Alcatraz

by David Ward

  ONE MORE BREAKOUT

  By 1943 the new industries building, set against the hillside on which the prison perched, housed almost all of the workshops. The old model building remained in place, however, with the guard tower in operation and the anti-aircraft gun emplacement manned by soldiers on the roof. The second and third floors of the building were no longer used, but several operations continued on the first floor. Three inmates worked in the carpenter shop; the paint shop employed two inmates; and in the old mat shop two men were assigned to make concrete blocks for use in building retaining walls at various points around the island.

  The men assigned to make the concrete blocks were Floyd Hamilton, who had escaped detection as a participant in the May 1941 breakout attempt, and forty-three-year-old Fred Hunter, who was serving a twenty-five-year term. Hunter’s hands were twisted from arthritis, and he weighed only 118 pounds. A staff report had stated that his body was “frail to almost childlike proportions” and that he would be unable to undertake “swimming or any strenuous exercise.”16 Despite his poor physical condition, Hunter joined Floyd Hamilton in plotting a breakout that would entail navigating the rough waters of San Francisco Bay.

  The model building was still the best location from which to launch an escape. It remained as a large obstacle between the bay and the sight lines of the guard towers on the hill above and the road leading to the cell house, and it backed up to the edge of the cliffs. A daylight escape attempt from the building in the absence of heavy fog was considered too risky—not only was there the guard on the roof, but now there were soldiers with weapons and the entire harbor was filled with naval boats scurrying back and forth, and at night picket boats with floodlights illuminated the entire area along the submarine net. Escape would require a heavy cover of fog to have any chance of succeeding.

  Two other men who worked in the Model Shop—Harold Brest and James Boarman—were let in on the carefully conceived plot to overcome all these obstacles. Brest was serving a life sentence for kidnapping, along with two concurrent twenty-five-year terms for interstate transportation of a stolen automobile.17 The length of his sentence had been the reason for Harold Brest’s transfer to Alcatraz and it was also the reason he was now ready to try to reach the bay.

  James Boarman, serving twenty years for bank robbery, transportation of stolen securities, and interstate auto theft, was a volatile and aggressive prisoner. When sentenced in Owensboro, Kentucky, for his offenses, the U. S. marshal had stationed fifteen officers in the courtroom as a precaution; when his sentence was pronounced his mother started screaming and Boarman began fighting with court personnel in an attempt to reach a door fifteen feet away. Deputies grabbed him immediately but his brother rushed in to help him, and the two fought until they were subdued and dragged cursing and shouting from the courtroom. The U.S. marshal wrote to the attorney general to warn that Boarman was “the most desperate prisoner we have ever had in our custody” and that he intended after serving his time to “come back and kill everyone connected with the Federal Court.”18 At Leavenworth, Boarman was soon identified as a “leader of the younger radical element” and within a few months he was on his way west. When he arrived at Alcatraz he was twenty-one years old.

  With Boarman providing energy and enthusiasm and Hamilton providing experience, the four men began their preparations for an early departure. Remembering that the drill had been too slow to cut the bars in his breakout attempt two years earlier, Hamilton looked for the parts of a better cutting device in a pile of burned out motors and other junk piled near the Model Shop. He found a motor “that looked like it was burned all to pieces” but took it back to the shop and succeeded in getting it to run. Hamilton and his fellow plotters then convinced an inmate in the machine shop to steal three “regular cutting wheels” that could “go through any kind of steel,” and from an inmate in the paint shop they received “some paint and putty.”19

  The guard who supervised the men was gone during regular intervals each day, but he counted the inmates in the shop every thirty minutes. Between his rounds, the inmates worked on cutting the bars. To keep the guard and soldiers on the roof from noticing the noise, they would “get Harvey Bailey in the carpenter shop to run some lumber through the planer and that’d kill the noise.” Knowing that swimming all the way to the mainland wasn’t possible, they also began making flotation devices that Hamilton referred to as “surfboards.” Using scrap lumber that Bailey planed down to a quarter of an inch in thickness, and watertight glue from the paint shop, they put together three surfboards with a three-inch air space in each, a twelve-foot board for Hamilton and Hunter, and a six-foot board each for Boarman and Brest. The plan was not to float on top of the boards, but to hang underneath them in “cradles” made of copper wire. A hole was bored in each board through which a rubber hose was inserted so they could breathe under water. Inside the board they stored army clothes and shoes. Finally they attached wooden paddles for rowing. Then they painted the boards blue to match the color of the water, using paint provided by an inmate in the paint shop.

  Instead of trying to hide the boards from the guards, the would-be escapees camouflaged them by hanging them on the wall as shelves on which pieces of hardware were placed according to size and type. Recalled Hamilton, “Captain Weinhold came by one day and seen all them fittings and bolts and nuts and everything and the sizes and he complimented us on the neat job we were doing. And that was our sailboat home.”

  By April the bars were cut and the surfboards complete, but the inmates needed a thick fog. As they came to work on April 13, the conditions seemed right. “The foghorns were blowing and the Golden Gate Bridge was already covered up,” remembered Hamilton, “and [it] looked like a thick, heavy fog [was] coming in.” Hamilton and Hunter, however, were concerned that the typical spring pattern would prevail—the fog would roll in but then lift. Boarman disagreed and argued that this was the day. “He kind of considered this his break,” recalled Hamilton, “and he went to arguing and cussing.” With the fog continuing to move in, the four decided to go.

  At approximately 9:45 A.M. Officer George Smith, who was in charge of the work detail, noticed that the pile of dirt the inmates were supposed to be spreading showed little sign of attention. As he walked into the old mat shop, Brest and Hamilton grabbed him, with Hamilton telling the officer, “We’re going home, Mr. Smith.” Smith struggled to free himself, and Hunter pointed a knife at this back, saying “Take it easy, Mr. Smith, we don’t want to hurt you.” But Smith continued to struggle, so Boarman punched him in the stomach. Smith fell to the floor and the inmates tied and gagged him. When Smith began to cough, Brest said “Wait, he can’t breathe through his nose; you’ll smother him and we don’t want to hurt him unless we have to” and then used the guard’s own handkerchief as a gag.20

  While Hamilton began taking the surfboards down off the wall, the others watched for Captain Henry Weinhold, who was making his rounds. When Weinhold arrived, Boarman and Hunter seized him and ordered him to lie down on the floor. When he refused, they called to Hamilton for help. Hamilton came over, threw Weinhold down onto the floor, turned him over on his belly, and held him as Hunter tried to tie his hands. When he “kept jerking his hands loose,” Brest came over with a hammer and began hitting him on the head. At that point Hamilton threw up his hands to catch the hammer blow. “I thought if we killed [an employee],” recalled Hamilton, “we would have a bad go.”

  With both guards subdued, Hamilton twisted off the precut bars, passed the twelve-foot surfboard out the window, and crawled out. Hunter followed and using “a kind-of blanket” to cover wires on the fence, they tied together two electrical cords about thirty feet long and threw them over the fence to climb down closer to the water’s edge. Boarman and Brest removed their clothes and smeared grease on their bodies. As Boarman pulled a rubber hospital doughnut from its hiding place and began blowing it up, Smith heard him say, “This may get me to the beach.” Then both men disappeared out the
window.

  Even though his hands were bound, Officer Smith was able to get his whistle out of his pocket, and Captain Weinhold was able to spit out the gag. Smith managed to get his whistle into the captain’s mouth. But when Weinhold began to blow the whistle, the machines in the carpenter shop suddenly started up, drowning out the shouts of the officers and the sound of the whistle.21

  Hunter tried to use the cords to lower himself down, but with his crippled hands he couldn’t hold tightly enough and fell most of the way down to the rocks, injuring his ankle. Boarman and Brest followed Hunter over the fence but without their boards. According to Hamilton, Boarman and Brest “just dove off into the water and went swimming out toward that fog bank.” Hunter got on top of the twelve-foot board and began paddling out into the bay, and Hamilton opted to swim for it. Fighting the surf, Hunter finally managed to get about a hundred feet away from the island but then became so fatigued that he decided to turn around and paddle back toward the island, to a cave he had heard about.

  Up on top of the model building, Officer Frank Johnson became suspicious when he noted that Officer Smith and Captain Weinhold had been in the building for some time and that Smith hadn’t answered his telephone call. After waiting a few minutes, Johnson leaned over the edge of the roof and called out for Smith and Weinhold. When there was no response he became concerned, called the control center, and told the officer in charge, “For Christ’s sake, get someone down here right away.” Johnson then left the tower and walked quickly to the back of the roof on the bay side. He saw two heads in the water some two hundred yards from shore and opened fire.

  Hamilton—still in the water but not with Brest and Boarman—heard the shooting and then the prison siren. He swam underwater to the cave entrance, where Hunter had already paddled. The two men crawled into the cave and looked for hiding places under the scraps of rubber along the walls. Since Hunter’s crippled hands prevented him from picking up large pieces, Hamilton scooped out a place against one wall, helped Hunter into the hole, and then covered him up. Urged on by the sound of men in boats, Hamilton crawled back to an area near the mouth of the cave where the floor was close to the roof. “I started digging out away from the wall,” recalled Hamilton. “I dug and dug until I got them tires up in front of me. I got behind them and pulled others back over me.”

  On the roof, Officer Johnson continued to fire at the two men in the water. The guard on duty in the tower on top of the administration building also opened fire with his 30.06 rifle. One of the figures was hit and, according to Johnson, “the body seemed to raise out of the water.” Other shots were fired by several guards, who on hearing the siren secured weapons from the armory and ran down the hill to the back of the model building. They heard Johnson firing from the roof and the soldiers on the roof yelled to them, “There are two in the bay.” All of the officers later pointed out that the two figures in the water were so close to each other they made one target.

  All firing from the island ceased when the prison launch came around the end of the island and moved between the men in the water and the shore. When the boat reached the northwest corner of the island, the boat guard saw two men in the water under heavy fire, but one was motionless with his head and feet under water, his midsection held out of the water by a small round rubber doughnut. The other man, recognized by the boat officer as Brest, signaled for assistance and swam toward the other man to help hold him up until the boat got closer to them. A boat hook was held out to Brest, who grabbed it shouting, “Pull us both up.” Brest loosened his grip on the other man at the instruction of the boat crew; he was hauled onto the boat and told to lie on the deck while the guards turned toward the other man in the water.

  William Knipscherr, the prison electrician—who had been working on the dock when word was sent to bring the launch around the island—leaned out of the launch, grabbed the belt of the man in the water, and tried to pull him out. As he raised the belt, James Boarman’s face appeared and Knipscherr saw a hole over Boarman’s right ear about the size of a quarter with what appeared to be brain tissue oozing out of the wound. As he tried to hoist the body out of the water, the belt broke and Boarman’s body quickly sank out of sight. The men in the launch searched the area for ten minutes without sighting the body and returned to the dock to get Brest to the prison hospital. Brest, without realizing that the officers onshore and in the launch had seen only himself and Boarman, asked the boat officers, “Did you pick up the other two?”22 Fred Hunter and Floyd Hamilton, however, were nowhere to be seen.

  In the prison hospital, Harold Brest was treated for barbed wire cuts and a bullet wound to his right elbow. He was then interviewed by FBI agents, who this time had been promptly notified of the breakout attempt by Warden Johnston. Brest adhered to the convict code as best he could after inadvertently revealing to the officers on the boat that he and Boarman were not the only escapees. Brest did not know whose idea the escape was, he did not know whether it had a leader or not, he did not know how, when, or by whom the bars of the Model Shop windows were cut. He claimed that the four escapees had no plans as to what they would do if they made it to shore and he had no idea where Hunter and Hamilton might be.

  The prison doctor, however, informed FBI agents that when the alarm sounded he had quickly moved to a vantage point where he could see the two men swimming away from the island with bullets spraying up the water around them. Dr. Ritchey reported that he had seen a third man, who he thought was Hamilton, swimming about a hundred yards from where Brest and Boarman were situated. He said that this man had been hit and that the body sank below the surface.

  The search for Hunter and Hamilton went on under the direction of Deputy Warden Ed Miller, who was well aware of the cave at the northwest tip of the island. For several years during which the inmates made rubber doormats, prison staff had dumped pieces of scrap rubber and old tire casings into the cave. Miller was of the opinion that, if Hunter and Hamilton were alive, they would most likely have sought refuge in the cave, which ran some forty feet or more under the cliffs. A group of officers were sent twice to search the cave during the afternoon of the thirteenth; the first time they found no sign of the escapees but during the second search one guard noticed blood on a rock at the mouth of the cave. Miller, on receiving this information, decided that he would lead another search himself. Taking two officers in a small boat from the prison launch, Miller and his men entered the cave and began throwing tires and scrap rubber around. They worked their way to the back of the cave, wading through several feet of water and pieces of rubber, but they saw no sign of the missing men.

  Just moments before they were ready to call off the search, Miller told FBI agents he suddenly saw something move under a pile of scraps. He turned his light on the area and saw “either the stomach or chest of a man or the white shirt covering the stomach of a man.” Miller said loudly to the rest of the officers, “We might as well get out of here, there’s no one here” and then backed up to the mouth of the cave. There, he quietly told his men that someone was hiding in the cave and that he was going to go after him. With his .45 automatic, he returned to the back of the cave and shouted, “Come out!” He fired one shot “and immediately Hunter’s head appeared above the layers of rubber.” Miller told Hunter to put his hands up; when he did not do so, Miller “fired a shot into the rock immediately above Hunter’s head, whereupon Hunter promptly complied with the directions.” Miller asked him where Hamilton was, and Hunter replied that he did not know.23

  Hamilton later related a somewhat different version of Hunter’s apprehension:

  I started digging out away from the wall. I dug and dug until I got them tires up in front of me. I got behind them and pulled others back over me. After just a little bit here come some people in there; they couldn’t find anything so after a while here comes the associate warden, Miller and two more lieutenants. When Miller came in he started cussing and fussing and digging around and finally he went to digging over where Fred w
as, and he jumped back and said, “Here’s one of them sons-of-a-bitches” and boom, he shot right at him. Fred said some of them tires ricocheted the bullet and it went down behind him between him and the wall. So they made him crawl out where they told him to get in that little boat to go out to the big boat. [Miller] told Fred, “You make one crooked move and I’ll kill you and these officers here will swear that you attacked me, won’t you?”

  The [officers] wouldn’t give him no answer at all. So they went on out but directly here come Miller back in and he said, “If I find that other son-of-a-bitch I’ll sure shoot him between the eyes.” And he went to shooting—boom! boom! boom! He was shooting everywhere. He shot one bullet that came right where I was; it felt like a sledgehammer hitting me, it just knocked the wind out of me. [Miller] was cussing so loud I don’t think he would have ever heard me if I’d hollered and he went on out.

  Later on here comes Weinhold, the captain we’d tied up, sounded like he must have had about a dozen guards with him. And he says, “If that fellow’s in here we’ll catch him.” I didn’t know if he was looking for me, or Brest, or Boarman. So they kept moving tires ’til they come around to where I was. There was two guards out in front digging and one of them crawled right up to where I was and started throwing pieces of tires out; he was getting down so close to me it seemed like he was breathing right on my face. He talked about how tired he was getting, and directly he just stopped working and turned around and sat down on me. I says to myself, “Boy when he gets rested he’s going to have to move just one or two more tires and he’ll see me.” But fortunately Weinhold says, “Tide’s coming up, it’s going to have this entrance covered up in a little bit, everybody out, we’ll come back and finish the job when tide goes down.” So everybody left.