Alcatraz

by David Ward

  Throughout Alcatraz’s thirty-year service as a federal prison, news reporters were prohibited from interviewing inmates and staff other than the warden. Even after a bloody escape attempt by six convicts in 1946, reporters from the wire services and San Francisco newspapers were allowed only a brief and restricted tour of the damaged cell house conducted by the warden. They were not permitted to interview any prisoner or guard, including those who were injured or taken hostage.

  For three decades, employees at Alcatraz followed the strict order laid down by four successive wardens: do not talk to reporters when you are on the mainland, and do not discuss events or personalities at the prison with family members or friends. The blood relatives and wives of prisoners given permission to visit the island for one hour a month could only look at their husbands, sons, brothers, or fathers through thick bulletproof glass and talk through a guard-monitored telephone. Visitors and the men behind the glass were warned that any conversation related to crime, prison life, or other prisoners would result in immediate termination of the visit. Written communications between inmates and their families and their lawyers were severely limited, censored, and retyped by guards to eliminate the possibility of secret messages being conveyed into or out of the prison.

  The occasional official statements released over the years by Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington, D.C., and by Alcatraz wardens never satisfied the interest of the outside world in what was happening to Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly, to Ma Barker’s son Dock, to Alvin Karpis, Public Enemy no. 1, to kidnapper Thomas Robinson, to Floyd Hamilton, confederate of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, to the Fleisch brothers of Detroit’s “Purple Gang,” and to other prominent gangsters of the 1930s and 1940s, including Basil “The Owl” Banghart, John Paul Chase, partner of Baby Face Nelson, and confederates of John Dillinger, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and the Barker-Karpis mob. Bay Area reporters also wanted to hear about the well-known local bandit from Napa Valley, Roy Gardner, one of the country’s last train robbers.

  With only scant information about what was happening on the island, and able to observe directly only the occasional signs of trouble—escape sirens, sounds of gunfire, searchlight beams piercing the dark waters around the island, armed men on boats, stretchers being carried from the prison launch to waiting ambulances and to hearses—reporters relied on speculation and their imaginations in putting together the stories they knew the public craved. In addition to local newspaper accounts, articles about Alcatraz appeared in nearly every national magazine, from Life and the Saturday Evening Post to men’s magazines such as True and Saga. These were predictably sensationalized and wholly or partially fictitious. Anthony Turano’s 1938 article “America’s Torture Chamber,” for example, articulated a common theme—that punishment on the Rock, even for what the Bureau would call “the worst of the worst,” had gone too far:

  The [prison’s] immured tenants are constantly tantalized by the view of several alluring cities. On clear days they may even see the vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the closer sections of San Francisco. The barbarous effect is the same as chaining a starving man to a wall and spreading a feast beyond his reach. . . . One of the announced purposes of this regime of systematic cruelty was the general terrorization of the entire prison population of the federal government. The inferior convict who became unruly in such purgatories as Fort Leavenworth and Atlanta was threatened with a transfer to the full-fledged inferno of Alcatraz. Thus, the quality of the rotten eggs in the general basket would be improved by picking out the most putrid ones for individual wrapping. . . . It may not be easy to wax sentimental about the tough hides of such personages as Al Capone and “Machine Gun” Kelly. . . . They must be securely segregated, of course, for the protection of the law-abiding population. [But] it is not easy to perceive the sociological wisdom of transforming convicted scoundrels into raving maniacs. Their summary execution would reflect more humanity and official dignity than the maintenance of a costly suite of torture chambers. . . . Alcatraz stands as a monument to human stupidity and pointless barbarity.3

  With pronouncements such as Turano’s setting the tenor of the public’s response to Alcatraz, prison and Bureau officials found themselves with precisely the public relations problem they had tried to avoid. Ironically, the secrecy policy had allowed the media to create their own versions of the Alcatraz regime. That policy, however, remained in force, and the negative perception of the prison held by many newspaper reporters and citizens only worsened.

  Since members of the press were prohibited from receiving any information directly from the staff or inmates, they eagerly sought accounts of life on the island from convicts after they were transferred to other prisons and then released on parole. These former inmates, pleased to have an opportunity to criticize the Bureau of Prisons and Alcatraz, clearly understood that the more sensational they made their accounts, the more attention they would receive. The stories they told of men going mad and suffering under miserable conditions like those on France’s notorious Devil’s Island were reported through the wire services to every part of the country.

  One high-profile Alcatraz ex-convict, Roy Gardner, did more than most to add to the harsh image of the prison. In 1939, after he was released from Alcatraz via Leavenworth, he published a book he had written while on the island entitled Hellcatraz: The Rock of Despair. 4 San Francisco Bay Area reporters, residents, and tourists were finally provided with a dramatic, firsthand account of the struggle of the nation’s “public enemies” to survive in a place Gardner called “the tomb of the living dead.” He found other venues from which to tell his stories as well, appearing as an attraction at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939 on nearby Treasure Island, and then working as a guide on a tour boat that circled the island daily.

  By the early 1940s, as a result of the stories written about Alcatraz, the American public had formed in its collective mind a vivid—and highly distorted—picture of life on the island. This powerful and harsh image lived on through the remainder of the prison’s thirty-year history, fueled by more tell-all accounts from ex-prisoners, speculative journalism, and several real events that appeared to corroborate all the negative claims.

  When the prison closed in 1963, the mythical Alcatraz portrayed by journalists did not fade away. Instead, Hollywood ensured that the Alcatraz myth would acquire more credibility. The tack that film producers and writers took in making movies about Alcatraz was to portray the convicts as heroes (or victims) and the guards and wardens as the villains. This was a time-tested formula for making films about prison inmates, reflecting the view in American culture that even though criminals are usually the “bad guys,” we can also admire them for their individualism, cleverness, and courage.

  In a string of movies made about real and imagined Alcatraz inmates, Hollywood made Alcatraz cons the protagonists—men who stood up to the inhumane conditions and the sadistic guards and wardens. Burt Lancaster played Robert Stroud, the wise, dignified Birdman of Alcatraz in the 1962 movie that followed the 1955 book of the same name; Clint Eastwood was Frank Morris, the cool and clever organizer of the famous 1962 escape in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz; Sean Connery starred as the imaginary former prisoner who saved San Francisco from a missile attack by right-wing fanatics in the 1996 film The Rock.

  One of the more recent of the Alcatraz films, Murder in the First, is also one of the most inaccurate. Released in 1995, it purports to tell the true story of Henry Young, an Alcatraz prisoner put on trial for the murder of another prisoner. According to the New York Times review:

  Murder in the First is the semi-true story of Henry Young, who in March 1938 was placed in solitary confinement in an underground vault at Alcatraz and remained thus cruelly confined for more than three years. Released into the prison population and suffering the mind-altering effects of his ordeal, he killed a man he thought had wronged him. Was Henry Young responsible for his own actions after suffering such duress? Was he a
murderer or a victim?5

  This review followed a news story about the making of the film, which had appeared in the Times ten months earlier. In that article, the director related how the brutal treatment of Young “set off a chain of events that helped lead to the closing of the ‘Rock,’” and actor Kevin Bacon reported: “To be honest, I almost went nuts playing this part . . . there’s no light. It’s wet. You’re in shackles. You’re naked. It’s horribly cold. There are rats and bugs. It was a nightmare and I was in a controlled situation. I can’t imagine living it.”6

  What Times readers and viewers of the film did not know is that the conditions described by Mr. Bacon were created for the movie and did not apply to Henry Young; Young was never confined in an underground vault; there were no rats in the cells at Alcatraz; and prisoners were not shackled, even in disciplinary segregation cells. Nor was Young tortured by “a sadistic warden” wielding a straight razor. A multitude of other events and claims in the film—including Young’s suicide two years after the trial—were also false. This film, however, continued the standard media portrayal of Alcatraz prisoners and their keepers. That the film could claim it was based on a true story, and the most prestigious newspaper in the country could call it “semi-true,” are indications of how deeply the Alcatraz myth has been ingrained in American culture.

  More than a dozen movies have been made about Alcatraz since it opened and along with countless documentaries on cable television, the image of Alcatraz as “Hellcatraz” and “America’s Devil’s Island” has been sustained.7 Not only has the prison retained its highly negative reputation, it has even become a symbol of harsh and inhumane punishment in other parts of the world. High-ranking American pilots in the Vietnam era who became prisoners of war, for example, used the label “Alcatraz” to describe a prison where “die-hard resisters” were subjected to particularly brutal conditions.8 More recently, the New York Times reported that prisoners confined “at a notorious jail in Smrekovnica north of Kosovo’s capital Pristina . . . were beaten, stripped of their identification cards and given little to eat. A sign there read: ‘Welcome to Alcatraz.’”9

  Behind the myths created and spread during its service as a federal prison and a tourist attraction is another Alcatraz. It is a place where prisoners deprived of the ability to make decisions about the most basic aspects of their lives nevertheless coped, adapted, and struggled to retain their sense of self; where men followed an ethical code, steadfastly refused to inform on their fellow inmates, and presented a common front against the government’s attempts to exert maximum control over their behavior. It is also a place where a hard-nosed warden who survived a vicious attack in the mess hall made an exception to the rules to allow his attacker to receive the materials the man needed to continue his education in prison. In the real Alcatraz, inmate-on-inmate violence was relatively rare, especially compared to modern prisons, and guards did not employ corporal punishment. Although the inmates confronted an extraordinarily severe regimen, they were not pressed into chain gangs or subjected to the inhumane living conditions and physical abuse suffered by many of their counterparts in some state prisons of the time, and they had more freedom to move about and more congregate activities than those locked up in today’s supermax prisons.

  The main purpose of this book is to tell its story—or rather, the many stories that make up an authentic history of Alcatraz—as accurately and completely as possible. In relating this history based on hard facts and primary sources, the book tries to answer the most basic questions about America’s most notorious prison and its effects on the men imprisoned there: How did the prisoners adapt to the isolation, deprivations, and restrictions they had to endure? Did they succumb psychologically or did they emerge with their minds and spirits intact? Did the isolation and time alone prompt them to review their lives, consider the costs and benefits of their criminal careers, and decide to lead more law-abiding lives, or did the strict controls and punitive conditions leave them bitter and more determined that ever to thwart government authority?

  Many other books have been written about Alcatraz, some succeeding in accurately relating parts of the prison’s history (see the bibliographic essay). This book differs from all others in several important respects. No other book draws on so many firsthand experiences—interviews with one hundred inmates and guards, almost all of whom are now deceased—or on the results of a federally funded sociological study that took many years to complete. No other author has been given such unrestricted access to the records of federal criminal justice agencies or received the assistance of federal probation offices—circumstances that combine to make this the only book about Alcatraz to document the long-term careers of Alcatraz inmates, from their criminal activities before confinement on the Rock to many years after their release.

  Most important, no other book takes as its starting point the crucial fact revealed in the research and unknown to other authors: that a significant number of Alcatraz’s habitual and incorrigible convicts proved the experts wrong and stayed out of prison after they were released. During the era of the “public enemies,” Alcatraz confined the most desperate, dangerous, troublesome, and highly publicized inmates in the federal prison system—all of them shipped there precisely because no one held any hope of their being rehabilitated or reformed—and provided them absolutely nothing in the way of psychological counseling or remedial programs. Yet two-thirds of these men emerged from the experience to lead constructive, law-abiding lives. Explaining this unexpected, counterintuitive result is the key challenge that lies at the heart of this book.

  Finally, this book does more than chronicle lives, describe events, and explain the culture of a famous prison—it raises questions relevant to the ongoing debate about the value and role of maximum-custody, minimum-privilege prisons. Alcatraz was this country’s first supermax penitentiary, and since its closure it has become the prototype for similar prisons established over the past two decades in thirty-six states, and for the indefinite administrative segregation regimes established at its federal successors at Marion, Illinois, and Florence, Colorado. Like Alcatraz, these prisons have attracted controversy. The question today, as it was with Alcatraz, is whether a penal regime that attempts to control inmate behavior as completely as can be allowed under the prohibition in the U.S. Constitution against “cruel and unusual punishment” is justified and necessary, or whether it is too harsh even for the nation’s most dangerous felons and most prolific prison hell-raisers. That doing time at Alcatraz did not cause significant, long-lasting mental health effects for most of its inmates or preclude their successful adjustment in other prisons and later in the free world, adds a new dimension to the debate: that a penal environment designed specifically for punishment, incapacitation, and deterrence does not negate the possibility of reform or rehabilitation even when the government does not expect or plan for that outcome.

  PART I

  ALCATRAZ FROM 1934 TO 1948

  1

  THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S

  WAR ON “PUBLIC ENEMIES”

  Shortly after the First World War many Americans came to believe that rampant crime was a defining element of their society. Attention soon centered on the gangster, the paragon of modern criminality and eventually the subject of innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, scores of novels and plays, and more than a hundred Hollywood movies. The media gangster was an invention, much less an accurate reflection of reality than a projection created from various Americans’ beliefs, concerns and ideas about what would sell. . . .

  The rhetoric of crime gained a resonant new term in April 1930 when the Chicago Crime Commission released a list of the city’s twenty-eight most dangerous “public enemies.” Journalists across the country published the list, adopted the term, and dubbed the notorious Al Capone “Public Enemy Number One.”1

  On April 27, 1926, Illinois Assistant State’s Attorney William H. McSwiggin was in a Cicero saloon drinking beer with five other men—a forme
r police officer and four gangsters, one of them a man he had unsuccessfully prosecuted for murder a few months earlier. As McSwiggin and the others walked out of the bar, Al Capone and his men opened up with machine guns. Several members of the group jumped to safety behind an automobile but three men, including McSwiggin, were hit. As Capone and his henchmen roared away, the survivors placed the wounded men in an automobile and drove off; later in the evening, McSwiggin’s body was dumped along a road outside of town.2

  The murder and the suspicious associations of the assistant state’s attorney created a sensation in the press. While state attorney Robert Crowe and other officials promised a relentless search for the killers, the Chicago Tribune concluded that the perpetrators of McSwiggin’s murder would never be identified, citing a “conspiracy of silence among gangsters and intimidation of other witnesses after a murder has been committed.” Concerning the latter factor, the paper claimed, “anyone who does aid the public officials by giving facts is very likely to be ‘taken for a ride.’”3

  In response to the Tribune story, Crowe announced that his office had established that Al Capone was not only responsible for the slaying of McSwiggin but had been behind the machine gun used in the assault. Capone and the survivors of the incident had disappeared, but Crowe ordered raids on Capone’s speakeasies, clubs, and brothels. Gambling equipment and large quantities of liquor were destroyed, some prostitutes were arrested, and several ledgers were confiscated. Capone was charged with the murder, but when he appeared in court, an assistant state’s attorney withdrew the charge due to lack of evidence. The judge then dismissed the case and Capone strolled out of the courtroom. Despite the impaneling of six grand juries, no other arrests were ever made and the case focused public attention on the inefficacy of local and state government.4