Alcatraz

by David Ward

  A call from FBI Assistant Director Tamm instructed Fletcher to confine his investigation “to potential criminal law violations, etc., and not to conduct any administrative investigations of the prison or the authorities.”24 Fletcher was further told to refrain from contact with the U.S. attorney and to submit his investigative reports to FBI headquarters before providing them to the U.S. attorney’s office. Fletcher responded that he and his agents were receiving “101% cooperation” from Director Bennett and Warden Johnston. Even so, Bennett was not informed that Thompson had told agents that the director himself might have been taken as a hostage in one version of the escape plan. Fletcher was also told not to provide Bureau of Prisons officials with information on any new leads his agents might develop, since James Bennett was advising the attorney general of developments and was not giving credit to the FBI for the information. Hoover, not satisfied with the credit being given to his agency, noted in handwriting at the bottom of memo: “I am outraged at this. Fletcher is being swept off his feet by Bennett and the Warden. It must stop.”25

  The cases against Fleisch and other inmates named during the investigation were determined by the U.S. attorney to be so weak that prosecution would not be successful. On May 10, a coroner’s jury in San Francisco returned a verdict of justifiable homicide regarding the deaths of Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard. Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney prepared to put Thompson, Shockley, and Carnes on trial.

  ASSIGNING BLAME

  After the dust of the battle had settled, it was clear to the custodial staff that the escapees’ plan had been abetted by serious lapses in basic security procedures. An inattentive guard had allowed the bar spreader to be smuggled into the cell house. The gun cage officer had apparently taken a postlunch nap on his post—a regular occurrence well known to observant inmates. And Coy had been allowed to wander freely in the cell house without supervision. In addition, numerous mistakes had been made in responding to the escape. One staff member after another was sent into the cell house, where the escapees easily took them captive. The alarm was not sounded immediately, not until the warden arrived at his office. Most serious, gunfire was directed from outside into the cell house, which contained not only uninvolved inmates cowering in their cells but prison staff trying to rescue the hostages and subdue the escapees. A high volume of indiscriminate firing killed one officer and wounded several others. San Quentin personnel and U.S. Marine units summoned to the island and prepared for an armed assault in the cell house found little coordinated authority.

  In reflecting on the events of May 2 through 4, Alcatraz administrators and officers singled out several guards for criticism: Bert Burch, both for getting careless about his work habits and for not putting up a better struggle with Coy; Cecil Corwin for not calling the control room due to being intimidated by Fleisch; and some criticized Edward Stucker for not giving a clearer warning than “Trouble in the cell house!” after he emerged from the basement and saw Cretzer with a gun. Philip Bergen, a lieutenant at the time of the break who was appointed acting captain to replace the injured Henry Weinhold, described the various breakdowns in security:

  What had happened unbeknownst to all us smart guys out in the front office was that Burch and Bill Miller had cooked up a little cozy arrangement between them which rendered null and void all the damn precautions that had been taken in setting up the security procedures. Burch thought that he was entitled to that full thirty minutes in the sunshine and he may have been dozing, who knows. Convicts have told me they seen him dozing up there. . . . The problem was that Burch, in order to keep from being interrupted during his lunch hour or his siesta or whatever the hell you want to call it, had left in Bill Miller’s hands two keys that Bill Miller should never have had, the key to the dining room gate and the key to the yard gate. So now, Bill Miller no longer has to interrupt Burch’s lunch, he had the keys. He can go ahead and do it contrary to orders and in violation of all the security procedures. . . . Miller had violated another rule, which said that no inmate could be loose in the cell house unless Burch was up there in the gallery covering him. . . . [So] there’s Burch, he’s violating his orders and there’s Miller, he’s violating the orders. That’s what made it all possible. Burch is over there in peaceful bliss, eating his lunch, or whatever, and when he finishes his lunch after a leisurely half hour or so, he comes strolling back into the other section of the gallery and gets clobbered.

  Some staff members were critical of Warden Johnston’s leadership before, during, and after the “battle.” George Boatman, for example, commented:

  Shuttleworth [former Alcatraz deputy warden] ran that place for two or three days, as I recall. During this time, Johnston was resting. It was almost too much for the old man, but he was on the phone to [Director] Bennett every day telling him, “We got everything under control.” . . . Warden Johnston wanted to retire without any troubles. That [escape] spoiled that.

  According to Officer Y,

  Warden Johnston was nervous and frightened, but he was a humanitarian to the end. He wanted to spare lives as much as possible and he was determined to do that. Of course, some of the rest of us didn’t quite feel that way about it, Mr. Miller especially wanted to go after ’em. He was restrained by the warden from going ahead and doing some of the things that might have ended this thing a little earlier. . . .

  When you see some of your own people shot up like I did, then you get an anger. . . . I’m not no hero, but you get a feeling that, “I wonder how long it’s gonna be before I get hit.” [At one point] I went down to get a sandwich and come back up. As I was walking back up the roadway I was wondering to myself, if I get hit, what’s gonna happen to my family. What are they gonna do with them? Kick them off the island? Things like that were going through my mind. It wasn’t that I was wanting to be a hero or anything, I had a job to do and we wanted to get it done. And, we had a feeling in our own mind that we might be next. It’s a hard thing to describe, but when you see your own people hurt and killed, boy, you want to get in there and really whack ’em. That must be what motivates people in battle. They’re not particularly heroes, they are not particularly anxious to hurt anybody but they want to get the people that hurt their friends and that’s the feeling that went through the officers. . . .

  [Officer William Miller] was a real hero of the whole thing. He really prevented the exodus from that place where they could of got out and taken control of the road tower and got down and took the women and children in the boat. And they’d already expressed the fact if they got to the boat they would get what they wanted or they’d kill one kid, or woman, and throw ’em off the boat just to prove what they was gonna do. They had enough fuel in that boat, they could of went a long ways. That man was the real hero because he dropped that key in that toilet with all the rest of the stuff in there and of course the water was dirty, and they didn’t fish around to get the key. He didn’t tell them and the result was they tried to force it out of him and I think that’s why he got shot because he wouldn’t tell. If anybody deserved an accolade, that man did. Of course he’s dead.

  Officers and midlevel administrators complained among themselves that the need for screening on the gun cage had been recognized before the escape—it had even been purchased and stored on the island—but had not been installed because Warden Johnston was of the opinion that the wire would impair the gun gallery’s appearance.

  Many officers criticized the lengthy and indiscriminant firing of bullets and shells into the cell house during the siege and were clearly angered by the fact that this “friendly fire” had killed one officer and injured several others. Philip Bergen focused on staff carelessness:

  We knew who killed Stites, and we thanked our lucky stars that he [guard on roof] didn’t have his rifle leveled when we went through that same damn place that Stites got killed a few seconds later, he coulda got us too. What was supposed to have been a pushover turned out to be a pretty dangerous operation, although we didn’t have sense to realize it was
dangerous until it was about over. It was dangerous for all the wrong reasons. There was no gun in D block and no shots were fired from D block, not at that point. . . . The guys in the segregation block told me later that they chased Coy out of there because every time he fired a shot they would get about a thousand shots coming back from the outside.

  They were scared to death that they were going to get hit, they were all at the back of the cells behind as many mattresses as they could pile up in front of them. Actually nobody in that block was hit, nobody was injured in any way, shape or manner. It’s incredible. . . .

  All the precautions that they set up for keeping contraband out of the cell house are easily rendered null and void by some dumb or inattentive officer, and we had enough of them to fill a barrel. You ask how you do it? Well, you put a false bottom in the garbage can. You send a push broom down to the shop to be repaired and you hollow out a place in the top part of the push broom where it comes together and you put your contraband in there. There’s as many different ways of smuggling contraband in and out as there is of identifying contraband. And no matter how carefully you indoctrinate these [officers], the incidence of people who don’t give a damn or who are careless or indifferent or whatever, will always confound you and defeat you. So that’s how contraband got into the cell house, piece by piece.

  Robert Baker, one of the injured hostages, made similar points:

  Everybody was shooting. There were guards that got buckshot in their rear ends—the convicts didn’t have any shotguns, so how’d that happen? Stites was shot getting into the west gun gallery . . . it came from the roof. The direction of the bullet that went through him, was from the guy on the roof. . . . The same with the two men . . . that had [been hit by] the buckshot—that was caused from the roof shooting down into anything. . . . This fella Burch who was in the west gun gallery, I’d heard that he said he fought for his guns, he fought this Coy, who was a little bitty man. He said he fought for his life to keep the guns from going down into the cell house. So he come into visit me [in the hospital] and I was laying there with a cast from [my waist] down. They’d found that other bullet hole, patched me up, and I was in no pain. So I looked him up and down and I said, “Where’s all the black eyes and busted nose if you fought for your guns?” He had fifty rounds of 30.06 and then he had forty rounds for the .45 automatic. I says, “Where’s all your hits?”

  And if Stucker had told Fish [in the control room] that the guy had a gun, that would have made a big difference. We would have tackled the whole thing from a different angle. We’d have gone outside and looked in instead of going in naked, with no gun.

  Finally, officers observed that escapes would always be possible as long as ingenuity and careful observation on the part of inmates were combined with lax attitudes, regular routines, and carelessness on the part of the custodial staff. According to George Boatman,

  [The inmates] spent all their time thinking of ways to escape . . . they never quit. They were always looking . . . they watched the guard if he switched his routine, if he had a little weakness, they would capitalize on it. That was the story in that breakout of the Model Shop when Cline was killed. They noticed the guard in the hill tower, the one that looked down [on the model building], every afternoon as soon as the inmates went in, he went to the toilet, and there was a curtain you could pull around so that you’d be hidden from view. [The inmates] noticed that.

  Boatman went on to give grudging praise to the conspirators:

  This escape was ingenious; the inmates looked and looked for one little weakness and took advantage of it. Coy found that somebody had the brilliant idea that those bars of the gun gallery ought to be dusted and he was the cell house orderly so they sent him up there to dust the bars and he found that place where they didn’t join and then somebody observed that Burch went over to D block and visited every afternoon and that was the two things they needed.

  Staff mistakes aside, the breakout attempt nevertheless demonstrated the difficulty of actually overcoming the entire range of security measures on the island. Although the prolonged military-style assault left two officers and three inmates dead, several officers seriously wounded, and the prison badly damaged, no prisoner had succeeded in getting off the island.

  THE TRIAL OF SHOCKLEY,

  THOMPSON, AND CARNES

  On June 19, 1946, a federal grand jury indicted Shockley, Thompson, and Carnes for “committing murder on a federal reservation,” assaulting federal officers, and violating the federal Escape Act. The defendants pleaded not guilty in federal court in July; their cases were bound over for trial in the fall. The court appointed attorneys for Carnes and Shockley and finally allowed Ernest Spagnoli to defend Thompson. Spagnoli tried to meet with Carnes and Thompson but was rebuffed by the federal district court and by Warden Johnston. His request was referred to Director Bennett, who after consultation with the attorney general’s office, denied Spagnoli permission to visit the island or to bring members of the press with him. On June 21, however, a district court judge ordered Warden Johnston to allow Spagnoli to visit Thompson.

  Meanwhile, James Bennett asked the attorney general to designate a special attorney to handle the prosecution because, in his opinion, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, Frank J. Hennessy, “has not been successful in the prosecution of Alcatraz cases.” Bennett had not forgotten the success of inmate Henry Young five years earlier in overturning the government’s case against him and putting the prison on trial instead. BOP headquarters did not want to provide another opportunity to the prisoners and critics of Alcatraz to provoke more calls to close down operations on the island.

  As the date for the trial drew near, the San Francisco Examiner described the defense strategy. For the Bureau of Prisons it had a familiar sound, but Attorney Hennessy went ahead with the prosecution.

  ATTORNEYS PLAN PROBE OF ALCATRAZ BRUTALITY

  DEFENSE COUNSEL FOR RIOT TRIO

  SLATE EXPOSURE OF PENAL TREATMENT

  Sam Shockley, the Alcatraz convict scheduled to go to trial November 20 with two fellow inmates on charges of murder, may never reach the prosecution stage. Defense counsel for the trio, convinced that the rigors of confinement on the Rock have “washed out” Shockley’s mind, plan to request that a court-appointed psychiatrist examine the Oklahoma kidnapper-robber before the case goes to trial. . . . Meanwhile, court appointed Defense Lawyers Archer Zamloch (for Carnes), William A. Sullivan (for Shockley), and Ernest Spagnoli and Aaron Vinkler (for Thompson), it was learned, are prepared to probe the whole Alcatraz system “down to its roots” once the trial begins. Tentative plans call for parading a virtual “Who’s Who” of the nation’s onetime toughest criminals, including one set of witnesses to “alibi” the roles of Thompson, Carnes, and Shockley in the riot, and another set to testify to these defense allegations: 1. That “psychological brutality” has left many inmates “stir crazy” and has plunged others into actual insanity. One convict, going over a tentative witness list for defense counsel, crossed off 60 percent of the names. “You can’t use these guys, they’re insane,” the convict, Ray Stevenson, told defense lawyers Spagnoli and Vinkler. 2. Failure of a prison doctor to treat six inmates in D block on the night of April 27, after they claimed to have become ill from the food they were served, produced a demonstration in which fourteen block members wrecked their cells.26

  Among those who would be called, the newspapers reported, would be Floyd Hamilton, Thomas Robinson, and George Kelly, all former stars on the FBI’s list of “public enemies,” along with the “Birdman,” Robert Stroud. Other witnesses for the convicts would include Whitey Franklin, who had killed a guard himself, Harmon Waley, one of the prison’s major troublemakers, and Ted Walters, who had also tried to escape from the Rock. Even J. Edgar Hoover was impressed: “This will be some aggregation if it is ever assembled. See that we play no part in ‘security.’”27

  But the inmates, the press, and the critics of Alcatraz would be disappointed if they expect
ed a replay of the defense strategy employed in the Henry Young trial. Judge Louis Goodman excused the jury from the courtroom and then warned the attorneys for the accused that convict witnesses would be allowed to testify only to issues in the case and not to “extraneous matters,” such as discipline on the island, the management of the prison, or comparisons of Alcatraz to other penitentiaries.

  The trial began on November 20, with rumors persisting that the defense would put witnesses on the stand who would provide alibis for the defendants and “expose the brutalities that caused the men to want to escape.”28 The prosecution began with testimony from guard Ernest Lageson, who explained how he had written the names of six convicts on the wall of the hostage cell, names that identified the defendants in addition to the dead ringleaders. Cecil Corwin and other officers ended their testimony by leaving the witness stand, walking over, and placing a finger on each of the defendants as participants in the revolt. Guard Joseph Burdette explained how the key to the yard had been hidden from Coy:

  When Miller walked into the cell [where Burdette had already been placed], his thumbs were tied together behind him. I asked Carnes, “Alright to untie Miller’s hands?” Carnes said, “Yes” and I untied him. Mr. Miller then gave me key 107. That was the key to the outside yard. The seat in the cell had been let down against the side of the wall. I hid the key behind it.29

  Lt. Joseph Simpson testified that Thompson, with the rifle, was the convict who took him hostage, and Burdette said that Carnes looked into the cell after Cretzer had fired at the hostages and said, “They’re all dead—let’s go.”

  Deputy Warden Edward Miller had a difficult time on the stand. Defense attorney Archer Zamloch asked him if he was “the most hated and feared man on Alcatraz” and if, “on the second day of the Alcatraz breakout, he and another guard had taken Carnes out of his cell, stripped him naked, and incarcerated him in a small storage room.” Miller denied taking such action, but Zamloch demanded, “Didn’t you, on the third tier of the cell block, mercilessly beat and kick Carnes, and isn’t it a fact that you put this knife [Miller’s pocket knife] against his throat and said, ‘I’ll put a scar on you here that you’ll have the rest of your life’?” Miller replied angrily, “No, I treated Carnes just like any other prisoner.” “Then the Lord help the prisoners,” replied the attorney.30