Alcatraz (47 page)

The plot to escape from Alcatraz was a long time in the making. Kyle, Cretzer’s partner and brother-in-law, who was in the industries building when the breakout began, said he knew of the plan and so did many inmates. By the time the break occurred, the planning for it “had been going for at least eight to nine months,” according to Kyle, and it was “supposed to have come off three or four different times” before. Kyle also identified Coy as the key figure in the plan, the man the others waited for to make the first move.

In advance, Coy had asked Floyd Hamilton to get him a bar spreader, which would be used to gain access to the gun gallery. The spreader was made up of “one piece of pipe, a bolt and a nut, you cut a notch in the
pipe to where it’d fit on the bar and couldn’t turn and you put a nut behind there and start pushing it out.” Hamilton recruited one inmate to get the parts and another to help him smuggle them into the cell house. He devised a clever strategy to foil the infallible metal detectors—called “snitch boxes” by the inmates—by focusing on the fallible guards who manned them. Hamilton had been alert: he realized that when a prisoner trying to smuggle in something metallic was closely followed by another man with a piece of metal, the second man could bump into the lead man at exactly the time the lead man entered the snitch box and set off the alarm, causing the guard at the box to conclude that the second man had set off the machine. The guard would tell the lead man to go on through and then shake down the second man. After succeeding in a trial run, Hamilton and an accomplice tried this tactic with the bar spreader, and it worked.

On the afternoon of May 2, it was business as usual in the cell block. With the noon meal concluded, the inmates with work assignments had returned to their jobs in the industries area, and the others were locked in their cells. Inmate Floyd Harrell said he knew something was up when he talked to Hubbard after lunch on the fateful day:

My first real knowledge of this escape attempt came shortly after lunch. . . . I remember distinctly asking [Hubbard] if he had planned on going on to the yard. After a short hesitation he looked at me and said, “You’re looking at a man that’s ready to go to hell.” Instantly I knew what he was referring to and not wanting to know any more about it, I made no remark whatsoever, I just stuck out my hand; he shook my hand and I walked out of the dining room. Something told me that the cell block would not be a very good place to be, so without a moment’s hesitation, I asked the guard to make sick call, went on up to the hospital, feigned some sort of illness, and was confined to the hospital. This proved to be a very wise decision.

Coy was authorized by his job as an orderly to walk freely in the cell house so he could deliver magazines to various prisoners. The cell house officer, William Miller, was covered by another guard, Bert Burch, who was stationed in the gun gallery located on the north wall of the cell house. The prisoners knew that Burch’s duties called for him to go through a door in the gun gallery to the adjacent disciplinary segregation unit, D block, where he would cover Officer Cecil Corwin while Corwin was releasing men one at a time for showers. During this period only one guard, Miller, was in the main cell house.

Once Burch entered D block, Hubbard—as a kitchen worker, he had
finished with the noon meal—appeared at the door between the dining room and the cell house. Miller opened the door to let Hubbard pass through and then turned his back to relock the door. As he did, Hubbard jumped him with a knife and, aided by Coy, took his keys and forced him into a cell on the north end of C block.

Coy and Hubbard ran over to unlock the cell of Cretzer, who took up a post standing guard over Miller. Coy and Hubbard quickly climbed up the bars of the gun cage to the point where the bars curved over to join the wall. With the bar spreader—which had been hidden in the utility corridor between the rows of cells that stood back to back in C block—Coy and Hubbard pried the bars just far enough apart to allow Coy, a very slight man, to wriggle through to a walkway. He clambered down a flight of steps to the second-level walkway that guard Burch would use when he returned from D block. Hiding behind the door, Coy waited until the officer was about to come through, then pushed the door into Burch, and jumped him with fists flying. (It is not known why their struggle did not draw the attention of Officer Corwin in D block.) The two fought briefly, with Coy continuing to hit Burch until he lost consciousness. Then Coy removed the guard’s uniform, tied him up, and grabbed his .45 pistol, 30.06 caliber rifle, and ammunition. He lowered the rifle to Hubbard on the cell house floor, dropped the pistol to Cretzer, ran back up to the top of the gun cage, squeezed back through the bars, and climbed down to join the others. Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard had achieved what the Alcatraz staff had always planned to prevent: prisoners were loose in the cell house, they had guns, and they quickly began releasing other prisoners from their cells.

Their plan called for getting more hostages, then using rifle fire to pin down the guards in the gun towers while they exited the cell house and made their way through the yard with their hostages. They would go down the steps on the west, or Golden Gate, side of the prison to the paved walkway and then turn south to the employee housing area where they would add some women and children to their collection of hostages. The hostages were essential if the plan was to work, as they would prevent anyone from firing on the inmates. The escapees would proceed to the dock area where the tower guard, under the threat of injury to the women and children, would be ordered to lower the key to the prison launch, which would take them to the mainland. As Cretzer’s partner, Kyle, later explained, “They had to get out quick; the thing had to work fast or else it wouldn’t work at all.”

Carnes was one of the first men released from his cell. As he grabbed
a knife, he saw Officer Robert Bristow enter the cell house at the east end and begin walking down Broadway. Carnes ran up to the surprised officer and forced him into cell 403, where Miller had been placed. Coy released Thompson to join the group. As guards Ernest B. Lageson and Joseph Burdette (the latter is missing from some accounts) entered the cell house to go to their posts, they were quickly taken hostage and also put in cell 403.

In the meantime, Cretzer went to the window in the door between the cell house and D block. Pointing his gun at Officer Cecil Corwin, he signaled the guard to open the door. Corwin complied. (Corwin would later claim that he opened the door in response to a threat by inmate Louis Fleisch, who as an orderly was out in D block talking to the guard at the time. Fleisch, however, would claim that he “advised” Corwin to open the door to avoid being killed, and that Corwin “was afraid and shaking badly.” The plan was to free the D block inmates, particularly Franklin, who had been in isolation since May 1938 for the escape attempt in which Officer Royal Cline was killed. The D block inmates on the second and third tiers were quickly released, but the first-tier cell doors were locked and unlocked not by the mechanical levers of a gear box, but by an electronic system controlled from inside the gun cage. Thus Franklin and the other men on the first floor were never released, which would prevent them from joining the break but also from seeking refuge in other cells during the gun battle that followed.

As the D block prisoners walked through their suddenly open cell doors and down to the main floor, Coy told them that a break was in progress. James Quillen, one of the occupants of D block at the time, said later,

The first time we knew anything was going down was when we heard the commotion in the gun cage . . . and you could hear voices out there. The door to D block was opened and then our cells were racked open. Hell, everybody was curious about what was going on so we all went down [to the first floor]. When we got close down to the door [to the main cell house], somebody says, “They’ve taken over the armory.” Hell, everybody wanted to go, everybody wanted a piece of the action then.

One D block prisoner, Shockley, grabbed a wrench and joined Coy, Hubbard, Cretzer, Carnes, and Thompson as they searched frantically for the key to the door to the recreation yard. But Officer Miller had hidden that key in the neck of the toilet bowl in cell 403 shortly after he was taken hostage. This would turn out to be the crucial act that foiled the escape
plot. As Kyle pointed out afterward, “If they would have gone on with the key like they were supposed to, they would have been [able to go] around to the front office in the armory before anyone knew what happened. They would have had the island.”

Back in the control room, Officer Clifford Fish was waiting for reports from the officers normally assigned to the cell house, or from the officers who had gone inside to investigate why a report had not been received. Fish informed Captain Henry Weinhold of the situation. When Weinhold entered the cell house, Coy and Carnes grabbed him. Weinhold was forced to remove his uniform and hand it over to Coy. Quillen, who had come out of his D block cell, recalled:

A lot of guys came out of their cells, saw the guns, and went back, which was the smart thing to do. But, I had to stick my nose in it and go out there. I walked out and over to the door in the dining room and looked down Broadway and they had just gotten Weinhold and were taking him around the corner by the lever box. Shockley and Cretzer and Coy were there. Something was said between Shockley and Weinhold and Coy told them both to shut up and then Shockley took a swing at Weinhold. Weinhold was very upstanding, he didn’t take any guff—he didn’t take anything from anybody. He had lots of guts. He turned around and hit Shockley back. Then they pushed him into the cell.

At this point, the escape plotters knew their plan was in trouble. Quillen remembered the words he exchanged with Cretzer and Coy before he returned to his cell to wait things out:

I said, “How’s it going?” He said, “It’s all fucked up—go on back in, it’s no good. We blew it.” So I walked over to Broadway and I saw Coy . . . running around with the rifle. And I said, “What’s going on? What can we do? Can we go?” He says, “Go back, we blew it.” So I said to Pep [friend and fellow convict], “Let’s do what they said and get our asses back in there.”

When Captain Weinhold failed to report back, Officer Fish called Robert Baker, who was on duty censoring mail in the administration building, to tell him there was some trouble in the cell house. Baker and Lieutenant Joseph Simpson walked into the cell house only to encounter a rifle and .45 automatic pointed at them, as well as several inmates wielding clubs and knives. They were forced into cell 402, adjacent to the other guards. Officer Carl Sundstrom came in next and was confronted by Cretzer armed with the .45. He was thrown in the cell with Baker and Simpson. Shockley struck him in the face three or four times and ordered him to
remove his pants. “Sundstrom was there with just his shirt on, they’d taken his pants off. . . . He’s mad as a hornet ’cuz they took his pants,” Baker later recalled. “We’re sitting there on the bed. And I’m looking out and taking the numbers down of any prisoners I see. I knew ’em all by name and number. So I’m writing on a little piece of paper.”

While Cretzer, Coy, and the others were moving about the cell house and taking hostages, a group of prisoners who had finished getting haircuts in the prison’s basement barbershop were released by supervising Officer Edward Stucker. As the inmates emerged into the cell house, they glimpsed the break taking place and quickly descended back into the barbershop, shaking their heads. Stucker went up to investigate:

So I walked up the stairs and looked over at the end of C block and there was Cretzer working the levers with a .45 in his hand. I said, “Good God almighty.” About that time he just happened to look over there and he seen me. He swung that gun over that a way and I got back down the stairs.

Stucker called the control center officer to report “trouble in the cell house.” (He claimed later that he mentioned Cretzer’s possession of a gun, but this was disputed by other custodial personnel.)

Finally, at about 2:30
P.M
. Officer Fish called the warden, who came running over and ordered the alarm to be sounded. Pandemonium ensued. The siren alerted everyone on the island that trouble had broken out, and the response was swift but chaotic. Coy began firing at the guard towers with the rifle, first striking guard Elmus E. Besk. From the hospital ward, Harrell saw the guard go down:

I’d been in the ward less than an hour when we heard rifle shots; they seemed to be coming from the cell block. Those of us in the ward immediately ran to the windows overlooking the yard and the tower. The first thing that caught my eyes was a guard that was assigned to the tower, he was lying on the catwalk face down on the outside of the tower itself. From all indications this man was dead.

Besk was not dead but lay unmoving for many hours. Officer James Comerford, in the dock tower, heard a bullet whiz by. He yelled down to Deputy Warden Miller that there was trouble, heard the glass window behind him smash, and dove to the floor. A guard in the employee apartment building yelled across to him to stay down and he did. “I had a dust pan for protection,” he recalled. He remained in the tower until the next morning.

From the hospital window Harrell watched the response to the shots and the siren:

In just a few minutes after this rifle shot, the sirens started screaming and in just no time at all it seemed that there were boats of every description, some with heavy arms, circling the island and most became stationed with their guns trained on the island. In the yard itself, there was guards scurrying about in every direction, seemingly in a state of confusion. But I can assure you this confusion didn’t last long. In just a short time, the guards were surrounding the cell blocks—I would estimate in about eight- to ten-foot intervals—most of them armed with rifles that fired rifle grenades. Shortly thereafter the guards started firing these rifle grenades into the cell block itself.

It was clear at this point that the escape plan had failed, and almost all of the inmates returned to their cells, with inmates in D block barricading themselves behind mattresses and law books for protection during the gun battle they expected would ensue. But Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard were not about to give up. Hamilton remembered an exchange with Coy and Cretzer: