Alcatraz

by David Ward

  The San Francisco Examiner described Waley’s performance before a courtroom crowded to capacity with spectators who listened “wide-eyed to the first sizable chunks of Alcatraz local color.”

  In every way the star of the day’s courtroom performance was Waley, tall and not unhandsome 30-year-old convict who is “doing” 45 years. It is for some reason not discernible to lay observers, he was permitted to testify on matters that other witnesses have touched upon only through the “bootleg” method of answering above the objections of Frank Hennessy, United States Attorney. Waley made the most of his chance. From the very outset, when he announced he has been in isolation for the last nine months, to the finish, when he sneaked over a response indicating he expected to be punished for his testimony, he was of obvious comfort to defense counsel. At some length and with considerable enjoyment, he related that he had been confined to the Alcatraz dungeon twice. Once, he related, he “made” the dungeon because he was sick, and applied for medical treatment, and was told he would receive medicine later; he insisted on aspirin at once; he was told he’d get his medicine later. “So,” he recounted, grinning in retrospect, “I told the doctor what to do with his aspirin and was thrown in the dungeon.” Then his mood changed abruptly. He became grave and obviously bitter as he was asked if he was ever beaten; words rushed out in a torrent over the objection of Hennessy, and everybody heard his answer, “Yes, I was beaten and taken to the hospital and put in a straight jacket and was half crazy.” The court ordered that answer stricken. He was grinning again, however, as Sol A. Abrams of defense counsel inquired if he had ever heard McCain discuss Young. . . .[He answered that] he saw McCain one day shortly after McCain was released from isolation, and congratulated him. . . . The witness testified “[McCain] said Young had snitched on their escape attempt. He was very angry and said he intended to kill Young just as soon as Young got out of isolation.” With language admittedly supplied by Abrams, Waley also testified that McCain had spread word about the prison concerning alleged depravity involving him and Young.24

  The ability of MacInnis and Abrams to lead their witnesses, combined with their witnesses’ desire to be led, produced a string of highly sensational story lines in San Francisco newspapers, most of them favorable to the defense side:

  Secrets of the “Rock” Told Death Jury: Details of “Solitary” Revealed by Warden (San Francisco Examiner, April 17, 1941)

  Brutality at Rock Charged: Young Beaten by Alcatraz Guards, Witness Declares (San Francisco News, April 23, 1941)

  Witnesses in Alcatraz Case Fear Reprisal (San Francisco News, April 24, 1941)

  In making the case that confinement at Alcatraz was driving men to acts of desperation, the defense attorneys elicited testimony from the convict witnesses that guards had beaten inmates so severely that in one case a man’s skull was fractured, that some prisoners lay for days in solitary without medical attention, and that others resorted to the ultimate escape—suicide. The will to endure crumbled for some inmates, according to inmate Samuel Berlin, who testified that he knew of thirty men who had been transferred to the federal prison hospital at Springfield, Missouri. These men had been driven insane at Alcatraz, said Berlin, due to a “fear psychosis” produced by the brutal beatings administered by guards and by Deputy Warden Miller. Although U.S. Attorney Hennessy objected to almost every question asked of Berlin—objections that were sustained by Judge Roche—the answers were heard clearly by the jury and reported by the press. Defense attorney Abrams led Berlin through a series of inflammatory questions about lower solitary:

  Abrams:

  Do you know an inmate named Walter Beardon?

  Berlin:

  He was in the dungeon with me. He’s dead now.

  Abrams:

  Was Beardon sick in the dungeon and after five days there without food he fainted and slumped to the floor?

  Berlin:

  Yes.

  Abrams:

  It was damp and cold and there was seepage of water?

  Berlin:

  Yes.

  Abrams:

  There was no toilet there and a bucket was not cleaned for five days?

  Berlin:

  Nine days.

  Abrams:

  Two blankets were thrown in at night?

  Berlin:

  Yes.

  Abrams:

  You got a cup of water?

  Berlin:

  Twice a day.

  Abrams:

  Beardon was spitting up blood?

  Berlin:

  Yes.

  Abrams:

  Beardon cried for hospitalization during the 12 days he was in the dungeon?

  Berlin:

  Yes.

  Abrams:

  And Dr. Hess, the prison physician, only peeked in the cell twice a day?

  Berlin:

  Yes.

  Abrams:

  What was he looking for—to see if you were dead yet?

  Berlin:

  I guess so. Lots of men have died there.

  Abrams:

  Did you have a bath in the 12 days?

  Berlin:

  I was 19 days without a bath.

  Abrams:

  Beardon had tuberculosis?

  Berlin:

  He died of it.25

  The next witness, James Grove, described by a San Francisco News reporter as a “breezy felon,” testified that McCain had told him that he was “out to get Young” and went on to describe the beating of Young by Alcatraz guards. His testimony was summarized in a San Francisco News story:

  The beating of Young, Grove testified, took place during the hunger strike of 1939, when both he and Young were occupying the cells in solitary confinement. Four guards came in and took Young from his cell. . . . They threw Young down the corridor steps and [Deputy Warden] Miller jumped up and came down on his face. “That’s why Young hasn’t any teeth today.” Prosecution attorney objected and succeeded in having the last sentence struck out. “I saw the guards bend over Young, hitting him with clubs,” Grove went on. He said Young had not attacked the guards, and that their only provocation was his refusal to leave the cell. . . . He said prisoners had enough water, but were fed once every three days. Young, he said, was placed in solitary for 19 days without a break following the beating. Voluble and sure of himself Grove had to be cautioned several times to allow the prosecution time to enter objections.26

  The defense contention that Young was “driven to slay McCain by an irresistible impulse” was supported by convict witnesses who testified that McCain had made numerous threats to kill Young and that Young, as described by prisoner Harry Kelly, had come out of solitary a changed man:

  I first knew Henri Young in 1935, when he came to the prison, as a well-educated, sane young fellow. He liked to play ball and he disappeared into solitary for more than three years. When he came out he was about crazy, mentally unbalanced. . . . It was on the first Sunday in December 1940 just before the killing, that McCain received a message saying he had lost 33 years good time. McCain was thoroughly enraged. The next day he told me that Young was the cause of his losing the time. He said Young had made a break unsuccessful. He told me if it was the last thing he ever did, he was going to kill Young. I saw Young on the morning of the killing. He didn’t seem to have possession of his faculties.27

  Another witness, Carl Hood, who had killed a prisoner at Leavenworth, told the court that he had been in the “hole” (disciplinary segregation) with Young, and that the two of them had “wondered why the people of the United States let a prison like Alcatraz stand.”28

  The ability of Abrams and MacInnis to elicit the testimony they wanted over the objections of the prosecution was clear in the following exchange involving the testimony of William Dunnock (as recorded in the Bureau’s annotated transcript):

  Q:

  On February 22, you were sent to solitary and were subjected to physical violence? [Objection sustained.]

  Q:

  Taken to the
hospital you were hit with a blackjack across the face and your nose was broken? [Objection sustained.]29

  Q:

  In solitary you were on a cement floor with no bedding? [Objection sustained.]

  Q:

  Miller tore your garment from your body?

  Yes. [The witness answered before Hennessy had time to object. Dunnock plainly showed his resentment of the prosecution objections and the court’s rulings, and thereafter he snapped out his answer before the judge had ruled.]

  Q:

  Your garment was torn off and you were struck and pushed into the hole?

  Dunnock:

  Yes. [Objection sustained. The judge then admonished Dunnock to refrain from answering until the court had ruled, but Dunnock continued to answer as quickly as possible, ignoring the judge’s order. MacInnis then brought out that Abrams had tried to see Dunnock in solitary, that he was refused, that Dunnock was first moved to a cell “that had a bed.”]

  Q:

  And you were lying on a cement floor without bedding?

  Dunnock: Yes. [Objection sustained.]

  Q:

  Do you expect to be physically punished for testifying in this case?

  Dunnock:

  I do.

  After Waley, Berlin, Dunnock, and the other convict witnesses finished their testimony, Deputy Warden Miller was called to the stand to provide rebuttals. “His memory appeared to be poor regarding incidents at the prison,” reported the papers, “and his favorite answer was, ‘I don’t recall.’” Miller’s vague responses allowed the defense attorneys to repeat all the previous inflammatory allegations of brutality as they sought to refresh the deputy warden’s memory.

  Attorney Abrams’s tactics included questioning prison officials about inmate Vito Giacalone. His fellow prisoners testified that Giacalone—whom they described as mentally ill—had thrown a cup of coffee on a guard, and that the officer responded by beating Giacalone on the head so badly that he died while being transported to the Springfield hospital.30 Prosecution objections to this line of questioning were sustained, but the jury and the press got the message.

  The defense captured more headlines by charging that the inmate witnesses were being warned by their guards to “lay off Alcatraz on the witness stand.” The court asked for the names of particular inmates who had been threatened, along with the identities of the Alcatraz officers who had issued the warnings. Attorney Abrams replied that, unfortunately, he could not reveal the names due to the inmates’ fear of violent reprisals at the hands of the guards.31

  Most of the testimony offered by Young’s witnesses focused on events and conditions on the island that caused his “psychological coma.” But testimony was also offered to prove that Young was only protecting himself when he knifed McCain. The victim, several prisoners reported, made threats to get Young and had called Young a stool pigeon and a homosexual. According to inmate Harold Brest, Young was only doing what any self-respecting Alcatraz convict would do if someone insulted his mother: “Young killed a man for making a rotten reference to his mother—that’s what he done—and that’s what I would’ve done.”32

  The sensational testimony offered by the prisoners was received with little skepticism by the press. After years of being denied any access to the island, reporters were apparently prepared to accept what the inmates said as accurate and consistent with the rumors they had heard and the allegations that had been voiced over the years by released prisoners. The government’s attempt to prevent this testimony from being introduced was regarded as evidence that the Bureau of Prisons had much to cover up.

  Henry Young’s appearance on April 26 was the highlight of the trial. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “The courtroom was like a theater and everybody came to hear Henri Young.”33 The defendant’s performance on the witness stand was described as “spellbinding” by the San Francisco News and as “superb” by the Examiner:

  Henri Theodore Young, a prepossessing youth who looks and acts as if he belongs on a college campus, but who is actually a bank robber “doing” twenty years on Alcatraz, began explaining yesterday just why he had to kill his fellow convict, Rufus McCain. . . . He was a superb witness. He chose his words with care and strung them together with profound regard for the rules of grammar; he uttered them in a voice generally mild and modulated. . . . Almost at once, he had spectators on the edge of their seats, listening in open-mouthed silence, and, as the saying is, “eating out of his hand.” His attorney, Sol A. Abrams, gave him . . . a record showing why and how often he had been disciplined, reprimanded, placed in solitary confinement and deprived of his privileges for infractions of prison rules. And as he proceeded to talk about the bare entries on those records, Young not only rid himself of virtually all blame in such matters but succeeded in placing Alcatraz penitentiary and its rules, guards and officials entirely on the defensive. There was no doubt, whatsoever, where the sympathy of the crowded courtroom lay after Young drew this picture of solitary confinement as he found it July of 1935.34

  Young described his first trip to solitary confinement, the result, he said, of refusing to do what he believed to be too much additional work in the prison laundry. His testimony was given in the same Examiner newspaper story:

  “Its size was approximately that of a regular cell—9 feet by 5 feet by about 7 feet high. I could just touch the ceiling by stretching my arm. . . . You are stripped nude and pushed into the cell. Guards take your clothes and go over them minutely for what few grains of tobacco may have fallen into the cuffs or pockets. There is no soap. No tobacco. No toothbrush. The smell—well you can describe it only by the word ‘stink.’ It is like stepping into a sewer. It is nauseating. After they have searched your clothing, they throw it in to you. For bedding, you get two blankets, around 5 in the evening. You have no shoes, no bed, no mattress—nothing but the four damp walls and two blankets. The walls are painted black. Once a day I got three slices of bread—no—that is an error. Some days I got four slices. I got one meal in five days, and nothing but bread in between. In the entire thirteen days I was there, I got two meals.” The witness described the air as “foul” and went on to tell the court of a particular cell inmates call the “Ice Box” because it is directly opposite a large vent through which “the winds off the Golden Gate blow continuously.” In the cell, Young asserted, a prisoner cannot possibly keep warm. “Standing in your stocking feet on that concrete floor is not conducive to health,” Young complained. “I tried to huddle in a corner, and took my coveralls off and used them to try to keep my shoulders warm. Then I shifted, and wrapped them around my legs to try to keep my legs warm. That went on day after day.” Asked about bathing facilities for convicts in solitary confinement, he replied: “I have seen but one man get a bath in solitary confinement, in all the time that I have been there. That man had a bucket of cold water thrown over him.” A man in solitary confinement, the witness asserted, can think of but one subject—his own misery. “He attempts,” said Young, “to understand how it is possible that human beings can do that to human beings. Over and over, it ran through my mind that this was too great a price to pay for the—shall I say?—crime for which I was thrown into solitary.”

  Young went on to characterize the work stoppages and strikes on the island as desperate measures by the prisoners to obtain basic privileges such as newspapers, radio, movies, and more tobacco and letters, which were, he contended, mandated by Bureau of Prisons regulations. Young reported that when Deputy Warden Miller was confronted with a copy of the rule-book that indicated the Alcatraz rules were deviation from Bureau policy, Miller replied, “You don’t run Alcatraz. I run Alcatraz. And Alcatraz is not a penitentiary. Alcatraz is Alcatraz.” Even his request for a bible, said Young, produced an angry denial by Miller. Young concluded his first day of testimony by telling the jury that beatings at Alcatraz were “as regular as meals.”

  Young next testified about the events that led up to his assault on McCain. He said the animosity b
etween the two had a long history, going back to January 13, 1939, when Young and McCain, along with Dock Barker and two other inmates, had broken out of the disciplinary segregation unit and made their way over the cliffs to the rocks below. Before they could construct makeshift rafts, the escape was discovered and the alarm sounded. Knowing their capture was only minutes away, McCain proposed leaving the beach, running up to the nearby employee residences and taking some of the guards’ wives as hostages. But, said Henry Young, “I refused to go along with the plan; I reminded McCain that freedom isn’t everything.”

  Then Young got to the day of the killing:

  That morning I went into breakfast. McCain was sitting across the room from me. He sneered at me and ran his finger across his throat. He meant he was going to cut my throat. I had a chill. It was like a cold, clammy snake had been put against my skin. When I went out, my head was burning. I went to my cell and got my coat and hat. At the foot of the steps I saw McCain. He made a filthy remark. I stopped and looked at him. . . . Everything seemed to go blank. I went away.

  At this point, Abrams asked, “Do you know what happened from that moment on?” Young responded,