by David Ward
It was customary for a prison—particularly a newly opened prison—to have a contingent of nonproblematic prisoners to take care of basic institutional maintenance tasks, such as working in the laundry and the kitchen and serving as janitors and hospital attendants. These men provided a bit of leavening in a larger population of prisoners who posed more serious custodial problems. But as Alcatraz opened, the proportion of inmates who did not meet the Bureau’s own criteria of notoriety, dangerousness, and escape potential represented well over one-third of the Alcatraz population. Up to the time the prison ceased operations thirty years later, there would always be men whose confinement at Alcatraz violated the official criteria; most fell into the nuisance category and some during the last decade of the prison’s operation were simply convenient commitments of men convicted on the West Coast. There never were anywhere near 250 men in the federal prison system at any one period from 1934 to 1963 whose criminal and prison records could match the imagery of the press or the official pronouncements of the Department of Justice.
THE ALL-STAR TEAM OF FEDERAL LAWBREAKERS
Despite the fact that some Alcatraz prisoners fell short of being notorious, desperate, escape-prone, or dangerous, most had records and reputations that justified these labels. The men collected together on the Rock in the autumn of 1934 made up the most complete assemblage of infamous outlaws, kidnappers, gangsters, murderers, and escape artists the country had ever seen. This became even more true in subsequent years, as more notorious criminals were captured and prosecuted or committed acts in other prisons that earned them a transfer to Alcatraz.
Al Capone and George Kelly were names well known to the press and the public, but the passengers on the first prison trains included a remarkable collection of lesser-known gang members who were the associates or partners of notorious bank robbers who couldn’t be sent to prison themselves because they had fallen in gun battles with police, sheriffs, or G-men. From Chicago, in addition to Capone, came five members of the Roger Touhy gang and two members of Bugs Moran’s organization. From New York, there were five members of Dutch Schultz’s West Side gang. They were joined by ten members of the Barker-Karpis mob, three leaders and one member of Detroit’s Purple Gang, seven associates of Harvey Bailey and Kelly, five members of the Irish O’Malley gang, and two partners each of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Even several aging members of the old Frank Nash–Al Spencer gang settled down on the Rock with long sentences ahead of them. Gordon Alcorn, kidnapper of Charles Boettcher, and Frank Mulloy, Richard Gallatas, and Herbert Farmer—convicted of conspiring to free Frank Nash in the Union Station massacre—had seats on the first train from Leavenworth as well.
The federal prison system’s most notable escapees were also among the first arrivals. They included Roy Gardner, Joe Urbaytis, and John Boyd, Atlanta Penitentiary escapees; James Clark, who with Harvey Bailey escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary; Charles Berta, Tom Underwood, and Stanley Brown, who took the warden as a hostage in their escape from Leavenworth; and Thomas Holden and Francis Keating, who walked out the front door of Leavenworth.
In addition to the “public enemies” with nationwide reputations, there were other federal lawbreakers among the first crop of Alcatraz inmates whose notoriety was more ephemeral or limited to local newspaper coverage. In any prison other than Alcatraz they would have been the highest-profile prisoners because of their criminal or escape histories. Among them were John P. Carroll, who escaped from prison to aid his sick wife, and Charles “Limpy” Cleaver.
These luminaries and semiluminaries of the “underworld” were joined in later years by other notable Public Enemies. These included Dock Barker, Volney Davis, Alvin Karpis, John Paul Chase, Floyd Hamilton, Ted Walters, and Harmon Waley.
The criminal exploits of some of these robbers, kidnappers, and outlaws were described in chapter 1. The pre-Alcatraz lives of various others deserve brief mention here for two reasons: their crimes were representative of what it took to be sent to Alcatraz; several will be central characters in events described in subsequent chapters.
At age sixty-one, John P. Carroll was considerably older than most of his fellow passengers on the train from Leavenworth, but he had the type of record that called for a transfer to a prison for habitual incorrigibles. Carroll’s record of incarceration had begun at age twenty when he was sent to the Wisconsin Industrial School for Boys after conviction on forgery charges. This sentence was followed by terms in the Wisconsin State Prison at Waupun for larceny, four separate periods of confinement in the state penitentiary at Joliet, Illinois, three years and one month in the state penitentiary at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for assault with a dangerous weapon, and a year and three months in the state penitentiary at Stillwater, Minnesota, for burglary.
Carroll’s federal trouble began when he and his wife, Mabel, stole seventy money order forms from a post office in Cartersville, Montana, and cashed them in a number of cities. When they were caught, Carroll received a seven-year federal sentence at Leavenworth, which he began serving on March 28, 1926. Mabel was convicted along with her husband and also received a seven-year term that—because a federal prison for women did not open at Alderson, West Virginia, until November 1938—she began serving in the Women’s Reformatory at Leeds, Missouri.
In February 1927, while working in Leavenworth’s new shoe factory, Carroll enlisted the aid of Charles Thompson, the assistant superintendent of the factory, who helped Carroll crawl inside a wooden box three feet long, three feet wide, and thirteen inches deep. The box was placed on the prison mail truck with other boxes and taken out of the prison; it next appeared on the sidewalk outside Thompson’s rooming house in the town of Leavenworth. Thompson asked two young men if they would each like to make fifty cents by carrying the box up some stairs to his room. They did so, and Thompson then disappeared with Carroll in a rented car, leaving his own belongings in his apartment. Acquaintances of the assistant superintendent were mystified as to the reasons for his involvement with Carroll. Some three weeks later, Thompson was arrested in New Orleans, where he explained his actions by claiming that Carroll had bribed him by offering to split $100,000 that Carroll said he had buried in Tennessee. Thompson never received any money for his efforts but earned a sentence of one year in jail after pleading guilty to helping Carroll escape.
The primary motivation for Carroll’s escape became apparent on July 7, 1927, when he succeeded in effecting his wife’s escape from the Leeds reformatory. When he learned that Mabel had become seriously ill with tuberculosis, he made plans to deliver her from prison, take care of her, and see that if she did die, it would not be in prison. After freeing Mabel, Carroll robbed post offices and jewelry stores as necessary to support himself and Mabel, who passed away six months later on January 18, 1928. Carroll remained at large until June 12 of that year when he was arrested in Philadelphia.
Carroll’s exploits in getting his dying wife out of prison were depicted in a 1928 movie that was accompanied by the following promotional statement:
Shipped out of the penitentiary as a box of shoes, got his sick wife out of jail at risk of his life, hid her and robbed to make her last days comfortable, and now goes back to Leavenworth satisfied—a movie thriller in real life.27
In October 1928 Carroll received a two-year sentence for the escape, to run concurrently with his seven-year term. After a period in solitary confinement at Leavenworth (the real punishment, since the concurrent sentence did not extend his time in prison) Carroll was released into the general population. On July 1, 1929, guards noticed that his clothing was wet and on investigation they found that he and another prisoner had cut a hole eighteen inches deep into a sewer line. In a search of his cell, guards found that Carroll had hidden a 114-foot-long rope made of bed sheets; he was returned to isolation.
Some months later Carroll was charged with stealing money orders from a post office in Maryland while he was on escape status; he demanded a jury tr
ial and was returned to Baltimore, where he agreed to plead guilty; this time he was sentenced to an eight-year term to run consecutively to his seven-year sentence and was transferred to the federal prison at Atlanta. He did not appreciate the transfer to Atlanta, as he made clear in a letter to the director of the Bureau of Prisons:
Dear Sir: I want to be transferred back to Leavenworth. You transferred me here in the first place against my will and I don’t like it a little bit. Besides the officials here are too cruel and hateful. No one would stay here if he could get away and you know it. Make it snappy and get me back to Leavenworth where civilized men run the prison.28
At Atlanta two mechanical bar spreaders were found concealed in the mattress in Carroll’s cell. After seventeen days in isolation he was placed in the disciplinary segregation unit, where he remained until December 10, 1933, when he was transferred back to Leavenworth. In June 1934 Carroll was placed on the list for transfer to Alcatraz based on the following justification prepared by the staff at Leavenworth:
He is an inveterate criminal and there is no hope he may be reclaimed. He has escaped from here. Since his return from escape he has constantly been plotting further escapes. He is a menace within and without a penal institution and always a menace to the public safety when at large. His transfer to Alcatraz is recommended.29
Charles “Limpy” Cleaver, regarded as “hardened and dangerous . . . a member of the Chicago underworld,” earned a transfer to Alcatraz because he combined a sensational mail train robbery with a sensational escape from jail after he was apprehended. The postal robbery, as described in a report to a chief postal inspector, had the character of a Hollywood movie:
At about 8:25 AM, February 25, 1928, Charles Cleaver and seven others held up a mail train near the outskirts of Chicago, Ill., and robbed it of $135,000 in currency, which was being transported by registered mail from Chicago to Harvey, Ill. There were two clerks on duty in the mail car at the time the train reached the point where the hold-up took place and all of the car doors were locked. The bandits used dynamite to blow one of the doors off the car, after which they entered with drawn guns and revolvers, and forced the two clerks to surrender the registered mails. Not only were the lives of the two clerks placed in jeopardy by the dangerous weapons, but the manner in which the mail car door was dynamited indicated a total disregard for consequences to the occupants. Throughout the hold-up two of the bandits armed with machine guns were stationed at points of vantage, one on either side of the train, and doubtless they would have made deadly use of these weapons had this been necessary in effecting the robbery. Charles Cleaver was one of the leaders of the gang and took a prominent part in the preparation and in the execution of the crime.30
Cleaver was arrested and locked up in jail at Wheaton, Illinois. But on June 10, 1928, with four other prisoners, he overpowered a jailer and escaped. Four days later, police caught up with the men, and a gun battle ensued in which at least five hundred shots were fired. Cleaver received several bullet wounds and was recaptured.
He was committed to Atlanta in August 1928 and transferred to Alcatraz in August 1934 on the first prison train. At that time, at age sixty-two, Cleaver was described as a “wrinkled old man” who “seemed quite proud that with two exceptions he is the oldest man in the institution.” By his own count, he had over the course of his criminal career sustained a total of twenty-seven bullet wounds, and many of the slugs were still lodged in his body.31 He remained imprisoned on Alcatraz until 1944, when he was transferred to Leavenworth. There prison doctors began removing bullets he had been carrying in his shoulder since his capture in 1928.
Joe Urbaytis was mentioned briefly in chapter 1 because of his involvement in two separate escape attempts from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. His place among the first Alcatraz inmates, however, was ensured by more than his determination to escape.
At 1:50 A.M. on February 17, 1921 a mail truck pulled up to the loading platform of the U.S. post office in Toledo, Ohio. When the driver and his partner walked around and unlocked the rear door of the truck, they were suddenly confronted by two armed men, who ordered them to lie face down on the ground. Two more men jumped out of an automobile parked nearby and began pulling pouches from the trucks and throwing them into a vehicle where Urbaytis sat at the wheel. After taking ten pouches, the four men jumped into their car and roared away. They had taken 173 pieces of registered mail that contained Liberty bonds, jewelry, commercial bonds, and stock certificates amounting in value to $915,961—one of the biggest hauls in the history of post office robberies. Urbaytis was arrested four days later. Some eighteen other principals and accomplices were rounded up and put on trial, and on June 24 Urbaytis was found guilty on seven counts of grand larceny. He was placed in the Lucas County Jail, but on September 5 he and two of his fellow bandits escaped; he remained at large for some two and a half years, until May 5, 1924.
After a gun fight with detectives in which he was shot, Urbaytis was captured, tried, and sentenced to two consecutive twenty-five-year terms in federal prison and transferred to the Atlanta Penitentiary. On his arrival at Atlanta, he noted that the police considered him a likely suspect in “every unsolved robbery in which $100 or more was stolen.”32 This claim was probably not far from the truth, since he had accumulated some fifteen prior arrests.
Urbaytis had been in Atlanta only for a few weeks when he was locked up in isolation for ten days as the result of a fight in the dining hall; during the next two years he was charged with attempted escape (fourteen more days in isolation) and “loafing on work detail” (four days isolation). As noted in chapter 1, Urbaytis, Roy Gardner, John Boyd, and two other inmates attempted to scale the thirty-foot-high walls of the penitentiary on July 19, 1928, after succeeding in getting two .25 caliber revolvers smuggled into the prison and taking the captain and two guards hostage. After the escape attempt failed, Urbaytis was locked up in “permanent” isolation on a restricted diet and lost all the statutory good time he had earned or could earn on his sentence—3,000 days, or more than eight years. He grew resentful when he learned that Roy Gardner, despite his central role in the escape, had been transferred to Leavenworth and that two other men involved in the plot had spent only six months in isolation.
After Urbaytis had been in isolation for thirty-one months, the prison psychiatrist, C. R. F. Beall, received a letter with a return address marked “Vault 10, The Wilcox Museum for the Living Dead,” in which Urbaytis expressed the view that he might remain in isolation for the remainder of his fifty-year sentence. At the end of January 1931, however, he was finally released to general population, although a guard was to accompany him whenever he moved about the prison. The following April Dr. Beall reported that Joe was “pleasant, courteous, talkative and cheerful,” expressing only the hope that he could be transferred from a job in the tailor shop to an outdoor assignment so that he could “get into the sunlight.”33
In November of that same year, an inmate about to be released from Atlanta was questioned by the deputy warden regarding reports that a recently released prisoner was to obtain three guns and smuggle them into the penitentiary to aid an escape attempt; the inmate readily admitted his knowledge of this plan, stating that he agreed to help the conspirators out because he feared he “would be cut to pieces” if he refused. The informant identified Joe Urbaytis as one of the intended recipients of smuggled weapons.34
When the list of transfers to Alcatraz was made up at Atlanta, Joe Urbaytis’s name was certain to be included. On November 16, 1934, he arrived on the island accompanied by this note in his file: “He is a gangster and bandit leader and exerts a bad influence . . . for this reason he is unsafe to mingle and mix with other prisoners.”35
Albert Bates had an important role in the Urschel kidnapping (as described in chapter 1), but he never reached the level of national prominence attained by his rap partners, George and Kathryn Kelly and Harvey Bailey. For some reason, the press and the FBI’s publicity machine gave hi
m only passing attention. Since his criminal career was at least as interesting as those of his partners, it deserves additional space here.
Bates was the only rider on the prison trains from Leavenworth and Atlanta who knew about doing time at Alcatraz. He had spent fifteen months on the island—then known as the Pacific branch of the U.S. Army Disciplinary Barracks—as punishment for deserting from the U.S. Army, in which he had enlisted in 1911. Given the intense Kansas summer heat he experienced in the basement of the Leavenworth Annex, Bates was said to have been pleased when he learned that he was going back to the cold, windy island.
Bates came to Alcatraz in 1934 with considerably more prior experience in penitentiaries than either George Kelly or Harvey Bailey. He had served time in the Nevada State Prison on a burglary conviction, and two terms in the Utah State Prison for burglary. While serving his second Utah sentence, he had been placed on a road camp from which he escaped; after he was arrested in Nebraska on charges of safecracking, he was returned to the Utah State Prison for the third time; six months after his release from Utah he was convicted of burglary and larceny in Colorado and was sent to the state penitentiary in Canon City and then to the state reformatory, from which he escaped and to which he was returned in 1930. In 1931, he was sentenced to thirty-five days in jail in Michigan for driving while intoxicated, but he escaped from the jail and remained at large until he was arrested in Denver in connection with the Urschel kidnapping. After Bates had been installed in a cell in the Leavenworth Annex with a life sentence, various states lodged eight separate complaints against him for various forms of criminal conduct if he was ever released from federal custody.