Alcatraz

by David Ward

  57. Director, FBI, to Director, BOP, October 13, 1933, file 7–115–791, pp. 1–2.

  58. Homer Cummings, Attorney General, to Warden Robert Hudspeth, USP Annex, Fort Leavenworth, October 17, 1933, Albert Bates Alcatraz file. Hudspeth responded to this directive with a detailed description of the conditions of confinement for Bates and Bailey: “I issued instructions to the Deputy Warden to confine them in Seven Wing Basement . . . where the solitary confinement cells are located. . . . When the men are locked in their cells this leaves Bates and Bailey under double lock as the door leading into this hallway is also padlocked, having a heavy wire screening over the hall partition and leaving this door where it can be unlocked only by a guard from the outside. I selected three of the best guards I have in the institution who are personally in charge of these men at all times, with instructions from me to permit no one to come near this part of the cellblock and to allow these men no privileges whatsoever except by written order by me.” Warden Hudspeth to Director [Sanford] Bates, October 20, 1933.

  59. E. E. Kirkpatrick, Voices from Alcatraz (San Antonio: Naylor, 1947), 119–20.

  60. Director, BOP, to Warden [Fred G.] Zerbst, [USP Leavenworth,] October 17, 1933.

  61. J. Edgar Hoover, memorandum to the Director, BOP, October 13, 1933.

  62. Albert Bates thought he could last forty-two days without food or water and “beat Keenan at his own game.” His resentment was directed toward the assistant attorney general, whom he held personally responsible for his placement in solitary confinement: along with his life sentence, it made the future appear completely hopeless. Warden Hudspeth advised him that if he revealed the location of his share of the ransom money, most of the restrictions might be removed; but Bates claimed it was too late for him to give information because the principal had died and if he did divulge information that led to the recovery of the money he would be “on the spot” with his underworld associates. Bates file.

  63. Warden Hudspeth to Director, BOP, January 22, 1933. Even though he had no contact whatsoever with other prisoners, Harvey Bailey was disgusted with his placement in the Annex, which he regarded as a depository for Leavenworth’s most degenerate offenders—drug addicts and homosexuals. For Bailey, who spurned a narcotic painkiller when his leg, broken during the escape from the Kansas State Penitentiary, was set, this was the ultimate indignity. The Annex was under BOP jurisdiction from 1929 to 1940, when it was returned to the army.

  64. Paul W. Keve, The McNeil Century: The Life and Times of an Island Prison (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984), 172, 167.

  65. James V. Bennett to Sanford Bates, July 2, 1931.

  66. Ibid.

  67. Ibid.

  68. John O’Donnell, “Rich U.S. Convicts Buy Vacations; Probe Bares New Scandal in Prisons,” New York Daily News, July 10, 1931, 2, 4.

  69. Spiering, Man Who Got, 162.

  70. Kobler, Capone, 313.

  71. Ibid., 313–14.

  72. Controversy surrounded this film as Hollywood wrestled with the question of whether the spate of crime movies produced in late 1920s and early 1930s were glorifying gangsters or conveying the message that crime did not pay. Naturally a film about Public Enemy no. 1, a man described as “one of America’s icons” and said to receive more media coverage than the president of the United States, attracted attention. After much editing, with all references to the city of Chicago deleted, and with a compromise title, Scarface, Shame of the Nation was finally released in May 1932—the same month that Capone arrived at the Atlanta Penitentiary.

  73. A. C. Aderhold, [Warden, USP Atlanta,] to Director, BOP, July 5, 1932. In regard to visits, however, his Atlanta prison file indicates that Capone’s family was allowed to visit him as regularly as a family living in the immediate area might—his wife made 27 trips during the 27 months he was imprisoned in Atlanta; she was allowed 73 visiting periods, his mother made 54 visits on 20 trips, Al’s son made 55 visits on 21 trips, his brother Earl saw him for 76 visits on 27 trips, his brother Albert came 12 times for 31 visits and his brother Matthew 4 times for 11 visits. Al’s brother Ralph, who had recently been released from McNeil Island Penitentiary, was denied a visit by Director Bates, although Warden Aderhold had said that he was prepared to make an exception to the rule that ex-prisoners could not visit inmates.

  74. “Capone Becomes Fine Tennis Player,” Washington D.C. Times, October 17, 1933, FBI file 69–180.

  75. New York Herald Tribune, August 28, 1932.

  76. Austin MacCormick, former assistant director, BOP, interview with the author, New York City, September 24, 1979.

  77. Capone Atlanta file.

  78. Sanford Bates to A. C. Aderhold, January 1934, ibid.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in America’s Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 44–45; this is a well-researched account of how elements in popular culture and the media combined to create powerful, positive images of federal government forces, particularly the FBI and Alcatraz, arrayed to save the republic from the public enemies. On October 13, 1933, the secretary of war approved a permit for the Department of Justice “to occupy Alcatraz Island as a maximum security institution for hardened offenders, including racketeers and incorrigible recidivists.” Sanford Bates, Director, memorandum to the Attorney General, October 17, 1933, Department of Justice [DOJ] file 4–49–3-2.

  2. James D. Calder, The Origins and Development of Federal Crime Control Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 11.

  3. Ibid., 2.

  4. Ibid., 15.

  5. Ibid., 13.

  6. Paul W. Keve, Prisons and the American Conscience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 95–96.

  7. Calder, Origins and Development, 34.

  8. Ibid., 159.

  9. Powers, G-Men, 3.

  10. Ibid., 42, 44.

  11. Real Detective, January 1934, 26, as cited in Powers, G-Men, 298.

  12. Powers, G-Men, 44.

  13. Ibid.

  14. This statement, from “Smash Racket Rule by Exiling Our Gangsters to a Devil’s Island,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October, 8 1933, reprinted in William Helmer and Rick Mattix, Public Enemies: America’s Criminal Past, 1919–1940 (New York: Checkmark Books, 1998), 277, was accompanied by a drawing of Al Capone pulling a wagonload of firewood with a watchful Uncle Sam behind him.

  15. Real Detective, as cited in Powers, G-Men, 298.

  16. Ibid., 44.

  17. The most detailed description of Alcatraz Island, particularly during its years as a fort and as a military prison, is Erwin N. Thompson’s The Rock: A History of Alcatraz Island, 1847–1972, Historic Resource Study, National Park Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Denver, May 1979.

  18. DOJ file 4–49–3, sub 2.

  19. Powers, G-Men, 44–45.

  20. Blair Niles, Condemned to Devil’s Island (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928). The convict who sold part of his story to Niles subsequently escaped, made his way to New York, and in 1938 published a more complete account of his penal servitude: Dry Guillotine: Fifteen Years Among the Living Dead. In 1940 another Hollywood movie, Devil’s Island, featured Boris Karloff as a surgeon sent to Guiana for treason who leads a rebellion against the brutal regime. Several other films, Strange Cargo starring Clark Gable in 1940, and Passage to Marseilles with Humphrey Bogart in 1944, helped to further the strong negative image of the penal colony.

  21. Before the first prisoners arrived, an article in the Literary Digest questioned the “wisdom of concentrating desperate criminals” on Alcatraz Island given the experience of island prisons established by France, Italy, Spain, and England. The writer did note that, unlike Devil’s Island, Alcatraz would be “thoroughly modern, with steam heat, running water, and recreation facilities.” The article concluded that despite the stories of disease, hunger, and brutal conditions at Devil’s Island: “in France, a large section of public opinion is not inclined to sympathize with the hardships of m
en sent to Devil’s Island.” “America’s Devil’s Island—and Some Others,” Literary Digest, October 28, 1933, 34.

  22. San Francisco News, October 17, 1933.

  23 Chief Quinn’s objections were reported in a memorandum from Joseph B. Keenan, Assistant Attorney General, to the Attorney General, October 25, 1933, file 4–49–0.

  24. Thompson, The Rock, 351.

  25. Sanford Bates, memo re Alcatraz to Attorney General, October 26, 1933, file 4–49–0.

  26. Notes on Alcatraz, BOP document, n.a., n.d.

  27. Editorial, Saturday Evening Post, December 2, 1933.

  28. John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 220, 223.

  29. For a description of the invention of the penitentiary in its classic forms at Eastern Penitentiary in Pennsylvania and at Auburn, New York, see David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 79–108; and his Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).

  30. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 82–83.

  31. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 117–58 in particular.

  32. Sanford Bates to Attorney General, January 8, 1933.

  33. Bates, memo to Attorney General, October 23, 1933.

  34. Sanford Bates, Prisons and Beyond (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 142–43.

  35. Paul W. Garrett and Austin H. MacCormick, eds., Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories (New York: National Society on Penal Information, 1929), 30. Some of the “barbarous” means of punishment in American prisons were described more than a decade later by two prominent university criminologists, who cited the attorney general’s survey of release procedures for 1944, which reported that twenty-six states used corporal punishment by means of a strap or a lash, with the number of strokes administered varying from one to twenty-five. Other types of punishment included the use of the ball and chain and cold baths at the Colorado State Prison in Canon City, the “sweat box” at Raiford Prison in Florida, and confining prisoners so tightly in a standing position that they could not move at the Jackson, Michigan, and Mansfield, Ohio, prisons. Many prisons, including those in Montana, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, handcuffed inmates to cell doors; at Moundsville in West Virginia troublemakers were subject to cold baths; and at Waupun in Wisconsin gagging was permitted. Harry Elmer Barnes and Negley K. Teeters, New Horizons in Criminology (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), 589–90.

  36. Kenneth Lamott, Chronicles of San Quentin: The Biography of a Prison (London: John Long, 1963), 158–59.

  37. National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, Report on Penal Institutions, Probation and Parole (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931).

  38. For the definitive description of how penal policy moved from punishment of the body to punishment of the mind, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).

  39. After Alcatraz opened, Warden Johnston established an office in San Francisco where he occasionally answered questions from newspaper reporters and where business could be conducted with contractors and purveyors of equipment and various products used on the island.

  40. As work continued, by early 1936 a new guard tower was built on the roof of the Model Shop; three detention rooms for handling mental health cases were constructed in the hospital; glass in the guard towers was replaced by shatterproof glass; to improve air circulation in the cell blocks, vents were installed in skylights, and the dirt-covered recreation yard was paved over. James A. Johnston [Warden, USP Alcatraz], to Director BOP, April 2, 1936, Dept. of Justice file 4–49–3, sub 2.

  41. Johnston to Director Bates, July 19, 1934, file 4–49–0.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. [Sanford Bates,] Director, to Warden Zerbst, Leavenworth, October 17, 1933, file 4–49–3-46.

  2. Henry Hill, Warden, USP Lewisburg, to Director, July 6, 1934, ibid.

  3. Director to Warden Zerbst, Leavenworth, October 17, 1933, ibid.

  4. [Edwin Swope,] Warden, USP McNeil Island, to Director, BOP, July 12, 1934, ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Warden, Atlanta, to Director, BOP, July 12, 1934.

  7. Warden, Leavenworth, to Director, BOP, July 14, 1934.

  8. Assistant Director Hammack to Director Bates, July 12, 1934, file 4–49–3-46. Hammack reported that the warden at Leavenworth was of the opinion that too much concern was being expressed about the transfer and was of the opinion that five or six guards could accomplish the task without any difficulty but, “of course, that was only boloney [sic], and he would probably want the U.S. Army to help him if he were responsible for it.”

  9. Ibid.

  10. Confidential instructions concerning prisoner movement, Sanford Bates, Director, August 1934, ibid.

  11. Warden Zerbst to Director, August 5, 1934, ibid.

  12. Warden Zerbst to Director, August 7, 1934, ibid.

  13. Ruey Eaton [AZ-61], In Prison . . . and Out (n.p., n.d.), 65–66.

  14. James A. Johnston to Sanford Bates, August 22, 1934, file 4–49–3-46.

  15. “Bringing Sinister Cargo Here: Prison Train at Devil’s Island,” San Francisco Examiner, and “Rush Capone and Enemy to Alcatraz ‘Devil’s Isle,’ ” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, August 22, 1934.

  16. Johnston press release, August 23, 1934.

  17. “Ex-Mogul of Underworld Cracks at Island Bastille,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 23, 1934.

  18. Eaton, In Prison.

  19. Robert Baker, interview with the author, September 3, 1980. Baker was sent to McNeil Island penitentiary for training, including the use of weapons and judo. He returned to Alcatraz on May 1 to be briefed by army personnel about all “the nooks and crannies, all the hiding places, on the island.”

  20. The lesser stature of prisoners in this group was indicated by their transfer by regular coach from Washington, D.C., to Ogden, Utah, at which point they were placed in one of the Southern Pacific Railway prison cars; this car was detached at the passenger depot in Oakland and shunted over on a side track to a pier where the prison launch from Alcatraz picked up the prisoners and transported them to the island.

  21. Conditions on the Leavenworth prison train turned out to be particularly uncomfortable, as described by Warden Johnston himself: “When they left Leavenworth the weather was broiling hot and it was hot all the way across the country. The car doors were closed; the windows were closed tight; the men could not move freely; they were anything but comfortable . . . as I received them. . . . They were hot, dirty, weary, unshaved, depressed, desperate, showing plainly that they felt they were at the end of the trail.” James A. Johnston, Alcatraz Island Prison, and the Men Who Live There (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 24.

  22. Upon his release from Leavenworth in June 1943, this former Alcatraz inmate sought to enlist in the army. His parole officer wrote to the parole executive supporting this request, arguing, “this man tells us that he has been convicted for shooting a Jap. Perhaps, if you allow him to be inducted, this time we can give him a medal.”

  23. Inmate no. 8, letter to the president, June 29, 1935. Five months later this man was transferred to McNeil Island.

  24. These transfers came only after Director Bates—one year after the arrival of the convicts from Leavenworth and Atlanta—advised Warden Johnston to start sending out the military prisoners and “to rectify any [other] mistakes in classification.” Bates to Johnston, September 16, 1935.

  25. Warden Robert Hudspeth, Annex, Ft. Leavenworth, to James A. Johnston, September 19, 1934, file 4–49–3-46.

  26. Warden Hudspeth to BOP, July 14, 1934.

  27. John Carroll Alcatraz file.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Post Office Inspectors R. G. Rowan and W. O. Baumgartner to Post Inspector in Charg
e, Chicago, Illinois, September 24, 1928.

  31. Charles Cleaver Alcatraz file December 6, 1935.

  32. Joseph Urbaytis Alcatraz file, September 23, 1930.

  33. C. R. F. Beall, MD, Atlanta, April 1931, Urbaytis file.

  34. Urbaytis file. Another escape attempt came to light with the discovery on August 16, 1934, that Urbaytis had cut the bars to his cell and stuck them back in position with laundry soap. He had planned to escape with two others through the roof of the cell house.

  35. Special summary at Atlanta, October 10, 1934, Urbaytis file.

  36. John Paul Chase, admission summary, Alcatraz.

  37. See Clifford James Walker, One Eye Closed, The Other Red: The California Bootlegging Days (Barstow, CA: Backdoor Publishing, 1991), 340–72.

  38. This account is based on an FB I report by V. W. Peterson, Chicago, Illinois, March 29, 1935, file 26–5685, pp. 2–4. For a more detailed description of this event, see Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 474–83. On the Nelson and Chase relationship and their activities see Steven Nickel and William J. Helmer, Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2002).

  39. This account is adapted from a history of the case by J. L. Fallon, FBI, July 4, 1935, file 7–39, pp. 1–4. Waley described these events in detail to the author during a daylong interview at his home on September 23, 1980.

  40. Harmon Waley Alcatraz file.

  41. Warden’s notebook no. 477. These notebooks maintained by the four wardens of Alcatraz listed basic information about every inmate.

  42. J. A. Johnston to W. F. Dorrington re report in case of Arthur Barker no. 268-AZ, n.d., Barker Alcatraz file.