Alcatraz (64 page)

Of the 1,547 felons sent to Alcatraz during its thirty-year existence, three names stand out above all others: Al Capone, George Kelly, and Alvin Karpis.
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Every television documentary, every article and book written about the prison and its inmates has featured these men. Their status in American criminal history and in popular folklore, however, is based on their exploits before they went off to federal prison, not on what happened during their years on the Rock. Hollywood movies about them, including
Machine Gun Kelly, The Alvin Karpis Story
, and several about Capone, centered entirely on their criminal careers.

When they arrived at Alcatraz, these men—along with the slightly less notorious “public enemies” Harvey Bailey, John Paul Chase, and Albert Bates—essentially disappeared from public view, a result of the deliberate attempt by the Department of Justice to diminish the reputations of the country’s leading gangsters once they were incarcerated. The dearth of real information about their lives in prison stands in stark contrast to the publicity surrounding their apprehension, which was in large part engineered by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s public relations machine and intended to enhance the director’s reputation. Even after Capone, Kelly, and Karpis were locked up on Alcatraz, Hoover made sure that selected columnists and authors, notably Courtney Ryley Cooper, continued to have material to publish dramatic accounts of how the FBI brought these men to justice.
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With the exception of Alvin Karpis, the Rock’s best-known “public enemies” participated only half-heartedly, if at all, in the strikes and organized protests that occurred during their years on the island and (with the exception of Dock Barker) did not take part in any escape plots. They were accustomed to giving, not taking, directions from others, but more important they knew that the government would use any misconduct to deny their transfers to prisons where they could be considered for parole. For the most part, they kept to a small group of trusted friends, trying,
as George Kelly put it, to “drift along” on “the tide of time.” Nevertheless, other prisoners respected them as “stand-up convicts.” Harvey Bailey and John Paul Chase, by virtue of the strength of their personalities and their unquestionable loyalty to the convict code, were held in very high esteem by their fellow prisoners. George Kelly was regarded as a good con, but somewhat full of himself. Albert Bates was a quiet convict whose status came not from his own reputation but from his association with Kelly. Al Capone was greatly admired as a genuine outlaw, but as his mental health deteriorated he began to become an object of derision.

An accurate account of the lives of these men after they disappeared behind prison walls is important because the ultimate villainy they symbolized served to justify the severity of punishment at Alcatraz. What will become evident in the pages ahead, however, is how unremarkable were their prison careers compared to their criminal careers. Readers will have already noted that at no place in the preceding chapters have Capone, Kelly, Bates, or Karpis featured in the descriptions of significant events on the island. They did not attempt to escape, and while Capone, Bates, and Karpis were involved in several fights, none had lethal consequences. None were identified as ringleaders during strikes (until that charge was levied against Alvin Karpis in the early 1950s). Each man acquired a handful of disciplinary reports, but none came even close to engaging in the kind of unrelenting resistance best represented by the record of the slightly less high-profile offender Harmon Waley.

Before arriving on the Rock in August 1934, Capone had spent ten months in Pennsylvania prisons, seven months in Illinois’s Cook County Jail, and twenty-seven months at Atlanta, and in all three places he had received preferential treatment. At Alcatraz, Capone discovered that life was to be considerably different for him. There were no more special privileges, as Alcatraz staff wanted to make certain the press had no reason to report that Capone was being treated differently than any other prisoner. Whereas in his previous incarcerations he had enjoyed frequent communication with his family and friends by mail, telephone, and through visits, at Alcatraz these contacts were largely severed, although his mother and his wife, Mae, continued to visit and correspond with him. Nor could he make use of the influence and prestige he had commanded at the other prisons. Because of their own high-profile criminal or prison
exploits, few convicts at Alcatraz were as impressed by Capone’s persona and reputation as the inmates had been in Atlanta, the Cook County Jail, or the Pennsylvania prison.

Alvin Karpis, who later succeeded Capone as Public Enemy no. 1, compared the man he saw on the Rock to the gang lord he knew in Chicago:

During the depression Capone dispensed life and death at a whim yet hundreds hailed him as a saint as they joined his “soup lines.” His personal armored car was always flanked fore and aft by other vehicles loaded with machine guns and bodyguards.

In Alcatraz, he’s a fish out of water, he knows nothing of prison life. For example, he is allowed to subscribe to various magazines and like any prisoner he is permitted to send the magazines to other inmates after he reads them. Ironically, Capone, who gave orders to eliminate hundreds of lives, is now confined to rubbing out names on his magazine list when he becomes displeased or annoyed with fellow cons. It’s kind of sad.
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With a sentence that was short compared to those of other convicts on the Rock, Capone kept his focus on his release, rather than on how he might make himself more accepted by the other convicts. He wanted to serve his sentence as easily and quickly as possible. That meant avoiding activities that would cause him to lose good time or be denied parole. His celebrity status, however, made it difficult for him to keep a low profile. He was involved in several altercations with other inmates who wanted him to finance their escape plots and other schemes, or who wanted to enhance their reputations by trying to intimidate the biggest name on the island.

Capone’s troubles began shortly after his arrival on the Rock. The desire to keep his record clean in order to shorten his sentence with goodtime deductions caused him to decide not to join in several strikes that happened not long after the trains from Leavenworth and Atlanta deposited their cargos on the island. His failure to support an effort to improve conditions for all inmates, coupled with the widespread belief that he controlled enormous financial resources and had minions awaiting his instructions for the distribution of those resources, made him an object of contempt and the subject of extortion rumors.

Even with Capone securely locked up in a single cell at Alcatraz, the FBI continued to investigate rumors and allegations that he had used his money and influence to gain favors at Atlanta, or alternately, that he had been the victim of extortion there. In February 1933 an Alcatraz inmate told FBI agents that Capone had been threatened with death or bodily
harm by several inmates at Atlanta who connived with three guards to force him to provide money for drugs. Capone, the informant reported, had been threatened with a knife to his throat and told to deliver $1,800 to a small hotel in Atlanta where guards were to pick it up. The guards in turn were said to have used part of the money to purchase morphine, which they brought into the penitentiary and delivered to an inmate. Two of these Atlanta guards and the inmate receiving the drugs had subsequently been transferred to Alcatraz, as had the informant. The informant also stated that he had been told that Capone had paid off a prison doctor by sending him a Shetland pony.
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When apprised of these charges, Atlanta Warden Aderhold informed Bureau of Prisons headquarters that he had heard all these allegations before the informant had left for Alcatraz. Aderhold stated that there had been no other negative reports about the guards who were alleged to be involved in the extortion plot. As for the doctor, who lived on the federal reservation with other senior staff, no pony had ever been observed.
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Capone worried about the effect the rumors might have on his reputation and prison influence, and the treatment he would receive as a result. During his first year at Alcatraz, he applied for parole, concluding his application with this plea:

I am 36 years old and all my life I have always tried to be a man, I have always keep my word, at no time did I ever steal or force anyone to give me any thing by force, I have keep up all of my family all the time, and the good Lord knows, I have, and intend to keep on doing so all my life. I have made mistakes, all of us have . . . I sure owe my dear son, wife, mother and the rest of my family for the grief I have caused them. . . . I was indicted for 27 counts, was found guilty of 2, got 5 years each, to run consecutively and 1 year for failure to file. . . . I realize that I broke the Laws, and should be punished, but not to the extent of 11 years, I realize also that I am notorious and make good copy for the Press, and used by every politician for Smoke screens in order to be elected. . . . So I would sure appreciate a new deal for Capone. Please try.
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In August two members of the board came to the island to listen to Capone argue his own case for parole, but on October 11, 1935, the full board rejected his application.

In May 1936 Capone’s brother, Ralph, received a letter from a recently released Alcatraz prisoner named Charles Mangiere. In the letter, Mangiere alleged that a group of inmates known as the Touhy gang had approached Capone for $5,000 to be used to hire a gunboat for an escape
attempt. According to the letter, they had threatened to kill Capone if he refused. Mangiere also claimed that the same group of inmates had planted a table knife under Capone’s seat in the dining room, which “would have caused him to go to the hole and maybe lose his good time” had the deputy warden not decided that “Al could not have done it.” Mangiere also described how Harmon Waley, who worked in the kitchen and was allied with the Touhy gang, had been trying to poison Capone with food and contraband candy, and that as a result, “Al is afraid to eat the food and his health is failing him.” In addition, the group had been “burning his clothes week after week from the laundry.” Mangiere explained that these attacks on Capone were the result of his refusal to join the strikes and his determination to be a model prisoner. He concluded his letter with this plea:

I beg of you as his brother to make these facts known or have me brought before the proper officials at Washington and confronted with the Deputy Warden of Alcatraz. I am sure and feel that Atty. General would not stand to see Al killed in cold blood when he has proven himself a model prisoner and helped to better himself in music.

Mangiere’s revelations had already been discounted by the staff at Alcatraz, but Ralph Capone, accompanied by an attorney, visited Bureau of Prisons headquarters, where he identified Alcatraz inmates most likely plotting against his brother. The names included Charles Berta, who was said to be behind the plan to dynamite a path out of the prison and escape on a speedboat, a scheme for which Capone had refused to provide financial backing.

Basil Banghart and other members of the Touhy organization on the island did have reason to hold a grudge against Capone. Convicted on charges that they kidnapped Jake “the Barber” Factor, they were said to believe that their convictions could have been avoided if Capone had prevailed on Factor, a longtime friend, to drop the charges against them.

Capone had a fight with William Coyler of the Touhy gang, an incident he described as follows:

I was working in the laundry and this fellow tried to start an argument . . . and he picked up some towels and threw them at me; Well, I don’t do nothing but he called me a dirty cock sucker and I said, “Why you dirty son of a bitch, I don’t take that from no one” and hit him and he starts to hit me with a club handle he had and I picked up the bench and hit him in the arm. . . . I don’t bother nobody if they just leave me alone.

In June the Associated Press asked Warden Johnston to verify a report that Capone was being provided a special guard due to threats on his life and that he had been knocked out in a fight with Waley. Johnston, as usual, refused to confirm or deny the story, but in Waley’s recollection of the incident (see
chapter 11
), it was Capone who acted first, hitting him in the back when they were both in the music room one day, and saying “You son of a bitch, I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

As news of these incidents leaked to the outside world, Capone’s family became fearful for his safety. His wife, Mae, wrote to Director Bates pleading with him to transfer her husband: “We love him, he is our life, our everything to us, he is in danger. Who can blame us for feeling otherwise?” Capone’s attorney petitioned Bureau headquarters for a transfer for his client claiming, “it is common knowledge that when certain of your guards are off duty in San Francisco they have repeatedly stated, ‘Al will never get out of there.’ ”