by David Ward
I am the only reporter on this particular boat, and we are 200 yards closer to the fight than the next nearest launch, which is loaded down with heavily armed “Feds.” Just above me, it seems, guards are lying on their bellies firing rifles. I watched them hit the dirt—army style—firing, advancing, taking cover. There’s a tinge of powder smoke mixed with the salt smell of the cold sea air. The slow, deliberate rifle fire of the guards is being answered by the tommy-gun bursts of the convicts. Apparently they have plenty of ammunition. They are throwing five shots for every one they take.13
The next morning, marine demolition expert Charles Buckner was up on the roof of the cell house drilling a hole through which to drop TNT, but he was stopped by Deputy Warden Miller, who did not want the building destroyed. Fragmentation grenades were dropped instead, bursting water pipes and sending shrapnel flying in all directions. “Of course [the inmates] took an awful hammering from the concussion bombs and grenades that were dropped in there from the roof,” said Officer Mahan later. “When one of those concussion bombs went off it just seemed like it’d raise you off the floor.”
After what seemed to everyone like an interminable time, the firing from outside was halted and quiet prevailed. Warden Johnston gave the order to enter the cell block. Lieutenant Isaac Faulk led the way with Officer James Comerford behind him and a group of San Quentin officers carrying Thompson submachine guns. As they ran down the corridor between A and B blocks, they were fired on but chased Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard into the utility corridor in C block.
Then the hostages were found. One of them, Robert Baker, remembered the rescue:
About 1:00 A.M., as near as I can gather, we heard a lot of “sons-a-bitching.” It was Miller, the deputy warden, Lt. Faulk, and the plumber, Severson. He was a colonel in the first war and he had a medal of honor, a Congressional Medal of Honor. He come in like old Matt Dillon, standing up shooting. Miller had a machine gun and Faulk had a .45; they was a-cussing and a-swearing and coming in shooting anything that moved. Finally Sundstrom stuck his hand out and found that the gate to the cell had been unlocked, so he opened it. . . . And he run out screaming and waved down the hallway at Faulk and Severson and Miller, so they come in and got us. Of course they took Simpson out first because he had two in the belly, then they brought me out and put me in the deputy warden’s office on a stretcher and treated this hole in the lower part of my leg. Then they took us in a marine landing barge over to the Marine Hospital.
Officer Y, one of the men who retrieved the wounded hostages, recalled entering the first cell where the hostages were.
I found [Officer] Miller; Captain [Weinhold] had been shot, and Simpson, the lieutenant, had been shot, and Corwin was sitting over where the toilet is on the opposite side there at the end of the block and his blood had coagulated. I didn’t even recognize him. His head was twice its normal size. I said, “Hell don’t bother with him, he’s dead. Let’s get these others out.” At that time [Miller] breathed and a big bubble of blood came out. That’s when we decided to get him out of there real quick. Miller was crying. I thought Well Jesus this big sissy, he ain’t even hurt. I got a guilt complex after that because the man died very shortly thereafter. . . . Simpson could talk, but you could see he was in pain. The captain was typical German type, stoic as hell. He was hurting real bad—you could tell, he had been shot twice. We got him out and then we got Baker and of course Lageson wasn’t hurt. He helped get the others out. So we got all the hostages out and we went back outside and then that’s when Mr. Miller said, “They’re on top of this cell block, we gotta get ’em.”
The armed convicts were presumed still loose in the cell block, and no one knew whether they were still hiding in the utility corridor. The warden and his senior staff talked about what should be the next move. “Just don’t do anything,” Officer Y recalled the warden saying. “I don’t want any more killing . . . just let it go for a minute. Maybe we can wait ’em out.” The waiting went on for a long time. Finally, at about two o’clock in the morning, Officer Y spoke and offered a plan to flush Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard out of the utility corridor: “Let us go in there and ease that door open, real easy. Let me get some shots off. We’ll find out where they are.” Y described what happened next:
We got that door open as easy as we could and then fired down at floor level, and kept firing up and down. We emptied about fifteen shots. We didn’t get no response. So he [Deputy Miller] said, “Close the door up again.” So we closed that steel door and waited and waited and nothing happened.
After a while Y offered to go back into the utility corridor and investigate. Miller gave his assent, Y grabbed a powerful flashlight and opened the door, his .45 in his hand, the light held high in case shots were fired at it:
So I started back in through that pipe chase [utility corridor]. There’s recesses in the floor just like in foxholes, but I finally got where I could see ’em. I could see Coy, he was sitting there with that gun like this across his lap, but he wasn’t pointing the gun at me. His eyes was wide open looking at me. I said, “Coy lay the gun down. We’ll get you out of here, we won’t hurt you. Just lay the gun down.” No answer, no moving. You know, I think that was about as frightened as I ever was in my life though. I’ve heard of people having a peculiar taste in their mouths, it tastes like copper. When I first saw him looking at me, I had this copper fish taste in my mouth, boy I just knew I’d had it. Because there was no place to go, no place to duck. I figured if the man is not firing he’s got to be in shock or he don’t want to give up, or he’s unconscious or something. I could see he had his eyes wide open, looking at me.
Well, I called back to the people outside and I said, “I found Coy.” Somebody yelled in there, “Shoot the son of a bitch.” I didn’t even try to argue with them, what the hell, shooting somebody, that’s out. I got closer and I said, “The man’s in shock or he’s dead or something. But his eyes are wide open and the gun’s pointing almost at me, but it’s not right at me.”
I had the drop on him if he’d moved I could have got him. . . . I moved in a little closer and he still didn’t move. By that time I could see Cretzer’s head and part of it was gone, with the brains hanging out. So I knew he was no trouble. And then I got on up to where I could see Hubbard and he had one of these knives that had slid out of his hand, laying there right by his hand. And I knew he was out of commission.
The dead prisoners, already stiffening into rigor mortis, were dragged from the utility corridor, Coy first, then Cretzer, and Hubbard. They were laid out on the cell block aisle called Broadway. The key to the yard, number 107, was found on Coy’s body. Lieutenant Bergen, who was put in charge of the bodies, described the scene:
They brought these three guys out, laid ’em down on the concrete floor outside the east end of A block and started counting the holes and one thing or another. Coy and Cretzer were in rigor mortis when we brought ’em out, Hubbard who must’ve been the last to die was still in rigor. They all were gradually straightened out, kind of a gruesome sight. . . . I was in charge so I got some blankets and covered them up. Very official delegations came in to view them and “ooh and ahh” and poke and look and count. Finally they moved them the hell out of there over to the coroner in San Francisco.
From the basement, Officer Ed Stucker emerged with the twenty-one inmates who had been getting haircuts in the barbershop when the escape began. Stucker and his charges had spent the entire ordeal in what turned out to be the relative safety of the basement barbershop. According to Stucker, the two days he had spent there with the inmates were uneventful, except for his fear that Cretzer—who had seen him poke his head up from the basement when the escape began—would come down and kill him:
I stayed in down there from that day until Saturday with those men. As far as the men down there with me, not one bit of trouble did they give me. A couple of them told me, “Mr. Stucker, we’ll try to keep you from getting hurt if they come down here.” I said, “Don’t get yourself in
a jam because if you do they might hurt you.”14
The inmates who had been held in the yard were finally returned to the cell house. Because of damage to many of the cells, they were locked up two, three, and four to a cell and subjected to frequent searches. Tear gas clung to every available surface. Waley recalled the hail of bullets in D block:
It was Meathead [Deputy Warden Miller] that shot through my writing board and through the stacked books I had in front of myself. My cell had 127 bullet holes in it. I had law books and a mattress piled up, and I was under the bunk, they weren’t going to kill me. . . .
After the guards finally came through the door at the end of D block they said, “Don’t anybody move.” They told us to stand up and I’m a little leery about standing up because the day before they had said, “Okay, we aren’t going to shoot in here anymore. You guys can stand up and get out of that water.” Well, a lot of guys stood up, including me like a big idiot and they really blasted us. When they did come in I didn’t know whether to get up. I heard them talking, so I stood up. Then Miller said, “Aren’t you dead yet Waley?” . . . I told him a couple of years previous to the breakout, “If you don’t stop the tension in the institution, you’re going to have a bloodbath.” Old Meathead said, “Oh, I like to wade knee-deep in blood.”
The press got a brief opportunity to take photos inside the cell house during a tour in which Warden Johnston pointed out the bent bars of the gun gallery, the bloodstained, bullet-scarred hostage cells, and the utility corridor where the dead ringleaders were finally found. During the days immediately following the end of hostilities, the press kept up a continuing flow of articles. The funerals of the slain officers were covered. There was speculation about the future of seventy-two-year-old James Johnston, who said “I can’t even think about quitting, I can’t let down this splendid staff we’ve got over here.”15 Readers were provided descriptions of the bodies of Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard at the morgue, and they read about the “morbid curiosity of the scores of men and women of all ages [who] asked permission to see the bodies.”16 They learned that Joe Cretzer was cremated, and that “his ex-wife, Kay Wallace Benedetti, notorious Bay Area brothel keeper at one time, wept at the brief service.” And, they read, Marvin Hubbard’s body had been shipped to relatives in Alabama, while Bernard Coy’s body lay unclaimed because “nobody wanted him.”17
THE FBI INVESTIGATION
The FBI field office in San Francisco first learned of trouble at Alcatraz on May 2 when a telephone call at 2:45 P.M. from the warden’s secretary reported that an inmate with a “machine gun” was loose in the prison; no assistance was requested. Several calls followed, but after 5:00 P.M., agents got their information from local radio broadcasters who were watching the assault on the cell house from boats offshore. FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., was informed, erroneously, that in addition to holding guards as hostages, “the prison doctors have been captured.” The U.S. attorney’s office notified the special agent in charge of the San Francisco office that one guard had been killed and that four others were wounded and had been transported to the Presidio’s marine hospital. The federal prosecutor expressed his view that agents should attempt to interview the wounded officers, “in the event they had some information of value to disclose before they passed away.”18
Clearly annoyed by what he saw as a pattern of federal prison officials not cooperating fully in FBI investigations, Director Hoover told the San Francisco office that the FBI would conduct an investigation at Alcatraz only if it were requested by the Prison Bureau—“and then only if the FBI is allowed to make it unrestricted and unhampered.”19 Assistant FBI director E. A. Tamm echoed this feeling in a memo to Hoover, citing the necessity of having “free [rein] to conduct our own investigation in the manner and under the conditions we deem appropriate.”20
In the early afternoon of May 3, BOP director James Bennett called assistant director Tamm to request an “investigation of the facts in this case as soon as the prisoners were subdued.” Bennett assured FBI headquarters that he had instructed Warden Johnston and his staff to cooperate in every way and that there would be no interference by the prison staff. To further reassure Hoover, Bennett said he was leaving for San Francisco himself to ensure that the Bureau “got what it wanted.” Hoover was not persuaded, however, and instructed Tamm:
See that our San Francisco office doesn’t subjugate itself to either Bennett or Johnston and the same goes for our staff at Washington. I am getting ‘fed up’ with the ‘palsey-walsey’ attitude of our officials both here and in the field with individuals who are constantly knifing the Bureau.21
In the meantime, San Francisco field office agents went to the Presidio hospital to interview the wounded officers. A “dying declaration” was obtained from William Miller that he had been shot in “cold blood” by Joseph Cretzer. Other hospitalized officers named Coy, Hubbard, Thompson, Shockley, and Carnes as participants.
On May 4 seven agents under the supervision of Special-Agent-in-Charge Fletcher arrived on the island to begin interviewing suspects and witnesses and to gather evidence. The naked bodies of Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard were examined and photographed, their clothing was packaged up, and the .45 pistol and Winchester 30.06 rifle found with them were sent to FBI headquarters for examination, although prison personnel had handled the weapons in the process of removing them from the utility corridor.
The agents reported back to Washington, D.C., that all prison personnel had “been most cooperative.” When James Bennett sent a telegram to Hoover offering his “sincere thanks” for the help of the FBI and the agency’s “splendid cooperation and efficient assistance,” he also offered to discuss “the details of this amazing mass escape attempt.”22 Hoover, however, declined to respond to his fellow director in the Department of Justice, and he continued to complain about coverage of the role of the FBI in the investigation, noting that news reports about the activity of the assistant U.S. attorney described FBI agents as “accompanying him to Alcatraz.” Memos and telephone calls went to Fletcher ordering him “not to serve as a ‘flunky’ or satellite to the assistant U.S. Attorney or to the U.S. Attorney for that matter.”23 Two federal officers had died, as many as a dozen more officers appeared to have been wounded, and the federal government’s highest-security penitentiary was the site of a battle involving the army, the marines, the coast guard, and personnel from San Quentin and other federal prisons—but J. Edgar Hoover was more concerned with the image of his agency.
With this preliminary communication, the relationship between the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons fell into its predictable pattern. For more than a decade, Alcatraz and Bureau of Prisons officials had tried to hold the FBI at arm’s length whenever serious problems arose, because FBI investigations tended to go beyond specific incidents to management issues, and because the resulting reports were often labeled Confidential and sent directly to the attorney general rather than to BOP officials. The Bureau of Prisons knew that in a major event such as the abortive escape attempt at Alcatraz, Hoover and his close associates could be counted on to make the most of what might be an outstanding opportunity to heap discredit on another agency, even one within the Department of Justice.
Following their interviews with prisoners and staff, FBI agents identified nine inmates as likely subjects for prosecution, adding Louis Fleisch, Floyd Hamilton, James Quillen, Edgar Cook, Jack Pepper, and Edwin Sharpe to the list that already included Carnes, Thompson, and Shockley. Ninety other prisoners were interviewed. The men who were in the cell house or in D block during the escape attempt and the hours of shooting and bombardment that followed were not reluctant to cooperate with the agents when they were questioned about Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard. Knowing these men were dead, the inmates readily identified them as the planners of the break, and as the ones responsible for shooting the officers. But no one would admit to seeing any other prisoner do anything wrong. As convict Earl Egan told the agents, “I am not going to say anything about no
live guys.”
However, the inmates freely condemned the actions of Alcatraz personnel during interviews. Fleisch, for example, contradicted Officer Corwin’s account of how Coy and Cretzer gained access to D block and released the prisoners in the second and third tiers, painted Corwin as slow to recognize what was going on, and said he did not know why Corwin, after it appeared that a break might be in progress, had not picked up the telephone and warned the armory what was happening.
Shockley refused to answer any questions from FBI agents, stating only “I have nothing to say and wish to return to my cell.” Thompson, on the other hand, anticipating his identification by guards, had written out an explanation of his participation and handed it to Deputy Warden Miller.
Agents interviewed Carnes for the first time, with Deputy Warden Miller present, on the evening of May 4. Carnes claimed that he had never left his cell during the entire break; he refused to say anything else. The following morning he was interviewed again; this time, he said he didn’t think he should say anything until he had seen a lawyer. The agents told him to ask prison officials for legal counsel. Carnes thought for a few minutes, then decided to make a statement. The interview concluded when Carnes was allowed to go back to his cell for lunch. When he was called back an hour later, he announced that he did not want to talk any further and refused to sign the statement based on the earlier interview, although he agreed that everything he had said was true. In San Francisco, Special-Agent-in-Charge Fletcher reported that the hostage officers corroborated Carnes’s story but identified Thompson as a participant who urged Cretzer to shoot them.
On May 7 a San Francisco attorney, Ernest Spagnoli, sent a telegram to Warden Johnston claiming that he had been retained to defend Carnes, Thompson, and Shockley. The San Francisco Examiner reported that Spagnoli had been employed “by a friend,” but Fletcher told FBI headquarters that the newspaper had hired Spagnoli and two of his associates. Thompson, Shockley, and Carnes later rejected Spagnoli’s effort to represent them.