by David Ward
No longer confident that the prison’s benefits outweighed its liabilities, James Bennett proposed to Attorney General Frank Murphy (who had succeeded Homer Cummings earlier that year) that Alcatraz be converted into a facility to house the Bureau’s “old and crippled prisoners,” along with West Coast drug users, and that the Department of Justice seek funds from Congress to construct a new maximum-security institution in southeastern Iowa to replace Alcatraz.12 In his memo to Murphy, Bennett acknowledged the importance of Alcatraz in the federal prison system, noting that it housed the inmates who disrupted operation in the other prisons, provided “deterrent punishment for the gangster, kidnapper and ruthless killer,” and countered the claims of those who believed “prisons did not deter crime because they were all ‘country clubs.’” But because Alcatraz had become “an extremely difficult institution to administer,” and because its per capita operating cost was two and a half times that of any other federal penitentiary, Bennett concluded, it was perhaps best to end its brief career as a maximum-security prison for “famous criminal personalities.”13
BREAKFAST
DINNER
SUPPER
Monday, July 15, 1940
Stewed peaches
Navy bean soup
Steamed frankfurters
Wheat meal
Beef stew & vegetables
Lyonnaise potatoes
Milk & sugar
Steamed potatoes
Succotash
Minced bacon
Creamed peas
Lettuce salad
Scrambled eggs
Sour pickles
Rice custard pudding
Hot cornbread
Bread
Bread, coffee
Coffee
Coffee
Tuesday, July 16, 1940
Fruit cocktail
Macodine [sic] soup
Southern hash
Rice Krispies
Baked link sausage
Steamed dumplings
Milk & sugar
Country gravy
Stewed tomatoes
Fruit pastry
Mashed potatoes
Beet & onion salad
Bread
Corn on cob
Mocha cake
Coffee
Bread, coffee
Bread, tea
Wednesday, July 17, 1940
Stewed apricots
Barley soup
Chili con carne
Oatmeal mush
American pot roast
Steamed rice
Milk & sugar
Brown gravy
Braised carrots
Cinnamon pastry
Cottage fried potatoes
Cottage cheese salad
Oleo [margarine]
Summer squash sauté
Watermelon
Bread, coffee
Hot biscuits, bread, coffee
Bread, coffee
Thursday, July 18, 1940
Applesauce
Vegetable soup
Fried beef liver
Corn flakes
Boiled short ribs
Onion gravy
Milk & sugar
Horseradish sauce
Hashed brown potatoes
Hot cakes
Baked macaroni
Mustard greens
Syrup
Buttered string beans
Bread & fruit Pudding
Bread, coffee
Bread, coffee
Bread, tea
Friday, July 19, 1940
Crushed pineapple
Potato chowder
Corn fritters
Hominy grits
Baked rock cod
Cream sauce
Milk & sugar
Spanish sauce
Sliced bacon
Bear claws
Boiled navy beans
Buttered peas
Bread
Cauliflower polonaise
Combination salad
Coffee
Bread, coffee
Ice cream, bread, coffee
Saturday, July 20, 1940
Stewed prunes
Minestrone soup
Stuffed bell peppers
Bran flakes
Hamburg steak
Tomato sauce
Milk & sugar
Pan Gravy
Au gratin potatoes
Parker House rolls
Rissole potatoes
Peas & carrots
Oleo
Creamed corn
Bread & fruit pudding
Bread, coffee
Bread, coffee
Bread, tea
Sunday, July 21, 1940
One-half cantaloupe
Mulligatawny soup
Spaghetti italienne
Steel-cut oats
Fried beef steak
Sliced cheese
Milk & sugar
Pan gravy
Buttered spinach
Butterhorns
Baked potatoes
Blackberry pie
Bread
Stewed tomatoes
Bread
Coffee
Bread, coffee
Cocoa
But Alcatraz still had powerful backers in the federal government and elsewhere. Former Attorney General Cummings, for example, responded to the criticism of Alcatraz with an article in Colliers magazine entitled “Why Alcatraz Is a Success.” The idea of ending maximum-security operations at Alcatraz joined all the other rumors about ending operations that prisoners and staff would hear throughout the life of the prison.
More negative publicity was generated following the evening of January 10, 1940, in a dramatic gesture, when Roy Gardner underscored his own point that doing time at Alcatraz left inmates psychologically damaged. Gardner sat down in his room in the Hotel Governor in San Francisco and began writing notes. One note, addressed “to whom it may concern,” provided instructions for the disposal of his body; a second asked newspapers not to mention his daughter’s married name in reports of his death. After finishing these notes, Gardner wrote another that warned, “Do not open this door. Poison gas. Call police” and attached it to the outside of the door to his room. He then sealed the door from the inside, went into the bathroom, dropped some cyanide pellets into a glass of acid, placed a handkerchief over his head, and inhaled the rising fumes.
When the police entered his room, they found Gardner’s belongings neatly packed; on each of the four suitcases containing his worldly belongings they found a fifty-cent tip for the porter and the maid. They also found a fourth note, addressed “to the newspaper reporters”:
Please let me down as light as possible boys. I have played ball with you all the way, and now you should pitch me a slow one and let me hit it. I am checking out simply because I am old and tired, and don’t care to continue the struggle. There are no love affairs or disappointments of any kind connected with this in anyway, just tired that’s all. I hold no malice toward any human being, and I hope those whom I have wronged will forgive me for it. If I had realized what the future held for me, I would have “checked out” in 1920 and saved my loved ones the disgrace and shame that they have had to endure these many years. Also I would have dodged plenty of grief that I endured unnecessarily. All men who have to serve more than 5 years in prison are doomed, but they don’t realize it. They kid themselves into the belief that they can “come back,” but they can’t—there is a barrier between the ex-convict and society that cannot be leveled. . . . I did not decide to check out on the spur of the moment. In fact I bought the cyanide 2 months ago for this very purpose. I got it at a drug store on the north side of Market St. near Kearney. I don’t remember what name I signed, but my address was given 1404 Post St. Good bye and good luck boys, and please grant my last request. Thanks. Sincerely yours, Roy Gardner14
Gardner’s death by suicide was given wide publicity in the Bay Area. The United Press International news servi
ce sent a story across its wires, “The quiet end of a two-gun man,” which characterized Gardner as “the last of the train robbers, a 20th-century Jesse James [who] cashed in his chips with neatness and dispatch, will malice towards none, and the hope of forgiveness in his heart.”15 At the inquest that followed, San Francisco coroner T. B. Leland wrote Roy Gardner’s final epitaph: “This is the case of a man who was down and out, who was going blind, who could not make a comeback after his long criminal career. He did not want to be a burden on his family. That’s all.”16
After years of hearing Alcatraz characterized as this country’s version of Devil’s Island, the public and the press were predisposed to interpret acts of violence on the island as a product of a repressive regime that drove men mad. Thus when one prisoner killed another in December 1940, the ground was well prepared for Alcatraz and its officials to be questioned, along with the perpetrator, Henry Young, in the trial that followed.
THE MURDER TRIAL OF HENRY YOUNG
In the prison tailor shop on a Tuesday morning in early December 1940, Henry Young began walking briskly in the direction of Rufe McCain, attracting the attention of several other inmates. George Kelly noticed the intense expression on Young’s face and, remembering that Young had attempted to stab McCain some months earlier, called out, “Rufe! Rufe!” McCain turned around, but not soon enough to defend himself; Young was already next to him and drove a prison-made knife deep into Mc-Cain’s abdomen.
Senior officer Frank Mach was giving instructions to a new guard when he heard the commotion behind him. As he turned, he saw Young, knife in hand, standing over McCain, who was lying on the floor bleeding from the stomach. Mach ran over, grabbed Young’s arm and pinned it to his side until the other guard wrested the weapon from Young’s hand. The knife, a blade taken from a plane used in the prison’s furniture shop, had been sharpened to a point at one end; tape was wrapped around the other end of the blade so that it could be held without cutting the user’s hand. The officers searched Young and found a second knife stuck in a crude scabbard attached to his belt. As he was escorted out of the tailor shop, Young muttered to no one in particular, “I hope I killed the son of a bitch.” McCain gasped, “I think he got me good.” Other guards arrived with a stretcher and transported McCain up the hill to the prison hospital.
While McCain was on the operating table, Deputy Warden Ed Miller asked him what happened. McCain replied, “Looks like I got stabbed!” Miller asked, “Who did it?” to which McCain responded, “Why ask me? You know the son-of-a-bitch that did it; he did a fair job too.” McCain refused to make any further statements.17 The doctor on duty worked to close the gaping wound, but McCain lapsed into unconsciousness and died.
Deputy Warden Miller interrogated Henry Young as soon as he was brought up from the tailor shop to the cell house. Asked why he attacked McCain, Young replied, “They were fixing a trap to get me and I sprung the trap before they got me.” He refused to identify the persons he referred to as “they,” and after stating that he “found” the knives in the workshops, Young would answer no further questions. He was placed in solitary confinement.
Four and a half months later, on April 15, 1941, Henry Young’s murder trial opened in the federal district court of Northern California. After the jury had been impaneled and the proceedings initiated, it became evident that something unusual was going to occur. Henry Young was in the dock, but because the judge had allowed a novel defense strategy, Alcatraz was going to be on trial as well.
Before the trial began, Judge Michael Roche asked Young if he had legal counsel; Young replied, “I have a preference in lawyers. The more youthful my lawyers are the better. I should like to have two attorneys of no established reputation.”18 When the newspapers reported Young’s request, Judge Roche was said to have been deluged with offers from young lawyers asking to be assigned to the case. Roche selected Sol Abrams, a former assistant United States attorney in his early forties, and James MacInnis, twenty-seven, only four years out of Stanford Law School.
Abrams and MacInnis, after a short meeting with Young, announced that Young was going to plead not guilty. They also said they would offer no evidence to prove either self-defense or traditional insanity. What they would seek to prove was that Young was in a “psychological coma” when he stabbed McCain—a kind of temporary insanity brought on by his confinement in the toughest prison in the world. The issue in the case, Abrams and MacInnis asserted, would be the psychological consequences of being locked up at Alcatraz.19 To provide evidence for this unusual defense, the attorneys asked the court to allow two dozen convicts to be brought over from the island to give testimony, even though none of them had witnessed the assault on McCain; they would be asked on the stand to describe life on the Rock.
The judge granted the request, setting the stage for one of this country’s most sensational trials involving penitentiary life. Not only would the courtroom drama include a cast of notorious bank robbers, kidnappers, and escape artists, but for the first time the outside world would be able to hear about life on Alcatraz directly from the mouths of its inhabitants. The Bureau of Prisons was about to begin paying the price for its policy of denying the press any access to the prison and creating the “air of mystery” over the island.
When Judge Roche agreed to allow testimony from twenty-two convicts about conditions at Alcatraz, reporters covering the trial apparently assumed that testimony given in a court of law—even testimony from some of the country’s most sophisticated and notorious lawbreakers—would be truthful. With this naive assumption in place, the trial began.
Warden Johnston was the first witness called by the prosecution. He was asked to explain the types of punitive measures used at the prison. He reported that the cells in the solitary confinement unit had no lights and no beds, but that mattresses were issued at night, and if the occupants behaved themselves, they received a single blanket. As to the diet, Johnston testified: “It’s the usual rule now that men in solitary get three meals a day, but there was a time when they got only two, there was a time when they got only one a day, and there was a time when they got only one meal in three days.”
Defense counsel MacInnis queried Johnston to establish the length of time Young had been in the isolation unit: “If I said he [Young] had never been taken out between September 1938 and November 1941, would you say I was correct?” Johnston replied, “I wouldn’t dispute it” but later commented that he thought that Young had been removed from isolation for a period of “30 to 35 minutes” a year.20
Questioning witnesses about the use of lower solitary was, as the Bureau of Prisons should have expected, an important part of the effort by the defense to create in the jurors’ minds a picture of a sadistic staff brutalizing prisoners for minor breaches of prison rules. On the witness stand, Warden Johnston stated that “the so-called dungeons” had not been used since early 1938. He did admit that “persons confined in the dungeons would not have any light” and that because the dungeon cells “were not equipped with the usual plumbing equipment,” prisoners were “furnished with only a bucket.” When he took his turn on the witness stand, Deputy Warden Miller denied knowledge of any “Spanish dungeons” but confirmed the use of the eight basement cells. Asked if it was true that the buckets used as toilets had not been emptied “for as long as nine days,” Miller answered no but entered into the court record the fact that Henry Young had never been confined in these cells.21
The twenty-two convicts selected by Henry Young to rebut the testimony of Johnston, Miller, and other prison officials came from a much wider pool of men anxious to testify for the defense. A story in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Hard Rock Criminals to Attend Trial” framed the upcoming testimony in a way that supported the defense strategy:
For the first time in the grim history of Alcatraz some of the most savage and brutish criminals behind bars will be taken off the Rock and brought into a federal courtroom here. Heavily guarded, bound with chains and
manacles, they will be taken off one by one . . . and grilled by defense attorney James Martin MacInnis. Through them MacInnis will try to probe the sullen whirlpools of passion that, this time, blazed into murder, and the timeless attrition that frays the minds of men into madness on the Rock.22
Thus began a parade to the witness stand of Alcatraz cons, some grim and subdued, some smiling and confident. They all took the oath to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about their experiences and those of the other unfortunates confined on the Rock. With sentences of twenty-five years, fifty years, and life, these men were hardly fearful of a puny two- or three-year conviction on perjury charges. The opportunity to take the boat trip over to the city and testify in the trial was a welcome break from the prison routine and carried with it the added bonus of being able to crucify the prison staff. Abrams and MacInnis helped this process along by asking leading and provocative questions of their very willing witnesses. The prosecution registered strenuous objections and Judge Roche often ruled the questions out of order—but the jury and the reporters listened as the inmates answered them anyway.
An important witness for the defense was kidnapper and longtime troublemaker Harmon Waley. By the time of the Young trial, Waley had spent not days, weeks, or even months in the various isolation units at Alcatraz, he had been locked up for years. He had been sent to a dungeon cell and had been subjected to every other form of punishment, from isolation in total darkness on a diet of bread and water to being forcibly restrained in a straitjacket in the prison hospital while food was forced down his throat. On the stand Waley listened carefully to a series of leading questions by defense attorney MacInnis. U.S. Attorney Hennessy objected to each question, but before Judge Roche could rule on the admissibility of the questions, Waley provided the answers in a loud voice. “You wait until I rule on the question,” admonished Roche, but Waley continued to answer the questions immediately, finally turning to the angry judge and asking “What can you do? I’ve already got forty-five years—are you going to slap my wrists or something?”23
