Alcatraz (50 page)

In the early afternoon of May 3, BOP director James Bennett called assistant director Tamm to request an “investigation of the facts in this case as soon as the prisoners were subdued.” Bennett assured FBI headquarters that he had instructed Warden Johnston and his staff to cooperate in every way and that there would be no interference by the prison staff. To further reassure Hoover, Bennett said he was leaving for San Francisco himself to ensure that the Bureau “got what it wanted.” Hoover was not persuaded, however, and instructed Tamm:

See that our San Francisco office doesn’t subjugate itself to either Bennett or Johnston and the same goes for our staff at Washington. I am getting ‘fed up’ with the ‘palsey-walsey’ attitude of our officials both here and in the field with individuals who are constantly knifing the Bureau.
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In the meantime, San Francisco field office agents went to the Presidio hospital to interview the wounded officers. A “dying declaration” was obtained from William Miller that he had been shot in “cold blood” by Joseph Cretzer. Other hospitalized officers named Coy, Hubbard, Thompson, Shockley, and Carnes as participants.

On May 4 seven agents under the supervision of Special-Agent-in-Charge Fletcher arrived on the island to begin interviewing suspects and witnesses and to gather evidence. The naked bodies of Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard were examined and photographed, their clothing was packaged up, and the .45 pistol and Winchester 30.06 rifle found with them were sent to FBI headquarters for examination, although prison personnel had handled the weapons in the process of removing them from the utility corridor.

The agents reported back to Washington, D.C., that all prison personnel had “been most cooperative.” When James Bennett sent a telegram to Hoover offering his “sincere thanks” for the help of the FBI and the agency’s “splendid cooperation and efficient assistance,” he also offered
to discuss “the details of this amazing mass escape attempt.”
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Hoover, however, declined to respond to his fellow director in the Department of Justice, and he continued to complain about coverage of the role of the FBI in the investigation, noting that news reports about the activity of the assistant U.S. attorney described FBI agents as “accompanying him to Alcatraz.” Memos and telephone calls went to Fletcher ordering him “not to serve as a ‘flunky’ or satellite to the assistant U.S. Attorney or to the U.S. Attorney for that matter.”
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Two federal officers had died, as many as a dozen more officers appeared to have been wounded, and the federal government’s highest-security penitentiary was the site of a battle involving the army, the marines, the coast guard, and personnel from San Quentin and other federal prisons—but J. Edgar Hoover was more concerned with the image of his agency.

With this preliminary communication, the relationship between the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons fell into its predictable pattern. For more than a decade, Alcatraz and Bureau of Prisons officials had tried to hold the FBI at arm’s length whenever serious problems arose, because FBI investigations tended to go beyond specific incidents to management issues, and because the resulting reports were often labeled Confidential and sent directly to the attorney general rather than to BOP officials. The Bureau of Prisons knew that in a major event such as the abortive escape attempt at Alcatraz, Hoover and his close associates could be counted on to make the most of what might be an outstanding opportunity to heap discredit on another agency, even one within the Department of Justice.

Following their interviews with prisoners and staff, FBI agents identified nine inmates as likely subjects for prosecution, adding Louis Fleisch, Floyd Hamilton, James Quillen, Edgar Cook, Jack Pepper, and Edwin Sharpe to the list that already included Carnes, Thompson, and Shockley. Ninety other prisoners were interviewed. The men who were in the cell house or in D block during the escape attempt and the hours of shooting and bombardment that followed were not reluctant to cooperate with the agents when they were questioned about Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard. Knowing these men were dead, the inmates readily identified them as the planners of the break, and as the ones responsible for shooting the officers. But no one would admit to seeing any other prisoner do anything wrong. As convict Earl Egan told the agents, “I am not going to say anything about no live guys.”

However, the inmates freely condemned the actions of Alcatraz personnel during interviews. Fleisch, for example, contradicted Officer Corwin’s account of how Coy and Cretzer gained access to D block and
released the prisoners in the second and third tiers, painted Corwin as slow to recognize what was going on, and said he did not know why Corwin, after it appeared that a break might be in progress, had not picked up the telephone and warned the armory what was happening.

Shockley refused to answer any questions from FBI agents, stating only “I have nothing to say and wish to return to my cell.” Thompson, on the other hand, anticipating his identification by guards, had written out an explanation of his participation and handed it to Deputy Warden Miller.

Agents interviewed Carnes for the first time, with Deputy Warden Miller present, on the evening of May 4. Carnes claimed that he had never left his cell during the entire break; he refused to say anything else. The following morning he was interviewed again; this time, he said he didn’t think he should say anything until he had seen a lawyer. The agents told him to ask prison officials for legal counsel. Carnes thought for a few minutes, then decided to make a statement. The interview concluded when Carnes was allowed to go back to his cell for lunch. When he was called back an hour later, he announced that he did not want to talk any further and refused to sign the statement based on the earlier interview, although he agreed that everything he had said was true. In San Francisco, Special-Agent-in-Charge Fletcher reported that the hostage officers corroborated Carnes’s story but identified Thompson as a participant who urged Cretzer to shoot them.

On May 7 a San Francisco attorney, Ernest Spagnoli, sent a telegram to Warden Johnston claiming that he had been retained to defend Carnes, Thompson, and Shockley. The
San Francisco Examiner
reported that Spagnoli had been employed “by a friend,” but Fletcher told FBI headquarters that the newspaper had hired Spagnoli and two of his associates. Thompson, Shockley, and Carnes later rejected Spagnoli’s effort to represent them.

A call from FBI Assistant Director Tamm instructed Fletcher to confine his investigation “to potential criminal law violations, etc., and not to conduct any administrative investigations of the prison or the authorities.”
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Fletcher was further told to refrain from contact with the U.S. attorney and to submit his investigative reports to FBI headquarters before providing them to the U.S. attorney’s office. Fletcher responded that he and his agents were receiving “101% cooperation” from Director Bennett and Warden Johnston. Even so, Bennett was not informed that Thompson had told agents that the director himself might have been taken as a hostage in one version of the escape plan. Fletcher was also told not to provide Bureau of Prisons officials with information on any
new leads his agents might develop, since James Bennett was advising the attorney general of developments and was not giving credit to the FBI for the information. Hoover, not satisfied with the credit being given to his agency, noted in handwriting at the bottom of memo: “I am outraged at this. Fletcher is being swept off his feet by Bennett and the Warden. It must stop.”
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The cases against Fleisch and other inmates named during the investigation were determined by the U.S. attorney to be so weak that prosecution would not be successful. On May 10, a coroner’s jury in San Francisco returned a verdict of justifiable homicide regarding the deaths of Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard. Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney prepared to put Thompson, Shockley, and Carnes on trial.

After the dust of the battle had settled, it was clear to the custodial staff that the escapees’ plan had been abetted by serious lapses in basic security procedures. An inattentive guard had allowed the bar spreader to be smuggled into the cell house. The gun cage officer had apparently taken a postlunch nap on his post—a regular occurrence well known to observant inmates. And Coy had been allowed to wander freely in the cell house without supervision. In addition, numerous mistakes had been made in responding to the escape. One staff member after another was sent into the cell house, where the escapees easily took them captive. The alarm was not sounded immediately, not until the warden arrived at his office. Most serious, gunfire was directed from outside into the cell house, which contained not only uninvolved inmates cowering in their cells but prison staff trying to rescue the hostages and subdue the escapees. A high volume of indiscriminate firing killed one officer and wounded several others. San Quentin personnel and U.S. Marine units summoned to the island and prepared for an armed assault in the cell house found little coordinated authority.

In reflecting on the events of May 2 through 4, Alcatraz administrators and officers singled out several guards for criticism: Bert Burch, both for getting careless about his work habits and for not putting up a better struggle with Coy; Cecil Corwin for not calling the control room due to being intimidated by Fleisch; and some criticized Edward Stucker for not giving a clearer warning than “Trouble in the cell house!” after he emerged from the basement and saw Cretzer with a gun. Philip Bergen, a lieutenant at the time of the break who was appointed acting captain
to replace the injured Henry Weinhold, described the various breakdowns in security:

What had happened unbeknownst to all us smart guys out in the front office was that Burch and Bill Miller had cooked up a little cozy arrangement between them which rendered null and void all the damn precautions that had been taken in setting up the security procedures. Burch thought that he was entitled to that full thirty minutes in the sunshine and he may have been dozing, who knows. Convicts have told me they seen him dozing up there. . . . The problem was that Burch, in order to keep from being interrupted during his lunch hour or his siesta or whatever the hell you want to call it, had left in Bill Miller’s hands two keys that Bill Miller should never have had, the key to the dining room gate and the key to the yard gate. So now, Bill Miller no longer has to interrupt Burch’s lunch, he had the keys. He can go ahead and do it contrary to orders and in violation of all the security procedures. . . . Miller had violated another rule, which said that no inmate could be loose in the cell house unless Burch was up there in the gallery covering him. . . . [So] there’s Burch, he’s violating his orders and there’s Miller, he’s violating the orders. That’s what made it all possible. Burch is over there in peaceful bliss, eating his lunch, or whatever, and when he finishes his lunch after a leisurely half hour or so, he comes strolling back into the other section of the gallery and gets clobbered.

Some staff members were critical of Warden Johnston’s leadership before, during, and after the “battle.” George Boatman, for example, commented:

Shuttleworth [former Alcatraz deputy warden] ran that place for two or three days, as I recall. During this time, Johnston was resting. It was almost too much for the old man, but he was on the phone to [Director] Bennett every day telling him, “We got everything under control.” . . . Warden Johnston wanted to retire without any troubles. That [escape] spoiled that.

According to Officer Y,

Warden Johnston was nervous and frightened, but he was a humanitarian to the end. He wanted to spare lives as much as possible and he was determined to do that. Of course, some of the rest of us didn’t quite feel that way about it, Mr. Miller especially wanted to go after ’em. He was restrained by the warden from going ahead and doing some of the things that might have ended this thing a little earlier. . . .

When you see some of your own people shot up like I did, then you get an anger. . . . I’m not no hero, but you get a feeling that, “I wonder how long it’s gonna be before I get hit.” [At one point] I went down to get a
sandwich and come back up. As I was walking back up the roadway I was wondering to myself, if I get hit, what’s gonna happen to my family. What are they gonna do with them? Kick them off the island? Things like that were going through my mind. It wasn’t that I was wanting to be a hero or anything, I had a job to do and we wanted to get it done. And, we had a feeling in our own mind that we might be next. It’s a hard thing to describe, but when you see your own people hurt and killed, boy, you want to get in there and really whack ’em. That must be what motivates people in battle. They’re not particularly heroes, they are not particularly anxious to hurt anybody but they want to get the people that hurt their friends and that’s the feeling that went through the officers. . . .

[Officer William Miller] was a real hero of the whole thing. He really prevented the exodus from that place where they could of got out and taken control of the road tower and got down and took the women and children in the boat. And they’d already expressed the fact if they got to the boat they would get what they wanted or they’d kill one kid, or woman, and throw ’em off the boat just to prove what they was gonna do. They had enough fuel in that boat, they could of went a long ways. That man was the real hero because he dropped that key in that toilet with all the rest of the stuff in there and of course the water was dirty, and they didn’t fish around to get the key. He didn’t tell them and the result was they tried to force it out of him and I think that’s why he got shot because he wouldn’t tell. If anybody deserved an accolade, that man did. Of course he’s dead.

Officers and midlevel administrators complained among themselves that the need for screening on the gun cage had been recognized before the escape—it had even been purchased and stored on the island—but had not been installed because Warden Johnston was of the opinion that the wire would impair the gun gallery’s appearance.