Alcatraz (44 page)

The moonlight was shining so bright I could see men walking on those submarine tenders and I figure they could see me if they looked that direction. I figured I’ll get back [inside the Model Shop] through the same hole that I came out of and try to find something to float away on. I figured if I could get in that paint shop I could get some empty paint buckets or full ones and empty them. I got right up to the top of the bank but there was nothing to catch hold around. I finally found a rock sticking up a little ways. I put a lot of weight on it and threw my leg over it and the thing pulled out. I went backwards head over heels down the hill until I hit the water. The rocks cut my back all the way down and I lost a good bit of blood. I sat on the rocks and rested ’til I figured them people out on the boat may see me. But I figured I’ll go back up that same way. I climbed back up to the top where this rock came out and left a hole. I got my hand in it and went on over [the edge of the cliff next to] a ten-foot fence with three strands of barbed wire. I got up on top of one of those fence posts and went over the fence down in between the buildings. When I stepped around the corner, the guard on the road tower was flashing the light on me, blinking it. I figured well I better not run—if I run he’ll think something is wrong. So I looked at him and stuck up my hand and I waved and he turned the light off. He figured I was down there giving him signals that everything’s all right.

Hamilton made his way to the model building but confronted a barbed-wire fence. In the bright moonlight, and with a guard two hundred feet away in the powerhouse able to see him if he did anything to attract attention, Hamilton found a piece of wood and used it to open a gap in the fence through which he could crawl. He next went over close to the old building where they’d broken out:

There was the night patrolman sitting in the office in the carpenter shop—you could hear him clear his throat every once in a while. I guess he was reading too. So I went around and went back in the building through a
window into the old mat shop. Fortunately it wasn’t locked—whoever closed the window never locked it and I pulled that window open and crawled back in and went through the two doors to the room next to where the guard was.

With dawn approaching, Hamilton took off his clothes and put them on a steam radiator to dry. When they were warm and dry he put them back on and squatted in a corner to rest. He tried to stay awake but ended up falling asleep. The next thing he knew, Captain Weinhold and a group of guards entered the room to search for the motor and cutting wheel the escapees had used to cut the bars. Seeing Hamilton in his corner, a guard “flattened up against the wall,” looking at him “like he’d seen a ghost.” “They must have been pretty surprised to see me,” surmised Hamilton later, “because they had already reported me dead to the FBI.”

Captain Weinhold ordered Hamilton to get up, but he was physically unable to comply. “My hands wouldn’t move, my legs wouldn’t move,” recollected Hamilton. “I’d think about it, but they wouldn’t obey.” According to Hamilton, Weinhold walked over and struck him on the side of the head with his blackjack. “It didn’t hurt then,” said Hamilton later, “but after I got up to the hospital, got thawed out, and took a hot bath, then my head started hurting.” In the hospital, Hamilton was treated for the more than four hundred separate cuts and bruises on his body. Then he was sent to D block isolation.

They stripped me down, they give me a little old pair of white shorts and they took me down to number 13 in the hole. It was a strip cell, it had a hole in the floor for a commode. If they wasn’t real mad at you, they’d give you a mattress at night. But they didn’t give me the mattress, they just give me a blanket or two, then they’d take them away from me the next morning. I was in that cell most of the time with just a pair of shorts on, walking back and forth. It was so dark that I couldn’t see at first—I’d run into the wall because I couldn’t see it and then finally I learned how to pace my steps. I’d take so many steps and turn, so many steps and turn. I got to where I could stay the same distance from the wall in the front or the back. They had two fans on the roof, one of them pumped air in and the other blew it out, and on the nights or the days that it was real foggy, that air would be so wet that the floor would get wet. It’s pretty miserable with no clothes. I got one meal every three days. It would usually be just a little spoonful of each of whatever the menu was. It was never near enough. At other times you’d get two slices of bread. When twenty-one days was over, they tried me and took all my good time. When
I was coming out of the dark cell [Deputy Warden] Miller was over there supervising. He said to put me up in number 42 cell way up in the corner, and he says, “Don’t let him have any privileges, don’t let him write to anybody or receive any mail and don’t let him have any clothes on but that pair of shorts. Give him an old mattress and two blankets—that’s all he gets until I give further orders.” I was there maybe about a month when they decided to come over and let me go down and take a shower. I’d occupied my time by walking back and forth, by cursing everything, and being mad at everybody. I think hate will bring you through; I was hating myself, I criticized myself an awful lot, which I do if I don’t do something right and I mess up. I cursed myself because there was no way out on that breakout.

While Hamilton raged on in isolation, regretting that he had given in to Boarman’s desperate urging that they make the attempt even though the fog was not heavy enough to provide cover, the search for Boarman’s remains went on. A body washed ashore on Stinson Beach north of San Francisco Bay on June 17 and another was fished out of the water near the Point Bonita Lighthouse on June 19, but neither was that of James Boarman. Boarman’s body, like those of Ted Cole and Ralph Roe, was never found.

The escape, combined with Hamilton’s reappearance, was one more embarrassment to the Bureau of Prisons. Not only had four prisoners succeeded in cutting through bars and getting off the island using all kinds of paraphernalia, one of them eluded searchers for three days and had been able to climb back through the security perimeter into a prison building. While James Johnston’s account (and other subsequent accounts) of this escape reported that Hamilton had reentered the Model Shop through the window he and the others had exited, he had in fact climbed over the fences and come into the building through another window that had been left unlocked. As FBI investigators soon reported to Director Hoover, Hamilton’s success in breaking back into the prison was seen as one more example of careless and shoddy management on the island. When the FBI field office in San Francisco learned by telegram from Johnston that Hamilton had been found alive inside the prison, that office reported to FBI headquarters that the discovery of Hamilton was “indicative of the sloppy job they [the Alcatraz staff] did in searching.” J. Edgar Hoover wrote on the report, “This prison outfit is certainly a mess.”
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A month later, Hoover referred parts of an agent’s report to Director Bennett at the Bureau of Prisons:

I am informed that the four subjects were permitted to spend considerable time without supervision in the Old Mat Shop which is located in the Model Building. This shop contains a number of large Stillson wrenches, pipe, cable benders, and other tools which could be utilized in effecting an escape. . . . Investigation has indicated that two outer cell bars wrenched off by the subjects had been partially cut sometime prior to the actual escape which would make it appear it is not the practice of the prison guards to examine the bars in this building.

The report went on to list the many items that the escapees “were able to acquire and use”:

Map of San Francisco and Bay Area showing Alcatraz Island. Oilcloth bag containing an Army uniform, consisting of pants, shirt, tie, overseas cap, one pair of shorts, two handkerchiefs and a $5.00 bill. One gallon paint can containing a pair of Army style khaki trousers, a sun tan Army shirt and black Army tie. One and one half gallon paint can containing two cakes of soap and a pair of tan shoes. One and one half gallon paint can containing two black Army ties, one tan Army tie, three tan overseas caps, one tan Army shirt and a pair of Army trousers. One claw hammer, one doughnut shaped inflated rubber tube, one homemade life belt, four prison-made knives, one homemade wooden raft, two pair of pliers, one pair of scissors, one 50 foot coil of insulated wire, one 4″ × 12″ plank, 12 foot long, one section of canvas.
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Clearly losing patience with James Johnston, Bureau of Prisons headquarters called the warden to Washington, D.C., to discuss the lapses in security that allowed the inmates to escape and—if they had had better luck—traverse the waters of the bay and use the escape gear and military uniforms they took from the laundry to blend in with the large numbers of soldiers moving around San Francisco at the time.

With the Henry Young trial and the bad press it had brought the prison still fresh in everyone’s minds, it was decided that trying the three surviving inmates for escape in federal court would only provide another forum for convicts to complain about conditions on the island. Furthermore, a trial would reveal the serious breaches of security that had occurred. In September 1943 the Bureau of Prisons notified the U.S. attorney in San Francisco that although Hamilton, Hunter, and Brest could be charged with assaulting federal officers, the officers had not been injured and thus the three could likely only be charged with attempting to escape. For this violation of prison rules, the Bureau had already ordered good time forfeiture hearings, and these had resulted
in the removal of good time in amounts that exceeded the length of the escape sentences each man could have received if convicted in court. (For example, Hamilton lost 3,600 days, or nearly ten years, and Hunter 3,103 days.)

During the war the Alcatraz laundry facilitated two other escape attempts. Thousands of uniforms from large Bay Area military bases passed through the laundry, affording inmates the opportunity to rifle the pockets for money, identification papers, and other useful items. Entire uniforms could be stolen with relative ease. The military uniforms hidden away by Hamilton, Hunter, Brest, and Boarman for use if they reached the mainland or Angel Island were pilfered from the laundry. In the two years between July 1943 and July 1945, two inmates used uniforms as they tried to break out. Between these two attempts, custodial staff uncovered a sophisticated escape plot involving five inmates with previous escape experience.

Less than four months after Hamilton and his compatriots made their failed attempt, Huron “Terrible Ted” Walters—a longtime associate of Hamilton’s—made his break in a U.S. Army uniform. Ted Walters arrived at Alcatraz in June 1940, to serve a thirty-year federal term for robberies. On the island he established himself as a man ready to protest the conditions of his confinement. In December 1940 he helped lead a brief strike by inmates working in the laundry, who complained there was too much work. Walters spent ten days in disciplinary segregation. After his return to the general population, he was written up for some minor rules violations; several months later he decided that he had had enough and it was time to leave Alcatraz.

Walters was assigned to work in the laundry in the new industries building. During work breaks, Walters noticed that on Saturdays when the road tower guard walked to the recreation-yard side of his tower to observe the yard, he could not see an area between the industries building and the perimeter fence, which would allow Walters to get from the laundry to the fence unobserved. Furthermore, Walters saw that there was a section of the fence that could not be easily observed by the road tower guard no matter where he was in the tower. The officer in the model
building tower could see that section of fence—but on Saturdays no officer was stationed in the model building tower, even though (due to the heavy demand for military laundry services) the laundry crew worked on Saturday afternoons. Seeing an opportunity to get through the fence at relatively low risk, Walters stole and hid some wire cutters to cut through the fences. He also set aside some wooden boxes to stand on, several empty gallon buckets to keep him afloat, and a soldier’s uniform to wear when he reached shore.

At about 2:00
P.M
. on Saturday, July 7, 1943, Ted Walters made his break for freedom. He waited until the guard moved to the rec-yard side of the tower and then crossed the field from the laundry to the fences. The wire cutters proved not to be strong enough to sever the strands of the fence. By standing on the boxes and wearing gloves, however, he was able to climb through the barbed wire at the top of the fence, drop down into the no-man’s-land between the two fences, and climb up the outer fence. But as he hurriedly crawled over the top of the second fence, he slipped and fell, injuring his back. Despite the pain from the fall, he made his way down a flight of steps to the area next to the water where an old wharf had once stood.

Walters had been gone for about fifteen minutes when he was missed by the shop foreman and the officer assigned to supervise the laundry crew. The alarm was sounded, and officers first searched the laundry itself to see if Walters was hiding inside the building. Warden Johnston, informed that a man was missing, came down from the administration building to lead the manhunt. Officers Edward Stucker and Robert Baker discovered Walter’s wire cutters and a glove between the two fences, and with the warden they went through a nearby gate in the fence to begin searching the waterfront. While the warden walked in the direction of the Model Shop, the two officers went in the other direction. The warden described what happened next:

I heard Stucker and Baker yelling that they had discovered Walters and I ran back where they were, and they saw Walters stripped down to his shorts and doing the best he could to conceal himself against the uneven ledges of rock in the little cove just beyond the end of the sea wall.
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