Seeing that Quinn had opened the gates for the two guards, a number of terrified prisoners from 9 Company begged to be let in to Times Square so that they would be safe. One beseeched, “Let me in…I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”12 But Quinn was too afraid to chance opening Times Square one more time. He told the men in 9 Company to stand quietly alongside the wall, and urged them not to get involved in any of this craziness. Then he picked up the phone and frantically tried to reach the administration building.13
The phone didn’t work. Attica’s telephone system was so archaic that only one party at a time could make a call, and the lines were now overloaded with people trying to reach the administration building to find out what the commotion was near Times Square. With no way of communicating with anyone, Quinn had little choice but simply to wait for help. He had no idea what he was supposed to do in a riot situation. There were no plans, no procedures—as the correction officers had been complaining to management all summer. As one guard put it, “[While] the superintendent…took [our request] under advisement in each instance, nothing was really done as far as I could see.”14
In A Tunnel, most of the prisoners originally under Kelsey’s command were desperately trying to get out of the claustrophobic space that was growing more dangerous by the minute. If they could not somehow open a gate, they would be trapped and thus an easy target for the scores of police officers and guards they imagined had by now assembled in the administration building. Driven by both fear and fury, a large group descended upon the massive gate at Times Square and several men began shoving various keys they had taken from the A Yard guards into its lock. They tried key after key, as Quinn, Kelsey, and Melven watched in terror. But none of the keys worked, and for a brief period it appeared that the COs would be safe.
But the A Block prisoners were desperate. Giving up on the keys, they began trying to force the gate open. Working furiously at its hinges, they called out to the still stunned men watching from C Tunnel, urging them to try to open their gate to Times Square. None of those men made any move to follow suit.
Nevertheless, the gate separating A Tunnel from Times Square A Gate began to groan. Someone had handed the men a long piece of pipe that appeared to have been ripped from the backboard of A Yard’s basketball net. Thanks to the force of dozens of men behind this makeshift battering ram, the massive gate between A Tunnel and Times Square suddenly gave way.15 One of the bars that secured the gate to the cement, which had long needed replacing, broke in half about fifteen inches down from the ceiling.16 Apparently this bar had broken before, been improperly rewelded, and then painted over so many times that its weakness had become invisible.17
At 9:05 a.m., as the massive gate separating A Tunnel from Times Square finally gave way, scores of prisoners flooded that tiny space and demanded William Quinn surrender his keys and nightstick. No sooner had Quinn handed them over, however, than he was hit on the head with tremendous force by someone wielding what was later described as either a two-by-four or a “heavy stick.” Quinn fell to the ground, where others set upon him and trampled him as men continued to pour into Times Square. Soon this young CO was lying motionless, with blood streaming down his head and face.18 Within minutes, both Gordon Kelsey and Don Melven were also knocked to the floor, where they too were kicked and beaten. All three COs were soon covered in blood, fading in and out of consciousness.
Meanwhile the scores of men who now crowded into the nerve center of Attica began trying to use Quinn’s keys to open the gates to the rest of Attica’s cell block tunnels. In no time, they had access to all four tunnels and cell blocks, as well as to the set of stairs leading from Times Square to the catwalks above. From this height they could evaluate what was happening in all four courtyards of the prison at once. As important, the roof of Times Square was where the officers kept several gas guns as well as tear gas grenades and they soon had commandeered these as well.19
Ten minutes after the collapse of A Block gate at Times Square, the prison alarm whistle finally sounded. Until that point, most of the 116 correction officers and 78 civilian employees who were on shift at Attica had no clue that all hell had broken loose at the very epicenter of the prison. Each time a group of prisoners burst into another area of the prison, they caught the officers there completely unprepared. Anyone in a white CO shirt or blue shirt worn by civilian employees was fair game for retaliation from prisoners deeply angry at the abuses they felt they had too long endured at Attica.
Standing guard in the metal shop, Mike Smith heard the prison whistle, but he had no idea what it meant; all he had ever been told was that an alarm would sound if a prisoner escaped. Heading to the windows that looked down to the first floor of the shop, the garage area, which was under the supervision of CO Eugene (G. B.) Smith, he saw that something was seriously wrong: prisoners were running around and arming themselves. Mike Smith hurriedly decided to lock the civilians in the metal shop office to protect them, and watched as the now terrified prisoner workers in his shop began trying to squeeze themselves into lockers or hide under tables.
Mike ran to the phone in the office. But it was dead. As he frantically dialed, trying to reach someone in authority, Mike could hear men breaking through the steel doors at the bottom of the stairs. He heard them climbing the stairs, then beating on the doors leading to his part of the shop. Mike could only stand still, his keys in one hand and his nightstick in the other, praying that the doors would hold. To his shock, a prisoner inside the shop suddenly came out of hiding, took Mike’s keys, and opened the door. Scores of men rushed in, knocked him down, and set upon him with a pipe.
As Mike lay there trying to protect his head, two other prisoners who had been hiding, July Manifesto author Don Noble and another man, threw their bodies over him, telling the men to leave him alone because he was “a good guy.” Correction officer Donald Almeter, who was also in the metal shop that day, didn’t fare so well. Twenty-three-year-old Almeter had a reputation as a tough guy, and prisoners gladly gave him a beating. “They looked like Watutsis comin’ in,” Almeter later recounted. “I got hit so hard and spun around I thought I was in A yard.”20
The prisoners then broke into the metal shop office and dragged the civilian employees down the stairs and out of the shop. Mike Smith was still in the shop with prisoner Don Noble and the other man who had protected him. These men now fretted about what to do with the CO. They considered hiding Smith in the paint shop, but feared what would happen to him if he were discovered later on. So they escorted him out of the metal shop as their “prisoner,” hoping to get him through A Block and out to the administration building, where he would be safe.
Although many of Attica’s COs experienced violence and wrath as the prison fell, Mike Smith was by no means the only guard to be protected by prisoners. G. B. Smith, the guard in the downstairs part of the metal shop, had watched in terror as the eighty men in his charge began to arm themselves. He asked one of them why he had grabbed a metal pipe. The man replied, “That is for my protection, Mr. Smith, I am not planning on using it on you.”21 Another group of men from outside the shop smashed through the steel door by driving an electric forklift through it. It appeared that the workers in G. B. Smith’s shop were abandoning him when they stepped aside, though he later reflected that stepping aside was “exactly what I would have done.”22 The intruders forced G. B. Smith to strip, but one of the men who worked for him grabbed the CO away from them and escorted him out the door, shouting at any prisoner who came near that this was his “motherfucking hostage.”23 When they were almost to Times Square, this man said quietly, “Don’t worry, Mr. Smith, I am going to try to get you to the yard as easy as possible.”24
In B Yard, correction officer Dean Wright had a similar experience. Soon after it became clear to him that a full-scale riot was under way, he and Mike Smith’s friend John D’Arcangelo barricaded themselves in the yard toilet, piling pillows, cushions, and other items that were stored in there up against the door.
After several hours of hearing nothing but smashing glass and screaming and, at times, utter silence, the two were discovered by prisoners, who threatened to burn them out if they did not open the door. They surrendered to this ragged group of men wearing football helmets and wielding baseball bats. They were subsequently stripped, roughed up, and forced out into D Yard. But as Wright recalled, one guy then ran over, grabbed him, told the others to leave him alone, and said to him, “You were always fair with me and I’m going to try to see that you don’t get hurt.”25
While Dean Wright, John D’Arcangelo, Mike Smith, G. B. Smith, and Don Almeter were being taken hostage, back in Times Square William Quinn still lay motionless on the floor. Don Melven and Gordon Kelsey were coming to, and two other officers whom prisoners had beaten, Paul Rosecrans and Alton Tolbert, were huddled on the floor. When prisoner Richard X Clark happened upon this scene, he could see that Quinn was in bad shape; the four other guards weren’t doing well either. He knew he had to do something to get them help.
Clark was twenty-five years old and had been sent to Attica after his addiction to drugs led him to stealing and a conviction for robbery and petty larceny. Clark had acquired his drug habit while serving in the Navy. He had managed to contain it for a while, even receiving an honorable discharge in 1968 and returning home to his wife, Celeste, and their one-year-old twin sons. But he soon became addicted again.26
Being in prison had been a wake-up call for Clark. He’d become a devout Muslim, and by 1971 had risen to a leadership position within Attica’s Black Muslim community. As a leader he felt compelled to do whatever it took to secure the safety of the five men who lay injured in Times Square. Within an hour, Clark and several of his men had taken COs Kelsey, Melven, Rosecrans, and Tolbert through A Tunnel to A Block, and for their own protection had locked them in two cells where 8 Company was usually housed. When he returned to A Tunnel, Clark came upon another battered guard, CO Royal Morgan, nicknamed “Tree Trunk,” and a prisoner, who were trying to carry CO William Quinn somewhere safer—although Morgan himself seemed to be in shock and had on nothing but his shoes and socks.27 It was obvious that Morgan’s hand had been badly shattered and that he was having a hard time carrying Quinn’s unconscious body, so Clark called some other prisoners over to assist. They moved Quinn into an office on the ground floor of A Block, and then locked up Morgan on the second floor gallery of A Block with the other guards from Times Square so that he would be spared further assault.28 Returning to Quinn, Clark realized that this CO was in urgent need of medical attention. He was, as Clark recalled, “still unconscious, flat on his back. He was bleeding from the nose and mouth…he also had a bad head injury.”29 With great trepidation, Clark walked to the gate that separated A Block from the administration building. Facing nervous officers with shotguns behind a second gate a mere fifteen feet away, he called out, “There’s a hurt guard in here, can you send in a doctor?” Their first response was cold stares.30 “Damn,” Clark thought, “here is one of their own men and they won’t even come to help him.”31 Finally, someone shouted that he should bring Quinn to them.32
Shaking his head in disbelief, Clark went back into A Block and recruited five of his fellow Black Muslims to help him lift Quinn’s limp body onto a mattress and carry him down one flight of stairs to the gate.33 Along the way one of the men known as Brother Sharif slipped on some blood and fell with such force that he chipped his tooth. The others somehow managed to keep Quinn upright, and they placed him carefully on the floor so that the guards behind the second gate could see him. Still no one came for Quinn. Thinking that prison officials might rescue Quinn if he left the area, Clark walked up the stairway to A Block. From there, he watched as someone finally came to take the severely injured CO away.
As soon as they shut the gate behind them, Clark yelled out to the officers on the other side of the gate that there were other guards upstairs who also needed medical attention. In addition to the COs he had secured on 8 Company, Clark had come upon Robert Curtiss and two other COs, Elmer Huehn and Raymond Bogart, hiding in a cell. It was clear that Bogart needed medical care.34 Clark told all of the men in the 8 Company cells that he was going to try to get them out. As CO Gordon Kelsey remembered, “He said he was going to try…[but] he didn’t know whether they were going to make it or not.”35 In fact, by 10:00 a.m., Clark had managed to get Kelsey, Tolbert, Rosecrans, Morgan, Melven, and another guard, Carl Murray, down to the first floor, where other COs got them out of the prison and to safety.36 By that afternoon, prisoners had managed to get four more officers out of the prison: Raymond Bogart, James Clute, Richard Delaney, and Ken Jennings. Some of them were well enough to go home; others needed to go to the hospital. No CO was as seriously injured as William Quinn. Not only had he been badly beaten by prisoners, but prison administrators had left Quinn alone on a mattress, on the ground by the front door, with no prison doctors or nurses anywhere in sight.37 When ambulance driver Richard O. Merle finally arrived at Attica to pick up Quinn, he couldn’t believe his eyes. He was shocked by how bad Quinn’s injuries were. If he hadn’t known Quinn his whole life, he wouldn’t have recognized him.
Outside Attica’s walls William Quinn’s wife, Nancy, had been hearing the relentless shrieking of the prison’s whistle from 9:15 until 10:30 that morning and had no idea what was happening over there. It wasn’t until many hours later that Nancy was notified that her husband was injured and had been taken to St. Jerome’s Hospital in nearby Batavia. When she finally saw him, she was horrified by the “bruising and swelling all over his arms and large bandages over his hands.”38 Doctors told her that he had two open skull fractures and would need to be transferred to Northside, a larger, better-equipped hospital in Rochester, almost an hour away.39 Nancy could barely process what she was seeing and hearing. Even much later that night Nancy Quinn still had no idea what had happened over at Attica to cause the injuries to her husband.
10
Reeling and Reacting
No one in the town of Attica, not the family members of Attica employees, nor even the COs who usually worked there, had any idea why police cars were racing to the prison as the siren there blared on the morning of September 9, 1971. Lieutenant Richard Maroney, the Attica CO who had been struck by prisoner Leroy Dewer the day before, had been in his house when Attica’s whistle began to sound and, though he wasn’t that surprised that things had blown up the next day, it bothered him that he had no idea what had happened to cause someone to sound the alarm. No one called and no one he tried to reach seemed to have a clue what was going on.1
Correction officer John D’Arcangelo’s wife, Ann, also had no idea why the prison whistle kept sounding, but the longer it did, the more frightened she became. She tried to remember what John had told her about that whistle. From what she could recall, it was only sounded when a prisoner had escaped. Since Ann was home alone with their three-month-old daughter, this thought was itself terrifying. She eventually gleaned that a riot had erupted, but that was all she knew. No one had called her to let her know if her husband was all right. Finally, many hours later, she learned that he was one of the COs taken hostage but that was it. She had no idea what might happen next.
Prisoners’ family members who were waiting in the visitor’s area to see their loved ones the morning of September 9 also had no clue why all hell seemed to be breaking loose just past the room they were in.2 Eventually, they realized that a riot was under way inside when they saw Attica’s clerical staff running out the front gate in a panic. The visiting family members also left the building, but they did so sick with fear for their loved ones still inside. Over the next few hours, the parking lot around the prison filled with the cars of family members of prisoners and prison employees alike—all desperate to know what was happening.
But Superintendent Mancusi was loath to release any information to anyone regarding why his prison was in complete chaos. Not only had he been reluctant to sound the whistle, even once he realized that things tru
ly had gotten out of hand, but he also did not want officials from DOCS or local enforcement to get involved. Mancusi wanted to handle this crisis himself and regain control of Attica with his own men. To that end, he began calling his off-duty officers back to work. Still, Mancusi knew that he had to at least apprise his bosses in Albany of what had happened at his facility. At 9:15 that morning, he managed to reach DOCS deputy commissioner Walter Dunbar, who, in turn, alerted Commissioner Russell Oswald. Deeply alarmed, Dunbar told Oswald that he believed they both should leave immediately for Attica. At around 1:00 p.m., the two boarded a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air in Albany. Wim Van Eekeren, another deputy commissioner of corrections, was told to make sure that all other state prisons were kept under tight watch.3 The National Guard was alerted. Governor Rockefeller’s office was also contacted, but the governor himself was at a meeting of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in Washington, D.C. Oswald spoke instead with the governor’s first assistant counsel, Howard Shapiro, who communicated with Rockefeller’s personal attorney, Michael Whiteman, who in turn relayed this intelligence to Rockefeller’s close advisor, Robert Douglass. Whiteman also alerted Rockefeller’s personal secretary, Ann Whitman. It was time for her to interrupt his meeting to tell the governor what was going on.4
Blood in the Water Page 8