The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (56 page)

However, Johnston’s theory is the most likely, and he was backed up by a report from assistant city engineer Floyd C. Whaley, who knew the local tides and eddies. Whaley was sure that it was impossible for the two men to reach the mainland since the tides had been exceptionally high that day. There was a very heavy fog, and it was just possible that a vessel might have been able to come closer to the shore than the usual 200-yard cordon, and pick the men up, but it seems pretty certain that, like Bowers, Cole and Roe achieved their liberty, but paid the ultimate price.

As a result of their breakout, the Public Works administration agreed to finance a new watchtower which would have eyes on the rear of the industries building, which itself was renewed as part of a modernization of the prison.

Five months after Cole and Roe disappeared from the Rock, three prisoners tried their own breakout. One of them, James C. Lucas, already had a claim to fame, after stabbing Chicago gang boss Al Capone in the shower room. He and Rufus Franklin were both serving thirty-year sentences; their accomplice Thomas R. Limerick, a bank robber and kidnapper, was in for life.

The three men were all engaged in the woodworking shop in the industrial building and on the afternoon of 23 May 1938, they decided that they had had enough of the brutal regime in force at Alcatraz. Carrying with them a hammer, some lead weights and pieces of iron, they resolved to escape over the roof. What they had in mind after that never became clear, since they never got as far as the edge of the island. “They probably figured they could seize the prison boat and make their getaway from the island,” Warden Johnston suggested to the
San Francisco Chronicle,
but this was never confirmed by any of the men.

In their way on the top floor stood the unarmed senior custodial officer Royal C. Cline, who was quickly despatched by a blow to the head with a hammer, leaving him lying on the ground fatally injured. The three men climbed through a window out onto the roof, but before they could go any further, they were spotted. Franklin had inched around the wall of a raised portion of the roof, but the guard apparently sensed something was wrong, and turning, shot him in the shoulder. Lucas and Limerick tried to throw the pieces of iron at the guard to put him off, but only one piece went through the shatterproof glass in the guard tower, slightly injuring the guard in one leg. Limerick was hit in the head, and Lucas managed to hide behind a wall, but soon realized the futility of his actions and surrendered. Both guard Cline and prisoner Limerick died within twenty-four hours.

Lucas and Franklin were tried for first-degree murder, and received life sentences; their defence that they had been beaten, kicked and pushed around by the prison officers was ignored.

The administration paid the price for not upgrading the bars across the whole prison in January 1939 when a group of five prisoners made their bid for freedom. They had all been involved with a “strike” action in September 1937, and as a result they had been held in the isolation cells. Unfortunately these still had the original soft iron bars from the prison’s time under the control of the US military, which were considerably easier to get through than their counterparts in the main prison.

The five men included Arthur “Doc” Barker, a member of the Ma Barker crime family. He had been arrested by FBI Special Agent Melvin Purvis in January 1935 on charges of kidnapping, and sentenced to life imprisonment. After his transfer to Alcatraz, he was assigned to the mat shop, where he quickly took control of the other inmates, and was believed by the authorities to be instrumental in organizing a general strike over prison conditions. According to a fellow prisoner, Alvin Karpis, though, Barker was “more interested in escape than confrontation. We join the strike to avoid suspicion; if we refuse to strike the officials will ask themselves why and it will make our escape plans more difficult.” No matter the extent of his involvement, Barker was sent to the isolation cells in the old military dungeons and realized that here was a perfect place from which to escape.

Barker became embroiled in various other potential escape plans before putting his own into operation: Al Karpis suggested breaking out of the isolation cells, overpowering the guards, stealing their uniforms, heading over to the family compound, where the prison guards’ and officers’ wives and children lived, and taking the warden and his wife hostage. They would then commandeer a launch that would come to pick up the warden’s wife, who they would claim was ill. Barker, not too surprisingly, felt that this was too complex.

Instead, Barker arranged for a crew of five – himself, murderer and kidnapper Dale Stamphill, and robbers Rufus Roy McCain, Henry Young and William Martin – to get themselves placed in isolation for infringing the rules. There they started using hacksaw blades which had been smuggled into the prison to cut through the bars of the cell, evading the metal detectors by keeping the blades near their feet, where the crude metal detectors weren’t effective.

Although the cell bars were easy enough to get through, the window bars were of the stronger quality found elsewhere on the Rock. To get through these the men devised a small-pressure jack, which was strong enough to bend the bars back and forth and eventually break the strong core. The breaks were filled with putty and painted with aluminium paint, matching the colour of the bars.

On Friday 13 January 1939, the Barker gang were ready to make their move. They let themselves out of their cells, and spread open the bars of the windows, squeezing through. The heavy morning fog prevented the guards from spotting them as they made their way to the base of a cliff and prepared to swim across the bay. They lashed together pieces of driftwood and lumber and started out, only for McCain to point out that he couldn’t swim!

By this time, the alert had been sounded, after the floor officer had spotted their departure on an informal roll call around 3.45 a.m. Patrol boats were launched by the coastguard and the prison guards, and spotlights used to illuminate the coastline. Although the accounts of what happened next are contradictory, it’s clear that Doc Barker was hit in the leg and the head, and Stamphill was also injured. Young and McCain were arrested after surrendering immediately the light was turned on them, although McCain had apparently suggested that they run towards the prison officers’ houses, because they wouldn’t be shot there. Martin was at large for the longest of the fugitives, but after he fell down the cliff at the south end of the island, he surrendered to prison officers. According to Warden Johnston’s book about his time on the island, Barker said he had been “a fool to try it” and succumbed to his wounds twelve hours after the escape attempt. A guard commented, “Well, he’s a lot better off now where he is than where he was.”

As a result of his death, a Coroner’s jury was empanelled, and decided that:

. . . the said Arthur R. Barker met his death attempting to escape from Alcatraz Prison by gunshot wounds inflicted by guards unknown.

From the evidence at hand, we the jury, believe that this escape was made possible by the failure of the system for guarding prisoners now in use at Alcatraz Prison, and we recommend a drastic improvement by those in authority.

Further, that a more efficient system be adopted for illumination of shore and waters immediately surrounding the prison; and that the citizens of San Francisco unite in an effort to have a more suitable location chosen for imprisonment of the type of desperadoes at present housed at Alcatraz.

A year later, funds were apportioned so that the isolation block could be modernized. No one else was going to leave Alcatraz from there.

The industrial building was the scene of another attempted escape a couple of years later, shortly after Henry Young was placed on trial for murdering Rufus McCain, whose inability to swim he probably blamed for the failure of the 1939 escape and the death of Doc Barker, as well as his unwillingness to use the wives of guards as shields during the break. Four felons, brothers-in-law Joseph Paul Cretzer and Arnold T. Kyle, Floyd H. Barkdoll and Sam R. Shockley took four prison guards, including future Alcatraz Warder Paul J. Madigan, in the mat shop hostage and then tried to pull apart the steel bars over the windows.

Warden Johnston described events to the
San Francisco Examiner
for their 22 May 1941 edition:

Right after lunch the four men lured Stoops into one of the rooms of the mat shop on the pretence that a machine was out of order. Then they fell upon him, bound him hand and foot with heavy bundle twine, and gagged him.

Then they herded other convicts into a separate room and went to work on the window, using a piece of pipe to pry off the reinforced inside casement.

They had worked at it about half an hour when Manning, who wasn’t expected, entered the shop on a routine inspection tour. They had a lookout posted. When Manning entered one grabbed him on each side and one from behind, and they hustled him into the room with Stoops, binding him but not gagging them [sic].

Then they went back to the window. By this time they had pried off part of the casement. They dragged over a small motor-driven emery stone and began grinding away at one of the toolproof bars.

One of the convicts remained posted at the door as a guard, and when Officer Johnston entered he was hustled in with the other officers. So far as I can gather they at no time used any weapons on the officers, just overpowering them by surprise and strength of numbers. Barkdoll is a big, husky man and took the lead.

Finally Captain Madigan entered the shop. They overpowered him too. But Captain Manning pointed out to them that it was time for the officers to ring in to the administration building, and that an alarm would be sounded if the officers failed to ring in. They were about ready to give up anyway. They had to cut through at least probably three of the bars before they could drop down to the outside and they hadn’t even cut through one.

So they freed Madigan. He phoned the administration building, and by the time we got there he was leading them away.

This wasn’t the last time that at least two of them were going to try to get away: Cretzer and Shockley were key figures in what would have been the most daring attempt, which culminated in the Battle of Alcatraz in 1946.

Before then came three other thwarted prison breaks. Twenty-five-year-old bank robber John R. Bayless was caught on the point of swimming away from the island by prison guards, after he had absconded from a garbage detail, taking advantage of a thick fog that had settled over the island. Some reports suggest that he surrendered when he realized how cold the water in San Francisco bay was on that September afternoon in 1941, others that he was pulled from the water before hypothermia set in. Either way, it didn’t prevent him from wanting to gain his freedom: when he appeared in court the following year, during a hearing to try to gain a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds he hadn’t been represented by legal counsel when he was convicted, he took advantage of what he thought was lax security. He leaped over a railing and headed for the rear door of the court but was grabbed by a deputy marshal.

The mat shop was the scene of yet another group attempt on 14 April 1943. The four involved on this occasion were some of the most violent men on the island at the time: Floyd Hamilton, who had been Public Enemy Number One; kidnapper Fred Hunter; and bank robbers Harold Breast and James A. Boar-man. Around 9.30 a.m. the would-be escapees overpowered, bound and gagged Custodial Officer Smith, using home-made knives that they had smuggled into the room. When the Guard Captain Henry Weinhold realized that Smith wasn’t where he was meant to be, he investigated, and was also overpowered. With the two guards out of action, the prisoners jumped out of a rear window, and headed down the thirty-foot cliff to the water’s edge. They had already stripped to their underwear, and greased up, to provide some measure of protection against the cold of the bay. Their intention was to use cans as floats, but in their haste, they left two behind in the mat room. These also had army uniforms inside, which they were hoping to use as disguises once they reached the mainland.

While the prisoners were working out what to do, the guards started to open fire, or, as the
San Francisco Chronicle
described it, “Fusilade after fusilade spattered the waters with deadly slugs, peppering the surface with tiny geysers.” Smith had managed to work one hand into his pocket to retrieve his whistle which he then placed in Weinhold’s mouth. With bullets raining down on them, the prisoners started to swim for it. Boarman was hit in the back of the head, and Breast held him up for a time. However, when the prison launch came to pick them out of the water, Breast let go of the body and it sank. If Boarman wasn’t dead from the bullet, he would have quickly drowned. His body, however, was never located.

Hunter and Hamilton kept swimming. Hunter tried to find shelter in the caves underneath the cliffs, but bloodstains were spotted near the entrance, as if someone had been leaning on the rocks for support. The guards brought their boat around to the entrance and ordered him to surrender. When he didn’t come out, they fired a single round into the cave, which prompted Hunter to exit rapidly.

The search for Hamilton continued, but when no trace was found, Warden Johnston confidently told the press that he was positive that the gangster had been shot, and fallen into the water. It was therefore rather embarrassing for him when Hamilton was discovered by guard captain Weinhold three days later, still in the industrial building! He had been concealed in the same cave as Hunter, but hadn’t surrendered with his colleague. Instead, he had waited there considering his options before deciding to return to the prison. The
Chronicle
suggested that he was “[l]ike a bad little boy who ran away from home and came crawling back in trembling fear of a spanking”. Climbing the cliff, he re-entered the mat room through the same window he and his friends had used earlier, then hid himself in a pile of material where he was found by Weinhold who was searching for further evidence regarding the escape.