Escape from Alcatraz
Page 23
Up in the shaft Clarence Anglin jabbed at Morris’s foot and called in a hoarse whisper, “Get goin’!”
Morris eased himself out of the shaft, which rose a foot or so above the roof. He turned, and a beacon flash blinded him. He shut his eyes tight for a moment, then, shielding his face with an arm, peered into the shaft. Clarence clambered to the bars and reached up the raft roll. Morris took the roll and, bent low, ran a half-dozen steps and crouched beside a raised skylight.
As he waited for the others, Morris studied the weather. One moment the night was black; the next, incandescent. The Alcatraz light did not rotate; it flashed every five seconds, each flash lasting three-tenths of a second. Morris knew their chances of being spotted by the lighthouse keeper were remote; it was unlikely he was even up there. Danger lay to the north and south: the two main gun towers. On the roof they were visible to the guard in the north tower—unless they kept low. Descending the far wall of the mess hall—and a vent pipe from the kitchen was their only means of descent—they would be in clear view of the guard in the south tower. Clear view? Overhanging lights floodlit that wall like day.
He observed the sky again. A high fog raced overhead, no more than a hundred yards. In the intermittent beacon flashes he could see the wind snatch a handful of cottony mist off the bottom and fling it along. A few more hours and the fog, pulled down into the airstream funneling through the Gate, would shroud The Rock—and obscure the kitchen wall. But these were precious hours, a head start.
Clarence climbed out of the shaft and crept to the shielding skylight. In a moment John’s head crept up, and he fell in behind Clarence. Morris, hugging the skylight, dragging the raft roll, crawled to the edge of the cellhouse roof. He slipped over onto the roof of the mess hall and crept along a fire wall. He waited in the shadowy far corner for the others, moving like salamanders. He led the crawlers toward the silhouette of the kitchen vent, protruding above the roof about midway along this side. He stopped at the pipe, and the others pulled up behind. They now faced their greatest peril, the fifty-foot descent in the glare of the floodlight from the lamps projecting from the edge of the roof.
Morris, lying against the fire wall, tied the raft to his belt at the left side. Face averted to cut the risk of reflection, he moved over the rim as slowly as a slug, kept to the side away from the tower and slid down the pipe with the same even movement, as less likely to catch an eye than jerkiness. He touched ground, slid onto his knees, then down sideways in a gentle continuing motion. He crawled on his stomach into the shadows at the end of the building. He lay back and watched the others descend as he had.
Morris led the way, still crawling, across a short open space to the cyclone fence. They were now in the range of the north gun tower but at a distance that diminished the glare of its searchlight. Morris scaled the fence, picked his way over the barbed wire and let himself down. The Anglins clambered after him. They kept at his heels as he skirted a terrace and the high water tower, then slanted down a cliff covered with ice plant. He suddenly froze, and they froze behind them. Then all three dropped, burying their faces in the flowers.
A guard came along the road ten feet below them. His footsteps receded in the direction of the shops. They scuttled across the road, into the shadow of the powerhouse. They were out of sight of the gun towers, and the patrol had gone by, their last worry erased. They ran down a slope to the shore of a cove. Off west the amber lights of the Golden Gate Bridge glistened under the fog.
“Made it,” said Morris, breathing deep. The cold wind felt good. He untied the raft. “Let’s get a few boards.”
“Hell with boards,” said John. “Let’s shove off.”
“They’ll stiffen the raft. Some stacks of lumber up the road a short ways. Unloaded the other day, still on pallets.”
“I’ll go along,” said Clarence. He drew a dark object from his jacket and handed it to John. “Hold this.”
“What’s that?” asked Morris.
“Some pictures and things. Let’s get them boards.”
They went back up the incline, a shallow ravine between the steeper heads of the cove, and returned shortly with four boards. They inserted them in the raft. Then they put the finishing touch on the improvised life preservers. They pulled each sleeve open-ended and rapidly through the air to inflate it, tied that end to the other to for a ring, then slid the ring on like a bandoleer—several to each shoulder.
“Where the hell’s the other oar?” asked Morris.
“Christ,” said John, “I forgot it.”
“Never mind, let’s shove.”
They carried the raft to the surf, climbed on, and pushed off onto the dark, wind-roughened waters. They soon blended into the night, and the slapping swish of the paddle faded toward the black mass of Angel Island, a mile and a half away.…
West chipped madly at the cement he had spooned onto his escape hatch, sealing himself in more effectively than the original concrete had. He estimated the times of the patrol and took breaks, climbing into bed, to let the guard pass by. It was after midnight when he made it to the corridor, up to the top, into the workshop. He found an unfinished pontoon, a plywood paddle, three “sleeve” life preservers, his own fake head staring up at him. He peered up into the dark shaft, felt a chill draft, shivered. He stared out across the top of the block. The only sound was the moan of the wind. For a moment he felt terrible alone. Then he grew panicky. Hell with the dummy. He dragged over the raft, folded it several times, knelt on it, then raised himself into the shaft and desperately clawed his way on up, past the dog-leg, over the crossbars. He emerged into the blinding flash of the beacon—and a sudden, screeching clamor.
He froze for a terrified instant, then ducked back in. He slid down the shaft, crawled out of the mesh cage, over the edge, down the pipe, into his cell, on into bed, exhausted, knowing that, for him at least, the jig was up.…
West’s head bobbing out of the ventilator shaft had frightened seagulls roosting nearby. They took off shrieking, alarming gulls all along the parapet. Soon the sky rang with the raucous awrk-awrks of gulls wheeling above the roof.
The guard in the south tower wondered about the commotion and called the Armorer, who dispatched guards. They searched the ground behind the prison and reported, “Not a thing—must’ve been a rat that scared them.” By now the gulls had settled down again, and nothing further disturbed the night.
Maybe
DID THEY MAKE IT? Maybe.…
Fog and tide are the meshes that most often entrap Alcatraz escapers. They can flounder in a dense fog, all sense of direction lost; and a swift current can carry them through the Golden Gate, out to sea. On that score, luck was with the Morris trio. At the time of the departure, the fog was high, visibility good; and during that night of June 11, 1962, the ebb tide at its peak ran only 2.2 knots, about two and a half miles an hour.
As usual, the escape generated a feverish hunt, by air, sea, land. Soldiers from the Presidio of San Francisco, carbines in hand, combed every foot of Angel Island, turned up no clue. For weeks every burglary and robbery in Northern California was carefully checked out, but none traced to the fugitives, who would need food and a change of clothing.
On Wednesday, the day after the break was discovered, the trio’s prison-made oar was found bobbing two hundred yards off Alcatraz, toward Marin county. On Thursday afternoon a debris boat with a scoop net, employed by the Army Corps of Engineers to clear the bay of objects hazardous to navigation, was chugging past Angel Island when a load was dumped on the afterdeck. A crewman picked a black plastic bag out of the dripping mass—actually, two bags, one within the other, for better waterproofing, both improvised out of the same polyethylene material of the raincoats. In the inner bag, still dry, were about sixty photographs, mostly snapshots of the family-album type, including fifteen of an attractive brunette; also, a list of names and addresses; also, a receipt for a $10 money order, cashed by the mail clerk at Alcatraz and made out to Clarence Anglin.
To others, a factor supporting a contrary view—that the convicts made it—seemed equally compelling; if all three went down, the odds were that at least one body would come up. None had. A dramatic boost to speculation that they got away came in mid-December when an escaper actually swam to the San Francisco shore.
At any rate, nine months after their flight the fate of the trio remained an enigma.
Why?
FROM THE DAY IT SWALLOWED up its first gangsters Alcatraz has had a reputation, fostered by the Department of Justice, as America’s most dread prison. The very name, Alcatraz, has become a synonym for a Devil’s Island, a penal rock harboring the worst criminal element, often chained to the wall of a dark, dripping dungeon, with only unseen rats for companions. A sort of Ile d’If incarnate. And to this day, a quarter of a century after the G-men ended the gangster era, that myth has endured as a fact.
In the early years, Associate Warden Miller made it clear to a prisoner: “Alcatraz is not a penitentiary. Alcatraz is Alcatraz.” Years later Warden Swope said: “There is always that small minority needing an Alcatraz.” And after him Warden Madigan said: “The men who come here have less prospect for rehabilitation than the men in the rest of our prison system.” The refrain kept up into the 1960s with the lament by Warden Blackwell on the difficulty of finding convict house servants because if they could be trusted to act as trusties, “they don’t belong on the island.” In such ways was the myth of Alcatraz nurtured.
Why? To hold as a Damoclean gasbilly over federal prisoners elsewhere: be good, or you go to Alcatraz. The myth also helped justify the extravagant cost of The Rock’s upkeep.
Has Alcatraz really housed only the “incorrigible incorrigibles”—only those with long terms that make them potential escape problems—only the troublemakers who stir unrest? Earl Taylor was an accountant serving five years for tax evasion, and he was given five dollars and an on-the-spot, unconditional release straight off The Rock, fifteen minutes before he was due in court to argue his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Allen Clayton West, who cemented himself in, was serving ten years for car theft. In 1962 a man was doing time at Alcatraz for stealing a pig—a federal rap because he stole it on an Indian Reservation. Another Rock felon’s offense: theft of two cases of cigarettes from a boxcar in Oklahoma. A military prisoner landed on The Rock for assault and a $1.50 robbery. To Alcatraz went another military prisoner who never stole anything, whose only offense was that he had gone AWOL; he gave himself up, later escaped, was sent to Leavenworth.
Why did such mild offenders, and many others, make Alcatraz? Were they assaultive, troublesome, escape-minded? Take the case of the AWOL soldier. He was at Leavenworth when the inmates went on a hunger strike in 1958. The Sword of Alcatraz broke it up. The warden had the Immigration Service bring up a twin-engined Border Patrol plane from the Mexican border. Then guards went to random cells: “Pack up, you’re leaving.” Within the hour, twenty-eight convicts, among them the AWOL young man, were flying to Alcatraz.
An isolated instance? Apparently wardens—chiefly at the maximum-security prisons of Leavenworth and Atlanta—have for years used Alcatraz as a convenient whip, and used it indiscriminately. Stan Brown, North Dakota mail robber who was in the first “shipment” from Leavenworth, served seven years and upon his release in 1941 said: “Only about fifty of the 300 prisoners rate Alcatraz. You take the thirty-seven hunger strikers they ran in recently from Leavenworth. Most of those boys were in for crimes like car stealing or something like that. Alcatraz isn’t built for those boys. It was made for the big shots like Machine Gun Kelly, Karpis, Cretzer, Bailey, Capone—guys like me. I rate Alcatraz.” And he waxed prophetic: “Alcatraz is a punishment prison. I think in the next few years you’ll see lots of trouble on Alcatraz. When a man’s on The Rock all he thinks about, day and night, is how to get off. The thing that seems impossible to you looks possible to him.”1
Alcatraz has even served vindictive purposes. Bryan Conway gave his own case as one example in his Saturday Evening Post article. Conway, while a soldier at a post in Alabama, had killed a sergeant, claimed self-defense and was freed by the civilian authorities for lack of evidence; was later rearrested by federal agents, convicted, sentenced to eighteen years. At Atlanta Conway said he refused to testify “as the Government wanted me to testify” in an inmate stabbing case that ended in an acquittal. Soon thereafter he was packed off, and not until the train was well away from Atlanta did he learn from his guard escort where he was headed. He asked, “What have I done to be sent to Alcatraz? My prison record is good,” and the guard replied, “You are certified as an incorrigible.” Yet the incorrigible Conway was released the very next year, 1937, with six years off for good behavior.
Conway also related that at Atlanta in October 1936 “when the authorities feared a mutiny, they confined eighteen men, shipping them all to Alcatraz on mere suspicion.” Not all were incorrigibles: “I knew, personally, men whose only brush with the law was the single offense which sent them to Alcatraz.” He told of the shipment of fourteen from Leavenworth in the summer of 1936, among them three first-offender Kentucky moonshiners who had not paid their internal revenue tax. These batches came from Atlanta and Leavenworth only two years after Alcatraz was created as a super-lockup.
Floyd Wilson was a thirty-three-year-old jobless carpenter with five children who set out from his Washington, D.C., home in the winter of 1947 with a gun to get $17 to buy a ton of coal “so my kids won’t freeze to death.” He tried to hold up a chain-store manager, sitting in a car in front of the store with $10,000 in a paper bag on the seat; killed the manager, fled in panic, without the money. Wilson, with no prior record, went home and waited for the police, said he had not intended to kill. He drew life, went to Atlanta, then to Alcatraz in what Warden Madigan called a “routine transfer because of his long sentence and the possibility of an escape problem.” So …? So he was put to work on the dock gang and one summer afternoon in 1956 he slipped away under cover of smoke from a trash fire, was found twelve hours later walking along the shore, shivering. Madigan said Wilson, who helped unload a cargo from barges, did not fill a role comparable to that of a jail trusty. “We have no trusties here,” the warden said. “For jobs such as that, we try to select men who are less of a security risk.”
The incident prompted this letter-to-the-editor comment by a San Franciscan, H. T. Reid:
“The temporary disappearance of Floyd Wilson at Alcatraz thoroughly explodes two carefully nurtured myths about that awful place.
“The Bureau of Prisons has long claimed Alcatraz is maintained for the ‘nation’s most desperate and hardened criminals.’ The bureau equally contends that Alcatraz is not ‘a permanent exile,’ that prisoners by a ‘convincing record of good behavior’ can ‘earn their way out … to some institution of less strict regimen and discipline.’ …
“His (Wilson’s) behavior qualified him for work on the dock gang, where he has worked for several years. What became of his opportunity to transfer to some place not so hopeless?
“Manifest abuse by high authorities of such a maximum-security prison, as well as its crushing effect on the human beings subjected to it, cry out for the abolition of Alcatraz as part of the federal prison system.”
Not all Alcatraz inmates are federal prisoners. Felons are boarded there by states that find the federal penal system a handy weapon with which to threaten their own troublemakers. Among these boarders is John Duncan, apparently not considered by the trial judge as a dangerous criminal because he drew only a two-to-four-year term in the Maine State Prison in 1955 for burglary. But the next year he joined six others in an attempt to e
scape, and Maine farmed him out to the Federal Government.
Director Bennett of the Federal Prison Bureau has himself admitted men are sent to Alcatraz for reasons other than safer keeping. His treatment of Robert Stroud, described by the Birdman’s attorney as purely vindictive, is a case in point. The first attempt to put Stroud on The Rock in the early days was called off after bird lovers raised an indignant storm. He was rousted out one midnight in 1942, taken summarily from his birds and research laboratory at Leavenworth, and quietly hustled off to Alcatraz while the country was busy with World War II. Bennett later told a reporter that Stroud was shipped off to Alcatraz “because he was a nuisance, not because he was a menace,”2 then added, “We do it all the time.” It was done in the case of Cecil Wright, the self-made legal expert, a model prisoner at Leavenworth but sent to Alcatraz for making himself a nuisance by offering advice to others on writs.
For years most of the inmates at dread Alcatraz have been short-termers, and often first-offenders, whose crimes, had they occurred under state rather than federal jurisdiction, would in all likelihood have meant probation with a county-jail term. Sometimes the difference of a few feet, or a few miles, can mean the difference between a jail and Alcatraz. The crime may happen on a sidewalk in front of a post office, keeping you under local jurisdiction; if it happens on the post office steps, it’s federal, and you might land on The Rock as one of those picked by lot. If you steal a car in San Francisco and drive it to Los Angeles and get picked up, it might mean a year in jail, if a first offense, or perhaps several years at San Quentin. If you drive the stolen car to Reno, less than half the distance, it’s across a state line, a federal rap, and.…
To many penologists, the crime of Alcatraz is that it inflicts on such young men, by their very presence on The Rock, a punishment far beyond the penalty intended by the statute. The worldwide infamy of Alcatraz tends to stigmatize them ever after as hardened criminals, to brand them with a new-type Scarlet Letter—A for Alcatraz. Even the old practice of never sentencing a man directly to Alcatraz nor paroling him from there, using way stations such as Leavenworth and Atlanta instead, although not always strictly adhered to in former days, has lapsed greatly in recent years. This can add to the young ex-convict’s difficulty of adjustment if, in filling out an application for a job, he honestly sets down his last place of employment as “Glove Shop, Alcatraz.”