Escape from Alcatraz

by J. Campbell Bruce

  He considered the fixtures. A steel cot that could fold against the wall ran along the right side. At its foot—or its head, if the cellhouse lights bothered the inmate—was the toilet, without a lid or a seat. Bolted into the opposite wall were two steel folding shelves, at separate levels, for use as a seat and table top or desk. On the left rear wall was a washbowl with a single cold-water faucet; over it, at five- and six-foot heights, ran two wooden shelves for personal effects, and beneath them wooden pegs to hang clothes.

  His roving eye caught an item near the base of the rear wall, to the right of the washbasin: a metal ventilator grille. Too small—about six by ten inches—to crawl through even if the grille could be pried loose, and a quick inspection revealed that it was tightly wedded to the concrete.

  From the moment a convict sets foot on the Alcatraz wharf, he has, according to the guards, one consuming thought: how to get off. And the prison’s physical complexity, the door after door blocking the intricate entrance passage, the multiplicity of guards, the solidity of walls and bars, the entombing security of the cell add up, for the new prisoner, to one despairing question: How in the name of God can anyone possibly get out of here?

  Frank Lee Morris, the quiet, courteous young man with the handsome features, was to find an answer; no newspaper had reported his arrival, but he would leave in a blaze of front-page banner lines. And in so doing, he would call into question the very existence of the federal government’s super-maximum-security prison at Alcatraz.

  Chapter 2

  THE SANDSTONE OUTCROPPING in San Francisco Bay that received Morris on that stormy January day in 1960 seems an island as dreary as the fog in which it is so often enveloped. But its history has been, if not edifying, certainly colorful. The island has been by turns a menace, an invitation, and a challenge to human beings ever since its discovery by Europeans in the late eighteenth century.

  For almost two centuries after Sir Francis Drake first sailed up the West Coast in 1579, fog hid the Golden Gate from seafaring explorers. Alcatraz, facing the sea, was discovered by land. In the fall of 1769—the year a Scot, James Watt, invented the steam engine and revolutionized industry—Don Gaspar de Portolá, on an overland march from Mexico, scaled a peak and stared down at San Francisco Bay.

  Not until 1775, about the time Paul Revere was galloping out of Boston, did the Golden Gate open in welcome to seafarers poking along the coast. On a clear afternoon that summer three Spanish vessels dropped anchor in a sheltering cove inside the heads. The next morning, August 5, seven weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, Don Juan Manuel de Ayala, in charge of a scouting party, maneuvered the first boat through the mile-wide passage. Directly ahead a bleak, barren mass of rock jutted out of the bay, covered as if frosted with white pelicans that stared curiously down their pouchy beaks at the intruders. Don Juan christened it La Isla de los Alcatraces. Later known as Bird Island and, from the snowy flocks, White Island, in time the Spanish singular for pelican, Alcatraz, took hold. (Alcatraz is a Spanish offshoot of an Arabic word ancient alchemists used to express the recovery of precious substances from a retort.) Don Juan turned to a neighboring isle that, by its verdant contrast, offered more hospitality. He named this La Isla de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles—the Island of Our Lady of the Angels—later Anglicized into the present Angel Island.

  Alcatraz, lying three miles in from the headlands at the Pacific, passed through three hands—Spanish, Mexican, American—in the next seventy-five years before anyone ventured to set foot on its precipitous shores. And in the century since, fantasy, as well as fog, has frequently enveloped the island. Some years ago a web-spinner wove this colorful bit of fabric:

  “Spanish authorities found an advantage in the island’s inaccessibility. They tunneled the rock into dungeons and confined rebellious American settlers there, along with army deserters.

  “Alcatraz was seized by the Americans in 1847 following the proclamation of the Bear Flag Republic. The settlers who had rebelled against the tyrannical Spanish rule were freed, and the dispossessed authorities placed in the cells in their stead.”

  Few, if any, Americans ever found their way to California when it was an outpost of the Spanish Empire. While the Americans were engaged in founding their own Republic, the brown-robed, benevolent Franciscan Padres trailblazed the celebrated El Camino Real in California. The briefer Mexican rule over California, remote from the troubled political scene of Mexico City, was memorable for its legendary fiestas at the haciendas of the vast ranchos, family domains held under Spanish crown grants.

  For a time, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded California and New Mexico to the United States in 1848, another fog—that of title—hung over Alcatraz. One Julian Workman claimed that Pio Pico, Mexican governor of California, granted him the island in 1846 on condition that “he cause to be established as soon as possible a light which may give protection on dark nights to the ships which may pass there.” Workman, after a closer look at Alcatraz, caused no light to be established; instead, he gave the pelican roost to a son-in-law who, equally dismayed by Pio Pico’s conditional clause, conveyed it for $5,000 to General John C. Frémont, then military governor of California and later first Republican Party candidate for President. The public-spirited Frémont took possession as an agent of the United States and President Millard Fillmore by executive order reserved Alcatraz for public purposes.

  San Francisco had already embraced Alcatraz. The ayuntamiento—as, in happy remembrance of Mexican days, they still called the municipal government—had adopted a charter that extended the city limits over the bay one league from shore “including the islands of Yerba Buena, Los Angeles and Alcantraz[sic].” (Yerba Buena, linked to Treasure Island, is the island through which the Bay Bridge passes, by tunnel.)

  The Gold Rush brought heavy maritime traffic, and by 1850 the bay was cluttered with sailing vessels that streamed through the Golden Gate bearing fortune-fevered passengers, and crews, bound for the fabulous Mother Lode. The need for a beacon on Alcatraz became urgent and that fall Congress authorized the fulfillment of Pio Pico’s old dream. But from Act to action, then as now, a long interval stretched. The military decided the harbor itself needed safeguarding with batteries at the points at the Gate and, in the event a man-of-war might survive that gantlet of cross fire, a fortress on Alcatraz. The Army Engineers, surveying the task in 1854, found the island an irregular oblong running southeast to northwest, 450 feet across, 1,650 feet long, in all 11.9 acres. Its mesa top, 136 feet above mean tide, sloped off to precipices, some a sheer seventy-five-foot drop to the water. Soundings revealed a depth offshore varying from twenty to eighty feet, and something else: Alcatraz did not spread out to a broad base like a normal peak; centuries of tide rips, the turbulence of ebb and flood tides colliding beneath the surface, had eroded the underpart to the shape of a spindle. They also found the island destitute of soil and vegetation, but not of pelican guano.

  By 1859, at a cost of about a million dollars, Fort Alcatraz and Alcatraz Light were a reality—the first American fortification and lighthouse on the West Coast. The latter, soaring 160 feet above the bay (then the tallest man-made structure west of Cape Hatteras), boasted a lantern visible twelve miles at sea, almost halfway to the Farrallones, islands visible on a clear day to the lightkeeper. Cannon of immense caliber—something called columbiads, from the War of 1812—could hurl 120-pound shot through the Gate. In addition to these fearful five-ton muzzleloaders, just in case a sneaky foe slipped in under their dread snouts, close-range barbette batteries stood ready to hold the ramparts. And to prevent the landing of an assault force, the engineers blasted the only gentle slope, on the southeastern end, into a cliff. In the unlikely event that a party might storm ashore at any of the coves, a three-story citadel commanded the crest and from its parapets musketry fire could rake the cliff tops clear. The musketeers smiled down on the mighty columbiads.

  Relics of that proud fortress remain. Ballast granite from China that buttresse
d the citadel’s portal graces the entrance to the warden’s office. The blue sandstone facing of the blockhouse that guarded the wharf forms part of a warehouse with the cornerstone inscription, “Alcatraces 1857.” Some of the powder magazine, supply vaults, and 50,000-gallon cisterns bored in the solid rock serve as storage space for the prison.

  No foe ever challenged Fort Alcatraz, and in less than a decade it was obsolete. The Civil War, as wars invariably do, produced radical changes in weaponry. The Army Engineers demolished the citadel, whose frowning parapets were now derided as “pretentious bastions,” and built a new fortification with walls twelve feet thick and quarters underground for the garrison officers.

  Even before this swift fate the majestic fortress, for want of a martial mission, had begun to assume a less noble aspect. In its very first year—a year of grandeur that had spectators gazing in wonder from the hills of San Francisco—Fort Alcatraz quartered a few prisoners from mainland posts, in a wooden shack in the shadow of the citadel. At that time Alcatraz, if not escape-proof, was awesome enough to discourage an attempt.

  Civil War prisoners began to dribble in after 1861, and in the fall of 1867 a brick building replaced the shack. A year later the War Department, doubtful that the guns of Fort Alcatraz would ever bark in anger, designated the island as a prison for long-term military offenders and incorrigibles. And The Rock officially began its long career as a bastille.

  That career was as checkered as that of any of the men confined there. In the 1870s Alcatraz took the “orneriness” out of intractable Indian chiefs from the Territories of Arizona and Alaska. During the Spanish–American War, The Rock assumed the added role of a health resort: soldiers returning from the Philippines with tropical diseases were taken there to convalesce, along with soldiers who had crossed the Pacific on the same boat, in the brig. The influx of culprits from that conflict so overtaxed Alcatraz that presidential pardons were handed down by the fistful to reduce the congestion. When San Francisco lost its jail in the 1906 catastrophe, the 176 inmates were removed, temporarily, to Alcatraz. (The earthquake broke the cable to the island but did no damage to The Rock itself.) During World War I still a new class of tenants arrived—enemy aliens and espionage agents.

  In 1909 the prison building in use today was erected on the site of the old citadel, resting on the solid masonry of the cisterns, the supply vaults, and garrison quarters carved in the rock—a foundation that did double duty as the foundation for the legend of the Spanish dungeons. It was built by the prisoners, at a cost of $250,000, plus the cost of their labor, $191,498.20.

  By an Act of Congress in 1907 Alcatraz became the Pacific Branch of the United States Military Prison. That impressive status, along with the disturbing effect of the huge new cellhouse, kindled agitation to remove this penal stronghold from San Francisco’s aquatic front yard, an agitation that erupts perennially, always for the same reasons: economic and esthetic. Congress, fretting over its high cost, in 1914 debated turning Alcatraz into a West Coast Ellis Island on the assumption that the opening of the Panama Canal would bring “a large stream of European immigrants” direct to San Francisco.

  San Francisco, espousing the esthetic view, once found a surprising ally in the Army’s Judge Advocate General, whose concern however was based on a military, rather than civic, pride. In a report to Congress in 1913 he deplored the infamous nature of Alcatraz as a tourist attraction: “It’s more the subject of inquiry than any other object in the harbor. The answer they receive, that it is a prison for confinement of our military offenders, gives an impression of the character of our enlisted personnel and of the discipline of our army, which is unfair and unjust to the service.”

  Congress, impressed, pondered the matter for several years, then denatured Alcatraz by converting it into the Pacific Branch, United States Disciplinary Barracks. This was more than a mere euphemism. With serious offenders packed off to a federal penitentiary, the milder species of malefactor left on The Rock joined disciplinary companies, doing the work of soldiers, not convicts. The aim: reformation. If a commanding officer felt a man wanted to make good, he was restored to Army duty. While civilian prisons were racked by riots, The Rock hummed with industry. As an example of their efficiency, the soldier-prisoners in the late twenties built a Class-A, concrete, three-story structure—in use until recently as the Model Shop Building—at a cost of $150,000. An astonishing record was achieved: 89 percent of the men returned to active service made good, a credit to their regiment. The key was the certainty of discipline, without malice or favoritism. Penologists the world over came to the island, went away singing encomiums. Alcatraz was enjoying the finest reputation of its penal history.

  Chapter 3

  IN THE EARLY THIRTIES shock waves of panic swept the country. The gangster era, spawn of Prohibition, was in full blaze. No one minded much when a beer baron sieved a rival and dumped him coffined in cement into a river. It helped to decimate the underworld and made good newspaper copy.

  But the evil spread beyond the bootleg traffic and the rackets. A new hoodlum element strapped on guns and strode forth. The Dillingers, the Baby Face Nelsons, and the Machine Gun Kellys. Rock-hard, ruthless. Outlaws of the Old West incarnate. Their stock in trade: bank holdups, kidnapings. Their tommyguns beat a rat-tat-tat of slaughter that echoed in big black type, and their outsized egos gorged on the scare banner lines.

  They barged into homes and packed off adults, reaping fortunes in ransom. They made hit-run forays: an Illinois bank in the morning, an Indiana bank in the afternoon. Local authorities were helpless; the FBI, lacking jurisdiction, was stymied. Terror seized the people: where would a gang strike next?… in what town?… what home? Citizens of one Midwest community organized a vigilante group, loaded their hunting rifles, manned a concrete blockhouse across the street from the bank.

  Congress acted. And on the scene came the now legendary G-men. Many fell in pitched battles, but in a remarkably short time they brought the gangster to his knees. Everyone rejoiced, except wardens. The gangster, an animal caged, proved too tough for his keeper to handle. The FBI had shifted the problem from the helpless constable to the helpless jailer.

  A superbastille seemed the only solution; a special lockup to quarantine these mad dogs, as they were branded; something along the line of a Devil’s Island. This would permit wardens elsewhere to pursue their work of rehabilitating the redeemable, unhampered by these disturbers and the long-termers bent on escape. The Justice Department began searching for a site. Penologists voiced misgivings, but their warnings were whispers in a canyon: unheard, or unheeded.

  The hunt for a perfect site for a super-lockup ended when the War Department announced in 1933 it was abandoning its Disciplinary Barracks on Alcatraz. The Justice Department took over, and Attorney General Homer S. Cummings asked James A. Johnston of San Francisco to set it up and take charge. Johnston seemed an odd choice as ruler of The Rock. Gentle-voiced and mild of manner, bespectacled, white-haired, he had more the look of a Latin professor, emeritus. This scholarly air contrasted incongruously the self-assurance he expressed: “I believe I know precisely what the Federal Government expects of me and that I can live up to the government’s expectations.” He was a banker and civic leader, twice president of the Commonwealth Club of California, but he had an earlier background to support his confidence. As a young department store clerk, he had studied law at night, entered politics, and won a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. He was catapulted into the field of penology in 1912 when the governor picked him to clean up Folsom, the state’s prison for hardened criminals and scene of reported barbaric practices. Johnston’s work in pulling Folsom out of the Middle Ages earned him a reputation as a humanitarian. The next year he became warden of San Quentin, retiring in 1925 to practice law and banking in San Francisco.

  The Rock became largely Johnston’s creation. He replaced the soft iron bars on most of the cells and the cellhouse windows with toolproof steel. He installed automatic
locking devices and tear-gas outlets, gun galleries at either end of the cellhouse, and an outside gunwalk along the south windows of the mess hall. He put steel doors on the utility alleys between the banks of each cell block and sealed off the tops of the blocks to the convicts. He erected gun towers, set other towers on roofs, and gun boxes on the yard wall, and connected them with catwalks. He set gates with electric locks, controlled by tower guards, in the roads to the shops. He enclosed the entire prison area with a cyclone fence topped by barbed wire. He put bars on the sewers. And he established a 200-yard keep-out zone around The Rock, marked by orange-hued tank buoys. It all added up, beyond doubt, to an escapeproof, super-maximum-security prison. It was he who scattered metal detectors about so that a convict would have to pass through them at least eight times a day. And it was he who devised the Armorer system of control over the interior of the prison.

  The Armorer, in his vault sealed on the inner side, accessible only from outside the prison, enjoys virtual omniscience about what is going on in the cell blocks. Microphones hidden about the prison relay sounds to him day and night. If a phone is off a hook for more than fifteen seconds a bulb lights on his board, and he dispatches an officer to investigate. He receives for the record twelve official counts a day of the inmate population (there are some thirty additional, special counts), and if a count reveals a prisoner missing he radios the Coast Guard and the San Francisco police. In the event of a riot or break, he hits the siren button to summon off-duty personnel and distributes weapons from an arsenal in his vault—rifles, pistols, submachine guns, gas grenades, ammunition.

  The complicated array of gadgets through which a turnkey leads a new convict into the prison are even more complicated in the procedure of getting out.

  In the reverse steps, the turnkey leads the way through the barred gate and the solid steel door into the middle chamber. Then he must buzz the Armorer, who scans the situation through his mirrors. If he sees a lone prisoner—or a prisoner standing suspiciously behind the officer—the Armorer lets the shield remain over the keyhole and throws a switch that clangs shut an emergency door of solid steel. The chamber becomes a trap.