All the photos in the front section of this book owe credit to the following:
The National Archives and Record Administration, International Press Photos, Image Vault, Acme Photo Service, and Michael Esslinger, author and Alcatraz historian.
Alcatraz Prison: See the cell house on top of the hill, factory building along the waterfront.
Forest Tucker, bank-robber and leader of the Alcatraz band. A great guy, he was to become a lifetime friend.
The wide corridor between B and C blocks called Broadway.
Warden Paul Madigan (“Promising Paul”) with convict Blackie Audett, behind, in whites and bow tie.
ISBN-13: 978-1482754070
ISBN-10: 148275407X
BISAC: Biography & Autobiography / Criminals & Outlaws
Alcatraz-1259 copyright © 2012, William G. Baker. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Every word in this book is true to the best of my memory of events and conversations that took place while I was serving time at Alcatraz and that I witnessed with my own eyes and heard with my own ears and felt with my own heart. As I write this I am eighty years old, and while today I may forget where I put my false teeth last night, like many old men I have a clear and vivid memory of events and conversations that happened in my youth many, many years ago. This is the true account of that time in my life when I was a bad boy.
Warning—strong language in character with a prison environment. This account is told from the viewpoint of the Alcatraz convict.
—William G. Baker 1259-AZ
Alcatraz Cell (dressed up for show). Cells were only 5’ x 9’
Life is a contest,
And when I fail to compete I will die,
And even though the grim reaper may not collect my body,
When I fail to compete I will surrender to the comfort of the bells,
And my soul will belong to my keeper,
For life is a contest.
—William G. Baker 1259-AZ
Mess hall, 1962. They believed in feeding good at Alcatraz. They had no canteen, so you couldn’t buy any snacks, so you couldn’t miss any meals—which I didn’t.
To Mae
When God made Mae He must have dipped her in honey,
because she is the sweetest woman in the world.
Recreation Yard, 1956. Daytime rec weekends & holidays only.
D Block—the “hole” (six punishment cells bottom tier, back)
Richard (Jackrabbit) Bayless, bank-robber. A quiet and thoughtful man, he too was to become a lifetime friend.
Aaron Burget. He died trying to escape. They found his body floating in the Bay but his soul was long gone.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AFTERWORD
RETURN TO ALCATRAZ, 2013
FOREWORD
Hello.
I’m Bill Baker. I guess I’m one of the last living prisoners from Alcatraz, that’s what I’ve been told. I know that everybody I knew from Alcatraz is dead, gone to that big prison in the sky, for I know that the Bureau of Prisons must have figured out a way to build a prison there and that Federal Prison Industries has built a factory there to employ the heavenly convicts, for they don’t miss a chance. I once heard that if you die at Alcatraz they bury your body standing up and don’t lay it down until your time is up, but I think it’s more likely that you go straight up, or maybe straight down, and finish your time sewing white cotton gloves for Federal Prison Industries.
I’m retired now. I’ve been trying to retire for many years, and I finally got a parole officer who was wise enough to let me. They don’t really need me anymore anyway, for there are millions of young gang-bangers and crack-heads and such out there just knocking on prison doors to get in, enough to provide job security for the entire criminal justice system for ever and ever, so why bother with me. The gang-bangers are easier to catch anyway. They shoot each other, and the ones who get shot go to the hospital and the ones who survive run to their mama’s house.
I retired at the top of my game. I’m the best counterfeit check casher there is. I learned my trade at Alcatraz from Courtney Taylor, the best there was. The only problem is the best isn’t good enough. You can get away with it a thousand times, but all you have to do is get caught once and you’re caught.
I guess you could say I’m a career criminal, but that really doesn’t fit my track record, for a career criminal jacket best fits somebody with a greater degree of success than I had. You could better describe me as a career convict. I mean I’ve either been a convict or an ex-convict all my life, doing a life sentence on the installment plan. But, for all that, I’m still the best there is. I just can’t seem to solve the problem of getting caught.
Not that the law is so smart. They never once caught me by their own effort. They didn’t have to. I caught myself, one little mistake after another, on the job training, but that’s what it takes to be the best, I guess.
I have no love for the law, nor they for me, but me and the law had a congenial dumb and dumber relationship, they being dumb and me being dumber.
Now at eighty years of age they’ve turned me out to pasture. It’s nice to not be needed any more. Once upon a time, though, I was desperately needed. The Bureau of Prisons needed me to fill up a bed. The Federal Prison Industries needed me to work in their factories. And when I was free, every cop from sea to shining sea wanted me badly, had a set of shiny handcuffs ready just for me. I can imagine law enforcement agencies throughout the land saying, “Oh shit! Baker’s on the loose again!” For I was wide open and they knew me well by name. So there were a lot of “Oh shits” when I was free.
Now I’m a relic, a fossil from a time before the gang-bangers came along and changed the world with their overwhelming numbers, those numbers created by new federal drug laws that made it highly profitable for even the lowest street peddler to make pockets full of money, which meant new prisons had to be built to hold them all, an impossibility, of course, because for every dope peddler they arrested there were two to take his place. So, if you’re crying about not being able to find a job, try the Bureau of Prisons. Become a prison guard. Then you’ll have it made from cradle to grave, for no profession on the face of the earth has a higher growth rate or better job security than they. And you don’t have to have any qualifications other than the ability to stand on two feet and count to ten, in my admittedly biased estimation. For in my estimation there’s room for dumb and dumber and dumbest.
There were some prison guards at Alcatraz, however, who didn’t fit into any of those categories, like Lieutenant Mitchell (Fat Mitchell), and the old captain, whatever his name was, and even old Promising Paul, the sorry old warden who turned out to be not so sorry after all. They were real men, a dying breed, no, a dead breed, who carried themselves with respect and dignity and who deserve a place in the story of Alcatraz. And there were many prisoners who, despite being considered by society to be the worst of the worst, were nevertheless some of the best people I’ve ever known and some who I would learn to love like brothers before it was over
.
And if these people, these “sorry” convicts, seem to be larger than life in my account of them, it’s because they were larger than life. I mean, if you’ve ever wondered what happened to the outlaws when the Old West ceased to exist, well, they might have died and gone to Alcatraz, for the Alcatraz convict, for the most part, was different from the gang-banging prison “inmate” of today. We didn’t fight each other, we fought the law. We stood on our own two feet. We usually lost, but at least we knew who to fight. And the prison guards had to take this into account when dealing with us. And they did.
But, like the Old West and the old convict, Alcatraz lived for a brief time and then died, and while a few accurate accounts of the history of Alcatraz have been written, the story of Alcatraz, how we lived, what we thought and said, who we were other than a name and number, is still largely a mystery.
So I guess it’s up to me to fill in some of the missing pieces. This is a story of Alcatraz—and how I somehow managed to get there.
CHAPTER ONE
On a cold and foggy January morning in nineteen-fifty-seven I took that boat ride across the San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz, involuntarily because I was a prisoner, not a tourist. I was cuffed and shackled and wore a standard issue shirt and pants three sizes too big for my skinny frame, and I was scared shitless. Scared not particularly of Alcatraz, though there was that too, but scared because of my most immediate danger which was that the raggedy boat on which I so helplessly rode was sure to capsize any second and send me straight to hell long before my time to go there. I was only twenty-three years old, much too young to die.
I remember clearly how I hung on desperately to that boat seat between my legs and how the boat bobbed up and down in the swelling black water and how my steel cuffs bit into my wrists and ankles. I had never in my life been on a boat on any body of water larger than a small pond, and the fog made the distance to shore, any shore, seem endless, for I could not see land in any direction. Up and down the raggedy boat bobbed.
They had treated me shabbily from the beginning, waking me up from a sound sleep in the middle of the night in the hole of the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas where I had been a resident for the previous six or seven months. Then they had unceremoniously dressed me out in the shabby clothing I still wore and which still didn’t fit properly. And while I was still half asleep they told me I was on my way to Alcatraz. Huh?
Who, me? Not me. There must be some mistake. I’m just a kid doing a four-year bit for car theft. All those thoughts went bouncing through my head from skull to skull without encountering a single cell of brain matter. It surely was a mistake. From Leavenworth they had driven me and three other prisoners in a prison van to a desolate spot out in the Kansas farmland where we were transferred to a bus driven by U.S. Marshals, and then we were transported still in darkness to Wichita and put on a train headed west. We had a special train car all to ourselves, the four of us plus two marshals. The car had special bunks and its own bathroom. So I guess they were serious. I was on my way to Alcatraz.
And now I was in a raggedy boat just seconds from sinking to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Maybe they were taking us to Australia to labor in the swamps. Maybe we were lost on the high seas. Maybe—maybe shit, I was about ready to take over that boat. Too young to die, I was.
I looked around, seriously considering my options. There were four of us. We might have a chance. But Tex was chatting with the old man, both of them seemingly unworried about our fate, and the big Indian was sitting there silently as he had been for most of the trip. He had a big chip on both shoulders. Didn’t they realize this silly boat wasn’t going to make it? I mean this boat had reportedly made hundreds of safe trips between Alcatraz and the mainland, but not with me on it. And not across the Pacific Ocean, hopelessly lost as we were.
Then the fog parted and I saw it, finally, Alcatraz Island just ahead, saw the eerie light of the lighthouse making ghostly figures as it swept through the morning fog, saw the big haunted house atop that hill, and I think it was maybe then that I wished the boat would go ahead and sink after all. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but Alcatraz Island on a foggy morning sitting (yes, sitting, not setting), Alcatraz Island sitting there like a living breathing thing ready to gobble us up right out of the water, coveralls, handcuffs, boat and all—I can report with historical accuracy that I did not like that at all. And as I first beheld that sight my asshole was chewing a hole in the seat of my pants.
But the boat did not sink and the Thing did not gobble us up and we landed safely at last and with relief we were driven up the winding road to the main building which up close still was not pretty but not a ghost either. We were there.
The four of us were silent as they escorted us into the building and into a receiving area. They made us strip, bend over, turn around, lift ‘em, the whole routine, nothing to it. But then they took us naked one at a time into a little room, and we got the real deal. An MTA stood there in a brown uniform flexing a rubber glove on one hand, and I didn’t appreciate that at all. It was what they did at Alcatraz, but not at any other prison that I know of, a special greeting for all arriving Alcatraz prisoners: Ye old fingerwave.
We weren’t happy about that.
Next, wearing a bathrobe we were led into an office one at a time for an initial interview with a stern lieutenant who when I went in was studying some papers on his desk. I came to a stop in front of his desk and stood there waiting—they always make you wait awhile without acknowledging your presence just to show you who’s boss, I guess. He finally looked up. “Baker?”
“Yes sir,” I answered neutrally, not a smart-ass but not condescending either.
He studied me, a hint of surprise crossing his face. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three,” I answered sadly.
“What are you doing here, you’re a little young aren’t you? What are they doing, robbing the cradle these days?” He shuffled some papers and began reading something. Then he read out loud: “…cut your handcuffs off on the transfer bus from McNeil Island to Leavenworth…ran a boxcar through the rear gate of the Oregon State Prison…hit a guard with a stick during a prison riot…” His face really clouded up when he read that last bit of information. He continued reading silently, his face turning darker by the minute until he finally slammed the report down on the desk and looked at me again, just sat there looking at me.
I stood silently. Was he talking about me?
Finally, without another word, he wrote something on a card and sent me out of his office.
When they finished processing us I had a brand new prison number, 1259-AZ, me. Then dressed in bathrobes we were herded down into a large open shower room in the basement where we showered and picked up our issue of new prison clothing, sheets and blanket and stuff, tooth powder, razor, soap, and last a set of metal earphones which we were cautioned to hang onto and take care of or else we’d have to pay for them. Then upstairs we went with our bundles. In the cell house we stopped at a guard desk.
The guard at the desk must have been the cell house officer, the number one, because our escorts handed him a set of cards and said, “Four new ones for you.”
The guard at the desk took the cards and studied them, then called out our names one at a time. When he called my name I answered and he looked up at me with surprise. “What are you doing here? How old are you?”
“Twenty-three,” I answered sadly.
“They must be hard-up for recruits. What did you do, rob a bubble-gum machine?” And he laughed at his joke.
“I stole a car,” I answered innocently. Tex rolled his eyes. The old man chuckled.
“You stole a car?” He shook his head. “What is the world coming to, they’re sending us car thieves.”
Finally he assigned us to our cells, took us down “Broadway,” a wide corridor between two rows of cells. He locked us down still shaking his head.
All cells at Alcatraz were one-man cells with a bunk on one wall and a
small fold-down desk on the other. There was a toilet and sink and some shelves on the back wall and open bars in front. Standard prison design. I tried my sink, only one faucet handle, just cold water, no hot, not standard prison design. I found a plug-in for my earphones on the wall. It worked. I sat on my bunk. Home.
The horror stories we’d heard about Alcatraz were not exactly true, as I found out when they finally let me out of my cell and I hit the yard for the first time, or at least that’s what Benny Rayburn told me. He ate at our table in the mess hall so I was already acquainted with him. People at the table were always asking him questions about the law, which he seemed to be able to answer easily, so I guess he was some kind of jailhouse lawyer. Anyway I was wandering around looking like I’d just rode in on a mule, so for whatever reason he struck up a conversation with me. He was friendly enough, congenial and all that, but what caught my ear was the way he talked on and on so clear and logical without using a single cuss word. I mean I could tell right away that he wasn’t a hard-headed convict because most of us real convicts couldn’t even talk without using fuck words.
He told me the most dangerous threat on the island was getting splattered with seagull “poop,” as those birds were everywhere, dropping their loads in mid-flight without discrimination. As for the threat of physical danger from another prisoner, the stories were mostly false, he said. In the first place there were only about two-hundred and fifty prisoners at Alcatraz at any one time and when you were out of your cell you were hardly ever out of sight of a guard. You never went anywhere without being escorted by a guard.
And he said there were no gang-bangers at Alcatraz. All prisoners were individuals who stood on their own two feet. Gang-bangers in federal prisons were a thing of the distant future. There were barely enough convicts at Alcatraz to get up a good softball game. That doesn’t mean there weren’t some bad boys at Alcatraz, there were. But they didn’t go around stabbing people just for the fun of it. And when there was trouble at Alcatraz it was between two men and they took care of business and that was the end of it one way or the other.
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