Alcatraz
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The brief skirmish ended with Capone fleeing the room, then five minutes later sending Delbano back, saying, “Al doesn’t want any trouble with you.” Waley told Delbano, “If you people don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.” After the incident, according to Waley, “Capone didn’t say anything to me for three months, then he said, ‘Hi.’ ”
Shortly after this altercation, Waley was charged with “insolence” for telling a doctor to “stick it up his ass” when the doctor denied him treatment for a cold. Two days later he refused to work and was placed in solitary. The following day he was written up for singing very loudly “They’ll hang Jim Johnston in a sour apple tree.” Told he was disturbing the cell house Waley replied, “I can’t get in any deeper, so why stop?” That proved not to be the case.
Four warnings later he was taken down the stairs in A block to lower solitary, where he remained for two days. In a memorandum to Bureau headquarters reporting that lower solitary was being used, Warden Johnston explained that Waley “became noisy . . . he persisted in deliberately whistling and hollering and making noise in an endeavor to attract attention and disturb others in the cell house. It therefore became necessary to move him downstairs . . . that is basement solitary . . . for one day and 21 hours . . . until he promised to behave.”20 A few weeks later Waley was in an A block solitary confinement for disobeying a direct order.
His hostility toward the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons was relentless throughout his many years at Alcatraz. Claiming to be the government’s “favorite whipping boy,” he filled his letters to his mother and his wife with tales of his persecution.
On September 27, 1937, after being placed in isolation for participating in a strike, Waley was charged with agitating and creating a disturbance. After repeated warnings to keep quiet he was forcibly removed for the second time down to lower solitary.
Lt. Culver, an ex-jar-head [marine], thought he was tough. He had a guard hold each one of my hands and he hit me in the stomach and in the cheek. But the next time I saw his hand coming, I stuck my head down so he hit my forehead and broke his thumb, or else he faked it.
This time he remained in a dungeon cell for thirteen days.21 When he was moved upstairs to a D block isolation cell he was limited to one meal each day, with bread and water for the other meals. A month later he was charged with ripping up his bed sheet and promising more of the same until he received food. While in D block, Waley continued to protest:
I said why don’t you just take my mattress and all my bed clothes and clothes too. So I took them, threw them out there. That was one of the reasons they thought I was crazy.
Then Waley refused to eat. His lengthy hunger strike was graphically described by U.S. Public Health Service physician Milton Beacher, who worked on the island for several months in 1937 and 1938:
[Waley] became listless, indifferent. Rebelling against the entire prison setup, he bluntly announced he didn’t care what happened to him, life was too miserable at Alcatraz. First he went on a hunger strike. For seventeen consecutive days he steadfastly refused to eat. We finally resorted to tube feeding.
On the seventeenth day, I visited Waley. “How about eating, Waley?” I asked. “This isn’t doing you any good. If you don’t eat, we’ll just have to give you the tube and pour it down.”
Waley grimaced weakly. “I don’t care. You can hose me with that tube day and night. The tube going into my nose and down my stomach doesn’t bother me like it does other guys. I’m not eating.”
I inserted the tube and poured down a pitcher of hot broth. Several times Waley paled and became nauseated and regurgitated. As the broth bubbled up, the guard holding the pitcher caught it and poured it down again, saying, “As many times as it come up, it will go down again.”
“I don’t give a god dam. You can give it to me with vomit puke, snot and all. What the hell do I care? I’m not eating until I get what I want. If it takes forty years, too. I’ll tell you what I want. I want out of this god damn stinking joint. I want to go back to McNeil—that’s where I was sentenced. There was no damn reason to transfer me here. I’m tired of the agitation and persecution here and getting the glassy-eye.” . . . In the midst of his hunger strike, Waley announced he positively would not budge from his bed. He made that clear to the guards one day when they approached him prior to another tube feeding.
“I’m not getting out of bed,” he said firmly. “Carry me if you want. If you want me to shave, then you shave me. If you want me to take a bath, then you carry me down and bathe me. I’m not doing a damn thing by myself any more. Get it?”
“Get out of bed,” a guard commanded. “Get out or we’ll drag you out!”
“Not on your life. Not while there’s so God damn much antagonism against me.”
“You’re asking for it, Waley—GET UP!” the guard thundered. Whereupon Waley was forcibly hauled out of bed, slammed down on the floor and tube fed. That afternoon, he walked voluntarily into the hospital.22
Waley’s version of this extended protest highlighted his ability to get out of restraints and the constipation that followed his refusal to eat.
They took me up to the hospital, put me in a straight sheet on the bed and handcuffed me to the side of the bed and handcuffed my feet down. I got out of the restraints—I got out twice. They put you in bed, handcuff you to the bedrails and handcuff your feet to the bottom of the bed with leather cuffs. Then they put this canvas sheet over you and strap it down to the bed. They had openings so your hands and your feet were outside this canvas sheet. They had me in one of those contraptions but I kept getting out of it. The sheet they put over you is strapped down on the side of the bed and you can holler for a bed pan but they wouldn’t give it to you—they let you lay in [your own bodily wastes].
So finally they took me out of that thing and put me over in the observation cells and my bowels hadn’t moved yet. Finally I figured, geez, these people are going to let me die here if I don’t raise some kind of objection and I told them that my bowels hadn’t moved. They poured all that eggnog down me and it’s sitting up just back of my tailbone like cement. . . . I been up here in the hospital fourteen days and my bowels hadn’t moved before then because I hadn’t had anything to eat. So they gave me an enema with salt water and mineral oil mixture of some kind. Boy, I had a hell of a time getting that down. I finally got all right but they tried to get me to say that I would go back to the cell house and wouldn’t do anything. I told them I would eat, so they started to feed me and they kept me [in the hospital] three or four months.
Although he eventually agreed to eat again, Waley continued to protest through desperate, self-destructive actions. First he removed his clothes and flooded his cell. Dr. Beacher found him naked, wet, and shivering on the floor. Waley was placed in an empty cell, in which even the bed was removed along with the chains which held the bed suspended from the wall. He immediately announced he would use the blankets to hang himself, so they too were removed. When the warden was notified, he ordered Waley to be sent to the hospital, where he was placed in a restraint jacket. Since Waley was judged to be neither sick nor insane, he was put back in isolation again the next morning. Guards made sure the cell contained nothing with which Waley might harm himself, and according to Dr. Beacher, “Waley was let into it entirely nude except a pair of shoes from which the laces were extracted. Laces were potential nooses—great for strangulation.” Nonetheless, “less than twenty minutes later,” according to Dr. Beacher, “a passing guard saw Waley hacking at himself with a broken safety razor blade. He was bleeding from his arms and wrists and had smeared blood over his face. This gave him an eerie slaughterhouse look. The guard was aghast.”23
After Waley cut himself, a search of his belongings revealed a razor blade hidden in the sole of his shoes. In a letter reporting this episode to Bureau headquarters, Waley was quoted as claiming, “I have got too much sense to hurt myself, but I will get out of this place, Alcatraz, head or feet first.”24
A m
ore serious suicide attempt followed in September 1938 when Waley was found in his cell face down breathing, but with difficulty. He had double-looped strips of blanket around his neck and tied them to the wash basin in an attempt to hang himself. After Dr. Ritchey removed the strips, Waley quickly recovered and tried to run out of the cell but a guard blocked his exit. He told Ritchey that he could not get along at Alcatraz because nobody would allow him to get along there. Ten days later he attempted to commit suicide again with another strip of blanket tied around his neck. Two weeks after that he wrote to his mother, explaining the suicide attempt:
I am in the observation tank in the hospital again for hanging myself. I cut my wrists and the vein in my elbow with a razor blade before. . . . I told you and the G-Men that I would rather be hung than be here before I ever was sentenced at all, because the place was injustice personified. I meant it. I am through this time. . . . Although I’m watched pretty close in the hospital, sooner or later I’ll get some broken glass or something. I’m either going to be transferred to McNeil so I can see you, and be given a shake, or I’m not going to do this time for them. . . . You know yourself that you would rather see me dead than a spiritless slobbering idiot, to which this environment leads. . . . ’Tis better to be transferred or die, than live like a dog here.25
When he was discharged from the hospital, Waley got along in general population until September 1939, when he was charged with fighting in the yard with Rudolph Brandt, a prisoner born in Germany. The two argued over the war, began cursing each other, and then resorted to fist fighting. Waley went to solitary again, where he extended his time by calling the mail censor “a cock sucker, bastard son of a bitch.”26
Next he was charged for creating a disturbance in the cell house by hitting a cup on the bars, yelling, and bumping his bed on the floor of the cell. Told to stop he refused, and when ordered out of his cell, he broke a medicine bottle and charged to the front of his cell trying to strike Deputy Warden Miller with the jagged neck of the bottle. Waley complained in a letter to Director Bennett that he did not attempt such an attack and that he was beaten up by Miller and Lt. Simpson.27 In his own report filed months after the incident in response to Waley’s claims of being beaten, Simpson wrote, “Waley told Miller, ‘I will kill you, you son of a bitch.’ [Miller] threw up his hands, striking Waley on the side of the head.”28
Like many other convicts Waley spent much of his time drawing up legal briefs. He began with a writ of habeas corpus contending that he had been denied counsel and the right to confront witnesses against him and that he should have been tried in the state of Idaho.29 By May 1941 Waley had filed eight petitions in the federal district court in San Francisco, all of which were denied. Several months later an appeals court judge noted that the petition contained “a threat to commit murder in the penitentiary in the event of the denial of Petition.”30 By September 1945 he had filed twenty-nine petitions for habeas corpus, motions to vacate judgments, and appeals to the Circuit Court and the Supreme Court. He also sent letters of complaint to the U.S. attorney in San Francisco and to the attorney general in Washington, D.C.
No Alcatraz convict was more enthusiastic about helping Henry Young put the Rock on trial than Harmon Waley. As described in chapter 6, he was a featured witness at Young’s murder trial. His handcuffs were removed before he entered the courtroom, nattily dressed in a suit, tie, and fedora. His picture appeared in the San Francisco News next to the headline “Brutality at the Rock Charged.”31 He was cited in the San Francisco Examiner as “in every way the star of the day’s court room performance . . . at some length and with considerable enjoyment he related that he had been confined to the Alcatraz dungeon twice.” He was allowed to testify “for reasons not discernable to lay observers” to a wide variety of matters that had been introduced by other convicts, through the “bootleg” method of answering defense attorney’s loaded questions over the objections of the U.S. attorney.32
Waley’s intent was not only to help Young but to expose the “damn lies” of James Bennett that the dungeons had never been used. Anticipating a negative reaction from the Alcatraz staff to his court appearance and testimony, Waley made sure that the judge and the jury were warned of this possibility as “he sneaked over a response indicating that he expected to be punished for his testimony.”33 For Harmon Waley this highly publicized opportunity to condemn the Bureau of Prisons and the regime at Alcatraz was truly satisfying.
Waley’s animosity toward Deputy Warden Miller was especially vehement. In a memo describing his inspection of D block, Warden Johnston reported the following incident:
When I stopped at Waley’s cell I remarked that he looked well and appeared to be putting on weight. He replied, “I’m alright, I’m not crazy and I haven’t been killed.” Looking at Mr. Miller and resuming the remarks he said, “He said that he would see to it that he either drove me crazy or killed me.” Mr. Miller said, “Waley when did I ever say anything like that?” Waley said, “Let’s see, I think it was a year ago last July about.” Mr. Miller said, “Waley you know that what you say is a lie.” Waley said, “No it ain’t no fucking lie.”
When Johnston returned to Waley’s cell later, Waley told him he planned to kill Miller when he got a chance. Johnston said he would see to it that Waley never got the opportunity, to which Waley replied, “Oh well, I will get a chance.”34
Two days later he threatened not only the lives of Alcatraz officers but the life of the warden as well:
If one of these things doesn’t soon happen which I have named in paragraph one [release or a fair trial] I am going to kill you or one of your officers and put the whole case before a jury at a murder trial. . . . I have no use for potential dictators or tyrants, and I’ve been punished for something I didn’t do long enough.35
Waley then reiterated his threats in a letter to the U.S. attorney general:
If any of your agents or yourself think I can do nothing because you have confined me to my cell you are very sadly mistaken. I assure you that I will splatter the brains of one of your agents all over the wall opposite my cell; and I think I can kill two or three more before you get me to a trial. . . . I am now giving you sixty days to release me from my false imprisonment without a fair trial, and God Damn you, you had better use this opportunity.36
But a few months later Waley informed Johnston that he had changed his mind, telling the warden, “You need have no fear about me killing you or any of your officers since it was never my intent to do so at any time; for I would not lower myself to the same level.”37
But Waley was not through resisting. In June 1944 he built a fire in his toilet and then kicked it until it broke apart. The next day he tore the covering from the drain in the cell and used it as a hammer to break the protective glass cover over the light in the cell. During his disciplinary hearing, Waley said his action was intended to secure a cell change: “Yes, I plead guilty. I’ll smash more toilets if you don’t move me off the flats and back upstairs. I am guilty but I will smash many more. I got 45 years, take it all. . . . I am not going in a cell on the flats. I am going to tear up every god damn toilet in Alcatraz.” For this action—and attitude—he forfeited 1,000 days of statutory good time.38
A month later Waley received a misconduct report for verbally abusing Officer Frank Johnson. The hostile relationship between Waley and this officer related to Johnson’s shooting James Boarman through the head during the April 1943 escape attempt. According to Waley, a Coast Guard officer who had been within twenty feet of Boarman to pick him up, called the act “deliberate murder.” Waley claimed he observed Johnson washing his hands “two, three times a day” and because he had read some psychology book, he believed he knew why:
When they put Johnson over as the officer in D block I was in the segregation unit . . . one day I’m trying to study. I’m into logic then and I got mad and said, “Listen Johnson, you’re washing three, four times every day and I say you’re causing a big disturbance—you can’
t wash that kid’s blood off your hands. Get that through your head. But some night he’s going to climb in bed with you, soaking wet and he’ll bleed all over you.” Jesus, he was fit to be tied he was so mad at me.
Throughout his long career at Alcatraz, Waley never missed an opportunity to challenge the authority of prison officials and the Department of Justice and to condemn the actions of individual officers and administrators using every means at his disposal. For years, he produced short stories, articles and poems, often with a pen name, sending some to Bureau headquarters, and asking in one case that his article be forwarded to a publisher such as Colliers Magazine.
In a letter to his mother he claimed to have invented “a fuel system for internal combustion engines . . . [as well as] a gravity engine,” asking her to seek patents and promising her half of the proceeds. He suggested that the gravity system be sold for $500,000 and the fuel system for $1,000,000.39 The secretary of war received a message from Waley describing a method to prevent guns and cannons from recoiling and suggested the use of an herb he called coyotilla that he claimed could paralyze but not kill enemy soldiers.40 In 1950 he submitted a parole release plan in which he claimed that he could support himself by applying the “Waley Method,” a surefire means of attaining financial success when betting on race horses. As his correspondence related to various projects accumulated in Bureau headquarters, James Bennett wrote to Warden Johnston characterizing Waley’s efforts as “indications of the development of a delusional system of ideas” and recommended that Johnston “continue frequent psychiatric interviews.”41
Waley’s hell-raising began to wind down about fifteen years into his sentence. A report in 1948 noted, “This man has paranoid interpretations and blames federal officers . . . for his troubles . . . [but] will probably become better adjusted as he grows older.”42 Another report a year later indicated that Waley was working in the basement, which gave him a chance to play a piano in his spare time. Waley wrote songs with such titles as “Don’t You Trifle Me,” “I’m Riding on a Sunbeam,” “Just an Old Oak Tree,” “Old Man Frog,” and “Oh My Baby.” Five hundred days of statutory good time were restored for his good behavior.43