My Life On Alcatraz
By Joe Donohoe • From The Marina & Fisherman's Wharf
On Labor Day 2007 I escaped from Alcatraz, braving the September waters of San Francisco Bay.
Only three times did I make the mistake of looking back at the Rock and thought to myself, “Doesn’t that damn island ever get any smaller?” as rollers broke in my face and toxic salt water went up my nose.
“The Island of the Pelicans,” as it was called by the Spaniard de Ayala, is a mean piece of land capped with wind-beaten prison buildings, seasonal coat of bird guano, and a light house that guards the outer reach of the inbound shipping lane with its eternally rotating cyclops-eye. The individual components of the Depression-era institution can be seen easily from Russian Hill, a puritan reprimand to the flamboyant city.
On the day of the annual “Centurion’s Escape from Alcatraz,” I got on a boat at seven in the morning along with my girlfriend and a cabin full of swimmers. Most wore only swim suits and thermal swim caps, as many bay swimmers consider wet suits cheating. I was a cheater in a wet suit, not sure if I was even going to survive despite my weekly training. The ferry we commanded cruised out from Pier 41 to within a few dozen yards of The Rock. Just beyond Barker Beach, so named for the infamous “Doc” Barker who met his death from rifle fire while trying to escape Alcatraz in 1939, and at the appointed time, the aquanauts dove in haphazard and reckless fashion and started swimming for distant San Francisco.
I was goaded into swimming from the famous and “inescapable” former prison by my friend Kent. Kent had gotten involved with the Dolphin Swimming Club, the 130 year-old club that specializes in swimming the frigid waters of the open bay.
I entered the water and immediately started hyperventilating. I had to float until calm returned. It took time to get used to the idea that my diminutive land mammal self was swimming against a persistent western current that would take me deeper into the 1600 square mile bay and then titanic Pacific Ocean beyond, if I wasn’t primed to swim against it. Once I made my panicked self understand that the only option I had was to swim my ass off or shamefully flag down a rescue boat, I aimed myself at the Bank of America building on California Street and, guided by the diagonal shafts of morning sunlight that plummeted through the dirty Gatorade-colored water, swam home.
When I made it to the Hyde Street beach, almost last out of all the swimmers, I nevertheless felt like a bad-ass. We had safety pilots in kayaks and no one was shooting at us as we swam. That wasn’t the case for any of the hard cases that ever tried to bust out of the Rock. The prisoners also didn’t have goggles, which may have been the most important factor. I wouldn’t have been able to guide myself if I had been blinded by salt water. Everyone—wet suit or no wet suit—wears goggles.
Fourteen escapes were attempted from U.S. Federal Prison Alcatraz. As far as anyone knows, none were successful. Some were finished off by the freezing waters and rough surf of the bay.
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I’ve gotten quite familiar with Alcatraz. I started working there as volunteer docent after my swim, feeling, perhaps, that I owed the legend of the prison something for the rush of surviving a breech of the channel (though in truth many do).
I answered an ad on the back page of the SF Weekly to become a volunteer for night tours on the island. I’ve been doing weekly volunteer work, meet and greet, or conducting private tours for friends, ever since. Alcatraz always held a morbid fascination for me. Someone told me that a scar makes a beautiful woman even more beautiful. A flawless face with a blemish is more interesting than perfection. A scar, or a mole, or an imperfection, adds a sense of history, depth or experience. There’s a story there, in that tragically flawed but otherwise breathtaking face. It’s the same thing with the ugliness of the Rock in San Francisco Bay. The city of St. Francis, with its cosmopolitan airs and stunning views, becomes more interesting than, say, Seattle, with that daily reminder of the failures of the American dream sitting like a toad out in the middle of the bay.
Originally, Alcatraz was designed to guard California gold from foreign navies and the Confederacy during the Civil War. Then it became a minimum-security military prison that incarcerated not only deserters and troublemakers but rebellious Hopi Indians and religious pacifists who refused to fight in World War I. The cement/steel cell house was built by the prisoners in 1909 who thereafter had to live in it. Everything is imported, for Alcatraz is indeed a rock. Water, top soil, the Agave on the southwest side of the island, the trees, all of that came from off island and water still has to be imported just as sewage has to be taken off (an improvement over the prison era when it was just flushed into the Bay). It became a prison for civilian offenders in the 1930’s when America was in the grip of Prohibition, the Depression, and a sensational crime wave.
One of the perks of working at Alcatraz is to be able to tour active prisons in order to compare them to the museum prison. Several of my fellow employees and volunteers have toured San Quentin and visited the gas chamber there. Another Alcatraz colleague used to make phone taps for the FBI and Darwin Coon, one of the last bank robbers to be imprisoned on the Rock, now sells his memoirs to fascinated tourists in the bookstore that was once the lower level of the kitchen. FBI agents, journalists, ex-cons, beautiful European tourists all make the pilgrimage as has Clint Eastwood, Willy Nelson, and other celebrities. Alcatraz still holds a wealth of stories.
Ironically, some of the most beautiful views of this region are to be found here. The Rock offers a lovely 300-degree unobscured panorama of San Francisco Bay that’s unique, especially on the night tour. Lights come up on the city and twilight paints a subtle skyscape behind and above the Golden Gate Bridge and the freighters glide into their ports as the harbor lights come on or wait patiently in the soft atmosphere of early evening in the quiet of the Bay when the water turns the color of a thin Cabernet backdropped with silver. Reddening sun light filters through the fog and catches on the city of Richmond’s refineries while pelicans and cormorants skim the infinitude of currents and waves.
One of the staff members prints up a duty schedule for both staff and volunteers. This item contains tide data, the exact time of the moon rise (if there is one) and historical items concerning the day’s date. This creates an intellectual frame and provides answers for the amateur photographers and history sleuths who come to Alcatraz.
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There is something about the island, its mixture of beauty and cruelty, pathos and ugliness that invites film crews, sight-seers and even former guards and prisoners, in their gray years, to come back to this place they seem to perversely not be able to let go of.
Everyone who works out on the Rock seems to do it out of love and intellectual curiosity. I’ve always been a history fiend. I like the bigger back drop of the scope of inter-generational experience that shadows the both the soap operas and workaday number-punching and toll-paying of daily life. Also the stories of people who have lived in extremes has consistently appealed to me. The margins are where you find out what are the worst, and best, things human beings are capable of.
In the thirties the public was in love with violent offenders like John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde and murderous gangsters like Al Capone. The former breed of outlaw preyed on the hated banks that foreclosed on millions of homes and the later provided beer and liquor in direct defiance of a despised law. These facts made people overlook such individuals’ wanton disregard for the lives of the citizens who died at their hands. Disillusioned with promises of prosperity, many Americans in the thirties felt that the only thing separating themselves from the gangsters were the guts to take whatever you wanted rather than sitting around, jobless and desperate while your family starved. It was in the Depression that the cult of the American outlaw, going back to Jesse James, got a twentieth century upgrade. For the Federal Government this represented an image problem. The stories of the outlaws featured in the newscasts were exciting, the crooks heroic to people who felt the system had failed them. The government needed it’s own propaganda and J. Edgar Hoover and the fledgling FBI were only too eager to embrace the role of action hero.
The legendary bureau chief recruited a militia of western gun-toting law men, mostly from Texas, to hunt down the bank robbers. He published a list of the most wanted criminals in America, all while bickering with Congress to get the right to arm his agents and secure revenue for operations. In a short time many of the more notorious criminals on the “most wanted” list had been shot to hell, including Dillinger and the Barker Gang. Others like Capone were done in by more legitimate means. Either way, the “war on crime” enabled Hoover to maneuver the FBI to become the national police force during FDR’s New Deal. At the same time the Bureau of Prisons systematized the federal prison system and streamlined the creation of what were to be super-prisons to house the nation’s super criminals and the foremost of these was Alcatraz. The BOP bought the Rock from the army and turned it into “America’s Devil’s Island” which suited the theatricality of the “war on crime.” It is not known how much of a role Hoover had in the selection of Alcatraz to become the high-security Pelican Bay of this time period but the evidence suggests that he was fond of the place and its symbolism. Many of the gun men that were captured, rather than killed, by FBI agents ended up within its walls.
The staff are an eclectic bunch—ranging from serious law enforcement ranger-types to high school kids, school teachers, naturalists and gardeners to old timers, retired ravers, comics geeks, former Marines or just history geeks like me. Some staff, in the past, have even been former prisoners. In the winter the one night boat comes out at around 4:40 PM and if I’m assigned to do so I’ll pass out maps to people as they come off the boat. Assignation of duties is largely informal though often I’m assigned to do cell door demos where I’ll open and close the cells on one tier from the mechanical lock box, having been trained at this. Then I’ll go to the hospital area where I’ll talk about the fact that having a fully functional hospital on the island made the prison almost completely self-contained. At the end of the night, with other staff, I sweep the island clear of people, herding everyone down to the dock before departing myself with the staff, leaving behind only the night security guards. If I can take the intermittently scheduled interpretive class at Fort Mason I can give more formal scheduled talks about popular subjects such as escapes.
One of the most interesting stories I’ve heard about former prisoners was about an old guy who came to visit the island in the 1990’s and talked to one of the volunteers in the shower room about what it looked like when the prison was active. The old timer gave very detailed descriptions and said that he had been a prisoner on Alcatraz once and gave his number. When the volunteer did research later he found out that not only were the old man’s descriptions picture accurate but that he was also a still wanted criminal. The old man was Whitey Bulger, the terror of the Irish Mafia in Boston, a man who had murdered, embezzled, grifted, run narcotics and prostitution and was still at large with a multimillion dollar bounty on his head. According to an Interpol website, Bulger and his girlfriend were last seen in Barcelona in 2002 and are still at large to this day, if Bulger is still alive. It seems as if, with every federal police agency in the country after him, he decided to stop in at Alcatraz, where he had indeed been imprisoned, and say hi.
Alcatraz mostly held American convicts with a few exceptions including Alvin “Creep” Karpis, brought in by the FBI, a Canadian who did crime in the US. There was a Japanese American, Tomoya Kawakita, who was incarcerated for treason during World War II (he was caught in Japan when the war broke out and became an interpreter for the Japanese Army in POW camps where he was abusive of American prisoners. Foolishly he returned to California after the war and was spotted by a seargent whom he had helped torture, was convicted of treason and sent to the Rock. People come from around the world now. A middle aged British tourist got really excited when I told him that a living bank robber was signing books on the island. He wore sweats and trainors in the international tenor of Euro casual hip and I thought he was a bit of a character himself. One time a visiting group of FBI agents came to take the tour. I visualized a group of physically fit, flat topped, lantern jawed guys, with a smaller number of prim women, in power suits with sun glasses and trench coats and ear pieces showing up off the boat but they were casually clad and looked just like the rest of the tourists. I have seen women of stunning beauty and fragile old people with graceful charm. Everyone seems to enjoy themselves. Coming out here is like being in a movie come to life, experiencing from a reasonable distance the emotional and mythic aspects of cinema, reinforced by the remnants of hardcore reality, which makes the experience of a visit seemingly more authentic than a trip to Universal Studios. It could hardly be said that the same was felt for the prisoners of course. What a difference thirty or forty years makes.
The stories of the prisoners are the main attraction. Alvin “Creepy” Karpis spent 25 years on the Rock, more than any other prisoner. He outlived the prison and his nemesis Hoover and wrote two candid autobiographies after being released in the 60’s. This was after teaching a young con named Charlie Manson how to play guitar at McNeil Island Prison in the Puget Sound where he had been paroled from the Rock. The books tell the story of crime and incarceration from the perspective of a criminal. Photos of Karpis as a young bank robber make him look like a mean goth rock star. His fingerprints had been surgically removed by an underworld doctor and his smile never appeared like anything but a grimace. Karpis was the only public enemy who was personally arrested by J. Edgar Hoover in New Orleans. (Karpis wrote that Hoover waited until he was safely handcuffed by his agents before making his presence known.)
When I take people around Alcatraz, in my volunteer uniform (to make it official), I point out graffiti from the Indian occupation of the late sixties. In 1969, six years after the government closed the prison, a group of urban college and graduate student Indians from various tribes occupied the Rock, claiming that as unoccupied Federal land it should go to the tribes as according to a nineteenth century treaty. The occupation last for 19 months with people bringing water and food out to the occupiers until fires burned down the warden’s house and other historical structures and the occupation lost the public’s sympathy. It is not known how the buildings burned although the Feds say that some of the lawless elements that came out to squat, such as Haight Ashbury and Hell’s Angels types, started them while Indian representatives say that the fires were caused by government provocateurs. Regardless, the incident gave US Marshals an excuse to clear off the island. As a result, however, Richard Nixon and the United States Government recognized the right to soverignty of the Indian nations. Every Thanksgiving morning since then there’s been a gathering of various tribes before sunrise on Alcatraz to commemorate the event in the Parade Grounds where the remains of the housing where the guards lived with their families molder. These were demolished by the government after the prison closed in 1963.
I’ve taken a lot of friends on private tours. I’ll demonstrate to them how the cell doors work. I’ll take the to the top of B block and describe how Frank Morris and the Anglin Brothers built a raft out of rain coats underneath the guards’ noses, drilled out the bars over the ventilation duct with a drill fashioned from an electric fan and might even have made it to nearby Angel Island in 1962 (though nobody knows, they were never found). I’ll point out in the bookstore where John Paul Scott successfully filed through a steel bar with a serrated spatula, butcher string, and scouring powder over a undetermined but lengthy period. He then managed to swim to the Presidio where he was found the next day naked, bleeding, and catatonic from hypothermia.
I might point out the scars on the cement floor of the C-block utility corridor where the Marines dropped grenades from holes sawed in the roof of the cell house during what the newspapers called “The Battle of Alcatraz” in 1946. The cell house had been hijacked by six prisoners who managed to get guns from the gun galleries and proceeded to take a half dozen guards hostage but were unable to get out of the prison alive. There are bullet holes in the asbestos blocks of the isolation wing from the same incident, when mortar fire brought against the cell house ricocheted off the steel cells of D Block, miraculously not killing any of the helpless prisoners locked in isolation. For the most part though, I just tell people stories.
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When I go out to Alcatraz, I take one of the Hornblower ferries from Pier 33. On a calm day—if you’re careful—you can stand at the bow without getting splashed and watch sail boats and the odd sea lion at play. Having grown up in the hot land-locked interior of California, water passages are still magical to me. For the crew it’s just a job, maybe a fun job, but it’s something they do everyday and deck hands and pilots will talk about shopping with significant others, TV and baseball while someone narrates Coast Guard safety regulations before condensing the 200 year history of the island to fifteen minutes.
For the prisoners, of course, the boat ride was a sober journey.
One of the first prisoners brought out to the island was George “Machine Gun” Kelly. Like Al Capone, he was delivered to the island after being taken across country aboard an armored train. When the train arrived in Oakland, the armored car that Kelly was handcuffed to was transferred onto a barge which sailed first to Tiburon and then to the Rock where Kelly was led with other inmates in leg shackles up the 130 foot climb from the Alcatraz dock to the cell house. Once admitted, he had his shackles removed, showered, was issued a uniform and then led naked upstairs where he was given a cell on “fish”—as in “fresh fish”—row or the bottom cell on the aisle between B and C Blocks the inmates called “Broadway.” There he was informed that medicine, shelter, and food were his only rights and that everything else, including work, was a privilege. More or less a fallen Catholic boy from a good family, Kelly’s legend was largely created by his wife Kathryn, a dangerous flapper beauty who encouraged him to leave spent Tommy gun shells as his calling card at Midwest speakeasies, something that she knew would catch the eye of the newspapers. Sentenced to life for kidnapping and robbery, Kelly would write an apologetic letter from Alcatraz to the Oklahoma oil tycoon he had kidnapped. In part he wrote “The analogy of thirst can’t possibly give you an inkling of what it’s like to be tortured by the absence of everything that makes life worth living… these five words seem to be written in fire on the walls of my cell: ‘nothing can be worth this.’” Kelly spent 17 years on Alcatraz and, despite his efforts to make parole, died of a heart attack at Leavenworth prison in 1954.
When the docking is finished I walk to shore and go past the dock area and up the hill to the dock theater in the base of Building 64, the first floor of which dates back to the Civil War. I stroll through the recycled 15 minute abbreviated Discovery Channel documentary about the prison and it’s history to the electronic combination door that leads to the ranger headquarters. Inside there’s a series of rooms housing desks for the rangers, the library and equipment check out area and then desks for the night staff as well as a copy machine, a lounge, private offices, storage and lockers for staff. If no one else is assigned I’ll do dock announcements for the day tours where, outside the Visitor Center, where is stored an AED and first aid supplies, I greet everyone that comes off the boat and remind them of safety rules, events and activities scheduled for that day and, most importantly, the central dogma designed for visitors to the park: don’t take it and don’t break it. These talks are delivered through a microphone wired into a PA and last for about five minutes. There is no time card system for volunteers, you just write your hours down in a book when you are done. After announcements I’ll either wait in the visitor center where I can chat with rangers and volunteers, or I’ll stroll around the island or I’ll read up on history in the library.
Under Warden Johnston, Alcatraz was meant for the worst Federal offenders. The old army cells were redesigned with tool-proof round carbon steel bar doors controlled by mechanical lock boxes at the end of each tier of each cell block. Three hundred thirty-six 5×9x7 one man cells are in the four main cell block divisions (blocks B and C) with another 42 in the isolation wing or D Block (the old army A Block was never upgraded and utilized for storage mostly). The mechanical cell door system used a clutch and pulley mechanism to horizontally open and close all or select cells on each tier. There was one guard for every three prisoners and the guards were hand-picked by the warden from the entire federal prison system. The number of prisoners was deliberately kept below the maximum capacity of 300. Monastic silence and rigid time schedules demarcated by whistles and bells and the sound of cell doors slamming open and closed created a monotonous order for the prisoners and guards alike. Morton Sobell, the Rosenberg conspirator and nuclear engineer who was perhaps the best educated man who was ever imprisoned in Alcatraz, commented that he had never been in a prison that seemed so much like “a tomb of living souls.” The day began at 7:00 AM and ended at 4:50 PM. Lights out at 9:30 PM and prisoners were confined to their cells for anywhere from 12 to 23 hours a day depending on their status that was determined by their behavior. Unlike many other prisons, prisoners were not allowed to roam around the island nor were they let out into the recreation yard for non-work related activities except on the weekend. Prisoners were not allowed newspapers or radio or anything but extremely limited contact with the outside world. Books about crime were absent in the library and magazines were highly censored. Prisoners were rarely paroled off Alcatraz and instead would have to earn a transfer to a less severe institution first through work in the industries buildings and good behavior. Alcatraz was largely considered a punishment second in harshness only to the death penalty, although no executions were ever conducted on the island. Convict Jim Quillen, who wrote about his life on the Rock, also said that Alcatraz was more regimented and disciplined than any other prison he had ever been in, including San Quentin.
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Jim Quillen was one of the rare convict success stories, a man who secured a productive and rewarding life after incarceration as a senior hospital x-ray technician and a full presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter, said one of the worst things about the Rock was the presence of San Francisco only a mile and a quarter across the Bay, where anything the cons could ever want could be found. He recalled that a particular torment was the smell of chocolate being made at the Ghirardelli’s Chocolate Factory on Fisherman’s Wharf. Other prisoners remembered the sound of women’s voices and the clinking of cocktail glasses carried out over the water from the St. Francis Yacht Club or the sounds emanating from jazz clubs in North Beach where people were free and having good times.
Many cons said they would rather have been imprisoned in the desert or somewhere where they didn’t have to be reminded of what they were missing.
I know people who want to knock the cell house down, remove the stain of the Draconian past and replace it with a Global Peace Center complete with obelisks and Epcot Center-like glass geodesic domes. This would be a reborn Alcatraz, both Utopian and New Age, all the rust and unpleasantries of historical time removed. The problem I have with this is we still live in historical time no matter how much we try to pretend that we don’t. Pretending that history didn’t happen is an insult to human ancestry, as if the sum of recorded human knowledge just sprang into existence spontaneously, all gain with no pain.
As it is, Alcatraz is one of the most-visited historical landmarks in the United States. This makes it the cash cow of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. People come here from all over the world because they want the folklore. They want to see where Al Capone was locked up. They want to learn about the real Birdman, Robert Stroud, who bred birds in Leavenworth, not Alcatraz, and was more of a homicidal Hannibal Lecter-like criminal genius than the kindly type that Burt Lancaster portrayed him as being in the classic film. Stroud killed a man at 19 in Juneau, Alaska, and then spent the rest of his life in federal custody, mostly for refusing to play along with the authorities. Karpis and other hardened criminals who were imprisoned with Stroud called him a psycho who needed to be locked up. People want to hear about how we still discover discarded “shanks” in the shower. They want to know about the dramatic escapes. People have seen the movie and they want the thrill. Would well-meaning and mysteriously financed hippies in depthless glass domes hold such an interest?
The prison was closed, as mentioned, in 1963. The reasons for this were many. The liberals of the Kennedy Administration wanted to emphasize reform over punishment and warehousing. Alcatraz was also one of the number one polluters in the country as the power plant used to burn coal (diesel now) and sewage was flushed raw into the Bay which made the crab fishing excellent for the guards and their families (it’s hauled off now). Lastly the prison was just too expensive to maintain. Sea water and salty air will hazard even concrete and rebar and there is an ongoing effort at acquiring private and public sponsorship to upgrade infrastructure like staircases, the gardens, the shell of the warden’s house and service elevators. The piers of the docks, like most of the piers in San Francisco, need constant maintenance as sea water and marine parasites destroy wood over time. While docents and gardeners are often volunteers, contractors and supplies cost money.
Every time I come out to the island I discover something new. There are layers and layers of meaning and stories here. Even the gulls and cormorants who breed here in the Spring have their stories. There have been ghost sightings on digital cameras and I’ve felt eerie walking alone on the west side of the island alone at night. Everyone I meet who comes to see the island experiences a weird sense of wonder. Even Darwin Coon and others who were imprisoned here seem to be in awe of the legend of the place. Perhaps it is the attraction of criminality and the necessary denouement that citizens need to have where the criminal gets punished or the salve of passing years that makes Alcatraz more a folk memory than a painful actuality. Like World War II we can look at the misery of strangers in a dimming past as if seen through a lens of fiction. Alcatraz was a place of extremes and sometimes we need to be reminded of what the extremes are, especially in a time and place where warehousing violent and dangerous criminals is still the accepted means of dealing with the problems of crime and mayhem. More than this there is an instinct for connecting to history, to have reminders of the past and how the present might actually be much better than the good ol’ days, or there might be a need to recall what has been lost and not for the better. Working at Alcatraz you can channel the essence of living history in a place that’s as American as Gettysburg, the Alamo, or the Grand Canyon. This is the real movie of human existence, human trial, and human striving for the sunrise of understanding.
Joe Donohoe is the editor of Specious Species and a former editor of Filth, contributor to Maximum Rock&Roll, The New Mission News, Bunnyhop and ReSearch. Looks for love in all the wrong places, needs to clean up more and has a working problem—lack of exotic vacation ability. If his life is a movie it is a cross between Taxi Driver and Andy Warhol’s Empire. Currently he is driving a taxicab at night while taking medical classes at City College during the day.
Art: “Unspecified SF Series 2008″ by Stijn Schiffeleers. The series from which this piece is borrowed features scraped off famous landmarks of San Francisco, the remains of which are shown in the final image. Working in many media, Stijn tries to reveal the subtleties of life via video, interactive installations, and work on paper. His work embodies a sense of play and sensitivity that reminds us to take a closer look at what surrounds us. He lives and works in San Francisco, but still has a strong connection with his country of origin, Belgium.
