Alcatraz

by David Ward

  9

  THE BATTLE OF ALCATRAZ

  On the afternoon of May 2, 1946, one of the most dramatic prison escape plots in American penal history began to unfold on Alcatraz Island. In this bold attempt, a group of prisoners planned to achieve what was said to be impossible: obtain guns behind prison walls, take guards hostage with the weapons, and capture the prison launch to get to the mainland. It was an ingenious but very dangerous plan, requiring precision, luck, daring—and, most of all, speed—if it was to succeed. Instead, the attempt triggered a two-day military siege of the island, with automatic weapons and grenades and military forces deployed against the prisoners. Before it was over, two officers had lost their lives, thirteen had been injured, and three inmates had died from gunshot wounds in the cell house. Two more were later executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin while Alcatraz officers watched.1

  THE CONSPIRATORS

  The escape was planned by four inmates, all serving long sentences: Joe Cretzer, Marvin Hubbard, Miran “Blackie” Thompson, and Bernard Paul Coy. Of these four, Cretzer, Hubbard, and Thompson were experienced escape artists. Coy, younger than the others, nevertheless seems to have been considered the group’s leader. Like most Alcatraz escapees, Coy was not regarded as particularly troublesome or violent. Serving a twenty-six-year sentence for bank robbery, he had accumulated only two disciplinary reports over a nine-year period on the island, one for joining in the September 1935 strike, the other for fighting with another kitchen worker. Coy had served sentences in Wisconsin and Kentucky state prisons and earned a transfer to Alcatraz because the staff at the Atlanta penitentiary had concluded that “he is possessed of superior intelligence, is prison-wise, reckless, impulsive, and erratic . . . the possibility of any reconstructive therapy of a permanent nature is very remote.”2

  Joseph Paul Cretzer had been involved in a series of escapes since his federal sentence began in February 1940. In a breakout attempt with his brother-in-law and crime partner, Arnold Kyle, at McNeil Island (described in chapter 8), the two blasted through a prison gate in a dump truck. This was followed by the attempt to break out of a detention cell in the federal courthouse in Tacoma, which resulted in the death of U.S. Marshal A. J. Chitty. In May 1941 Cretzer had participated in the attempt to cut the bars in the model building. His only comment after being caught was “I had a lot of time to do and could not see how I could do it; I might just as well get bumped off attempting escape than stay here until I die.” In May 1944 he had been caught in a conspiracy with Kyle and another prisoner to escape from the disciplinary segregation unit by boring holes in the back walls of their cells. In an interview with the author Kyle said of his partner’s final, fatal attempt to escape: “Cretzer had a life sentence and not much hope of getting out. He was young and when you’re young like that a few years ahead seems like a lifetime away.”

  Marvin F. Hubbard was thirty-four years old and illiterate when he arrived on the island in December 1944. The reason for the transfer was his involvement in an escape plot at the Atlanta penitentiary.3 Two years after his arrival at Alcatraz, he was involved in another escape plan that was never put into effect because an inmate informed on Hubbard and another plotter. The plan had called for constructing a ladder to go over the wall and taking several yard guards as hostages. For his role in this plot, Hubbard forfeited 730 days of good time. A psychiatric evaluation concluded that with an IQ of 65, he was “definitely on the defective side of the scale” and that an impulsive nature caused him to give “little heed to the consequences of his misdeeds until it is too late to rectify them.”

  Before he arrived at Leavenworth in June 1945 to begin a ninety-nine-year sentence for kidnapping and motor vehicle theft, Miran “Blackie” Thompson had eight successful escapes on his record—five from a boys’ reformatory, two from the Alabama state prison at Kilby, and one from a county jail. Thompson had also served a one-year sentence at Atlanta and a two-year term at the state prison in Huntsville, Texas. At Leavenworth, a psychiatric evaluation found that Thompson “has no insight into the seriousness of his aggressive criminal activity and sees himself as a victim of police and the law.” The classification committee unanimously concluded that Thompson’s transfer to Alcatraz “would appear to be justified” because of his “long sentence,” his “record of eight escapes,” and the psychiatrist’s conclusion that he was “a desperate individual who would take any opportunity to try to escape.”4

  Clarence Victor Carnes, one of the first convicts to be released from his cell by the others, and Samuel Shockley, who was being held in isolation in D block, were also identified as being closely involved in this breakout attempt. At sixteen, Carnes had shot and killed an attendant during a gas station robbery. He received a life sentence and was sent first to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and subsequently transferred to the state reformatory.5 Carnes received a ninety-nine-year federal prison term for kidnapping and escaping from the custody of the U.S. marshal and arrived at Leavenworth on April 24, 1945, at age eighteen. The psychiatric evaluation described him as “a desperate, cruel, aggressive individual who would not stop at anything to gain his own end. It is believed that he will find it impossible to make a good adjustment here. . . . He knows that . . . [he will] have to spend all or most of his life in this prison and in the state prison and will remain a desperate man for years.”

  As noted in chapter 8, Samuel Shockley was erroneously identified as a participant in Cretzer, Kyle, and Barkdoll’s May 1941 escape attempt, but in 1946 the staff still believed he had been involved. Because of his emotional and erratic behavior, combined with his “mentally deficient” IQ of 54, staff vacillated between regarding Shockley as mentally ill or as a troublesome and potentially dangerous malingerer. He was described by a fellow inmate as being “batty as a loon.”6 Four days before the break began on May 2, Shockley participated in the general disturbance in the disciplinary segregation unit described at the end of the previous chapter, in which fourteen inmates in D block trashed their cells. Shockley smashed the toilet and washbowl in his cell, set his bedding and clothing on fire, and tore the clothing hooks off the wall.

  PHASE ONE

  The plot to escape from Alcatraz was a long time in the making. Kyle, Cretzer’s partner and brother-in-law, who was in the industries building when the breakout began, said he knew of the plan and so did many inmates. By the time the break occurred, the planning for it “had been going for at least eight to nine months,” according to Kyle, and it was “supposed to have come off three or four different times” before. Kyle also identified Coy as the key figure in the plan, the man the others waited for to make the first move.

  In advance, Coy had asked Floyd Hamilton to get him a bar spreader, which would be used to gain access to the gun gallery. The spreader was made up of “one piece of pipe, a bolt and a nut, you cut a notch in the pipe to where it’d fit on the bar and couldn’t turn and you put a nut behind there and start pushing it out.” Hamilton recruited one inmate to get the parts and another to help him smuggle them into the cell house. He devised a clever strategy to foil the infallible metal detectors—called “snitch boxes” by the inmates—by focusing on the fallible guards who manned them. Hamilton had been alert: he realized that when a prisoner trying to smuggle in something metallic was closely followed by another man with a piece of metal, the second man could bump into the lead man at exactly the time the lead man entered the snitch box and set off the alarm, causing the guard at the box to conclude that the second man had set off the machine. The guard would tell the lead man to go on through and then shake down the second man. After succeeding in a trial run, Hamilton and an accomplice tried this tactic with the bar spreader, and it worked.

  On the afternoon of May 2, it was business as usual in the cell block. With the noon meal concluded, the inmates with work assignments had returned to their jobs in the industries area, and the others were locked in their cells. Inmate Floyd Harrell said he knew something was up when he talked to Hubbar
d after lunch on the fateful day:

  My first real knowledge of this escape attempt came shortly after lunch. . . . I remember distinctly asking [Hubbard] if he had planned on going on to the yard. After a short hesitation he looked at me and said, “You’re looking at a man that’s ready to go to hell.” Instantly I knew what he was referring to and not wanting to know any more about it, I made no remark whatsoever, I just stuck out my hand; he shook my hand and I walked out of the dining room. Something told me that the cell block would not be a very good place to be, so without a moment’s hesitation, I asked the guard to make sick call, went on up to the hospital, feigned some sort of illness, and was confined to the hospital. This proved to be a very wise decision.

  Coy was authorized by his job as an orderly to walk freely in the cell house so he could deliver magazines to various prisoners. The cell house officer, William Miller, was covered by another guard, Bert Burch, who was stationed in the gun gallery located on the north wall of the cell house. The prisoners knew that Burch’s duties called for him to go through a door in the gun gallery to the adjacent disciplinary segregation unit, D block, where he would cover Officer Cecil Corwin while Corwin was releasing men one at a time for showers. During this period only one guard, Miller, was in the main cell house.

  Once Burch entered D block, Hubbard—as a kitchen worker, he had finished with the noon meal—appeared at the door between the dining room and the cell house. Miller opened the door to let Hubbard pass through and then turned his back to relock the door. As he did, Hubbard jumped him with a knife and, aided by Coy, took his keys and forced him into a cell on the north end of C block.

  Coy and Hubbard ran over to unlock the cell of Cretzer, who took up a post standing guard over Miller. Coy and Hubbard quickly climbed up the bars of the gun cage to the point where the bars curved over to join the wall. With the bar spreader—which had been hidden in the utility corridor between the rows of cells that stood back to back in C block—Coy and Hubbard pried the bars just far enough apart to allow Coy, a very slight man, to wriggle through to a walkway. He clambered down a flight of steps to the second-level walkway that guard Burch would use when he returned from D block. Hiding behind the door, Coy waited until the officer was about to come through, then pushed the door into Burch, and jumped him with fists flying. (It is not known why their struggle did not draw the attention of Officer Corwin in D block.) The two fought briefly, with Coy continuing to hit Burch until he lost consciousness. Then Coy removed the guard’s uniform, tied him up, and grabbed his .45 pistol, 30.06 caliber rifle, and ammunition. He lowered the rifle to Hubbard on the cell house floor, dropped the pistol to Cretzer, ran back up to the top of the gun cage, squeezed back through the bars, and climbed down to join the others. Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard had achieved what the Alcatraz staff had always planned to prevent: prisoners were loose in the cell house, they had guns, and they quickly began releasing other prisoners from their cells.

  Their plan called for getting more hostages, then using rifle fire to pin down the guards in the gun towers while they exited the cell house and made their way through the yard with their hostages. They would go down the steps on the west, or Golden Gate, side of the prison to the paved walkway and then turn south to the employee housing area where they would add some women and children to their collection of hostages. The hostages were essential if the plan was to work, as they would prevent anyone from firing on the inmates. The escapees would proceed to the dock area where the tower guard, under the threat of injury to the women and children, would be ordered to lower the key to the prison launch, which would take them to the mainland. As Cretzer’s partner, Kyle, later explained, “They had to get out quick; the thing had to work fast or else it wouldn’t work at all.”

  Carnes was one of the first men released from his cell. As he grabbed a knife, he saw Officer Robert Bristow enter the cell house at the east end and begin walking down Broadway. Carnes ran up to the surprised officer and forced him into cell 403, where Miller had been placed. Coy released Thompson to join the group. As guards Ernest B. Lageson and Joseph Burdette (the latter is missing from some accounts) entered the cell house to go to their posts, they were quickly taken hostage and also put in cell 403.

  In the meantime, Cretzer went to the window in the door between the cell house and D block. Pointing his gun at Officer Cecil Corwin, he signaled the guard to open the door. Corwin complied. (Corwin would later claim that he opened the door in response to a threat by inmate Louis Fleisch, who as an orderly was out in D block talking to the guard at the time. Fleisch, however, would claim that he “advised” Corwin to open the door to avoid being killed, and that Corwin “was afraid and shaking badly.” The plan was to free the D block inmates, particularly Franklin, who had been in isolation since May 1938 for the escape attempt in which Officer Royal Cline was killed. The D block inmates on the second and third tiers were quickly released, but the first-tier cell doors were locked and unlocked not by the mechanical levers of a gear box, but by an electronic system controlled from inside the gun cage. Thus Franklin and the other men on the first floor were never released, which would prevent them from joining the break but also from seeking refuge in other cells during the gun battle that followed.

  As the D block prisoners walked through their suddenly open cell doors and down to the main floor, Coy told them that a break was in progress. James Quillen, one of the occupants of D block at the time, said later,

  The first time we knew anything was going down was when we heard the commotion in the gun cage . . . and you could hear voices out there. The door to D block was opened and then our cells were racked open. Hell, everybody was curious about what was going on so we all went down [to the first floor]. When we got close down to the door [to the main cell house], somebody says, “They’ve taken over the armory.” Hell, everybody wanted to go, everybody wanted a piece of the action then.

  One D block prisoner, Shockley, grabbed a wrench and joined Coy, Hubbard, Cretzer, Carnes, and Thompson as they searched frantically for the key to the door to the recreation yard. But Officer Miller had hidden that key in the neck of the toilet bowl in cell 403 shortly after he was taken hostage. This would turn out to be the crucial act that foiled the escape plot. As Kyle pointed out afterward, “If they would have gone on with the key like they were supposed to, they would have been [able to go] around to the front office in the armory before anyone knew what happened. They would have had the island.”

  Back in the control room, Officer Clifford Fish was waiting for reports from the officers normally assigned to the cell house, or from the officers who had gone inside to investigate why a report had not been received. Fish informed Captain Henry Weinhold of the situation. When Weinhold entered the cell house, Coy and Carnes grabbed him. Weinhold was forced to remove his uniform and hand it over to Coy. Quillen, who had come out of his D block cell, recalled:

  A lot of guys came out of their cells, saw the guns, and went back, which was the smart thing to do. But, I had to stick my nose in it and go out there. I walked out and over to the door in the dining room and looked down Broadway and they had just gotten Weinhold and were taking him around the corner by the lever box. Shockley and Cretzer and Coy were there. Something was said between Shockley and Weinhold and Coy told them both to shut up and then Shockley took a swing at Weinhold. Weinhold was very upstanding, he didn’t take any guff—he didn’t take anything from anybody. He had lots of guts. He turned around and hit Shockley back. Then they pushed him into the cell.

  At this point, the escape plotters knew their plan was in trouble. Quillen remembered the words he exchanged with Cretzer and Coy before he returned to his cell to wait things out:

  I said, “How’s it going?” He said, “It’s all fucked up—go on back in, it’s no good. We blew it.” So I walked over to Broadway and I saw Coy . . . running around with the rifle. And I said, “What’s going on? What can we do? Can we go?” He says, “Go back, we blew it.” So I said to Pep [friend a
nd fellow convict], “Let’s do what they said and get our asses back in there.”

  When Captain Weinhold failed to report back, Officer Fish called Robert Baker, who was on duty censoring mail in the administration building, to tell him there was some trouble in the cell house. Baker and Lieutenant Joseph Simpson walked into the cell house only to encounter a rifle and .45 automatic pointed at them, as well as several inmates wielding clubs and knives. They were forced into cell 402, adjacent to the other guards. Officer Carl Sundstrom came in next and was confronted by Cretzer armed with the .45. He was thrown in the cell with Baker and Simpson. Shockley struck him in the face three or four times and ordered him to remove his pants. “Sundstrom was there with just his shirt on, they’d taken his pants off. . . . He’s mad as a hornet ’cuz they took his pants,” Baker later recalled. “We’re sitting there on the bed. And I’m looking out and taking the numbers down of any prisoners I see. I knew ’em all by name and number. So I’m writing on a little piece of paper.”

  While Cretzer, Coy, and the others were moving about the cell house and taking hostages, a group of prisoners who had finished getting haircuts in the prison’s basement barbershop were released by supervising Officer Edward Stucker. As the inmates emerged into the cell house, they glimpsed the break taking place and quickly descended back into the barbershop, shaking their heads. Stucker went up to investigate:

  So I walked up the stairs and looked over at the end of C block and there was Cretzer working the levers with a .45 in his hand. I said, “Good God almighty.” About that time he just happened to look over there and he seen me. He swung that gun over that a way and I got back down the stairs.