by David Ward
43. See Burrough, Public Enemies, for a detailed description of Barker, his notorious family, and his criminal career.
44. Volney Davis, admission summary, Leavenworth, Kansas, July 10, 1935, p. 3.
45. E. A. Tamm, memorandum to the Director, FBI, February 8, 1935, file 7–576–4598.
46. F. G. Zerbst, Warden, Leavenworth, to Director, BOP, April 20, 1935.
47. Alvin Karpis was born Alvin Karpowicz, but he was always identified in Alcatraz records as “Karpavicz.” Much of what has been written about Karpis and the Karpis-Barker mob overdramatizes Karpis’s exploits, as authorized by J. Edgar Hoover. Karpis’s own book about his criminal career offers an alternative perspective. See Alvin Karpis, with Bill Trent, The Alvin Karpis Story (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971) and Burrough’s Public Enemies.
48. Ibid., 256.
49. Warden’s notebook no. 325.
50. W. F. Whitely, report on Huron Ted Walters, January 7, 1939, FBI file 91–136.
51. Admission special progress report, Leavenworth, Kansas, January 24, 1940, Walters Alcatraz file.
CHAPTER 4
1. This statement was formalized in the institution’s first rule book, which was not issued to inmates until 1956, “Rules and Regulations, USP Alcatraz.” During the gangster era inmates were provided a copy of “Rules and Regulations for the Government and Discipline of the United States Penal and Correctional Institutions,” May 1, 1930, and two mimeographed sheets listing the “daily routine of work and counts . . . regulations concerning mail and a list of approved magazines . . . additional information was provided verbally to new arrivals by the officer in charge of the cellhouse.” J. A. Johnston to Director, December 14, 1937, file 4–49–3-14.
2. Robert Baker’s comments for this chapter are taken from his lengthy interview with the author in 1980.
3. Letter to Assistant Director Hammack from James A. Johnston, July 9, 1934.
4. Ibid.
5. Johnston described this and other routines for Bureau headquarters. In regard to food he wrote, “What they take we require them to eat. We do not permit any waste of food. We do not allow prisoners to crumble and destroy food, spread it on the tables, or leave it on their trays. . . . Prisoners who attempt to waste food in any manner are reported.” James A. Johnston to Director, August 21, 1935, file 4–49–3-57, p. 4.
6. Floyd Harrell, description and commentary tape recorded for the author July 10, 1983. All subsequent quotes attributed to Harrell in this chapter are from this source.
7. Hot running water in the cells was not introduced until the 1950s.
8. Harrell provided an interesting side note about movies: “Occasionally these shows would provide a nickname for a guard. One, Blue Boy, was about an oversized hog, which provided us with a nickname for one of the least-liked guards who was on the heavy side.”
9. Sanford Bates, memorandum to Attorney General, March 20, 1934, file 4–49–3-14.
10. Educational and religious reports from Wayne L. Hunter, chaplain to J. A. Johnston, Warden, October 3 and 31, November 1, December 2, 1936, and March 3, April 2 and 7, 1937.
11. “Rules and Regulations, Alcatraz.” Painting materials were also allowed.
12. In the mid-1950s, inmates were issued headsets so that they could listen to one of two radio stations; guards monitoring the programs quickly changed stations if crime stories or any content they regarded as inappropriate came across the airwaves.
13. An earlier draft of rules from Bates to the attorney general called for lawyers to obtain approval from the attorney general to be allowed to visit their clients at Alcatraz. Sanford Bates, memorandum to the Attorney General, December 21, 1933, file 4–49–0.
14. Maurice E. Ordway, Prison Service Study Course lesson 9, September 1936.
15. Bates, memorandum for the Attorney General, December 1, 1936, file 4–49–3-14.
16. Ordway, Study Course lesson 3, October 1937.
17. Johnston to Director, August 21, 1935, pp. 6–7.
18. Ordway, Study Course lesson 9. In his July 18, 1977, interview with the author, Maurice Ordway, who spent his entire career at Alcatraz, first as an officer and then as a lieutenant, described the management challenge that prisoners presented to the staff:
Alcatraz has been designated as a maximum-security institution for the housing of “incorrigible” prisoners . . . prisoners confined in this institution present as a whole a somewhat different disciplinary problem than do the prisoners of other institutions. Every individual confined in Alcatraz is classed as a disciplinary problem. If this were not true, they would not be in Alcatraz, for the population here is composed of the disciplinary problems of other institutions. For instance, we have here men who will not respond to either kind or harsh treatment, for they have reached a state of mind where nothing matters to them. These sort of inmates present one of the greatest problems here, for to keep them in line and keep them from influencing the would-be “good inmate”. . . is more than a problem.
19. Erwin N. Thompson, The Rock: A History of Alcatraz Island, 1847–1942, Historic Resource Study, National Park Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Denver, May 1979, 278–79. A 1905 report by the Judge Advocate General, George B. Davis, noted that the dungeons had been abandoned in favor of an iron cage in a room on the second floor of the [lower] prison; 324. A 1909 report listing punishments for prisoners included “solitary confinement on restricted diet and handcuffed to door.” Thompson’s resource study provides the definitive description of Alcatraz during its years as a fort and as a military prison. Due to changes in construction, the “dungeons” cited in the 1893 report are not consistent with the much larger dungeon cells used by the Bureau of Prisons during the 1930s. Despite Alcatraz’s becoming a disciplinary barracks and the army’s limited efforts to rehabilitate the prisoners, the legends surrounding it continued to grow. Newspapers enjoyed playing up the story of tunnels and dungeons. Perhaps the ultimate development of this theme appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1933, when the old kitchen basement of the citadel, then used as “dark and dreary cells under the prison building,” was described as being a relic of a prison built by the Spaniards; 334.
20. Loring O. Mills, interview with Anthony Calabrese, May 21, 1980.
21. Baker interview.
22. Alcatraz was not the only federal prison with a disciplinary segregation area called the “dungeon.” Jesse Watkins, no. 229, escaped from the McNeil Island Penitentiary, was captured the next day, returned to the prison, and placed in a “dark cell on restricted diet for having wire concealed in the dungeon, hands cuffed to the wall,” as detailed in Watkins’s Leavenworth file:
UP (cuffed standing)
DOWN (uncuffed)
7:30 AM
11:30 AM
12:45 PM
3:20 PM
23. McIntosh was transferred to Leavenworth in March 1937 and then on to Atlanta to facilitate turning him over to state of Georgia authorities. In July 1937 he was conditionally released from Atlanta and taken into custody by the sheriff of Fulton County, where he subsequently received a sentence of sixty years for robbery. While awaiting transportation to the chain gang, McIntosh escaped from jail and remained free for four months. He was arrested in December 1937 after a gun battle with police in North Carolina during which he was shot and hospitalized for ten days and then returned to the Atlanta penitentiary as a conditional release violator. McIntosh’s record is uneventful after this time, although he did write to Director Bennett in August 1938 requesting a transfer back to Alcatraz, where he preferred to serve his sentence.
24. Berta interviews in 1987 and 1988. An account of the use of dungeon cells with details somewhat at variance from those reported by Berta is contained in a book of reflections by E. F. Chandler, who was a guard at Alcatraz from 1934 through 1941. Alcatraz: The Hard Years Remembered, by Roy F. Chandler and E. F. Chandler (Orwigsburg, PA: Baker and Freeman, 1989); see 79 for a “charge out sheet” that identifies the
cell location of all 258 prisoners on January 29, 1936. Listed under the heading “lower solitary” are the numbers of eight prisoners.
25. Ordway interview.
26. George Boatman, interview by the author, September 4, 1980. “There were no rats down there—the only time rats were on the island was during the war. We killed them off after the war. We went over to the army base and got some [rat poison] and spread it on fish heads and that was the end of the rats—there were field mice on the island all the time, but no rats.”
27. James D. Calder, The Origins and Development of Federal Crime Control Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 164.
28. Director Bates to Warden Johnston, February 28, 1935, file 4–49–3-49.
29. James A. Johnston to Bates, March 9, 1935, ibid.
30. Director to Warden, March 27, 1935, ibid.
31. Bates to Johnston, April 12, 1935, ibid.
32. As it turned out, using the dungeons for purposes of internal control was a major factor contributing to the prison’s image in the outside world becoming too harsh. For more on this dynamic, see the discussion in chapter 7.
33. John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 55.
CHAPTER 5
1. James A. Johnston to Director, BOP, October 2, 1934, file 4–49–4-0.
2. Charles Berta Alcatraz file.
3. Harmon Waley Alcatraz file.
4. Waley interview in 1980.
5. J. A. Johnston, Warden, to J. V. Bennett, Director, “Recent Visitors to the Island,” September 11, 1937, DOJ file 4–49–3-29.
6. George Sink Alcatraz file.
7. Johnston to Bennett, June 1938.
8. In the book Johnston wrote after his retirement he claimed, “strictly speaking we did not have any dungeons. When we took over the Island in 1934 we did not like the disciplinary cells that we inherited with the building. The army had solitary cells on one of the top tiers and dungeon cells in the basement. The basement was dry and the Army had established a mechanic’s shop in the cross-corridor, but the floor was rough and the cells were in the corners close to the water cisterns, the brick walls of which were often damp. The building was erected by the War Dept. on top of the foundations of the fortified citadel erected in the 1850s. Despite corrections and explanations people persisted in the belief that the island had been occupied and the fortifications built by Spain. And we were sometimes accused of punishing prisoners by keeping them in the old Spanish dungeons. They were dungeons, but they were not Spanish though they were bad enough and I did not like them. They were badly located, poorly constructed and unsafe because they were easy to dig out of and in the few instances when we did use them we had to chain the men to keep them from breaking out and running amuck. We used them when we had strikes in 1936 and 1937 because at that time we had no other facilities for separating the noisy disturbers from those who wanted to work. I did not like these cells, in fact I was ashamed of them and used them only under necessity. When we got a P.W.A. [sic] appropriation in 1940 we tore out the dungeons, converted the basement into storage space, and built a new disciplinary unit now referred to as ‘D’ Block.” James A. Johnston, Alcatraz Island Prison, and the Men Who Live There (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 252–53.
9. James V. Bennett, interview by the author, August 17, 1978.
10. James V. Bennett to Justice Harlan, February. 13, 1964.
11. Ordway interview in 1977.
12. Allen’s Alcatraz file does not provide clear evidence that he had TB, although he always claimed that he had the disease and that his mother and sister died from tuberculosis.
13. J. Jacobsen, MD, to Dr. G. Hess, Chief Medical Officer, January 21, 1936.
14. C. J. Shuttleworth, Deputy Warden, to James A. Johnston, Warden, March 8, 1936, file 4–49–3-57.
15. “Fox Headed 3 Days of Madness in Western Crime Fortress” and “Capone Now Cowers in Cell Fearing Death from Mutineers,” Washington Herald, February 9 and 10, 1936.
16. “Note Says 3 Driven Insane at Alcatraz: Brutality and Torture Charged in Letter Smuggled From ‘Devil’s Isle.’ Ridiculous says Warden. Prisoner Declares Inmates Beaten, Shot with Gas Guns, Starved,” San Francisco News, September 20, 1935.
17. Ibid.
18. BOP Assistant Director W. T. Hammack to Attorney General Cummings, August 23, 1935.
19. “Just a Life of Hell—That’s Felon’s Alcatraz Story—Monotony Breaks Spirit,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 5, 1936.
20. While managing the Leavenworth Cardinals baseball team from a losing to a winning record, Johnson penned a short essay, “The Umpire, Baseball’s Greatest Alibi,” in which he noted that the decisions of umpires provided excuses for misplays and failures on the part of players. Harry Johnson Alcatraz file.
21. “Terrors and Tortures as the Background of the Riots on Uncle Sam’s ‘Devil’s Island,’ ” Toledo (OH) Mirror, March 15, 1936.
22. Dr. [Edward M.] Twitchell, memo to Warden Johnston, February 22, 1935.
23. E. F. Chandler, report to Warden Johnston, April 27, 1936.
24. A. R. Archer to C. J. Shuttleworth, Deputy Warden, April 27, 1936.
25. As a result of this escape, Director Bates sent the following memo to the attorney general’s office: “If it is advisable for us to surround Alcatraz prisoners with restrictions while in the institution, should there not be some very definite rules laid down by the Attorney General for the conduct of Marshals in custody of such prisoners while out of the institution upon a writ or pursuant to some legal process? It seems somewhat futile for the Prison Bureau to surround the prisoners with restrictive measures and then have the Dept. handle him in a routine manner as soon as he passes to the custody of the Marshal.” Director, BOP, to Mr. Stanley, Attorney General’s office, December 12, 1934, p. 2.
26. John Stadig Alcatraz file; Hammock memo, February 11, 1936, ibid.
27. Dr. Hess to Warden Johnston, June 26, 1935, ibid.
28. Dr. Twitchell to Warden Johnston, August 24, 1936, ibid.
29. M. R. King, Surgeon, to Director, BOP, August 31, 1936. Dr. King’s letter concluded with the following comment on his tour of Alcatraz: “I was favorably impressed by the routine, sanitary conditions, morale and upkeep of grounds and buildings. I observed the manner in which the noon meal was served. The food was very well prepared and without waste. I like the one piece of outside clothing worn by the inmates. In other institutions, including the Medical Center, so many inmates appear slouchy and untidy with trousers suspended by the belts, with the shirt tail occasionally hanging out. It seems to me that the one piece suit adds to the neatness of a large group of inmates.” Dr. Hess to Surgeon General, September 2, 1936, ibid.
30. The BOP’s September 25, 1936, news release on Stadig’s death reported that the patient had been placed in a room “where he could be under the observation of medical officers of the U.S. Public Health Service.” But on the same day Warden Zerbst of Leavenworth wrote to Director Bates to complain: “These mental patients should not be left to the supervision of penitentiary inmates, which is the practice of our medical service at present. I wish, at this time, to repeat my previous suggestion that if the Public Health Service does not have the funds to employ more guard attendants, that the services of the female nurses be dispensed with and that guard attendants be employed instead. The female nurses are used largely to have charge of hospital linens.” Fred G. Zerbst, Warden, to Director, BOP, September 25, 1936.
31. Word of Persful’s self-mutilation took more than a month to reach the San Francisco newspapers. The Associated Press (AP) inaccurately reported that “an inmate named ‘Percival’ secretly obtained an ax . . . filed the edge to razor sharpness and chopped off the left hand. He is said to have handed the ax to another prisoner with the plea ‘cut off my right.’ Warden Johnston would not deny or confirm the story.” AP release, July 29, 1937, Persful Alcatraz file.
32. FBI report by N. E. Marshall, Little Ro
ck, Arkansas, March 25, 1935, file 7–14, ibid.
33. On October 12, 1934, a few months after his release from the Arkansas prison Persful was arrested and subsequently convicted on federal charges of kidnapping and violating the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act. In one of these cases Persful and two associates at gunpoint took the night watchman at a store to the home of the store manager. While one of the men stood guard over the family, Persful and the second man forced the manager to return to the store and open the safe. The robbers took $1,000 in currency and some checks and left with the night watchman and manager, who were driven from Arkansas to Missouri, where they were left bound and gagged in a wooded area. Two nights earlier Persful and his partners had robbed a gas station and then forced the owner, his wife, and his sister to accompany them. The group drove to Oklahoma, where the victims were put out of the car and left on a highway.
Before Persful and his partners were apprehended in the kidnapping cases, the trio was involved in another crime that provided additional evidence of Persful’s attitude toward his associates. Persful, Dewey, Kent, and Riley Gunn attempted to hold up a gas station in Oklahoma but the proprietor had been prepared for such a possibility and kept a gun in his pocket. When told to “stick them up,” he pulled the pistol and fired at the robbers, hitting Kent. Persful and Gunn pulled the wounded Kent into the stolen car they were driving and sped away. Kent succumbed within minutes, and Persful, according to Gunn, “drove to Kent’s home. . . . Carried Kent in the house and placed him on the bed. . . . Mrs. Kent begged them to get a doctor. [But] Persful told her, ‘Lady, you don’t need a doctor; what you need is a burying squad.’ ” Ibid.
For this series of crimes Persful received what would appear to be a modest federal sentence of twenty years, given his prior record of convictions and penitentiary time.
34. Persful BOP central office report, September 14, 1936.
35. Persful to Warren Squier, June 29, 1943, Persful file.
