Alcatraz (41 page)

We figured that we had to do something right now. [Joe] figured we could grab one of those dump trucks, and then pull the bed up and have them go ahead and shoot at the back of the bed while we went over the hill. It was really a spur of the moment thing. Where Joe was working I could watch out the window of the tailor shop. He gave me a signal; I jumped up and went out. We grabbed the inmate driver and told him that we were taking the truck. He said “Go ahead” so we took the truck—it was half loaded with lumber.

I drove. I laid down as far as I could on the seat and Joe scooted down on the floor and held the gas pedal down with his hand while I did the shifting. We hit the middle of the gate and dumped that lumber right in the gate area. I guess we were kind of lucky from what I heard because the
man in the tower got so excited that when he went to throw a shell into his rifle he pulled the whole bolt out, bullets and all. He didn’t get a shot fired. We left the truck and hid out—that’s a big island and it was four days before they found us.

Because they were regarded as such serious escape risks, Kyle and Cretzer were locked up in isolation cells until they were taken to Tacoma for trial on escape charges. They were held in a detention cell in the office of the U.S. marshal there. As Kyle told the author,

While they were trying us for escape we seen a chance that we could get this marshal’s gun and we might get away. So that’s what we done—we grabbed this old marshal [Artis J. Chitty], but his gun was tied down a little better than we thought. One of the guards came in and tackled all three of us (Joe and I were handcuffed together). This marshal was elderly, he gets up and of course he was real excited. He turned around for a minute, then he dropped over. He died of a heart attack. So, they charged us with second-degree murder but that sentence didn’t mean that much to us so we pleaded guilty.
¹

At the time of his sentencing, Joseph Cretzer told the judge he would rather be “a target for bullets” than be confined in prison. After he and Kyle got to Alcatraz and met Hamilton, he acted accordingly. The three men invited Lloyd Barkdoll—a physically powerful man with a reputation for taking chances—to join them and to take on the responsibility during the break of subduing guards and keeping hostages and uninvolved convicts under control.
²

The escape plan devised by Hamilton, Kyle, and Cretzer (a far more sophisticated scheme than Warden Johnston and his officers knew) was to cut through the bars in the Model Shop, aided by two elements lacking in the earlier escape attempts—a special grinding wheel to cut the bars and a speedboat that would rush in close to the island when the escapees appeared and pick them out of the water. The first feature of the plan required that the plotters induce an employee to smuggle a special cutting wheel onto the island, and the second required that they communicate with a visitor who could make arrangements for a boat to stand by on the right day at the right time.
³

To obtain the cutting wheel, the inmates prevailed upon a civilian worker who was not a member of the custodial force to help them (why he agreed to help them remains unclear). This employee brought the cutting device, a diamond-studded wheel, to the powerhouse, where he worked. It was then picked up by an inmate who brought it to the carpenter
shop in the model building, where he turned it over to Kyle and Cretzer. The motor to which the cutting wheel was to be attached was the same motor used in the mat shop with an emery wheel to smooth down the jagged ends of the wires that held together the pieces of scrap rubber that made up mats for the navy. To hold the cutting wheel high enough up the wall to reach the bars of the windows through which they were to exit, the inmates rigged a rod two feet long to which the motor could be attached. Since they knew that an ordinary emery wheel could not cut through tool-proof steel quickly enough for them to climb out a window before they would be missed at a count, all hope rested on the special diamond-studded wheel.

A greater challenge would be to communicate the plan, including the date and precise time of the break, to a family member approved to visit. Mail was censored and guards closely watched visitors and monitored their conversations with inmates. A way around this obstacle was offered by Joe Cretzer, who informed the others that since his mother and father were both deaf mutes he had learned sign language as he grew up. Furthermore, his wife, Edna, had also learned sign language during a period when Joe’s father lived with the couple. With only one visit allowed per month, it took several months for Cretzer to communicate to Edna the need for a fast motorboat to stand by, ready to move at the exact time the inmates would climb out of the model building window, clamber down the cliffs, and swim away from the island.

On May 21, 1941, the four men put their plan into action. Immediately after the 1:00
P.M
. count, Barkdoll, Kyle, and Cretzer called to Officer Clyde Stoops, telling him that a machine was out of order. When the officer came over to investigate, the prisoners grabbed his arms, hustled him into a storage room, tied him up, and gagged him. Then they overpowered three other employees and took them hostage. Meanwhile Floyd Hamilton unbolted the grinding wheel and motor from the workshop table, attached it to the extension rod the men had devised, substituted the diamond-studded cutting grinder for the emery wheel, climbed up on a stool, turned on the machine, and began cutting the bars. When Captain Paul J. Madigan—a large man who the inmates thought might be hard to subdue—was seen making his way to the model building, the other inmates yelled to Hamilton to stop cutting and help them wrestle the captain down when he came through the door. But Madigan did not resist when he was suddenly grabbed and shoved into the room where the employee hostages (and several inmates) were being held. Luckily for Hamilton, Madigan had focused his attention on Barkdoll—who was
standing in front of him, issuing orders and holding a hammer in case the captain tried to free himself—and did not look into Hamilton’s face as Hamilton held onto one of Madigan’s arms.

Barkdoll had been stationed as a lookout. Convicts working in the mat shop agreed to go into the storage room to be tied up so that they could support their claims later on that they were not involved in the break. Hamilton went back to cutting. Finally, one bar was severed, and Kyle and Cretzer, aware that a count was coming up, urged Hamilton to work faster. Hamilton responded by increasing the pressure of the cutting wheel on the next bar, at which point the wheel, as Kyle recalled, “broke into a thousand pieces.”

Then we didn’t have anything except the regular emery wheel and we couldn’t get through with that . . . time was running out on us. [The guy in the boat] got tired of waiting and he left . . . the count was about due, so we talked it over and decided that we better give up.

Captain Madigan was offering a deal, Kyle remembered: “if we gave up peaceably, they wouldn’t come in and beat our heads off.” The inmates agreed to the offer. “We gave our word and he gave his word,” said Kyle, “and his word was good.”
⁴

After Cretzer and Barkdoll went to the captain and said “We give up,” Cretzer, Barkdoll, and Kyle were marched up the hill to D block isolation. Another inmate, Samuel Shockley, was also taken to isolation, despite his loud protests that he had not been involved. Barkdoll and other inmates who had been “hostages” complained that Shockley was getting a bum rap. Madigan was asked if he remembered seeing Shockley tied up and after some reflection the captain allowed that perhaps he did remember seeing Shockley as a hostage. So Shockley was released from D block and returned to his cell. No disciplinary report, record, or notice of any kind was placed in Shockley’s Alcatraz file to indicate that he had participated in any way in the Model Shop break.

Yet when Warden Johnston briefed the press that evening, and again the next day, he too identified Shockley as one of the “desperate plotters.” Accordingly, every San Francisco newspaper listed Shockley as one of the principals in this escape. This was not only erroneous, it made little sense: with an IQ of 54, Sam Shockley was regarded by his fellow inmates at Alcatraz as slow, excitable, and lacking in judgment—traits not valued by escape plotters. Nevertheless, Johnston’s statements forever connected Shockley with the escape: every book written about Alcatraz escapes has identified Shockley as one of the participants in the 1941 break.

In an ironic symmetry, Shockley’s mistaken culpability matched Hamilton’s evasion of it. The Alcatraz employees held as hostages had the strong impression that another man, in addition to Cretzer, Barkdoll, and Kyle, had been involved, but remarkably Floyd Hamilton’s claim that he was one of the inmate hostages was never questioned, and the other inmates in the mat shop were not talking.
⁵
Hamilton thus avoided the others’ prolonged confinement in the hole and the loss of good time. Moreover this experience did not change Hamilton’s view that the model building was still the best place to break out of Alcatraz.

Although the escape attempt failed and resulted in no injuries, it was nonetheless an embarrassment for Warden Johnston. Since the escape attempt from D block, he had continued to assure Bureau headquarters that he had taken care of any defects in security on the island. To minimize the damage, Johnston sought to characterize the escape attempt as “foiled” by the tool-proof steel bars and, as one newspaper put it, “by the matching nerves of a resourceful guard captain.”
⁶
According to the warden, the convicts had been unable to cut through a single bar and had been talked out of their “desperate” actions by Captain Madigan. The warden did not explain how the inmates had been able to take control of part of a prison building and hold five employees hostage, including the captain, for one and a half hours without attracting the attention of officers in the control room, the towers, or those working on other assignments in the industries area.

Johnston’s reports to Bureau of Prisons headquarters so minimized the escape attempt that Director Bennett’s memorandum on the incident to the attorney general consisted of only one typed page plus five lines on a second sheet, most of it a description of the four inmate participants, including Shockley; the one-paragraph account of the escape itself included the following:

[The convicts] were unsuccessful in cutting the bars, and the Captain of the Guards, a Mr. Madigan, who had been seized and bound, managed to turn on the emergency alarm and obtained help. The incident was then suppressed without injury to any of the officers or prisoners.
⁷

Official reports about this escape attempt, in contrast to previous plots, were limited because FBI agents had not been called to the island in connection with the case. Beyond an interview conducted with industries superintendent Manning at his home in San Francisco, none of the inmates or employees who were in the model building at the time of the attempted break were interviewed by the FBI. The “incident” had taken
place between 1
P.M
. and 3
P.M
. but Warden Johnston did not notify the FBI field office in San Francisco until 9:50 that evening, and then only by telegram. The telegram arrived at the field office shortly after agents on duty had received a phone call from a reporter for the
San Francisco Examiner
asking if they could provide photographs of Bark-doll and Shockley.

Special-Agent-in-Charge Pieper of the San Francisco office called Johnston that same evening to ask whether an escape had been attempted. The warden replied that four convicts had attempted to break out of the mat shop, but when Captain Madigan entered, “he was able to sound the alarm and the subjects were immediately subdued by other guards who rushed in and placed the subjects in solitary confinement.”
⁸
Pieper reported that Johnston “was very indefinite” as to when the escape had occurred, stating only that “it was in the afternoon.” When asked why he had not immediately notified the San Francisco field office as prescribed by the policy, and reminded that possible federal law violations were supposed to be investigated by the FBI, the warden replied that his first priorities were to subdue the prisoners, place them in solitary, “restore order in the mat shop and elsewhere throughout the prison,” and discuss the matter with the guards—and all this had taken time.

Pieper asked for the addresses of the employees who had been taken hostage. Captain Madigan and Officer Stoops were asleep on the island, Johnston stated, and he did not want them disturbed that night and, as far as interviewing the four inmate participants, he did not wish to take them out of solitary “for a while.” Johnston provided the San Francisco address of one guard and the industries supervisor. FBI agents, in their effort to obtain statements as soon as possible after the event occurred, sought to contact the guard but could not verify his address; Manning, the industries supervisor, was located and interviewed. The investigating FBI agent who talked with Manning concluded his report with the statement that after discussion with FBI headquarters, “it is agreed that no further action would be taken in this matter due to the fact that this office had not been appropriately advised.”
⁹

By this time, the relationship between the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI was openly hostile. Both Warden Johnston and Bureau headquarters recognized the importance of handling incidents in a way that would minimize the chances of FBI agents interviewing inmates and employees and obtaining statements that would allow Director Hoover to complain to the attorney general about security defects and flaws in the management of Alcatraz. At the same time, James Bennett and other BOP officials had
their own concerns about James Johnston’s management of their highest-profile prison.

Three weeks after the abortive attempt to escape from the Model Shop, Assistant Director William T. Hammack wrote to Director Bennett expressing his frustration with Warden Johnston. The problem at Alcatraz, said Hammack, was Johnston’s “insistence” that “everything be so systemized that probably everybody on the Island knows exactly what happens at any given time.”
¹⁰
Hammack went on to complain that Johnston, in violation of Bureau policy, had allowed inmates to leave their area of the island to work in his house as servants or to work on the docks. And he had put convicts on cleanup details scattered all around the island, thus allowing them to learn about every aspect of the terrain, the buildings, and perimeter security arrangements. Hammack concluded his report with a warning that proved to be prophetic: