Alcatraz

by David Ward

  Some officers told me I had killed McCain. Deputy Warden E. J. Miller came down to my cell and asked me why I had stabbed McCain. I told him I didn’t know I had hurt McCain. I was taken to a solitary confinement cell. Miller came again and said I had killed McCain. I said I wouldn’t deny it, but neither would I admit it. I told him I didn’t believe I had killed him.

  Henry Young’s trial ended on April 29, and on the following day the jury returned a verdict of guilty, not on the charge of murder in the first degree, but on the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter. Young, delighted with the verdict, expressed his gratitude to the judge for appointing “youthful attorneys” to defend him.

  The jury had performed its official duty, but it had not finished. After rendering its verdict on the accused prisoner, the jury foreman sent the following telegram to James V. Bennett, Congressmen Thomas Rolph and Richard J. Welch, Senator Hiram W. Johnson, and Justice Frank Murphy of the United States Supreme Court:35

  It is my duty to inform you, on behalf of the twelve jurors who found Henry Young, an inmate of Alcatraz Penitentiary, guilty of involuntary manslaughter after our deliberations tonight upon the conclusion of his two and one half week trial for murder of a fellow prisoner that it is our additional finding that conditions as concern treatment of prisoners at Alcatraz are unbelievably brutal and inhuman, and it is our respectful hope and our earnest petition that a proper and speedy investigation of Alcatraz be made so that justice and humanity may be served.36

  Both Alcatraz and Henry Young had been found guilty.

  Several days later, when Young was sentenced, Judge Roche spoke angrily from the bench:

  I’ve known Warden Johnston for 30 years. I’ve watched him work. He is a man most respected in this community. I’ve visited San Quentin and Folsom unannounced and found everything in order. . . . Warden Johnston’s work is outstanding. He admits that he made a mistake by letting you out of isolation.

  “That’s a rather perverse attempt to rehabilitate, don’t you think, Judge?” interrupted Young. According to the newspaper account of the exchange, Judge Roche at this point “almost rose out of his seat” but continued, “Some men deserve sympathy, but you’re not one of those. You planned a cold, deliberate murder of an unfortunate human being.” At this Young smiled and asked, “Does my sentence run concurrently, Judge?” The judge replied, “When you finish this term, you serve the other.”37

  DAMAGE CONTROL AFTER THE VERDICTS

  The trial demonstrated more clearly than any previous event that the Justice Department’s attempt to make Alcatraz a powerful symbol of punishment and deterrence had a serious down side. The policies and practices that incapacitated infamous gangsters demonstrated the serious consequences of criminal wrongdoing and allowed the successful operation of an institution packed with troublesome and dangerous inmates. But they also left the prison and its administration open to charges of brutality and inhumanity. It was, in many ways, a conundrum inherent in the very conception of Alcatraz, but Director Bennett and Warden Johnston treated it as a public-relations problem that arose from a large gap between perception and reality.

  To defend the Bureau of Prisons and Alcatraz, Director Bennett distributed a statement to the wire services and to the San Francisco newspapers. It criticized the jury for believing Henry Young’s testimony and for rendering a judgment with “no first hand information . . . as to the policies or methods followed in the management of the most difficult and desperate group of prisoners ever assembled.”38 The statement also noted that Alcatraz had been inspected by judges and members of Congress and had received a favorable report from the Osborne Association, a private prison reform group headquartered in New York City whose executive director was Austin MacCormick, a former assistant director of the Bureau of Prisons. Denying that the Bureau would tolerate corporal punishment in any form in any federal prison, Bennett promised a thorough investigation of the incidents cited during the Young trial. The director’s statement, Warden Johnston reported a few days later, did not appear in any Bay Area newspaper.

  Bennett also had to respond to a letter sent to the attorney general by Young’s attorney, Sol Abrams, which cited trial testimony and the jury findings as reasons that changes in the regime in Alcatraz should be ordered. In his response to the attorney general, Director Bennett complained that Abrams’s efforts had “prejudiced the jury and secured the release of one of the most vicious killers we have ever had in our institutions.” He went on to claim that “upon Young’s advice . . . the most psychopathic and unreliable of our inmates . . . shouted untruthful answers to [Abrams’s] questions.”

  According to Bennett, the jury had voted eight to four on the first ballot to convict Young of first-degree murder but had been “worn down” by the foreman on subsequent ballots. The attorney general was invited to accompany the director on an inspection tour of Alcatraz.39

  One of the most experienced troubleshooters in the Bureau of Prisons, A. H. Connor, was sent to San Francisco to prepare a report for the director on the trial and the jury findings. Based on the trial transcript, Connor constructed an eighty-page digest of testimony, insinuations, and innuendos reflecting on the management of the institution. Connor, of course, concluded that Judge Roche should not have allowed the defense attorneys to continually introduce testimony over the objections of U.S. Attorney Hennessy. Furthermore, he pointed out, “the prosecution contented itself with assuming that the jury would not believe convict witnesses and met this line of testimony merely with objections to its relevancy.” What the prosecution should have done, wrote Connor, was to counter the defense strategy “with a full disclosure of just how Alcatraz is operated, and doing away with a lot of the mystery which has been built up around the conduct of the institution.” Connor concluded that despite the negative publicity and the “unjust verdict,” no further investigation of prison conditions, transfers to the Springfield Medical Center, or allegations of brutality were warranted: “My recommendation is to send the whole business to the files and forget about it.”40

  Bureau headquarters asked Warden Johnston to submit complete reports on the allegations of corporal punishment and the use of excessive force by staff, conditions in isolation and solitary confinement, the deaths of Joseph Bowers and Vito Giacalone, and the reasons for the transfers of prisoners to the Springfield Medical Center.

  Johnston’s detailed response included a denial that he had “authorized, sanctioned, or permitted corporal punishment to be inflicted on any prisoner as a matter of discipline.” The only complaint he had ever received alleging the beating of a prisoner involved Harmon Waley; this complaint had not been written by Waley, but by another prisoner, Burton Phillips. In that case, wrote Johnston, “only necessary force had been used to drag Waley out of his cell in order to force feed him.” All allegations of physical abuse by Henry Young and his attorneys involving Young, Waley, and Dunnock were false, said Johnston.41

  In describing policies regarding isolation and solitary, Johnston reported that the chief medical officer made two visits each day to check on the physical condition of prisoners in these cells. As a result of the doctor’s recommendations, the amount of food given to particular prisoners was increased “on a number of occasions.” The warden described the policy regarding meals for men in solitary and isolation:

  When we opened the institution and until the latter part of 1938, we followed the rule then in force of men in solitary receiving bread for the first days and then a full meal on the third day. . . . Following the strikes in January 1936 and September 1937 . . . we came to the conclusion that while two meals might be ample for a man who was in isolation and not working, we decided to give them all three meals a day.42

  Johnston reviewed the circumstances surrounding the death of Joseph Bowers, which had been introduced at the trial to demonstrate that “an insane man was purposely shot by a guard while . . . trying to retrieve some cans that were at the top of the fence.” The officer who fired at the p
risoner had done his duty, said Johnston, and recalled the officer’s claim that he had prevented an escape.43 (The warden did not address the obvious question of how Bowers would have been able to reach the mainland in broad daylight with Alcatraz personnel fully alerted.}

  Concerning the transfer of prisoners to Springfield Medical Center, Johnston noted that eleven of the thirty-one were “strictly medical cases,” and that some of the twenty prisoners transferred for mental health reasons brought their problems with them to Alcatraz, presenting symptoms that were observed during their first days on the island.44

  As Bureau officials studied the transcript of the Young trial along with the reports from Connor and Warden Johnston, concerns about the effects that the regime might be having on prisoners came to the forefront. In mid-May Assistant Director Howard Gill had written to Bennett:

  The issue has become the type of treatment accorded certain prisoners at Alcatraz. . . . If the system is so barren and hard as to leave justice without mercy, that too will cause men to crack and go berserk. These are the points at issue and James A. Johnston does not meet them.45

  Several weeks later, Gill sent another memorandum to Director Bennett reiterating his view that Johnston’s responses to the issues raised in the Young case indicated that the warden did not understand the need for more sensitive and innovative penal policy and practice in his very high-profile penitentiary:

  Unless we are to expect more of the same, I think the Bureau needs to have a man at Alcatraz supplementing Johnston who will represent individual treatment and stand as a guarantor of methods and treatments such as the Bureau endorses. Even if nothing is done to wipe out what has happened, this will put new hope in the lives of the prisoners and act as an agent toward calming troubled waters.46

  Bureau headquarters did not send anyone from Washington, D.C., to help Johnston run Alcatraz, but Director Bennett increased the frequency and length of his visits to the island. The Bureau’s concerns about the image of the regime it had created continued, but by late 1941 the public relations problems related to Alcatraz would vanish from the front pages of Bay Area newspapers as the United States entered World War II.47

  As a corollary to a decline in the staff’s use of gas billy clubs and saps after the Young trial, one Alcatraz inmate also attributed restraint on the use of force to the U.S. Public Health Service medical staff, who were not employees at Alcatraz but were called over to the island to treat any significant injuries the prisoners sustained. “Anytime a prison official beat up on an inmate,” Arnold Kyle said, “the hospital people would be aware of that and make a report, so there wasn’t too much brutality.”

  8

  THE WAR YEARS

  After the Henry Young trial, Alcatraz was more controversial than ever. The public, always schizophrenic about penal policy, perceived the regime at Alcatraz as both too harsh and just right for the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers. The FBI and the attorney general considered the prison poorly (even incompetently) managed, and Bureau of Prisons headquarters openly questioned the warden’s policies and procedures. Over the next four and a half years, five more escape attempts confirmed the accuracy of these views. But despite these accusations, criticisms, and FBI investigations, neither the prison’s existence nor the jobs of its top administrators were seriously threatened—largely because both the public and the federal government focused their attention on the threats posed by the Axis powers in Europe and imperial Japan in the Pacific, and, after December 1941, on the prosecution of a war that spread across the globe.

  ANOTHER ESCAPE TO THE BAY

  Only weeks after the verdict in the Henry Young trial, a group of inmates took five employees hostage, escaped from the model building, and made it into the bay. Although the escape ultimately failed, it demonstrated that even with new security measures instituted after the breakout attempt by Stamphill, Barker, McCain, Young, and Martin eighteen months earlier, the prison still had vulnerabilities.

  The idea for the escape was hatched by Floyd Hamilton, who had arrived at Alcatraz in June 1940. Listening to his fellow convicts talk about Cole and Roe’s escape from the model building, Hamilton realized that this building still had exploitable weaknesses. Even though the soft iron bars in the building’s windows had been replaced with tool-proof steel bars resistant to hacksaw blades, the building’s location created blind spots for the tower guards, and the large number of rooms meant that continuous supervision by guards was not possible. The challenge would be to find a way to cut through the tool-proof bars of the windows, which constituted the only significant barrier between the convicts and the waters of the bay.

  Hamilton also knew that opportunities for launching an escape from the old model building would soon be diminished. The escapes during the 1930s had revealed obvious weaknesses in and around the structure, and Bureau headquarters had authorized the construction of a new, two-story industries building to be placed dead against the rocky hillside below the prison yard. This location provided ample open space for two sets of fences between the building and the cliffs leading down to the water’s edge. Guards in the gun tower on the roof of the old model building and in the road tower located at the base of steps leading down from the yard would have unobstructed views of the fences, the no-man’s-land between the fences, and every door and window on the three sides of the new building that were not backed up against the hillside. Construction had begun in 1939, but in the spring of 1941 the new building was still unfinished. And inmates were still assigned to jobs in the old building.

  Hamilton’s first step in carrying out the escape was to request a job in the model building. Then he recruited two men to help plan and carry out the escape: Arnold “Pappy” Kyle and Joseph Paul Cretzer, both of whom had demonstrated the necessary patience, ingenuity, and courage in previous escape attempts.

  At McNeil Island in April 1940 Arnold Kyle and his brother-in-law and crime partner, Joseph Cretzer, had begun serving twenty-five-year sentences for bank robbery. Then Kyle learned that he was going to be transferred to Leavenworth and Cretzer to Alcatraz.

  We figured that we had to do something right now. [Joe] figured we could grab one of those dump trucks, and then pull the bed up and have them go ahead and shoot at the back of the bed while we went over the hill. It was really a spur of the moment thing. Where Joe was working I could watch out the window of the tailor shop. He gave me a signal; I jumped up and went out. We grabbed the inmate driver and told him that we were taking the truck. He said “Go ahead” so we took the truck—it was half loaded with lumber.

  I drove. I laid down as far as I could on the seat and Joe scooted down on the floor and held the gas pedal down with his hand while I did the shifting. We hit the middle of the gate and dumped that lumber right in the gate area. I guess we were kind of lucky from what I heard because the man in the tower got so excited that when he went to throw a shell into his rifle he pulled the whole bolt out, bullets and all. He didn’t get a shot fired. We left the truck and hid out—that’s a big island and it was four days before they found us.

  Because they were regarded as such serious escape risks, Kyle and Cretzer were locked up in isolation cells until they were taken to Tacoma for trial on escape charges. They were held in a detention cell in the office of the U.S. marshal there. As Kyle told the author,

  While they were trying us for escape we seen a chance that we could get this marshal’s gun and we might get away. So that’s what we done—we grabbed this old marshal [Artis J. Chitty], but his gun was tied down a little better than we thought. One of the guards came in and tackled all three of us (Joe and I were handcuffed together). This marshal was elderly, he gets up and of course he was real excited. He turned around for a minute, then he dropped over. He died of a heart attack. So, they charged us with second-degree murder but that sentence didn’t mean that much to us so we pleaded guilty.1

  At the time of his sentencing, Joseph Cretzer told the judge he would rather be “a target for bullets�
� than be confined in prison. After he and Kyle got to Alcatraz and met Hamilton, he acted accordingly. The three men invited Lloyd Barkdoll—a physically powerful man with a reputation for taking chances—to join them and to take on the responsibility during the break of subduing guards and keeping hostages and uninvolved convicts under control.2

  The escape plan devised by Hamilton, Kyle, and Cretzer (a far more sophisticated scheme than Warden Johnston and his officers knew) was to cut through the bars in the Model Shop, aided by two elements lacking in the earlier escape attempts—a special grinding wheel to cut the bars and a speedboat that would rush in close to the island when the escapees appeared and pick them out of the water. The first feature of the plan required that the plotters induce an employee to smuggle a special cutting wheel onto the island, and the second required that they communicate with a visitor who could make arrangements for a boat to stand by on the right day at the right time.3

  To obtain the cutting wheel, the inmates prevailed upon a civilian worker who was not a member of the custodial force to help them (why he agreed to help them remains unclear). This employee brought the cutting device, a diamond-studded wheel, to the powerhouse, where he worked. It was then picked up by an inmate who brought it to the carpenter shop in the model building, where he turned it over to Kyle and Cretzer. The motor to which the cutting wheel was to be attached was the same motor used in the mat shop with an emery wheel to smooth down the jagged ends of the wires that held together the pieces of scrap rubber that made up mats for the navy. To hold the cutting wheel high enough up the wall to reach the bars of the windows through which they were to exit, the inmates rigged a rod two feet long to which the motor could be attached. Since they knew that an ordinary emery wheel could not cut through tool-proof steel quickly enough for them to climb out a window before they would be missed at a count, all hope rested on the special diamond-studded wheel.