Alcatraz (71 page)

Several years later Karpis, now in his midfifties, moved into a residence for “model prisoners” outside the prison walls, where he became head of the resident council and occasionally acted as a tour guide for visitors. When arthritis forced him to give up general office work he took a job in the hospital records office. In 1965 the staff recommended him for parole, noting that his “reckless, anti-social tendencies are as defunct as the conditions that surrounded him in the Prohibition Days.”

That parole board staff and members were sensitive to the objections of J. Edgar Hoover, however, was evident in the minutes of a September 1966 board meeting. Unfortunately for Karpis, a visitor to McNeil who had heard Karpis was going to a parole hearing notified a local newspaper, which led to an Associated Press story headed “He and Ma Barker’s Boy: Ex-Public Enemy No. 1 Now a Model Prisoner,” which once again triggered protests opposing his release. One parole board member noted that Karpis was fifty-eight years old and “is not a vegetable,” that he had made an excellent adjustment at McNeil Island and had a “well worked out” parole release plan, and that the prison staff recommended his parole. She summed up the difficult situation facing the board:

There is the continuing concern of J. Edgar Hoover and no doubt that the FBI, at least in the person of its Director is irrevocably determined to bring about all the pressure that is possible to prevent his release at any time . . . the Board must choose between coming to a decision according to our own rules and judgment, or accepting Mr. Hoover’s attitude.
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Charlotte P. Reese, the parole board member who wrote this summary, rejected Hoover’s position and recommended Karpis’s parole “for deportation only.”

Two years later Karpis, still at McNeil Island, was advised by an attorney for the parole board to obtain letters from former wardens and other prison personnel that would support his release, obtain assurance from the Catholic Rehabilitation Service that they would accept responsibility for him, and send a letter to the parole executive stating the following: “that you realize your early career was both wrong and stupid . . . [that] you regret it and are willing to go out, keep your nose clean and fit into society without indulging in any further controversy or illegal, immoral or wrong behavior.”
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Karpis dutifully asked for and received a strong letter of support from former Alcatraz and McNeil Island warden Paul J. Madigan, who commented that “a number of Karpis’s old associates are now enjoying parole supervision and no doubt succeeding.”
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Retired Alcatraz and McNeil Island Officer Raymond May wrote to the parole board, arguing

That if correction is to have any meaning [Karpis should be released, otherwise] from this point on the enthusiasm and the ardor that has been developed for a better life “if and when” which has sustained him the many years will gradually dim and we merely serve as a warehouse.
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The parole board still wanted Karpis to jump through a few more hoops before parole would be granted. The chairman, Walter Dunbar, met with Karpis and asked him to write a letter describing “The kind of person you were in 1936; How do you now view your criminal activities of the 1930s; How prison has changed you in the last 30 years; Your activities and behavior while in prison; How do you view yourself now; and What are your future plans.”
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Karpis responded with the expected answers to these inane questions, concluding with a plea for a definite yes or no on his release. The yes came seven months later, on November 27, 1968; the Department of Justice announced that after thirty-two years in prison Karpis would be paroled, “for deportation only.”

On January 11, 1969, Alvin Karpis was turned over to Canadian immigration officials and taken to Montreal, where at age sixty he began the rest of his life. He was a celebrity in the minds of those old enough to remember the Roaring Twenties and gangster days. He knew he had a story to tell, and he began to work on it with a writer while answering questions from various reporters. Interviewed when he arrived in Montreal, Karpis talked about his plans “to become a respectable citizen” and said that he wanted to see the movie about two people he knew—“Bonnie and Clyde.” If his release job did not work out and he had to wash dishes, he stated confidently, “I guarantee you I’ll be washing dishes in the best place in town within six months.”

He declined, however, to answer the big question: Was it true that after a year on the run he had been personally arrested by J. Edgar Hoover? He responded as would any wise prisoner just released on parole: “I believe it would be bad taste for me to . . . say anything in the absence of Mr. Hoover. . . . Mr. Hoover has performed a credible job for his country.”
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Karpis knew that the account of his capture by Hoover, as written by Hoover, had been a major contributor to the FBI director’s reputation; he also knew that his own version of this event would create publicity for the book on which he was working. In a feature article in
the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, he described how after thirty-two years in prison, he marveled at the expense of riding in a jet plane, seeing girls in mini-skirts, and going on a “simple dinner date . . . taking a woman to a restaurant, helping her into a chair, taking her coat, lighting her cigarette.” Noting that he enjoyed such simple activities as “hailing a cab, riding on a bus, buying a tie, calling a friend on the telephone,” he reflected: “you forget so much in prison. . . . I can’t take freedom for granted the way other people do.”
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In March 1971 Karpis’s campaign to cut J. Edgar Hoover down to size began with an article in the
Weekend Magazine
, “I Made Hoover’s Reputation,” excerpted from his forthcoming book. Karpis described his arrest, along with that of Fred Hunter in New Orleans, after the two had climbed into their automobile:

I put the key in the ignition and turned it. I started to push the starter with my foot and, at that exact moment, a car cut sharply in front of our car and stopped at the curb. Five men climbed out very quickly. . . . I heard a voice at my window.

“All right, Karpis,” the voice said, “just keep your hands on that wheel.” I turned my head slight to the left and my temple bumped into the barrel of a gun. It was a 351 automatic rifle. . . . I held my head steady, looking straight out the window. I had no choice. Two men were leaning over the hood of the car that had cut in front of us. Each of them was aiming a machine gun at my head. Three other men were crouched in the street. They had pistols, drawn and ready. . . .

“Okay, Karpis,” he said, “get out of the car and be damn careful where you put your hands.” I slid out of the seat keeping my hands in plain sight. I stood up on the street. . . . It was bedlam.

I turned slightly and I was facing a man holding a Thompson machine gun. . . . [He] spoke to me in a calm assured voice. “Karpis, do you have a gun with you?” “No.” . . . By that time, the action had attracted a huge crowd. There were a couple of dozen FBI agents and at least a hundred spectators. The commotion was terrific. But I could see that some of the men with the guns had turned their attention to another chore. They were looking over toward the corner of the building and they were waving their arms.

I heard one guy shouting, “We’ve got him. We’ve got him. It’s all clear, Chief.” A couple of others shouted the same thing. I turned my head in the direction they were looking. Two men came out from behind the apartment. They’d apparently been waiting in the shelter of the building, out of sight, while the guys with the guns had been leveling at Freddie and me.
They began to walk across the lawn and sidewalk toward the crowd. One was slight and blond. The other was heavy-set, with a dark complexion. Both were wearing suits and blue shirts and neat ties. They walked closer, and I recognized the dark heavy man. I’d seen pictures of him. Anyone would have known him. He was J. Edgar Hoover.

Noting that visiting “U.S. Attorney Generals, Senators, Congressmen, and prison officials” had all asked him during his years in prison if Hoover had personally arrested him, Karpis announced it was time “to set the record straight.”

The FBI story of my arrest is totally false. . . . [Hoover] didn’t lead the attack on me. He hid until I was safely covered by many guns. He waited until he was told the coast was clear. Then he came out to reap the glory . . . that May day in 1936, I made Hoover’s reputation as a fearless lawman. It’s a reputation he doesn’t deserve. I have nothing but contempt for J. Edgar Hoover.
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Hoover’s angry response to the extensive publicity given to Karpis’s magazine article and an appearance on an NBC television program was evident in the director’s handwritten comments on a script NBC had sent to the FBI. After several of Karpis’s remarks, Hoover wrote “He is a liar” and “A lie.” FBI officials contended that the true account of Karpis’s arrest had been written by the director himself in
Persons in Hiding
and that Karpis’s claim was “a bid for public attention . . . at a time when he reportedly has a book of his memoirs pending publication.” In response to Karpis’s challenge to Hoover, at the end of his NBC interview, “to prove me a liar,” Hoover initiated a search within the FBI to locate the eighteen agents who comprised the May 1936 raiding party in New Orleans. Since it was not likely that his agents would deny the director’s central role, this effort may have been mounted to head off views to the contrary should any of the nine agents still living be interviewed. On the FBI’s internal review of
The Alvin Karpis Story
Hoover wrote, “Karpis or/and his writer must be on dope.”
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While Karpis could only imagine the effect of his campaign to disparage the reputation of his nemesis, the man who had so effectively blocked his release from prison, he could take satisfaction forever from knowing that he had raised questions about J. Edgar Hoover’s credibility.
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Karpis disappeared from view after the publication of
The Alvin Karpis Story
. He moved to Torremolinos, Spain, on the Costa del Sol in 1973 and lived alone. In 1978 he received a visit from former FBI agent Thomas McDade, who had been in the raiding party that resulted in the deaths
of Ma Barker and her son Fred. The two discussed doing a TV program together, but in August 1979, at age seventy-one, Karpis was found dead, “apparently of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.”
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Alvin Karpis is not as well known today as his fellow prisoners Al Capone and George Kelly, but his photo is still on the wall of the cell house and tourists are still buying his book about all those years he spent on the Rock.
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While Alcatraz was not intended to rehabilitate its hardcore offenders, neither was it meant to hold them forever. Over the three-decade span of Alcatraz history, prisoners remained on the Rock for an average of four to five years before the staff and Bureau headquarters considered them ready to be transferred to Leavenworth, Atlanta, or McNeil Island. At these prisons, they served an average of two years before being released to civil society.

What happened to Alcatraz inmates after they left the Rock? That is the question the longtime Bureau of Prisons director James V. Bennett urged me to answer after the prison closed. The effort to find the answer led to the comprehensive study described in the preface and lies at the heart of this book. What it revealed about Alcatraz releasees—and through them, the prison itself—forms the basis for this chapter and the next. This chapter focuses on presenting the findings from the study that most directly answer Director Bennett’s question about the fates of inmates after they left Alcatraz (see table, p. 386).

No one had high expectations for Alcatraz prisoners, as previous chapters made clear. They were labeled “habitual and incorrigible”—men for whom rehabilitation was thought to be impossible. No one anticipated that the veteran hardcore prisoners imprisoned at Alcatraz would emerge from their years on the island with improved behavior and reasonable chances for success as law-abiding citizens. In fact, many people predicted that, if anything, incarceration at Alcatraz would have the opposite effect. Members of the press, academic criminologists, and some corrections professionals assumed that these “career criminals” would return to their old ways or, perhaps more likely, that their mental health would be so damaged they would have trouble adjusting to imprisonment in
other penitentiaries, much less to life in the free world. These assertions, beliefs, and speculations surfaced when the prison opened in 1934 and remained part of conventional and popular wisdom for the prison’s entire history, contributing to the decision to close Alcatraz in 1963. They have survived essentially unchallenged to this day.