Escape from Alcatraz

by J. Campbell Bruce

  The officer in the basement shower room directed each to a bin that bore his number. “Drop your socks in there. You can pick them up next shower day.”

  “Pick ’em up where?” asked a convict.

  “Out of the bin.”

  “When’s next shower day?”

  “Tuesday, 3 P.M.”

  “What about our other stuff?”

  “You dump that in Tuesdays, pick it up Tuesdays. Pillow case, one sheet, towel, three pairs of socks, underwear, shirt, pants if they need it. Saturdays, turn in the other three pairs of socks. Clear?”

  “Our stuff won’t get mixed up?”

  “You come straight here from college? Look.” The guard grabbed the inmate’s towel. “See that number? Everything’s got your number on, except socks, and they don’t matter—they’re all the same size.”

  “When do we shave?”

  “You’ll get blades tonight.” The officer gestured toward the row of showers. “Get to it.”

  This was a movie weekend, and half the general population saw it during recreation period that Saturday afternoon, the other half on Sunday afternoon. Morris was in the Saturday matinee crowd, which gathered, as always in any mass movement of prisoners, in groups. Morris descended the spiral staircase from his tier, marched with his unit down Broadway toward the main entrance, turned right, went past the prisoners’ side of the visitors’ room, through a gate at the southeast corner of the cellhouse, up a stairway to the chapel, a room about 50 by 100 feet. A screen stood at one end, a projection booth at the other. A guard stood sentry at the door, and a guard in the east gun gallery, manned for the movies and chapel services, kept watch through a window from the second level of his cage. The movie was Pork Chop Hill, about the Korean War.

  After lockup that Saturday—5 P.M. on weekends—guards passed out two razor blades to each inmate, a week’s supply. Morris could now whip up a lather with the cold water in the old-fashioned mug with its round cake of soap and enjoy a shave. Conditions had indeed improved on The Rock: no guard stood over him in a suicide watch.

  Sunday came to Alcatraz as early, and as abruptly, as any other day: the wake-up blast at 6 A.M. Morris climbed out of bed, remembered it was Sunday, climbed back in. He had been told that Catholics could eat after the nine o’clock Mass. Later he joined a dozen other Catholic convicts on the escorted march to the chapel, which had been transformed from a movie theater by the simple process of rolling up the screen, revealing the altar. The rows of folding chairs now served as pews, and just beyond the front row was the rail where communicants partook of the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The convicts, cheeks scrubbed and shaven, comb streaks in their hair, sat with rapt faces as the priest celebrated the ancient, solemnly beautiful liturgy. The guard near the door watched with the indifference of an usher who has seen the show innumerable times, his eye darting toward the cluster of worshipers at every movement, a genuflection or sign of the cross.

  Afterward, only a few headed for the mess hall, the others returning to their cells. Morris fell in with the breakfast group, but was halted by the guard who had shepherded them to the chapel. “Back to your cell,” he ordered. “I didn’t see you take any of that bread up there. Regulations.” Only those who received Communion and its bread, or host, which required a three-hour fast, had the privilege of breakfast after Mass. Morris, like his mother not too devout, had apparently forgotten about this reason for a belated breakfast.

  Other cell doors clattered open and about the same number of inmates tramped upstairs for the nondenominational Protestant service. By now Catholic and Protestant chaplains both came over every Sunday, instead of alternate weeks.

  That afternoon Morris went out to the yard for the two-hour recreation period. A few convicts loped around its borders, like boxers in training; teams played softball with a Big League intensity, but here a ball over the fence was out, not a home run. Other prisoners leaped about at handball, bumping into outfielders. Cliques stood apart, chatting. Bridge experts sat at a few card tables along the foot of the counterfeit bleachers, but a casual observer would not have guessed the same. Their cards were dominoes with playing-card markings instead of dots, the dealer shuffling them as in dominoes and each player setting up his hand on the table in front of him. The men bought the domino cards, and a ditty bag to hold them, out of shop earnings. (Prisons ban regular playing cards because they are usually made of celluloid which the convicts can grind up and use as an explosive.)

  The day was clear, and the view from the top steps spectacular, but a chill wind blew off the ocean through the Golden Gate. Morris, clad only in his light prison garb, retreated to a protected spot near the cellhouse door and, out of the wind, soaked up the warm winter sun. He noted most of the prisoners wore snug peacoats and caps and made inquiry. “You got to ask for them,” said a convict. “A jacket, too, to wear around the cell. Navy sends over the peacoats.”

  He discovered that Alcatraz had three seasons: winter, summer, and October. Only in October was the weather invariable—golden, balmy days, the sky a deep blue. Winter and summer were variable—rain, wind, or fog, on occasion a day with none of these, a day of sparkling beauty. Summer differed from winter in the absence of rain. Every afternoon, with the regularity of a railroad schedule, the trade winds whipped in through the Gate and on most days, especially in summer, they brought along a thick, wet fog. “Hell,” said the convict, “summer’s about the coldest time of the year here. The bulls on outside patrol wear heavy overcoats in July and August.” Morris put in a request for a peacoat, cap, and jacket; also a raincoat.

  On his twelfth day, Morris was assigned a household job, cleaning vegetables in the receiving room of the kitchen basement. This took him out of quarantine into a more permanent living room, as Warden Johnston once called the inmates’ cells. He moved into Cell No. 138 on the bottom row of outside B Block, across from the deserted A Block.

  Next door lived Allen Clayton West, a thirty-year-old native of New York City who had picked up a slight southern accent during years in Georgia and considered himself more of a Georgian than a New Yorker. He was stocky, brown-eyed, and dark-haired, with a complexion a little on the swarthy side, perhaps from exposure to the southern sun in convertibles with the top down, and in the fields of Georgia state prison farms. He had acquired many cars but never by purchase, and as a consequence had served three prison-farm terms before he finally drove one across the Georgia line, a federal rap that eventually landed him on The Rock. Here his deep tan began to fade. He was now serving ten years for car theft. Like Morris, he was addicted to tattoos and sported one on the back of each finger of both hands. Unlike Morris, he was a compulsive chatterer, and that was likely the reason that Morris did not cotton to his neighbor right off. West played an accordion, a big one with a big dark case that stood against the rear wall.

  Several weeks later Morris won a sort of promotion, to library messenger in the mornings, janitor in the afternoons. On his morning rounds, delivering books and magazines to cells, he had an opportunity to observe inmate living habits. Some cells had a monastic bareness; some held a pack-rat clutter; others had a barracks look, with pinup-calendar nudes; still others resembled a college dormitory, with books on a rear shelf, homework on the table; some were studios—walls hung with originals, a partly finished landscape on the bed; a guitar or horn indicated a musician.

  Eventually, he was assigned to an industrial job and on that first morning as they moved out of their cells, West said, “Got yourself a payin’ job, eh? What’d you draw?”

  “Brush shop.”

  “Glove maker myself,” said West. “I’ll show you the brush-shop line when we get out.” In the yard he pointed to one of three painted yellow strips. “Yours. Be seein’ you, boy.”

  Once all the workers were assembled, the lieutenant called, “Glove shop!” A guard-foreman nodded to his crew on a line, and the lieutenant made a count as they marched out a gate at the far corner. “Tailor shop!” Finally, “B
rush shop!” Morris stepped through the gate of the high-walled yard, followed by a convict from the South labeled the Green Lizard. They descended a steep flight of steps in the Cliffside to a landing midway, passed through a Snitch Box, then down another flight to a road, bordered on the bay side by the cyclone fence. While they were in the yard, armed guards in the gun boxes on the wall peered down at them with a sort of languid interest. From the moment they emerged from the yard, until they reached the shop building, other eyes watched their progress from the lofty gun tower back up the road and the tower on the factory roof. The eyes of the road tower guard were not strictly on the men every moment this particular morning, for suddenly rifle fire rattled menacingly.

  “Somebody make it to the water?” Morris asked.

  “No siren,” said the Green Lizard. “Must be a log goin’ by on the tide. They take potshots at anything driftin’ by, case it’s a con makin’ like a log. Target practice. Also a kind of a reminder to us goin’ down this lonesome road, pal.”

  They were counted into the shop, then every half hour thereafter. Men worked at lathes fashioning the wood parts for the pushbrooms; others glued on the fibers; still others screwed in handles. Alcatraz’s factories then numbered three, turning out these brooms; a variety of work gloves, plain cottons to welder’s gloves; and in the tailor shop, the convicts’ own gray-and-white trousers, the nickel-gray trousers for the guards’ uniforms, blue dungarees for the Navy, and white pants for Army cooks and bakers and orderlies in the Veterans Administration hospitals.

  The pay rate was based on group piecework, which averaged, depending on skill, from $12 to $70 a month per man for a six-and-a-half-hour day and five-day week, the highest wage going to the tailors. The prisoners could send their earnings home or buy art supplies, selected magazines, musical instruments, chess sets, domino cards, law books, and, a little later under the next warden, even knitting and crocheting needles and yarn. Shop work also earned a prisoner “good time” on a graduating scale that, at the start of the fifth year, reached a peak of five days off his sentence for every month of employment. This was in addition to the statutory ten days off for every thirty days served as a model prisoner. Attempts to escape, or infractions of rules that put a convict in the Treatment Unit, could mean the loss of good time on both scores. The fact that a convict will feign a fight in the yard or commit some minor offense to be sent to TU as a sort of vacation from routine, at a cost of good time and all privileges, seems a graphic indication of the depressing monotony.

  (In this society of Rock felons, an ex-guard says, TU also represents a status symbol: a sojourn there bestows a tough-guy stature, a con who would not turn stoolie. Top status goes to the man who had made the Hole, and even that has its own strata, defined by the length of solitary confinement. Stroud, who spent more than half his life in solitary, attained a peak of inmate respect at Alcatraz. In the isolation block when he was in residence there, the other prisoners manifested their sentiments by bluntly calling to a guard, “Hey, Jones, get me a drink of water,” but invariably addressing the Birdman as “Mr. Stroud.”)

  In the open-front cells of TU, or D Block, the cells with the grate doors, the prisoner has no radio outlet, no books, sees no movies, has no period in the yard—nothing to do except walk, lie, or sit, but he has a bed to lie on and light to walk or sit by. He does get the same food, served him by inmate orderlies off a wheeled table, as the men in the mess hall.

  In the six closed-front cells, the Dark Hole, life is tougher. Warden Madigan substituted a gruel—but still no meat, nor dessert—for the bread-and-water and tasteless-spaghetti diet in solitary. “It was found,” he said, “that bread and water did not encourage repentance.” (On the mess-hall diet granted those in the open-front cells, he commented: “Our prison rule is fairness but no pampering.”) A man in solitary has no bed, curls up on the concrete floor with a blanket. A former inmate recalls a sojourn in the Dark Hole: “The worst things were boredom, and no cigarettes to help endure the boredom, and the darkness, never knowing whether it’s noon or midnight. You walk around in the darkness a while, always touching a wall so you won’t bump into it. You lie down a while, maybe take a catnap. Then you just stand a while, and every once in a while you say to yourself, ‘Boy, what wouldn’t I give for a cigarette.’ You start wanting the wackiest things, like a match; you’d like to hold a match and just watch it burn down to your fingers. Or you might wonder if the sun’s coming up now, or is it going down?”

  Morris lost his neighbor for an indefinite period in late summer of that year, 1960. West helped stage a fracas at a noon meal to draw the guards and give robber Joseph Wagstaff a free hand to stab an inmate at another part of the mess hall. Off to the dark cells of D Block they went.

  One evening in October, as he sat at dinner, Morris saw a face grinning at him across the room, and his eyes widened in surprise. It was John Anglin, whom he had known at Atlanta before Anglin and his brother, Clarence, were transferred to Leavenworth, leaving a third brother, Al, to stick it out at Atlanta. The Anglins, three black sheep among thirteen children of a “Tobacco Road” family along the backwater of the Little Mantee in Florida, stuck up a bank in Alabama and made off with a tidy $19,000. But the FBI nabbed them in Ohio before they could settle down to a spree, and the bank got the loot back. At the time, Clarence and Al were fugitives from the Florida state prison (it was Clarence’s fourth escape), and John had just wrapped up a stretch for grand larceny. For the Alabama job John drew ten years, the others fifteen each.

  Clarence, assuming a prerogative of the warden, tried to ship John out of Leavenworth. He cut the top out of a big bread box and the bottom out of another. John sat in one, and Clarence set the other on top, then packed in loaves of bread. A truck was ready to haul John and other boxes out to a prison farm camp when a supervisor, apparently wondering why the helpers had struggled to hoist that particular double box onto the vehicle, grew suspicious. He pulled out a few loaves, and in no time at all the warden exercised his own prerogative and shipped John out, to The Rock.

  Clarence came along in January, and the brothers occupied adjoining cells, Nos. 140 and 142, just four down the row from Morris, on the theory that, as Blackwell later explained, they might want to discuss family affairs in the evening hours. (Two other brothers lived side-by-side between Morris and the Anglins.)

  The Anglins were the roughneck type, the direct opposites of the introspective Morris. John was thirty-two, of medium build with blue eyes and blonde hair; Clarence a year younger, but huskier, almost six feet. Wilkinson, who knew them too at Atlanta, said they were “more on the natively cunning side, throwbacks to the swamp country, more impulsive, more given to action than Morris.”

  In June of that year, 1961, Warren Madigan took over the top post at McNeil, noted for its rehabilitative work, and there his talents flowered. His associate at Alcatraz, Blackwell, became acting warden, and on November 26, 1961, was officially named keeper of The Rock. Blackwell moved Arthur M. Dollison, superintendent of the shops, into his old spot as associate, to oversee the prison and, in Blackwell’s absences, to act as warden.

  Warden Blackwell, a man of picturesque speech and Pickwickian bent, soon stamped Alcatraz with his own good-natured personality. Unknown to the world at large, The Rock softened, lost much of its grimness, even some of its old and unrelenting monotony. It took on, unbelievably, the aspect of a school for wayward girls. He added more variety to the games in the yard, but that wasn’t what did it. He posted a new purchasing privilege: the men could buy crochet needles (four inches long, in exciting colors) and slender knitting needles (both plastic, too brittle for less delicate use), along with yarns of all hues, patterns and, an obvious complement, instruction books. In the evening hours before bedtime, the nation’s most desperate and hardened criminals, at first clumsily, and then deftly, were soon crocheting doilies, pink or blue booties, and gorgeous bedspreads garnished with red-yarn rosebuds. Knitting needles flashed in fingers that once kn
ew only triggers as the erstwhile bank robbers purled one, seldom dropped two, and skeins of yarn sped wondrously into sweaters. Blackwell did impose one stern rule: these new Rock needlemen must not cover their own beds with the spreads, nor wear the sweaters (every shade but gray), nor use the doilies as place mats at mess. They went out as gifts—booties for sister’s new baby, a bedspread for Mom, a sweater for Pop. Blackwell took a fancy to some of the doilies, proudly hung them on a wall in his office.

  Dollison too, as overseer, had a distinctive influence on The Rock—no startling innovations, such as Blackwell’s, but a gradual change that seemed to sift down through the echelons. A more relaxed atmosphere began to exist among the custodians, no doubt partly induced by the clicking of knitting needles, a sound not normally associated with menace. And so the officer on the floor in the cellhouse rarely made a patrol in the four hours before lights-out, unless out of curiosity to see how a sweater or a bootie was taking shape. The rap of the rubber mallet on the bars in the weekend security checks abated to a languid tap, then into long silences. The cell shakedowns stirred less and less dust, finally became hasty glances. Upstairs in the hospital the MTAs and the duty officers for the most part still looked upon the sick as goldbrickers; outside, the guards at the gun ports and in the gun towers were still ready to pepper away; but inside the feeling seemed to be: the doors are locked, everything’s tight, the men embroidering doilies.

  The convicts were not taking over the joint by any means, but this slackening had an infectious effect. Mealtime became playtime, the mess hall abuzz with chatter, the air filled with doughy missiles as the fun-loving felons now flung wadded bread at the guards, whose only reaction was to duck and glower. In the after-lockup hours men talked to neighbors at their cell fronts in louder voices, or called to friends across the corridor or the tier above or below; convicts with banjos and guitars plucked livelier tunes, and cornetists tootled away. Beneath this clamor, the quiet ones tended to their knitting. And in Cell 138 Morris was weaving an escape plot.