his paper cup (no tin cups in D Block). The man above drained the trap under the basin by removing the plug or blowing out the water, then spoke into the basin, his voice traveling down the sewer pipe to the man listening at the hole.

  They could carry on a conversation in normal tones. “Sending down a blade, Stu,” and Stu would reply, “Okay, Mike, let her come.” Mike would drop the blade, tied to a long string, into the toilet and flush it. Stu would wait for the water to rush past, then reach in and pull out the string, untie the blade and say, “Okay, take her away.” And Mike would haul up the cord for future use.

  Madigan, who had withheld the names of the “three” Thanksgiving cutters, readily identified this January pair as Joseph Wagstaff, thirty, a Washington, D.C., robber doing eight years, and Homer Clinton, forty-one, the Oklahoma kidnaper-lifer known as the Green Lizard, the trade name of a hair tonic he preferred over bourbon. It seems the warden forgot two: Jack Waites and Red Stetson, a brace of bank bandits. The surgeon summoned for the suturing also missed them—they were already back in the Dark Hole. A medical technical assistant, or MTA, had looked at their wounds, remarked “Hell, they’re only superficial,” and sewed them up.

  Waites’s tendon had been cut, but not quite severe, and it kept bothering him. One day, about six weeks later, he fell down; his right ankle just gave way. His left leg, its heel cord cut in the mass Thanksgiving demonstration, was still wobbly, and he was unable to stand up. They carried him up to the hospital, and it so happened than an orthopedic surgeon was there, called over on a sacroiliac case. He inspected the scar left by the January repair job and ordered him into surgery at once. A witness recalls, “He found an inch of Jack’s tendon rotted away. He spliced it together, then asked who had done that needlework. The MTA owned up to it and, man, did that orthopedist chew him out! ‘This is strictly the work of a physician,’ he told the MTA, ‘and I don’t want to ever hear you messin’ around with it again.’ ” What happened to Red Stetson could not be ascertained.

  During this latter-day period of The Rock’s existence, conditions in the hospital gradually worsened, report a number of former patients. To reach the hospital, over the mess hall, an ailing convict entered the hall and turned left to a locked gate. A guard opened it, and he climbed a stairway to another gate. He pushed a button. An officer came down a long hallway and let him in. He walked down that corridor through a third
gate into an infirmary starkly grim as a morgue. Fronting the duty officer’s desk were three large ward cells, each with five hospital-type beds. In addition there was a doctor’s office, a dentist’s office, the chief MTA’s office, a treatment room, a surgery, a medicine supply room, a kitchen, two isolation wards (the “bug cages” of prison argot) for mental patients, and next to these a similar ward, also with both a gate and a solid wooden door, built especially for Stroud. The kitchen, where dietary meals were once prepared, was now reserved mainly as a retreat; the doctor on his daily visits usually had coffee there with the MTA on duty.

  The hospital, the pride of Warden Johnston in the old days, was then accredited and staffed by medical men. In recent years, as the treatment accorded healthy convicts improved, care for the sick declined. Instead of a medical officer in charge, the director now was a Chief Medical Technical Assistant, in charge of Assistant Medical Technical Assistants. Even so, the hospital was staffed only during the day; the duty MTA left at 8 P.M., and another came on at 7 A.M. the next morning. At night the custodial officer doubled in brass as “medical” officer in charge. A private-practice doctor took the nine o’clock boat over in the morning, rode the bus up the cliff, made a swift round of the patients, rode the bus back down, returned on the ten o’clock boat. For serious illnesses or an operation or an emergency such as a stabbing or accident, the medical staff of the Marine Hospital was on call.

  Patients receive the same food as that served in the mess hall and, with the exception of dessert and tobacco, have no more privileges than convicts consigned to the Misbehavioral Treatment Unit, i.e., none. This is to encourage a faster convalescence. Patients must keep the wards clean, but if a patient asks for a bucket and brush to scrub the asphalt tile floor, or even a broom to sweep it, or a cloth to dust, he is considered well enough to return to the general population downstairs. Former inmates say the wards lacked the dustless, antiseptic aspect usually associated with a hospital.

  Because of his limited time, the doctor could make only a cursory examination. One morning he stepped to the foot of a patient’s bed and inquired, “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “Chills and fever, doctor. Retchin’ all night.”

  “Well, you’ll stop vomiting in twenty-four hours.”

  The patient was then running a temperature of 104° and, as it turned out, had pneumonia.

  The doctor moved over to the foot of the next bed and said to that patient, who had complained of chest pains: “I checked your X-rays. You can go back to your job. There’s nothing wrong with your chest.”

  “Doc, them X-rays is two years old.”

  “Look, boy, I told you, there’s nothing wrong with you,” and he walked out.

  Once the doctor almost missed the ten o’clock boat, as an ex-patient relates: “One day he has a con on the table—prostate trouble—and has his fingers up his behind examin’ him when he happens to see the time. ‘Oh, oh,’ he says and yanks his hand out. ‘See you tomorrow,’ and he rushes out.”

  An ailing convict must first pass the test at the gate at the top of the stairs. Not every guard is inclined to grant admission, in the belief most convicts are malingerers. Another former patient says, “Some bulls figure like this: if you ain’t bleedin’, you ain’t hurtin’. One night I saw the bull shove a sick con in a bug cage and tell him, ‘I’m gonna give you one week to get well. If you ain’t well then, I’m gonna throw you in isolation.’ After a week in the bug cage he’d welcome TU.

  “Another time, a con hurt his back exercisin’ in the yard, liftin’ weights, and they brung him up, lettin’ out a yell every other step. A bull pushes him in the Birdman’s old room and says, ‘Okay, we can stand it as long as you can.’ Then he closes the wood door to drown out the screams. Next morning the doc looks at him and says, ‘Your back’ll stop achin’ in twenty-four hours.’ Only it don’t. Every time he moves wrong, he lets out a bloody scream. They figure he’s a real bug and call over a head shrinker, tellin’ him this con’s a faker. So the head shrinker has it all doped out and he tells the con: ‘What happened is, you made a bet with yourself you could lift that weight and when it fell, you lost your bet. You didn’t want to lose the bet, so your mind makes up an excuse and blames it on your back, and the bet is called off. So you think your back hurts.’ The con kept on thinkin’ it was his back.”

  In a place where tempers and smoldering hatreds can flare into violence, the absence of a resident physician was deplored by a former inmate: “What can the MTA do? Take the con stabbed in the shower room one day—knife in his back right through the spine. A couple MTAs bring him up on a stretcher, then call a doc in Frisco. The guy has to lay on the table, waitin’ for the doc to catch the next boat, the knife stickin’ out of his back. Cons bleed to death waitin’ for the doc.”

  Sometimes a convict with no ailment will make the hospital, or just as likely get his treatment, a forced feeding, in his solitary cell, as an ex-inmate relates: “These are the leaders of hunger strikes. A couple of bulls will hold a man down while the MTA runs a rubber hose in his nose and pours in milk. After a while the fellas decide it’s easier to sit up and eat, and the strike ends.” (This is an old prison custom. Kidnaper Harvey Bailey went on a one-man hunger strike at Leavenworth in 1934 and called it off after taking a gallon of milk a day through his nose for several days.)

  There are no reports of such activities during the days when the hospital had a regular medical staff. A guard of that time relates an incident, not so much of custodial callousness as a natural human impulse: “A prisoner in an isolation ward worked loose an iron slat from the bed, wrapped it in a strip of bed sheet, then insisted on seeing the captain about a complaint. He struck the captain a sharp glancing blow that cut open his cheek. We finally subdued him by shoving his elbow down the toilet and holding the wrist over the side until it became numb. He quieted down and we took him into the treatment room for a checkup before bedding him down under a restraining sheet. One of the guards, who had the iron slat in his hand, started out, came back, took two swipes across the prisoner’s rump and walked on out. We all felt better. It was a sort of tribute to the way we felt about the captain.”

  Olin Blackwell, the rangy, congenial rancher from Coryell County, Texas, who had spent twenty of his forty-four years with the federal penal system, was associate warden when the tendon-cutting epidemic broke out in solitary in September of 1960. Nine, among them the ringleaders of the “mysterious” lay-in strike, sliced their Achilles’ tendons. A few days later five more hacked their heels. Blackwell said the first batch had used fragments of eyeglass lenses, the second tiny pieces of sharpened metal. But they were “feeble” attempts, the wounds superficial and requiring “only a couple of stitches and a piece of Band-Aid.”

  The grapevine hummed. All had been taken to the hospital, sutured, and their legs put in casts. Some had slashed both heels, had both legs in casts. All had been taken right back to their dark cells, and there beaten up. A former inmate says, “They hadn’t used any broken eyeglasses, but sharp pieces of metal sure enough. Razor blades. Man, that shook the bulls up. Bad enough having a razor blade in TU, but blades in the Dark Hole—and after they’d switched to an electric razor. The bulls was really shook. They walloped the bejesus out of the guys, trying to find out where those razor blades come from. Nobody snitched.”

  Every prison has a remarkable news service, but The Rock’s grapevine is undoubtedly the most amazing. Attorney Stanley Furman of Beverly Hills, who volunteered his services to Stroud, offers a dramatic illustration. In his last eight years at Alcatraz, Stroud was kept in the special ward built for him in the hospital, behind two doors, one solid. He had no radio, no newspapers or news magazines, censored mail, no contact with other inmates, presumably no contact with the outside world, sealed off in a little bug cage upstairs, and what he was reading at the time was 2,000 years old: Latin.

  After the third jury had decreed execution, Stroud’s lawyers carried a plea to the Supre
me Court that he had been placed in double jeopardy because the second trial jury had recommended against the death penalty. The high court rejected the plea. On one of his visits, Furman found Stroud strangely elated. “I’ve got it made!” the Birdman said, and at Furman’s quizzical look: “Why, the Supreme Court decision in the Green case!” The court had recently ruled such a plea valid. Furman hadn’t heard.

  Tendon cuttings kept occurring periodically—and kept, as usual, from the press. On an August night as late as 1961 ten cellhouse convicts, in a desperate try to reach the courts, cut their heel strings. “We were stacked in the Dark Hole like cordwood and not given any medical attention till the next day,” says a participant. The Hole became their convalescent ward, and there they continued their drastic protest. A convict in an open-front cell above called on the sewer line: “I got the thing—drink some red wine,” and flushed down a strip of metal off a coffee can.

  Chapter 15

  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1960, when Frank Lee Morris shuffled onto The Rock in leg irons, all the evidence seemed to indicate that Warden Johnston’s buttoning up after the Battle of Alcatraz had made the prison truly escapeproof. Only one serious try had been made during the fourteen years since the desperate and bloody battle, and the results of that one should have discouraged even the most determined.

  This attempt took place on the afternoon of September 29, 1958, and the participants were a brace of robbers, Clyde Johnson and Aaron Burgett. Johnson, forty, was serving forty years for the armed robbery with an accomplice of the North Side Branch of the First National Bank of Memphis, a job that netted $43,162 in currency and enabled him to pursue for another two months his dual personality of Clyde Milton Johnson, robber, and John Horace Alexander, bon vivant. He had first tried his hand at crime in a series of chain-store robberies in Los Angles while AWOL from the Army, forays from the barracks that earned him a discharge “other than honorable” and a prison term. In those holdups he had always used a paper bag to carry off the cash from the till and thereafter, in periods of freedom on parole or as an escapee, he had a predilection for the brown paper pokes in stickups of supermarkets, night clubs, and banks across the country. He also had a partiality for flashy cars, whisky mixed with lemon juice, and a plump blonde named Butcher Knife Billie Glaze, whose husband was in prison. The FBI admittedly found his trail hard to follow because he was quiet, well-mannered, courteous. His easygoing, casual way of handing a teller or store manager a paper bag and saying softly, “Fill this with money,” invariably led the victim to laugh it off as a joke—until Johnson backed up his request with a gun. He was shot, the bullet boring just an eighth of an inch from his heart, in the FBI chase that ended his active career in 1949.