by David Ward
A greater challenge would be to communicate the plan, including the date and precise time of the break, to a family member approved to visit. Mail was censored and guards closely watched visitors and monitored their conversations with inmates. A way around this obstacle was offered by Joe Cretzer, who informed the others that since his mother and father were both deaf mutes he had learned sign language as he grew up. Furthermore, his wife, Edna, had also learned sign language during a period when Joe’s father lived with the couple. With only one visit allowed per month, it took several months for Cretzer to communicate to Edna the need for a fast motorboat to stand by, ready to move at the exact time the inmates would climb out of the model building window, clamber down the cliffs, and swim away from the island.
On May 21, 1941, the four men put their plan into action. Immediately after the 1:00 P.M. count, Barkdoll, Kyle, and Cretzer called to Officer Clyde Stoops, telling him that a machine was out of order. When the officer came over to investigate, the prisoners grabbed his arms, hustled him into a storage room, tied him up, and gagged him. Then they overpowered three other employees and took them hostage. Meanwhile Floyd Hamilton unbolted the grinding wheel and motor from the workshop table, attached it to the extension rod the men had devised, substituted the diamond-studded cutting grinder for the emery wheel, climbed up on a stool, turned on the machine, and began cutting the bars. When Captain Paul J. Madigan—a large man who the inmates thought might be hard to subdue—was seen making his way to the model building, the other inmates yelled to Hamilton to stop cutting and help them wrestle the captain down when he came through the door. But Madigan did not resist when he was suddenly grabbed and shoved into the room where the employee hostages (and several inmates) were being held. Luckily for Hamilton, Madigan had focused his attention on Barkdoll—who was standing in front of him, issuing orders and holding a hammer in case the captain tried to free himself—and did not look into Hamilton’s face as Hamilton held onto one of Madigan’s arms.
Barkdoll had been stationed as a lookout. Convicts working in the mat shop agreed to go into the storage room to be tied up so that they could support their claims later on that they were not involved in the break. Hamilton went back to cutting. Finally, one bar was severed, and Kyle and Cretzer, aware that a count was coming up, urged Hamilton to work faster. Hamilton responded by increasing the pressure of the cutting wheel on the next bar, at which point the wheel, as Kyle recalled, “broke into a thousand pieces.”
Then we didn’t have anything except the regular emery wheel and we couldn’t get through with that . . . time was running out on us. [The guy in the boat] got tired of waiting and he left . . . the count was about due, so we talked it over and decided that we better give up.
Captain Madigan was offering a deal, Kyle remembered: “if we gave up peaceably, they wouldn’t come in and beat our heads off.” The inmates agreed to the offer. “We gave our word and he gave his word,” said Kyle, “and his word was good.”4
After Cretzer and Barkdoll went to the captain and said “We give up,” Cretzer, Barkdoll, and Kyle were marched up the hill to D block isolation. Another inmate, Samuel Shockley, was also taken to isolation, despite his loud protests that he had not been involved. Barkdoll and other inmates who had been “hostages” complained that Shockley was getting a bum rap. Madigan was asked if he remembered seeing Shockley tied up and after some reflection the captain allowed that perhaps he did remember seeing Shockley as a hostage. So Shockley was released from D block and returned to his cell. No disciplinary report, record, or notice of any kind was placed in Shockley’s Alcatraz file to indicate that he had participated in any way in the Model Shop break.
Yet when Warden Johnston briefed the press that evening, and again the next day, he too identified Shockley as one of the “desperate plotters.” Accordingly, every San Francisco newspaper listed Shockley as one of the principals in this escape. This was not only erroneous, it made little sense: with an IQ of 54, Sam Shockley was regarded by his fellow inmates at Alcatraz as slow, excitable, and lacking in judgment—traits not valued by escape plotters. Nevertheless, Johnston’s statements forever connected Shockley with the escape: every book written about Alcatraz escapes has identified Shockley as one of the participants in the 1941 break.
In an ironic symmetry, Shockley’s mistaken culpability matched Hamilton’s evasion of it. The Alcatraz employees held as hostages had the strong impression that another man, in addition to Cretzer, Barkdoll, and Kyle, had been involved, but remarkably Floyd Hamilton’s claim that he was one of the inmate hostages was never questioned, and the other inmates in the mat shop were not talking.5 Hamilton thus avoided the others’ prolonged confinement in the hole and the loss of good time. Moreover this experience did not change Hamilton’s view that the model building was still the best place to break out of Alcatraz.
Although the escape attempt failed and resulted in no injuries, it was nonetheless an embarrassment for Warden Johnston. Since the escape attempt from D block, he had continued to assure Bureau headquarters that he had taken care of any defects in security on the island. To minimize the damage, Johnston sought to characterize the escape attempt as “foiled” by the tool-proof steel bars and, as one newspaper put it, “by the matching nerves of a resourceful guard captain.”6 According to the warden, the convicts had been unable to cut through a single bar and had been talked out of their “desperate” actions by Captain Madigan. The warden did not explain how the inmates had been able to take control of part of a prison building and hold five employees hostage, including the captain, for one and a half hours without attracting the attention of officers in the control room, the towers, or those working on other assignments in the industries area.
Johnston’s reports to Bureau of Prisons headquarters so minimized the escape attempt that Director Bennett’s memorandum on the incident to the attorney general consisted of only one typed page plus five lines on a second sheet, most of it a description of the four inmate participants, including Shockley; the one-paragraph account of the escape itself included the following:
[The convicts] were unsuccessful in cutting the bars, and the Captain of the Guards, a Mr. Madigan, who had been seized and bound, managed to turn on the emergency alarm and obtained help. The incident was then suppressed without injury to any of the officers or prisoners.7
Official reports about this escape attempt, in contrast to previous plots, were limited because FBI agents had not been called to the island in connection with the case. Beyond an interview conducted with industries superintendent Manning at his home in San Francisco, none of the inmates or employees who were in the model building at the time of the attempted break were interviewed by the FBI. The “incident” had taken place between 1 P.M. and 3 P.M. but Warden Johnston did not notify the FBI field office in San Francisco until 9:50 that evening, and then only by telegram. The telegram arrived at the field office shortly after agents on duty had received a phone call from a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner asking if they could provide photographs of Bark-doll and Shockley.
Special-Agent-in-Charge Pieper of the San Francisco office called Johnston that same evening to ask whether an escape had been attempted. The warden replied that four convicts had attempted to break out of the mat shop, but when Captain Madigan entered, “he was able to sound the alarm and the subjects were immediately subdued by other guards who rushed in and placed the subjects in solitary confinement.”8 Pieper reported that Johnston “was very indefinite” as to when the escape had occurred, stating only that “it was in the afternoon.” When asked why he had not immediately notified the San Francisco field office as prescribed by the policy, and reminded that possible federal law violations were supposed to be investigated by the FBI, the warden replied that his first priorities were to subdue the prisoners, place them in solitary, “restore order in the mat shop and elsewhere throughout the prison,” and discuss the matter with the guards—and all this had taken time.
Pieper asked
for the addresses of the employees who had been taken hostage. Captain Madigan and Officer Stoops were asleep on the island, Johnston stated, and he did not want them disturbed that night and, as far as interviewing the four inmate participants, he did not wish to take them out of solitary “for a while.” Johnston provided the San Francisco address of one guard and the industries supervisor. FBI agents, in their effort to obtain statements as soon as possible after the event occurred, sought to contact the guard but could not verify his address; Manning, the industries supervisor, was located and interviewed. The investigating FBI agent who talked with Manning concluded his report with the statement that after discussion with FBI headquarters, “it is agreed that no further action would be taken in this matter due to the fact that this office had not been appropriately advised.”9
By this time, the relationship between the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI was openly hostile. Both Warden Johnston and Bureau headquarters recognized the importance of handling incidents in a way that would minimize the chances of FBI agents interviewing inmates and employees and obtaining statements that would allow Director Hoover to complain to the attorney general about security defects and flaws in the management of Alcatraz. At the same time, James Bennett and other BOP officials had their own concerns about James Johnston’s management of their highest-profile prison.
Three weeks after the abortive attempt to escape from the Model Shop, Assistant Director William T. Hammack wrote to Director Bennett expressing his frustration with Warden Johnston. The problem at Alcatraz, said Hammack, was Johnston’s “insistence” that “everything be so systemized that probably everybody on the Island knows exactly what happens at any given time.”10 Hammack went on to complain that Johnston, in violation of Bureau policy, had allowed inmates to leave their area of the island to work in his house as servants or to work on the docks. And he had put convicts on cleanup details scattered all around the island, thus allowing them to learn about every aspect of the terrain, the buildings, and perimeter security arrangements. Hammack concluded his report with a warning that proved to be prophetic:
Some time, some day, there will be a serious outbreak which will be possible because it is planned with full knowledge of all the Island’s protective devices, including the routine involving use and storage of the launch and custodial routine in the prison area. I think that the Bureau should insist on establishment of a different procedure and . . . I would recommend we give positive orders that the Warden break up his own routine. At the present time the prisoners could almost bank on knowing where the Warden would be at any given time and it creates a ridiculous situation to have the principal officers of the institution taken into custody by the inmates.11
A few months later, in September, another escape attempt did take place, this time a one-man affair. John R. Bayless had begun his years in the federal prison system with a two-year sentence to the federal reformatory at El Reno, Oklahoma. After the staff received a report that he had become active in planning an escape, he was transferred to Leavenworth. Conditionally released in July 1937, he was soon back for a twenty-five-year term for robbing the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Mansfield, Missouri, of $606 and stealing an automobile at gunpoint from a garage attendant. After he was identified as plotting with three other Leavenworth inmates to secure knives, overpower the cell house guard, and take the associate warden hostage, he was shipped to Alcatraz at age twenty-two.
At Alcatraz, Bayless did quiet time and earned an assignment working with another inmate outside the walls. The two gathered refuse and garbage from various points around the island and, accompanied by an officer, trucked the debris to an incinerator. On September 15, 1941, a supervising officer noticed that when his crew and the inmate stevedores who worked on the dock lined up for a count, one man was missing. The control room was notified and the escape siren sounded. As one of the dock officers ran in the direction where the missing prisoner had last been seen, he encountered Bayless on the road dressed in his underwear, soaking wet, and bleeding from abrasions on his knee and feet. Bayless had simply walked away from the work area, climbed down, and stumbled over the slippery rocks until he reached the water’s edge. Once in the bay he was so shocked by the frigid temperature of the water that he quickly concluded that he could not survive very long; he swam back to shore, climbed over the rocks, crawled up the hillside, and made his way to the road. Bayless was sent to isolation in the newly remodeled D block and tried by a good time forfeiture board. The board found him guilty of escape and took away 3,000 days of statutory good time.12
THE WAR COMES TO ALCATRAZ
The entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941 altered operations at Alcatraz in a variety of ways. On the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, Warden Johnston set up a blackboard in the yard to keep inmates informed about the war in the Pacific and in Europe. It relayed headlines from local newspapers, such as “Singapore in Grave Danger—Japs only 48 Miles Away and Striking Hard” and “RAF Smash at Axis and Slow Them in Their Drive in Libya.”13 A number of guards were called to military duty, and concerns were raised about the location of the prison near the entrance to one of the major harbors on the West Coast. A submarine net was installed to protect the entrance to the bay, and large numbers of Coast Guard vessels and navy ships from the nearby Treasure Island airbase began regular patrols in the waters around the island.
The inmates began to worry that Japanese planes might bomb the prison along with everything else in San Francisco Bay, and that in such an attack they would be left to die, locked up in their cells. In June 1942 four antiaircraft guns were brought to the island. One was mounted on the roof of the old model building, two were located on the cell house roof, and the fourth on the roof of the guards’ apartment building. Locating these guns over their heads did little to assuage inmates’ or employees’ apprehensions about an air raid. The guns were removed in July 1944.
Like other federal prisons, Alcatraz took on war-related work, which included doing the laundry for many military posts throughout the Bay Area and manufacturing rubber mats and cargo nets for naval vessels. In a report on the federal prisons’ role in the war effort, the Bureau of Prisons noted, in an attempt to demonstrate the patriotism of even the most desperate and “unregenerate” federal prisoners, that Alcatraz convicts had purchased $3,250 in war bonds, donated blood, and “stepped up their industrial activities to meet the [laundry] needs of the many governmental agencies in the vicinity.” In addition to describing Alcatraz’s war contributions, the Bureau also demonstrated some defensiveness about the Rock:
Contrary to popular misconceptions, Alcatraz is no “haven of the damned,” no American Devil’s Island. It is an institution with a necessarily strict regimen and discipline. It does house criminals whose past acts classify them as vicious and whose long sentences render them classifiable as desperate. But in all other ways and aside from the restraints necessary to the custodial security of such men, Alcatraz shares all of the benefits and amenities to be found in the other federal institutions. The food is good. The inmates receive humane and understanding treatment. There are opportunities for recreation and facilities for education and intellectual advancement. And practically any man on Alcatraz may earn his return, by good conduct and proper adjustment, to institutions where the strictures are less rigorous. . . . Alcatraz exists not only as an incarceratorium for the vicious but it, no less than the other federal prisons, functions as a rehabilitative agency, for few men—even those regarded as “the worst”—are completely unregenerate, and, with increasing frequency, “corrected incorrigibles” are transferred from “the Rock” to be given new opportunities in the other prisons of the system.
The report also noted that in case of an attack on the Bay Area by Japanese planes, plans had been made to move the inmates into “virtually impregnable air raid shelters”—in other words, the cisterns and dungeons below the floor of the cell house. It concluded by observing that as war was unfortunately the best mea
ns of dealing with “international thuggery,” Alcatraz was the best means available to deal with domestic thuggery.14
The presence of military personnel on the island and the flotilla of ships guarding the bay added an additional layer to the prison’s security. While the Alcatraz staff was feeling more confident and most inmates were doing their part in the war effort, a handful of inmates made their plans to take advantage of the distractions of the war to take an early, unauthorized leave from the island.
The first of these escape attempts involved Rufus “Whitey” Franklin, a central figure in the failed 1938 model building breakout. Convicted of the murder of Officer Cline, Franklin had received a life sentence to go along with his original thirty-year term. He had lost 3,600 days of good time and was living on a permanent basis in D block disciplinary segregation, where his “adjustment” was not good. On one occasion, he had assaulted an officer who opened his cell door to retrieve a book, and on another occasion a brass plunger rod, sharpened at one end, was found in his cell. But by August 1942 Franklin was being allowed out of his cell to do cleanup jobs and to help serve meals to other inmates.15 As he did so, he worked out an escape plan: cut several of the bars that enclosed the gun gallery (also called a gun cage), crawl inside it at the ground-floor level, climb the stairs to the second floor, and then surprise the armed guard who patrolled D block when that officer came back through a door after supervising inmate movements in the main cell house. The plan fell apart when an officer discovered him sawing away with a file on a gun-gallery bar.
Franklin’s abortive attempt did not alert staff to this potential flaw in the cell house security system. No effort was made to cover the bars of the gallery on the floor level of D block with heavy wire mesh or metal plates to reduce the risk that an inmate could get inside the gun cage. And no change was made in the procedure that allowed the gun gallery guard to leave either the main cell house or D block unsupervised when he was on the other side of the door that separated the two units. (These weaknesses would prove deadly in May 1946.)
