by Jack Lynch
“And the warden approves of all this?”
“Not exactly approves, but he’s already under great pressure from Sacramento. The women hostages, you see. And I told him you weren’t a really bad person, for a private investigator. I even told him you used to work for The Chronicle yourself. He’s willing to give it a try.”
“All right, Casey, I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Where are you?”
“In the warden’s office. You turn off the highway just before the approach span to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.”
“I know the way, Casey. See you in a little.”
I didn’t take the time for a shower, but ran the electric razor over my face, dressed, grabbed up toilet articles and threw them and a few other things into a bag, including the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver and a box of shells. They would never let any of that junk inside the walls, but that wasn’t where it would be needed. Casey had mentioned somebody’s family problems, and I had no idea where the family was. Too many times I’d dashed on out into the world with minimal preparations and paid dearly for it, either in comfort or security. One thing I’d learned over the years, you never take lightly the phone calls that come in the middle of the night.
My office is in San Francisco but my apartment is in Sausalito, down along the bay just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. San Quentin prison wasn’t all that far away. It sits on a little promontory about five miles north of Sausalito, overlooking the bay. Along its southern edge is a narrow inlet, where gaily painted white-and-blue passenger ferries haul Marin County commuters between the landing at Larkspur and the city’s financial district. Despite perimeter fences topped with barbed wire and the guard towers, San Quentin, from the outside, doesn’t really look all that much like a state prison. The dormitories are long, two-story concrete buildings painted a cheery tan color, with long vertical windows trimmed in red. It helps mask the problems inside the prison from neighbors living in one of the most affluent counties in not only California, but the country at large.
San Quentin is old. More than 130 years old. It was built in 1852 and filled to capacity immediately with 2,800 convicts who until then had been housed in rotting ships off Angel Island, out in the bay. Today it is a maximum security unit that holds problem inmates, although that is a relative term. This year there were 3,400 of those people in San Quentin, 1,200 of them serving time for murder. Many of them were vicious, more than a few of them a little psychotic when they arrived, with others becoming that way cooped up together two men to a cell that was six feet wide and nine feet long. You can measure out that amount of space in your own home, six feet wide, nine feet long, then imagine the amount of that space taken up by double-deck bunks, footlockers, a toilet and sink. Then pretend that unless you are one of the lucky 30 percent or so with a prison job, you will have to spend the next two years, or ten years or longer with another man in that space for twenty out of twenty-four hours a day, and you can get a glimmer of the sort of problems that can brew inside those gaily colored outer walls toward which homeward-bound commuters lift martini glasses in toasts as they glide past on the Larkspur ferry.
San Quentin also has its own prison within a prison. That’s the north cell block, a place called the adjustment center. The lower floor houses the worst of the troublemakers, who are kept segregated from the rest of the prison population. The upper floor is home to the men condemned to die. Accommodations for the condemned are relatively posh. Those people are housed one to a cell, and while they don’t get an hour a day out in the big yard, they do get exercise periods up on the north cell block roof, while the apple-green gas chamber sits idle in a lower corner of the building and men and women sitting solemnly on the highest courts of the state and nation waffle over what is and what is not a capital offense. Or whether there is such a thing even. Feelings in California, as elsewhere, were strong and divided, and perhaps that is why the courts waffled, reflecting the divided mentality of the community at large.
People have tried nearly every conceivable way to escape from San Quentin, a rare few with success. The bloodiest attempt in modern times occurred on a sunny Saturday afternoon in August 1971, when several black militant inmates led by George Jackson overpowered security officers in the adjustment center. Six men died in that attempt, three inmates and three prison guards. Jackson himself was killed in a hail of bullets fired by tower guards when he and another prisoner dashed out of the adjustment center and across a landscaped quadrangle toward an alleyway running between the activities building and prison chapel. Their goal was the twenty-foot high north wall, seventy-five yards away. Jackson staggered into the alleyway before he fell. The other prisoner hid in nearby bushes and was found there soon afterward. Clutched in Jackson’s lifeless hand was a 9mm pistol with its grip handles removed, which authorities believed was smuggled into the prison inside a tape recorder by an attorney. The attorney had visited Jackson earlier in the day and he dropped out of sight immediately after. Police across the nation searched more than a dozen years for this attorney, whom they held responsible for that bloody Saturday in August 1971 until the attorney turned himself in to authorities and protested his innocence in July of 1984.
The successful escape attempts rarely rate even a paragraph or two in the daily newspapers. Most are executed by very foolish men, those with little time left to serve, well behaved, with trustee status and the privilege to roam over the prison farm or industrial area outside the main prison walls. They climb a fence and walk away and aren’t missed until the evening body count. It’s very easy, but most of them are recaptured, eventually, and are brought back to serve time that is very hard, in a cell six feet wide, nine feet long, with another man, for twenty hours a day.
The outer gate guard was expecting me and I drove on in and parked in front of the administration building. The pie crust walls of San Quentin were brightly illuminated by outside floodlights. Lights were burning in the administration building as well. A couple of television news vans were parked out front. The cameramen would have shot outside footage of the walls and guard towers and administration building hours earlier. Now they were hunched down in their vans with engines running to keep warm against the near-dawn chill and wisps of fog drifting in off the bay.
Half a dozen newsmen lounged around the reception area. I identified myself to a khaki-clad woman at a desk and was passed on through the building to the warden’s office.
Casey Martin sat dozing on a worn leather sofa along one wall of the office. He looked like a senatorial patriarch, out of gas and run-down. He was a man of medium height with a spreading belly that rode comfortably on his stocky body. His thick gray hair was trimmed close to his head, just slightly longer than a military crew cut. The veins on his nose attested to the hours he’d spent with elbows on the bar talking to cops in joints across the street from the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street, and the closed eyes, rolled-up sleeves, unknotted necktie and rumpled sports jacket tossed to one side indicated the hours he’d spent that night at San Quentin.
I ignored a nearby aide who rose to go through the formalities and crossed to the warden, who was seated behind a wooden desk as old as the sofa. Barry Thompson was one of the few black men to have held the post of warden of San Quentin. He’d spent his professional lifetime in the California prison system before getting the post, and the crow’s-feet around his almond eyes, the gray-flecks in his modest Afro and the wary expression on his face showed every minute of that career.
His expression was one of distaste. For me, for his office, for the prison, and maybe for himself, for allowing the present situation to develop inside a place that was his responsibility.
I showed him the photostat of my license. “Casey phoned me. He said I might be able to help.”
Thompson leaned forward to study the plastic-enclosed card, then sat back and made a somber appraisal of me, the way he might of a new inmate, as the wardens in old prison movies always did. I doubted if they did that anymore, or ever really had. With 3
,400 inmates he wouldn’t have time to greet newcomers. Besides, if a man was impressionable enough to be swayed by anything the warden had to say to him, he wouldn’t have been sent to San Quentin in the first place. Also, in the old movies the warden was never nervous. Thompson was rolling a pencil around in his hand like he was trying to warm it up.
He grunted finally, turned in his swivel chair toward the sofa and crossed his long legs. “Mr. Martin, the man you telephoned is here.”
He said it in a penetrating voice. Casey came awake with a snort and blinked in the overhead lights.
“Ah, Peter, what took you so long?” He grinned up at me, scratching his side. I crossed over and sat down beside him.
“What’s going on?”
Casey turned toward the warden. “You want to explain things, Barry?”
Thompson stared at the two of us a moment before shifting his weight and stretching his arms. He wore a soft flannel gray suit with a pale blue shirt and white knit tie. He was a good-looking man and dressed well. He looked as if he belonged in the executive offices of someplace far better than a prison, this warden.
“Be my guest, Mr. Martin. You know some of it better than I do.”
Casey grunted and reached for his sports jacket. He was of the old school, Casey was. He rolled down his sleeves, shrugged into the jacket and adjusted his necktie before saying what he had to say. The aide and two other men in the room, an older one in khaki, a younger one in civilian garb, exchanged glances at the old newsman’s peculiar habits. They didn’t understand how it was with men who had been senior police reporters for years at the Hall of Justice in San Francisco. Informally, in the third-floor press room, they called the hall the cop house, and that wasn’t a bad name for it. It was home and headquarters to a two-thousand-member paramilitary force that dressed correctly and carried itself properly. If you were a newsman stationed there you were their guest. And if you wanted to be posted there long enough to gain their confidence in the squad rooms, the captain’s offices or—as often was the case—in the bars across the street, you also dressed correctly and conducted yourself properly.
“This is all taking place in the activities building,” Casey began, “over on the other side of the little plot of grass just inside the main sally port. There were several inmates there engaged in various projects along with a number of civilian volunteers conducting classes in this and that and, of course, a few correctional officers here and there.”
I nodded. Correctional officers was what guards liked to call themselves these days inside California prisons.
“Among the inmates there,” said Casey, “were four men who’d known each other for a number of years before they made the joint. They all were members, or probably still are members, of an outlaw motorcycle club. Cherubs, they call themselves. Those four were charter members. Used to be Hell’s Angels, but got in some sort of beef over God knows what, and broke away to form their own group. Whatever the fight was about, it wasn’t on account of any of them being too namby-pamby. They’re all of them tough men.
“Two of these Cherubs were prison trustees, serving up to six years for various drug violations. As you might know, Peter, the conduct of these people—Cherubs or Angels, either one—is usually exemplary while serving time in jail or prison. Not because they’re any softer than the rest of these birds—they’re just smarter, usually. Anyway, the Cherub trustees were sweeping out the area, just before closing-up time in late afternoon. The other two were there on various errands. The four of them congregated in a section at the north end of the building where two civilian women were preparing to leave for the day when whammo! One of the Cherub trustees produced a pistol and took the women hostage.”
There was an audible sigh from Warden Thompson. He raised one hand and let it fall back onto the arm of his chair. Casey ignored it.
“They started to make their way toward the building entrance, the four inmates and the two hostages. Then they ducked into a general assembly room where one of them had earlier hidden a long coil of nylon line and a crudely fashioned grappling hook. When they entered the assembly room they surprised two correctional officers over by a coffee urn. The officers didn’t see any gun. The man holding that was still in the hallway. But the two officers did see the women and the stricken looks on their faces. They brought out their tear gas canisters and tried to subdue the men. The both of them were disarmed of their canisters and beaten up some. One of them was severely whacked around the head by the man with the pistol, who’d joined the others by then. I think the injured man is in a coma. He still was unconscious when I was in there, a couple of hours ago.”
I blinked. “You were in there?”
“Yes, Peter. They sent for me. How in God’s name do you think I learned so much? Now keep still and let me finish.”
He reached inside a jacket pocket and brought out a small silver flask, uncapped it and took a brief drink. The warden looked away. Casey didn’t offer to pass it around. This was no cocktail party.
“Now there were seven of them,” said Casey, recapping the flask, “the four Cherubs, the two women and the ambulatory guard. They left the unconscious man in the assembly room. But as they continued down the corridor into the lobby they had a surprise waiting for them. Two correctional officers, armed with a shotgun and rifle, were manning an armored guard cage near the front door. It’s usually empty, just a holdover from the days right after the bloody George Jackson escape try. But this time it was manned, and the Cherubs came under fire despite the hostages. Hostages don’t mean all that much in this place. Civilians are made to understand that before they go behind the walls.”
I glanced at Warden Thompson. He sat impassively, rolling the pencil.
“One of the Cherubs was hit in the arm, but the officers had opened fire a little too soon. The would-be escape party made a hasty retreat. On their way back down the hall, two of them went in and got the unconscious officer in the assembly room. They dragged him back with them to the rooms at the deep end of the corridor. That’s where they are now. The main room is used for small group meetings. There are two other rooms off that, one a bathroom, the other a small office. I didn’t get in there, so I don’t know just where the hostages are. There’s a big round mirror mounted in the ceiling at the end of the corridor, like those anti-theft mirrors hung in supermarkets. Officers have a movable barricade about twenty yards up the corridor. They can’t see much of what’s going on in the discussion room, but the convicts inside can keep an eye on the corridor, up as far as the barricade. I understand that for the first twenty or thirty minutes after that bit of excitement there was a general commotion throughout this, ahem, fine institution. Alarms, lockdowns in the dormitories, body counts, much running around…”
“Amen, amen, I say to you…” murmured the warden.
Casey told quite a story. The room was silent. “What sort of family problem does the man inside have?”
Casey shook his head. “I’d rather he told you about that himself. It’s better than having it filtered through me. I might have missed something, or read it the wrong way.”
“What sort of men are they?”
“The ringleader, Beau Bancetti, is the only one I talked with. The others only seemed to be backing up his play. Though he appears forceful enough himself to require little backing up. He’s a determined young man. At least, that was my impression.”
“And you didn’t see the hostages?”
“Nope. I asked to, but they wouldn’t let me. I had to do my talking from the corridor, through the partly open door.”
I got up to stretch my legs and take a turn around the room. The warden was slumped deeply in his chair. “Do you know the men?” I asked him.
“Not really. I have their jackets here,” he told me, jabbing the pencil toward several folders on the desk in front of him. “But they’ve never done anything to come to my attention. All four have kept their noses clean up to now. I wouldn’t have thought they belonged in this par
ticular prison, even, from their behavior before today—or yesterday, rather.”
“Why are they in this particular prison?”
“Because of some very rough-and-tumble activities on the outside before they were arrested and convicted, finally. They all four are here for local dealing in cocaine and heroin. But earlier, one of them was arrested for suspicion of homicide, in connection with the garroting of a Hell’s Angel. He wasn’t convicted of that one. Another of them has served time for rape and multiple assault. All of them were considered dangerous enough to be here, not somewhere else.”
“But since they were here,” I said, “how did they ever get their hands on a gun?”
Thompson rose slowly behind the desk, his eyes never leaving mine. “The same way they get any other contraband material, Mr. Bragg. I have more than seven hundred correctional officers in this institution. I suspect not each and every one of them is totally loyal to the California Department of Corrections. And other people routinely pass in and out. Attorneys, family, service personnel, newspaper people, civilian volunteers who conduct workshops for the men, like the two women now being held. We screen them as best we can, but the best isn’t always foolproof. If a man concentrates hard enough, he sometimes can figure out a way, somebody he can bribe, perhaps. In the course of one day, Mr. Bragg, I might have a hundred or more custodial problems on my mind. An inmate bent on escape has only one. Which of us do you think has the better chance, given enough time. And these men have plenty of time.”
“No offense, Warden. I just wondered if you knew.”
“No, I do not know.”
We might have been the only two men in the room. There wasn’t a peep from the others.
“Were you here at the time?”
“Not quite. I’d been home since midday, packing for a long weekend away from here. My wife and I had been looking forward to it for the past month. But some things came up. I spent most of the afternoon on the phone to Sacramento. I was still there when the trouble started.”
