Alcatraz (87 page)

37
. Dowd, FBI report, C-4, pp. 21–22.

38
. This feature of criminal conduct has been identified or understood in few criminology studies except for Jack Katz,
Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil
(New York: Basic Books, 1988).

39
. For Bailey’s description of his remarkable career as a bank robber and the Memorial Day break from the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing, see J. Evetts Haley,
Robbing Banks Was My Business: The Story of J. Harvey Bailey, America’s Most Successful Bank Robber
(Canyon, TX: Palo Duro Press, 1973).

40
. See the statements of Deputy Sheriff Charles W. Young to FBI agents, September 4, 1933, file 7–115–435, pp. 1–2; and Nick Tresp, September 5, 1933, file 7–115–418.

41
. J. E. Hoover to Attorney General, September 5, 1933, file 7–115–405.

42
. J. W. Hughs, memorandum to the Director, September 6, 1933, file 7–115–433.

43
. Machine Gun Kelly is still famous in U.S. criminal history because his photograph is posted and his name is brought up every year to the 1.4 million tourists who visit Alcatraz and hear descriptions of the prison’s most notorious convicts. For details about Kelly’s criminal career see Burrough,
Public Enemies
. Kelly’s life up to his arrest for the Urschel kidnapping has been described by his son, Bruce Barnes, in
Machine Gun Kelly: To Right a Wrong
(Perris, CA: Tipper Publications, 1991).

44
. The Department of Justice, wishing to make the most of its apprehension of the Kellys, quickly turned to the matter of their transportation to Oklahoma City and the trial. Serious consideration was given to a suggestion that the defendants be locked up in a steel baggage car owned by the Rock Island Railway that could be fitted out with cots; however, since the press would watch every movement from the jail, it soon became clear that a train holding the Kellys would attract crowds at every station on the route west from Memphis. The decision was thus made to charter a plane to fly the Kellys to Oklahoma City; three and a half hours later, they were lodged in the same jail where their co-defendants were being held while they awaited sentencing. For an account of the apprehension of the Kellys see Burrough,
Public Enemies
, 116–25, 129–34.

45
. For Bailey’s description of these proceedings see Haley,
Robbing Banks
, 161–75.

46
. Bryan Burrough was able to trace the origin of this famous statement to an account of the arrest of the Kellys by FBI agent William Rorer; given to “a
Chicago American
reporter hours after Kelly’s capture, Rorer said it was Kathryn who uttered the historic word . . . at the moment she was arrested. ‘Kelly’s wife cried like a baby. She put her arms around [her husband] and said, Honey, I guess it’s all up for us. The G-men won’t ever give us a break.’” Burrough,
Public Enemies
, 133–34.

47
. Basil Banghart Alcatraz file.

48
. Roy Gardner and Joe Urbaytis, Alcatraz files.

49
. U.S. Marshal J. B. Holahan to Attorney General Dougherty, September 29, 1921, Gardner Alcatraz file.

50
. Holden and Keating, Alcatraz files.

51
. For Nash’s connection to the string of outlaw families descended from Quantrill’s Raiders through the James, Younger, Dalton, Jennings, and Belle Starr
gangs, see Paul I. Wellman,
A Dynasty of Western Outlaws
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 296–300.

52
. Earl Thayer was captured three days later, “delirious and half frozen . . . on the outskirts of Leavenworth carrying a 30.30 Winchester.” FBI interesting case memorandum 62–26316–49, April 24, 1933. The FBI account of this escape was not at variance with Berta’s except in stating that he was wounded in the shoulder during a “short skirmish”; Berta said that he was standing on the road with his hands up when a soldier shot him.

53
. In addition to the author’s two lengthy interviews with Charlie Berta (August 2, 1987; February 19, 1988), another source of information for this account of one of the most famous escapes in federal prison history is Jack Cope, U.S. Penitentiary [USP] commitment no. 72485, “1300 Metropolitan Avenue: A History of the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth Kansas” (USP Leavenworth, n.d.), 69–70, written under the supervision of G. Cuthbertson, Supervisor of Education. See also Paul W. Keve,
Prisons and the American Conscience: A History of U.S. Federal Corrections
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 109–10, where Keve comments on a policy the BOP developed after this escape, “that a warden, or any other staff person, taken hostage immediately loses all authority, no other staff is to accept any orders from him. . . . Such a policy was not in place in 1931.”

54
. James D. Calder,
The Origins and Development of Federal Crime Control Policy: Herbert Hoover’s Initiatives
(Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1993), 176.

55
. FBI report, W. F. Trainor, January 7, 1935.

56
. In his book about this event,
Missouri Waltz
, Maurice Milligan, the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, claimed that the culprits were Pretty Boy Floyd, Verne Miller, and a Kansas City gangster, Adam Richetti. Maurice M. Milligan,
Missouri Waltz
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 132–33. A more recent book by Robert Unger based on an analysis of 89 volumes of FBI files identified Verne Miller as one of the shooters, but the identity of a second man remains unknown. Unger’s conclusion is that the shooting began when FBI agent Lackey accidentally discharged his shotgun, killing Nash and agent Caffrey. Robert Unger,
The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI
(Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 1997), 230.

57
. Director, FBI, to Director, BOP, October 13, 1933, file 7–115–791, pp. 1–2.

58
. Homer Cummings, Attorney General, to Warden Robert Hudspeth, USP Annex, Fort Leavenworth, October 17, 1933, Albert Bates Alcatraz file. Hudspeth responded to this directive with a detailed description of the conditions of confinement for Bates and Bailey: “I issued instructions to the Deputy Warden to confine them in Seven Wing Basement . . . where the solitary confinement cells are located. . . . When the men are locked in their cells this leaves Bates and Bailey under double lock as the door leading into this hallway is also padlocked, having a heavy wire screening over the hall partition and leaving this door where it can be unlocked only by a guard from the outside. I selected three of the best guards I have in the institution who are personally in charge of these men at all times, with instructions from me to permit no one to come near this part of the
cellblock and to allow these men no privileges whatsoever except by written order by me.” Warden Hudspeth to Director [Sanford] Bates, October 20, 1933.

59
. E. E. Kirkpatrick,
Voices from Alcatraz
(San Antonio: Naylor, 1947), 119–20.

60
. Director, BOP, to Warden [Fred G.] Zerbst, [USP Leavenworth,] October 17, 1933.

61
. J. Edgar Hoover, memorandum to the Director, BOP, October 13, 1933.

62
. Albert Bates thought he could last forty-two days without food or water and “beat Keenan at his own game.” His resentment was directed toward the assistant attorney general, whom he held personally responsible for his placement in solitary confinement: along with his life sentence, it made the future appear completely hopeless. Warden Hudspeth advised him that if he revealed the location of his share of the ransom money, most of the restrictions might be removed; but Bates claimed it was too late for him to give information because the principal had died and if he did divulge information that led to the recovery of the money he would be “on the spot” with his underworld associates. Bates file.

63
. Warden Hudspeth to Director, BOP, January 22, 1933. Even though he had no contact whatsoever with other prisoners, Harvey Bailey was disgusted with his placement in the Annex, which he regarded as a depository for Leavenworth’s most degenerate offenders—drug addicts and homosexuals. For Bailey, who spurned a narcotic painkiller when his leg, broken during the escape from the Kansas State Penitentiary, was set, this was the ultimate indignity. The Annex was under BOP jurisdiction from 1929 to 1940, when it was returned to the army.

64
. Paul W. Keve,
The McNeil Century: The Life and Times of an Island Prison
(Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984), 172, 167.

65
. James V. Bennett to Sanford Bates, July 2, 1931.

66
. Ibid.

67
. Ibid.

68
. John O’Donnell, “Rich U.S. Convicts Buy Vacations; Probe Bares New Scandal in Prisons,”
New York Daily News
, July 10, 1931, 2, 4.

69
. Spiering,
Man Who Got
, 162.

70
. Kobler,
Capone
, 313.

71
. Ibid., 313–14.

72
. Controversy surrounded this film as Hollywood wrestled with the question of whether the spate of crime movies produced in late 1920s and early 1930s were glorifying gangsters or conveying the message that crime did not pay. Naturally a film about Public Enemy no. 1, a man described as “one of America’s icons” and said to receive more media coverage than the president of the United States, attracted attention. After much editing, with all references to the city of Chicago deleted, and with a compromise title,
Scarface, Shame of the Nation
was finally released in May 1932—the same month that Capone arrived at the Atlanta Penitentiary.

73
. A. C. Aderhold, [Warden, USP Atlanta,] to Director, BOP, July 5, 1932. In regard to visits, however, his Atlanta prison file indicates that Capone’s family was allowed to visit him as regularly as a family living in the immediate area might—his wife made 27 trips during the 27 months he was imprisoned in Atlanta;
she was allowed 73 visiting periods, his mother made 54 visits on 20 trips, Al’s son made 55 visits on 21 trips, his brother Earl saw him for 76 visits on 27 trips, his brother Albert came 12 times for 31 visits and his brother Matthew 4 times for 11 visits. Al’s brother Ralph, who had recently been released from McNeil Island Penitentiary, was denied a visit by Director Bates, although Warden Aderhold had said that he was prepared to make an exception to the rule that ex-prisoners could not visit inmates.

74
. “Capone Becomes Fine Tennis Player,”
Washington D.C. Times
, October 17, 1933, FBI file 69–180.

75
.
New York Herald Tribune
, August 28, 1932.

76
. Austin MacCormick, former assistant director, BOP, interview with the author, New York City, September 24, 1979.

77
. Capone Atlanta file.

78
. Sanford Bates to A. C. Aderhold, January 1934, ibid.

1
. Richard Gid Powers,
G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in America’s Popular Culture
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 44–45; this is a well-researched account of how elements in popular culture and the media combined to create powerful, positive images of federal government forces, particularly the FBI and Alcatraz, arrayed to save the republic from the public enemies. On October 13, 1933, the secretary of war approved a permit for the Department of Justice “to occupy Alcatraz Island as a maximum security institution for hardened offenders, including racketeers and incorrigible recidivists.” Sanford Bates, Director, memorandum to the Attorney General, October 17, 1933, Department of Justice [DOJ] file 4–49–3-2.

2
. James D. Calder,
The Origins and Development of Federal Crime Control Policy
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 11.

3
. Ibid., 2.

4
. Ibid., 15.

5
. Ibid., 13.

6
. Paul W. Keve,
Prisons and the American Conscience
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 95–96.

7
. Calder,
Origins and Development
, 34.

8
. Ibid., 159.

9
. Powers,
G-Men
, 3.

10
. Ibid., 42, 44.

11
.
Real Detective
, January 1934, 26, as cited in Powers,
G-Men
, 298.

12
. Powers,
G-Men
, 44.

13
. Ibid.

14
. This statement, from “Smash Racket Rule by Exiling Our Gangsters to a Devil’s Island,”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, October, 8 1933, reprinted in William Helmer and Rick Mattix,
Public Enemies: America’s Criminal Past, 1919–1940
(New York: Checkmark Books, 1998), 277, was accompanied by a drawing of Al Capone pulling a wagonload of firewood with a watchful Uncle Sam behind him.

15
.
Real Detective
, as cited in Powers,
G-Men
, 298.

16
. Ibid., 44.

17
. The most detailed description of Alcatraz Island, particularly during its years as a fort and as a military prison, is Erwin N. Thompson’s
The Rock: A History of Alcatraz Island, 1847–1972
, Historic Resource Study, National Park Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Denver, May 1979.

18
. DOJ file 4–49–3, sub 2.

19
. Powers,
G-Men
, 44–45.

20
. Blair Niles,
Condemned to Devil’s Island
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928). The convict who sold part of his story to Niles subsequently escaped, made his way to New York, and in 1938 published a more complete account of his penal servitude:
Dry Guillotine: Fifteen Years Among the Living Dead
. In 1940 another Hollywood movie,
Devil’s Island
, featured Boris Karloff as a surgeon sent to Guiana for treason who leads a rebellion against the brutal regime. Several other films,
Strange Cargo
starring Clark Gable in 1940, and
Passage to Marseilles
with Humphrey Bogart in 1944, helped to further the strong negative image of the penal colony.