Alcatraz (86 page)

Finally, it should be recognized that since the 1930s the federal government, in contrast to state prison systems, has sought to put the nation’s highest-profile lawbreakers in a prison setting that symbolized harsh punishment for serious crime. As Alcatraz held Al Capone and Machine
Gun Kelly, and as Marion, Illinois, has held Mafia boss John Gotti, drug-king Carlos Lehder, and assorted spies and traitors, Administrative Maximum (ADX) at Florence, Colorado, has been the preferred penitentiary for Timothy McVeigh (until his execution); Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”; Richard Reed, the “Shoe-bomber”; Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and Ramzi Yousef, convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing; and most recently, Zacharias Moussawi, found guilty of conspiracy in the 2001 World Trade Center bombing. The feminine names of the towns in which these prisons are located—Marion and Florence—do not connote a harsh and menacing penal setting, but federal officials have had their intention confirmed by the nicknames attached to these prisons by newspaper and television reporters, inmate lawyers, and prisoners’ rights groups—Marion as “the new Alcatraz” and Florence as “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” Decades after it ceased operation, the word Alcatraz still conveys the dramatic image of a tough prison where bad guys get the punishment they deserve.
⁴

1
. This work was part of a Ford Foundation–funded study of federal prisons by a research team from the University of Illinois. For an account of this unusually comprehensive study see Daniel Glaser,
The Effectiveness of a Prison and Parole System
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).

2
. For more information about the GGNRA and its inclusion of Alcatraz, see Amy Meyer,
New Guardians for the Golden Gate: How America Got a Great National Park
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

3
. After the original startup of tours, Robert Kirby, site supervisor for the National Park Service, improved the accuracy of rangers’ presentations by inviting former guards, lieutenants, and captains who lived in the Bay Area to return to the island to provide information and answer questions.

4
. These files included those of men who died of natural or unnatural causes at Alcatraz; were deported or released to state prisons; served their entire sentence and thus came out of Alcatraz “flat”; or were conditionally released directly from Alcatraz.

5
. The only other set of federal prison records marked for historic preservation during Norman Carlson’s term as director came from the Federal Women’s Prison at Alderson, West Virginia.

6
. See David A. Ward and Annesley K. Schmidt, “Last-Resort Prisons for Habitual and Dangerous Offenders: Some Second Thoughts about Alcatraz,” in
Confinement in Maximum Custody: New Last Resort Prisons in the United States and Western Europe
, ed. David A. Ward and Kenneth E. Schoen (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books / D. C. Heath, 1981), 61–68.

7
. In the chapters ahead, individual FBI agents who authored reports to the director are identified by name; during the Hoover administration such individual recognition was not agency policy.

8
. “Conditional release” (later called “mandatory release”) is release from prison when good time earned (every day without misconduct reports) is subtracted from the statutory maximum of a sentence. Conditional releasees were subject to supervision by federal probation officers and to rules and conditions similar to parole; violations constituted grounds for revocation and return to prison.

9
. The following circumstances reduced the sample of 508 to 439 cases: the inmates’ postrelease history was unknown (twenty-eight cases, mainly due to incomplete
FBI arrest records); they were deported (nine cases); or they died prior to release or during their first year after release (thirty-five cases).

10
. Most former employees, having been told to keep their thoughts about or experiences on Alcatraz within the Bureau of Prisons “family,” were initially hesitant about expressing candid opinions—particularly about the management of the prison by Warden James Johnston and other administrators and the influence of Bureau headquarters. They were advised that their comments would not be attributed to them by name, but as interviews progressed (and as they learned that their colleagues were also telling their stories), they agreed during the interviews to be identified with their remarks. As former employees got over their reluctance to talk, a number of wives who were at home during the interviews told me, “I’ve never heard him talk about his work like that.”

Few former inmates expressed any concern about keeping their identities anonymous when they talked about the prison. For privacy and other reasons, three prisoners are identified by fictitious numbers: 1600, 1700, and 1800. Two senior officers are identified in this book only as “X” and “Y,” one because many years following his retirement from the Bureau he was still concerned about the candor of some of his remarks; the other by the request of his former caregivers that they be asked to review any excerpts from his interview before agreeing to identify him as the source.

For both employees and prisoners, as Alcatraz became a major tourist attraction and more movies, books, and television documentaries appeared, everyone felt free to describe their experiences and more than a few started thinking that they should write their own books about Alcatraz.

11
. Focusing on careers helps avoid the false dichotomy of explaining prison society either as a response to the deprivations of life in a “total institution” (one closed to the outside world) or as a result of the importation of criminal values and life styles into penal settings. A criminal career typically is a sequence of crimes, encounters with the police, outcomes of judicial proceedings, responses to the conditions of sentences, and decisions to discharge or release, followed by further encounters with police, courts, penal institutions, and parole agencies. With lengthy or repeated incarcerations, the features and habits of a criminal career interact with the prisoner’s response to the conditions of confinement and measures of control exercised by the staff.

1
. Alistair Cooke, “Alcatraz: Summer 1959,”
Letter from America
(Bath: BBC Audiobooks, 2003). This commentary on Alcatraz was selected by Cooke for a BBC collection of his radio broadcasts, 1946–1968. Cooke was incorrect in asserting that state prisoners were confined at Alcatraz and that an inmate, Gene Colson, was among the residents.

2
. Harry Elmer Barnes and Negley K. Teeters,
New Horizons in Criminology
(New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), 461.

3
. Anthony M. Turano, “America’s Torture Chamber,”
American Mercury
, September 1938, 11–15.

4
. Roy Gardner,
Hellcatraz: The Rock of Despair
(n.p., 1939).

5
. Janet Maslin, “When Does Pain Make a Murderer a Victim?”
New York Times
, January 20, 1995.

6
. Bernard Weintraub, “As Film Location, Alcatraz Lives Up to Its Dark Past,”
New York Times
, March 3, 1994, 33.

7
. For descriptions of more than a dozen movies made about Alcatraz, its inmates, or as a setting for fictionalized stories see Robert Lieber,
Alcatraz: The Ultimate Movie Book
(San Francisco: Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, 2006); and Dashka Slater,
Lights, Camera, Alcatraz: Hollywood’s View of an American Landmark
(San Francisco: Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, 2005).

8
. According to U.S. Senator John McCain, POWs who tried to escape or who “distinguished themselves as die-hard resisters” were confined in the Viet “Alcatraz.” John McCain with Mark Salter,
Faith of My Fathers
(New York: Random House, 1999), 316–17.

9
. Ian Fischer, “Missing Refugees Turn Up with Accounts of Abuse,”
New York Times
, May 30, 1999, 7.

1
. David E. Ruth,
Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918–1934
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1–2.

2
. John Kobler,
Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone
(New York: Collier Books, 1971), 181.

3
. Ibid.

4
. Ibid., 181–82, 186–87.

5
. Sean Dennis Cashman,
Prohibition: The Lie of the Land
(New York: Free Press, 1981), 80.

6
. Kobler,
Capone
, 190.

7
. Ibid., 202, 204.

8
. Ibid., 253; see 247–61 for an account of this event. A more recent book on the subject is William J. Helmer and Arthur J. Bilek,
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
(Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 2004).

9
. Francis X. Busch,
Enemies of the State
(London: Arco Publications, 1957), 189.

10
. Karl Sifakis,
The Encyclopedia of American Crime
(New York: Facts on File, 1982), 638.

11
. Ibid., 637.

12
. Kobler,
Capone
, 269–70.

13
. Lawrence Bergreen,
Capone: The Man and the Era
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 322.

14
. Ibid., 365–66.

15
. Kobler,
Capone
, 277–78.

16
. Frank Spiering,
The Man Who Got Capone
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 149.

17
. Ibid., 192–93.

18
. Ibid., 196–97.

19
. “Capone Runs Underworld from Cell, U.S. Reveals: Al Living in Luxury,”
Chicago Herald and Examiner
, December 18, 1932.

20
. See Kobler,
Capone
, 351–54; and Melvin H. Purvis, Special-Agent-in-Charge, Bureau of Investigation, Chicago, Illinois, to Director, Bureau of Investigation, January 26, 1932.

21
. On the way to Atlanta the U.S. marshal and his five deputies kept Capone in leg irons and handcuffed to a youth being transported to Florida for automobile theft. Capone was allowed out of the restraints while he put on his monogrammed sky blue silk pajamas but then the handcuffs were reattached. Through the night Capone was thus linked to the auto thief, requiring that they lie in the same berth; the young thief was said to have been so in awe of his traveling companion that he remained mute throughout the trip. Kobler,
Capone
, 355–56.

22
. For a recent, exceptionally well-documented account of the exploits of key figures in the gangster era see Bryan Burrough,
Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–1934
(New York: Penguin Press, 2004).

23
. For a list of important robberies and ransom kidnappings from 1930–1937 see Jay Robert Nash,
Crime Chronology: A Worldwide Record, 1900–1983
(New York: Facts on File, 1984), 80–111.

24
. See Burrough,
Public Enemies;
and Michael Wallis,
Pretty Boy Floyd: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd
(New York: St. Martins Press, 1992).

25
. See Burrough,
Public Enemies;
and Steven Nickel and William J. Helmer,
Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy
(Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 2002).

26
. Alvin Karpis, with Bill Trent,
The Alvin Karpis Story
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971), 118–19.

27
. Ernest A. Alix,
Ransom Kidnapping in America, 1874–1974: The Creation of a Capital Crime
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 51–55.

28
. Alix’s study of ransom kidnapping confirmed the wisdom of this decision, concluding that when businessmen were kidnap targets, there was much less societal approbation, successful prosecutions were rare, and when convictions were obtained, they were generally on lesser charges. Ibid.

29
. Ibid., 61.

30
. Other cases during the six months after federal legislation went into effect did not involve interstate transport of victims: “The 8-year-old son of a wealthy partner in the New York Stock Exchange, a wealthy Chicago couple, and an alleged New York City bootlegger.” Ibid., 76.

31
. For a more detailed account of this case see ibid., 79–80.

32
. For five years until her death by suicide, McElroy was said to have been in despair over the prospect of never being united with her kidnapper. Ibid., 81, 82–84.

33
. Ibid., 81.

34
. For a kidnapper’s account of this case, see Karpis,
Karpis Story
, 132–44.

35
. Alix,
Ransom Kidnapping
, 85.

36
. For descriptions of this case, see Burrough,
Public Enemies
, 68–75, 80–84, 87–94; and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports by H. H. Colvin, August 5, 1933; and D. L. McCormick, August 7, 1933.