by David Ward
36. Hess, Chief Medical Officer, Twitchell, Psychiatrist, and Wolfson, Psychiatrist, memorandum of examination, April 9, 1937, Alcatraz, California.
37. Hayes Van Gorder federal prison file.
38. This letter from Johnston to Bennett provides further evidence that Bureau headquarters was aware that the warden was still placing inmates in the dungeon.
39. Burton Phillips Alcatraz file.
40. R. O. Culver, Day Watch Lieutenant, to E. J. Miller, Deputy Warden, Alcatraz, October 4, 1937.
41. Alvin Karpis, as told to Robert Livesey, On the Rock: Twenty-Five Years in Alcatraz (New York: Beaufort Books, 1980), 88.
42. Waley interview. Alvin Karpis made a similar observation in his book.
43. International News Service release, San Francisco, September 24, 1937.
44. Johnston to J. V. Bennett, October 11, 1937; Johnston to Director, BOP, November 6, 1937.
45. “The Rebellion in Alcatraz Prison,” Dallas (TX) Times-Herald, September 29, 1937.
46. “No Pity for Convicts,” Rapid City (SD) Journal, October 1, 1937.
47. “Prisons Should Be Grim,” Spokane (WA) Spokesman-Review, October 2, 1937.
48. “What Happened at Alcatraz,” Kansas City (MO) Star, September 27, 1937.
CHAPTER 6
1. Conduct report, January 20, 1936, Ted Cole Alcatraz file.
2. San Francisco Examiner, December 17, 1937.
3. N. J. L. Pieper, Special-Agent-in-Charge, San Francisco FBI office, to Director FBI, January 3, 1938. This poem was found in the prison laundry.
4. J. E. Hoover, memo to E. A. Tamm, December 20, 1937.
5. M. B. Myerson, FBI report, January 7, 1938, file 76–390.
6. Ibid., p. 32.
7. A captain at Atlanta who had been a guard at Alcatraz, and in whose office one of the interviews with an inmate was conducted, told the agents that it was a complete waste of time for them to try to get information from the ex-Alcatraz inmate they had just questioned, giving an example of the man’s stoicism in the face of punishment that the captain had observed when both were at Alcatraz. FBI report by A. J. Lemaire, March 18, 1938, file 6–96.
____ had committed an infraction of the rules at Alcatraz and it was the custom of the warden there to require the prisoner to say that he was sorry. ___, because of his peculiar personality and his stubborn nature flatly refused to apologize, and as a disciplinary measure, he was put in the dungeon in chains. It was believed that such action would cause him to come about . . . he remained twenty-three days in the hole before he could be prevailed upon to say he was sorry and then it was only utter exhaustion that caused him to break.
8. San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 1941.
9. Thomas Limerick Alcatraz file.
10. James Lucas Alcatraz file.
11. Several years later, in a letter to the parole board, which must be considered self-serving since he claimed that he was an unwilling participant, Lucas provided the following account of the escape attempt:
Limerick and Franklin picked a little after one o’clock as the time the officer in charge of the shop went into the office to check his count sheet. At Alcatraz, each officer must check his men on the count sheet every thirty minutes. He also looked over the orders and stayed in the office about fifteen minutes. This routine never varied just as the officers changed places every thirty minutes on the roof and never varied. The day of the break came, Limerick said I was to work with him. At one, Mr. Cline went into his office as usual. Limerick got out a wedge he had built to hold the window open and level when he stood on it. He put it on and waited. Franklin went into the file room. He was to watch the officer patrol the back side and when he started back to the far end of the building and his back was to the window he was to walk out of the File Room. That would be the signal to go up on the roof. So that was the reason Franklin was in the file room. We stood on the floor near the window watching for Franklin to come out of the File Room. Then as we stood on the far side of the shop under the window, Mr. Cline came out of the office and walked slowly into the File Room. I don’t know why he came out of his office so soon, he never had before. He never looked around, just walked slowly into the File Room. Maybe he went there to check on an order for supplies. I just don’t know. I told Limerick let’s put it off. His eyes were cold as ice, he shook his head. He said he didn’t notice anything meaning Mr. Cline. We waited what seemed like a million years, but was only a minute or so according to time verified at the trial. Then Franklin walked out of the File Room with a hammer in his hand. Limerick grabbed my arm. Let’s go he said, and crawled . . . out the window and stood up on the steel sash of the window. I crawled out the other side and stood on the steel sash also. I looked up and could see the officer in the tower, his back toward us, looking over the work area. The door to the glass tower stood open. He was totally unaware to what was creeping up behind him. I was supposed to help Limerick cut the barb wire. Franklin was below us now waiting to crawl out the window as soon as one of us went up. Before I could put up my hand and pretend to cut the wire, Limerick cut through two strands. I had to act fast as the officer was still sitting unaware of anything. As Limerick cut the third strand, I lifted my foot and kicked out one of the windows. I looked up at the officer, he never moved, my heart fell. Below Franklin jerked my pants leg. As he held one pant leg, I rested that foot on the steel sash of the window and kicked another pane of glass out. The window was only 3 panes wide. I looked up. The officer heard that one break. He slowly turned around and looked back. Limerick was crawling up on the roof. He stood up and charged the tower throwing everything he could at the tower. The officer kicked the door shut and he barely had time to bring his gun into action. At that time, the other officer was on the far side of the building getting ready to move a scaffold for workers putting in new steel. I got up on the roof and Mr. Stites was firing at everything and everybody. I was barely able to save my life by crawling under the tower. Limerick was killed at the door. Franklin came flying into action and charged the door and struck several times against the glass with a blood stained hammer. He was shot down and he struck again and again with the hammer. After everything was over, they dragged me out from under the tower. . . . I thought all there would be was an attempt to escape against me. But I wound up being tried for murder. The very thing I sacrificed myself to avoid. There was no plan to kill Mr. Cline, he just walked out into the room where there was a man who already had a life sentence in Alabama for murder. At the trial, I asked Franklin why he killed Mr. Cline and he said when Mr. Cline came into the room, he tried to tie him, but was resisted. He said Mr. Cline reached for his sap. Franklin said he hit him several times with his hammer before he fell.
12. San Francisco News, November 1, 1938.
13. San Francisco Examiner, November 7, 1938.
14. San Francisco Examiner, November 1, 1938.
15. “Alcatraz Killer Held Sane,” San Francisco Examiner, October 29, 1938.
16. Cline’s unpopularity with the inmates was noted by Alvin Karpis. Karpis, as told to Robert Livesey, On the Rock: Twenty-Five Years in Alcatraz (New York: Beaufort Books, 1980), 102:
Screw Cline stands six feet, four inches tall and brags openly of the “wetbacks” he had killed on the Texas Border Patrol. Every time a fight breaks out in the yard, he charges into the midst of the squabbling cons laying them out left and right with his “billy.” His brutal actions inevitably initiate a chorus of boos from onlooking cons; he is hated for his sadistic streak.
Harmon Waley, in a note written to the author on April 12, 1982, regarding this escape attempt, commented, “Cline said to the inmates in the yard one day that he’d be glad to shoot all the men in Alcatraz if someone would pay for the shells; he wouldn’t pay for it because they weren’t worth that much—even dead. He used to take his sap [blackjack] out and pat it on his hand—Limerick patted him on the head with a hammer!”
17. San Francisco Examiner, November 5, 1938.
18. San Francisco Examiner, November 15, 1938.
19. AP release, November 26, 1938.
20. Dale Stamphill’s account and all of his comments are taken from daylong interviews with the author, April 23, 1981, and October 15, 1995.
21. Henry Young, as told to George Dillon in “One Hour Pass from Hell,” Cavalier Magazine, February 4, 1962, 72. Young said of Dock Barker, “He was one of America’s most dangerous men. I knew, however, that he was determined and ruthless and that once he started on anything, nothing could stop him but death. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have with me on a break from Alcatraz.”
22. The escapees hid some of the tools within toilet drains. The tools were attached to long strings and then lowered into the drain until they came to rest in the necks of turns in the pipes. The strings floated upward within arm’s reach, but out of the sight of any guard who looked into toilet bowls during shakedowns. It was important for the inmates to dispose of their tools, not so much to avoid detection, but to keep the staff from uncovering evidence that an escape attempt was in progress and thus launching a search that would likely discover bars that had been cut and replaced.
23. N.J.L. Pieper, Special-Agent-in-Charge, San Francisco. FBI investigation file, January 14, 1939, pp. 36–37.
24. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
25. Ibid., pp. 20–21.
26. Warden Johnston notified the surviving member of Barker’s family, his father, of the violent death of another son. Johnston was advised by George Barker—“Bury Arthur Barker there. Please send me location of grave to be moved later.” On January 17, 1939, Barker was buried in Mount Olive Cemetery in San Francisco. A memo from Chaplain Hunter to Johnston reported that, with the business manager and several funeral home and cemetery employees present, “I read a brief service which consisted of some verses of scripture and a prayer. . . . I feel that we gave Barker a decent and respectable burial.”
27. Pieper FBI investigation file, p. 35.
28. James V. Bennett to James A. Johnston, January 18, 1939, “Alcatraz: Escape Procedure,” PR-G.
29. Memo to Attorney General, January 14, 1939; FBI investigation file, pp. 5–6. The agents incorrectly blamed the metal detection system for allowing the escapees’ tools into the cell house, since the paraphernalia was hidden in a razor-sharpening machine and brought to the cell house by an unknowing guard.
30. Special-Agent-in-Charge Pieper to J. Edgar Hoover, January 16, 1939, p. 1.
31. Ibid., pp. 7–8.
32. The search of the industries area, described as “an unlimited source of materials for escape tools,” produced a miter box saw (a rectangular saw with a handle high on the blades placed in a wooden frame in order to cut wood evenly at a 45-degree angle), a putty knife sharpened on one side to a knife-blade edge with the other edge converted into a saw, a thin steel bar that had been made into a saw edge on one side, and two pieces of heavy wire some thirty inches in length with the ends curved, devices that could be used to push or pull objects from any area or from one cell to another. The shakedown also turned up two hacksaw blades; and another handscrew jack or bar spreader was found on the top of D block.
33. Pieper to J. Edgar Hoover, p. 14.
34. J. Edgar Hoover to James V. Bennett, January 24, 1939.
35. E. A. Tamm, memo to Director [Hoover], March 29, 1939. According to the coroner as quoted on January 26, 1939, in the San Francisco News, “the inquest . . . shows that Alcatraz is not ‘impregnable’ against the super-cunning of the men caged there, the Rock is dynamite in our Bay!”
36. Henry Young Alcatraz file.
37. James V. Bennett to J. A. Johnston, January 4, 1940.
38. James A. Johnston to Director, BOP, January 29, 1940. Johnston wrote in the genteel style typical of communications between the director and the warden during this period when Bureau headquarters increasingly sought to exercise more and more influence over an administrator accustomed to running his own show, but about whose administrative abilities Bureau officials were becoming increasingly concerned.
CHAPTER 7
1. “Alcatraz Horrors Doom Men, Ex-Convict Says”; “Alcatraz Silence ‘Breaks’ Toughest Gangsters: Machine Gun Kelly Through Bragging; Karpis Is Cracking, Human Beings Can’t Endure ‘the Rock’ ”; “Riots and Bloodshed Are Forecast at Alcatraz; Convicts Can’t Win But Silence Is Worse than Machine Guns; The Rock a Barrel of Dynamite with Tough Warden Sitting on Lid,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 29, 30, December 1, 1937. Because no news organization had been allowed to take photographs after federal prisoners arrived, the Inquirer illustrated its series with a photo from the Warner Brothers movie Alcatraz Island.
2. Alexander Kendrick, editorial, Philadelphia Inquirer, December 4, 1937.
3. Roy Gardner to J. V. Bennett, June 7, 1938, Gardner Alcatraz file.
4. “Roy Gardner Quits Prison,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, June 17, 1938.
5. First draft of Hellcatraz, 1–2, Gardner file. His book’s full title is Hell-catraz: The Rock of Despair, The Tomb of the Living Dead (n.p., 1939). For an expanded description of Gardner’s life and federal prison experience see Roy Gardner, My Life Story, Hellcatraz, ed. Tom Ryan (n.p.: Douglas/Ryan Communication, 2000).
6. “Gardner Quits Prison.”
7. E. J. Miller, Acting Warden, to Director, BOP, February 28, 1939.
8. J. A. Johnston to Director, BOP, July 19, 1940.
9. Ibid. The variety of food given to Alcatraz convicts underscores the administration’s determination not to allow that feature of the regime to become a source of protest. It should also be noted that during the 1930s and 1940s employees were served the same food. No staff member or inmate interviewed for this project registered a complaint about the quantity or the quality of food.
10. Ibid., p. 2.
11. In March 1941 guards discovered that an inmate had managed to manufacture a couple of “crude” guns and have them smuggled past the metal detectors into the cell house. For obvious reasons, no contraband found on the island attracted as much staff attention as a gun, or the parts of a gun. A March 1941 statement by inmate William Dainard, the rap partner of Harmon Waley in the Weyerhaeuser kidnapping, that he knew where two guns were hidden produced an immediate response from Deputy Warden E. J. Miller. Dainard was upset over the length of his sentence, which was twenty years longer than Waley’s. He became severely depressed, and two months after he arrived at McNeil Island he tried to commit suicide three times within a week. He was transferred to Leavenworth, where he was certified as having “an unsound mind” and sent on to the Springfield Medical Center, where he remained for two and a half years. Dainard was returned to Leavenworth, but in July he was shipped off to Alcatraz, due to his lengthy sentence, the nature of his offense, the detainers held against him, and the view that he was a “dangerous, hardened criminal and a potential escape risk.”
Dainard’s note to Deputy Warden Miller stated that he knew where two guns were hidden and would provide information as to their whereabouts if Miller would promise to get him a pardon. The subsequent investigation revealed that Dainard “had manufactured two firearms, hidden them in his cell, and concocted the story to bargain for a sentence reduction.” For this ruse, Dainard was sent to disciplinary segregation, where he remained for seven years and four months. (This period included Dainard’s loss of 1,300 days of good time for destroying property in D block. In December 1946 Dainard was charged with conspiring with guard Oscar Eastin to have Eastin smuggle some contraband in to him, Copenhagen snuff.)
The discovery of these guns, described by Warden Johnston as “very crude, of doubtful practicability, nevertheless fashioned with devilish ingenuity,” was a matter of concern because Dainard had never been out of the cell house; the gun barrels therefore had to have been molded in the industries and workshop area and smuggled into the cell house by another inmate, revealing, once again, that the metal detectors had been foiled by the use of brass, a feature of which the inmates were clearly awa
re. Warden Johnston swore the senior staff to secrecy about the discovery of the guns to keep the information from reaching the San Francisco newspapers. Dainard Alcatraz file.
12. James V. Bennett, to Attorney General, June 14, 1939. Bennett claimed that using Alcatraz as a facility for “the lame, the halt, and the blind” would be consistent with the island’s earlier use “as a health resort and sanitarium for enlisted men and officers returning from the Orient.” Apparently, the director had missed the sight of his own guards, as well as the inmates, bundled up in heavy overcoats and huddled in the less windy corners of the prison yard seeking relief from the persistent cold winds and frequent dense fogs of San Francisco Bay.
13. Ibid., pp. 1–2.
14. Gardner file.
15. United Press International (UPI) release, San Francisco, January 11, 1940, ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. R. W. Gaynor, attempted interview with McCain, E. J. Miller, 10:45 A.M., December 3, 1940, Young Alcatraz file.
18. San Francisco Chronicle, February 12, 1941.
19. Warden Johnston wrote to Director Bennett describing the defense strategy: “They plan a defense based on psychological reasoning; theorizing that a man imprisoned for a long term and restricted in privileges and confined either in solitary or in isolation over a long period undergoes a mental and emotional strain so that when taunted or abused or threatened as they will indicate he was by McCain, he was seized with a sudden or irresistible impulse over which he had no control and that at the moment of the crime he was psychologically unconscious.” April 16, 1941.
20. San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 1941.
21. Edited transcript of the Henry Young trial prepared for Bureau headquarters by A. H. Connor, Commissioner of Prisoner Industries, pp. 8–9.
22. “Hard Rock Criminals to Attend Trial,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 16, 1941.
23. Waley interview in 1980.
24. San Francisco Examiner, April 24, 1941. Waley told the author that denial of aspirin was not the issue in the incident he described in the trial: “Coming out of the dungeon I refused to go for no books, letters, one meal a day, and no tobacco in D block. I told them to take my clothes, cut off my water and food, and go to hell. They force-fed me. Lt. Culver had a guard hold each arm while he tried to hit me with his fist. I ducked my head so he’d hit my forehead and I think he broke his thumb on it. They took me to the hospital and put me in a straight sheet in bed.” Written commentary by Harmon Waley on a copy of the edited transcript of Young trial.
