Alcatraz (18 page)

Warden Johnston refused to answer any press inquiries until the day after the inmates arrived. With officers armed with rifles and submachine guns evident at every station on the train’s route and with the Coast Guard boat and the prison launch providing armed escorts as the barge holding the prison cars made its way to Alcatraz Island, it was not surprising that reporters interpreted these sights and symbols as indicators of the dangerousness of the cargo. A
San Francisco Examiner
headline read “Bringing Sinister Cargo Here: Prison Train at Devil’s Island” and
The San Francisco Call Bulletin
exclaimed, “Rush Capone and Enemy to Alcatraz ‘Devil’s Isle.’”
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In his statement to the press, Johnston, following a directive from Bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C., refused to identify a single rider on the prison train:

No one is going to know the identity of the prisoners housed here, nor even the numbers they go by. . . . We are not even going to let the outside world know to which duties they have been assigned . . . [the inmates] . . . are not even going to have an opportunity to know what goes on outside. . . . Those men were sent here because the government wants to break their contacts with the underworld. That is going to be done.
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The press also sought to describe the experience of arriving at Alcatraz from the perspective of the inmates. The impact of seeing their new home, they
reported, was powerful from the moment prisoners first viewed the “island fortress.” With no firsthand information to support its contention, the
San Francisco Chronicle
printed a picture of Al Capone under the heading “Ex-Mogul of Underworld Cracks at Island Bastille” and went on to say,

He couldn’t take it—Al Capone, whose iron nerve he boasted would never break, cracked when he viewed the escape-proof ramparts of Alcatraz yesterday. . . . Sagging shoulders and listless eyes told only too plainly that [his] first view of the prison confirmed penitentiary grapevine reports that any attempt to flee Alcatraz would be worse than futile.
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In contrast, Ruey Eaton’s account of his initial impression of Alcatraz provides a more accurate account of the inmates’ first day on the island:

Well, it was a relief to dock at Alcatraz and get off on the island. We were about as worn out a bunch as you could ever see. We could hardly recognize each other, we were so dusty and dirty. . . . I guess the women and children looking down from their apartments on the cliffs above the docks thought we were some kind of wild animals being unloaded on the island. We were marched into a small yard from which the guards would take us two at a time in the cell block for a bath, a number, and a cell. I thought I would freeze to death while I was waiting. That fine California weather the fellow had told me about was about to kill me. . . . Finally we all got inside. . . . We each had a separate cell, small but clean. I was pleased to have a cell by myself. When we went in for our first meal, we saw how tight security was. The kitchen was barred off from the mess hall and when we were inside the hall the great steel doors were locked. Guards were on catwalks outside the windows and another guard was in a gun cage over the door. We knew they had tommy guns. Ten men were seated at each table, five on each side. Gas cylinders hung from the ceilings above about every other table. In addition a guard was stationed at every second table. We were told that there would be no talking at the table except to ask that bread be passed. The meal was far better than any we had in Atlanta. But at Alcatraz there were no radios, no newspapers, no commissary where we might buy candy, toothpaste, or cigarettes. All of these we had at Atlanta. Already we felt lonely with nothing to hear but the sad sound of fog horns.
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Robert Baker, the first guard hired by Warden Johnston, described the arrival of the first large shipment of inmates:

The Atlanta inmates came on a train from Tiburon, they brought these railcars over on a Southern Pacific Railroad barge, and they brought them all chained up. When they got to Alcatraz, the Coast Guard and the police boats and our boats, and we were lined up with machine guns, .45 automatics,
and pistols. We walked the prisoners up the street and through that little round tunnel [in the back of the yard]. We walked them by the hill [guard] tower, and then down the road past what we call the road tower. Then they went up the steps into the yard; it was cold and windy and miserable and they were pooping their britches—they’d been on that railway car for five days. Then they went up the steps to the cell house. The warden was sitting right there, opposite Broadway [the corridor between B and C blocks] where you go into the kitchen. One guard was assigned to one convict—I guess they don’t call them convicts now—but we call them convicts. The warden gave them a number and we took them down to the basement and they threw the coveralls away and we stood there and watched them take a shower. We gave them clothing, took them upstairs, put them in cells and locked the door.

Warden Johnston was sitting there and he asked the guys, “Who are you and what’s your name?” Capone made a big splash about “You know who I am,” and then he finally said, “I am Al Capone.” The warden said, “Well, you’re now number 85.”
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Several days after the arrival of the inmates from Atlanta, Warden Johnston was notified that he would shortly receive eight additional prisoners. District of Columbia officials at Lorton Reformatory had asked that seven ringleaders of a food strike “and other trouble” be transferred to the Bureau of Prisons. Ordinarily troublemakers from a lower-security facility would have been sent to Atlanta or Leavenworth, but the Bureau was looking for candidates for its new prison and it had been decided to send these men, along with one inmate from the Washington, D.C., Asylum and Jail, directly to Alcatraz.
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Johnston was told to expect his largest shipment on September 4, 103 inmates from Leavenworth and the Leavenworth Annex. Experience with the Atlanta shipment indicated that because the ankles of some men had become swollen from the leg irons, a physician was needed on the train to make such adjustments as were necessary for medical reasons; it was also decided that drinking water could be provided by a pail and dipper circulated through the cars rather than having inmates leave their seats under restraints to go to a faucet. The Leavenworth prison train arrived on the scheduled day at 6:00
A.M
. at Ferry Point in Richmond in the East Bay.
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From here, the railroad barge, escorted by a Coast Guard cutter and the prison launch, transported the three coaches containing the prisoners to the island. Once again the warden sent a telegram to Bureau headquarters announcing that another 103 crates of furniture had arrived in good condition and had been unpacked. Alcatraz was in business.

By early September 1934, 210 prisoners comprised the population on the island. As Warden Johnston reviewed their records, he must have concluded that they were an odd assemblage. First of all, there were the thirty-two military prisoners (inmates nos. 1–32) who had remained imprisoned on Alcatraz when the War Department transferred the island to the Department of Justice. Ten of these men had been convicted of sodomy while in the military; another had killed his homosexual lover; two others had been convicted of rape; one had a prior sexual assault on a minor female; and another had assaulted his wife (and threatened to “make hamburger out of her” when he got out of prison). Fifteen of the military prisoners were serving time for robbery (all small-time compared to the bank, post office, and train robberies committed by the federal prisoners); and three other men had been convicted of larceny, counterfeiting, and forgery. One military prisoner had been convicted of shooting a Japanese merchant while stationed in Hawaii.
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The records of the military prisoners hardly fit the description of the population intended for Alcatraz and several of these men would file protests of their detention in, as one prisoner’s petition put it, “a penitentiary for habitual criminals and insidious menaces to society.”
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The military prisoners had been very apprehensive about the arrival of the real convicts coming from Atlanta and Leavenworth. Those convicted of sodomy, rape, and sexual molestation were particularly fearful as they anticipated—correctly—that the gangsters, bank robbers, and prison escape artists soon to arrive would hold hostile views of homosexuals and men who sexually assaulted women and children. Warden Johnston recognized that these prisoners were out of place but took the position that he needed a core of nondangerous, compliant workers for the kitchen and the laundry, and to provide housekeeping and cooking services in his home. The military prisoners kept to themselves as much as possible when the federal prisoners arrived, and few posed disciplinary problems. About fourteen months after the trains arrived, nine were shipped off to McNeil Island; within three and a half years, all had been released or transferred.
²⁴

Similarly, the first contingent of fourteen McNeil Island prisoners (inmates nos. 33–46) did not contain any big-shot gangsters or notable prison management problems. Prior to the opening of Alcatraz, most of these men would have been sent to Leavenworth or Atlanta. Eleven, however, had plotted escapes or had actually tried to escape from McNeil Island
or other jails or prisons. Most were described as “agitators” and “desperadoes,” men who were “willing to do anything to gain freedom.” They had sentences of ten years or longer in most cases, but two had only three-year terms. Their lack of even regional notoriety was evident in the ability of the Bureau of Prisons to effect their transfer to Alcatraz without the public noticing, and the inability of the press to identify any prisoner in the shipment after they had been “installed” on the island.

Nor did the troublemakers from the District of Columbia’s Lorton Reformatory (inmates nos. 47–54) fit the criteria established for Alcatraz prisoners. Prior to August 1934 they would have been transferred to the penitentiaries at Lewisburg or Atlanta. Like the McNeil Island and military prisoners, they were sent to Alcatraz only to help fill out the population. The same was true of some of the transfers from Atlanta and Leavenworth who had nevertheless made it through the BOP’s filtering process.

Rounding out the list of inmates who arguably did not fit the Alcatraz criteria were seven inmates from the Leavenworth Annex. One man, Roy Gardner, showing some naïveté about the regime awaiting him on the Rock, actually requested the transfer to Alcatraz. He was well known in California for his earlier exploits as a train robber and for three successful escapes from federal custody. Despite this history, he had posed “no trouble from a disciplinary or custodial standpoint” at the Annex. Indeed, the warden had praised him as “a conscientious workman” who taught other inmates in the electrical school and appeared “to be sincere in his desire to rehabilitate himself.”
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Gardner requested the move partly because he was offended not to be included on the original lists of America’s most accomplished desperadoes and escape artists, but more important because his wife and other relatives lived close by in the Napa Valley. The other Annex volunteers included a trusty, the institution’s head baker, a clerical worker whose only fault was described as an “insolent attitude and inclination toward conniving and possession of contraband,” a man whose disciplinary record indicated that he had been found intoxicated “and would probably become so again if the opportunity presented itself,” and two prisoners said to pose no disciplinary or custodial problems, but they had “long criminal records.”
²⁶

It was customary for a prison—particularly a newly opened prison—to have a contingent of nonproblematic prisoners to take care of basic institutional maintenance tasks, such as working in the laundry and the kitchen and serving as janitors and hospital attendants. These men provided a bit of leavening in a larger population of prisoners who posed more serious custodial problems. But as Alcatraz opened, the proportion
of inmates who did not meet the Bureau’s own criteria of notoriety, dangerousness, and escape potential represented well over one-third of the Alcatraz population. Up to the time the prison ceased operations thirty years later, there would always be men whose confinement at Alcatraz violated the official criteria; most fell into the nuisance category and some during the last decade of the prison’s operation were simply convenient commitments of men convicted on the West Coast. There never were anywhere near 250 men in the federal prison system at any one period from 1934 to 1963 whose criminal and prison records could match the imagery of the press or the official pronouncements of the Department of Justice.

Despite the fact that some Alcatraz prisoners fell short of being notorious, desperate, escape-prone, or dangerous, most had records and reputations that justified these labels. The men collected together on the Rock in the autumn of 1934 made up the most complete assemblage of infamous outlaws, kidnappers, gangsters, murderers, and escape artists the country had ever seen. This became even more true in subsequent years, as more notorious criminals were captured and prosecuted or committed acts in other prisons that earned them a transfer to Alcatraz.

Al Capone and George Kelly were names well known to the press and the public, but the passengers on the first prison trains included a remarkable collection of lesser-known gang members who were the associates or partners of notorious bank robbers who couldn’t be sent to prison themselves because they had fallen in gun battles with police, sheriffs, or G-men. From Chicago, in addition to Capone, came five members of the Roger Touhy gang and two members of Bugs Moran’s organization. From New York, there were five members of Dutch Schultz’s West Side gang. They were joined by ten members of the Barker-Karpis mob, three leaders and one member of Detroit’s Purple Gang, seven associates of Harvey Bailey and Kelly, five members of the Irish O’Malley gang, and two partners each of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Even several aging members of the old Frank Nash–Al Spencer gang settled down on the Rock with long sentences ahead of them. Gordon Alcorn, kidnapper of Charles Boettcher, and Frank Mulloy, Richard Gallatas, and Herbert Farmer—convicted of conspiring to free Frank Nash in the Union Station massacre—had seats on the first train from Leavenworth as well.