Escape from Alcatraz (25 page)

In the open-front cells of TU, or D Block, the cells with the grate doors, the prisoner has no radio outlet, no books, sees no movies, has no period in the yard—nothing to do except walk, lie, or sit, but he has a bed to lie on and light to walk or sit by. He does get the same food, served him by inmate orderlies off a wheeled table, as the men in the mess hall.

In the six closed-front cells, the Dark Hole, life is tougher. Warden Madigan substituted a gruel—but still no meat, nor dessert—for the bread-and-water and tasteless-spaghetti diet in solitary. “It was found,” he said, “that bread and water did not encourage repentance.” (On the mess-hall diet granted those in the open-front cells, he commented: “Our prison rule is fairness but no pampering.”) A man in solitary has no bed, curls up on the concrete floor with a blanket. A former inmate recalls a sojourn in the Dark Hole: “The worst things were boredom, and no cigarettes to help endure the boredom, and the darkness, never knowing whether it’s noon or midnight. You walk around in the darkness a while, always touching a wall so you won’t bump into it. You lie down a while, maybe take a catnap. Then you just stand a while, and every once in a while you say to yourself, ‘Boy, what wouldn’t I give for a cigarette.’ You start wanting the wackiest things, like a match; you’d like to hold a match and just watch it burn down to your fingers. Or you might wonder if the sun’s coming up now, or is it going down?”

Morris lost his neighbor for an indefinite period in late summer of that year, 1960. West helped stage a fracas at a noon meal to draw the guards and give robber Joseph Wagstaff a free hand to stab an inmate at another part of the mess hall. Off to the dark cells of D Block they went.

One evening in October, as he sat at dinner, Morris saw a face grinning at him across the room, and his eyes widened in surprise. It was John Anglin, whom he had known at Atlanta before Anglin and his brother, Clarence, were transferred to Leavenworth, leaving a third brother, Al, to stick it out at Atlanta. The Anglins, three black sheep among thirteen children of a “Tobacco Road” family along the backwater of the Little Mantee in Florida, stuck up a bank in Alabama and made off with a tidy $19,000. But the FBI nabbed them in Ohio before they could settle down to a spree, and the bank got the loot back. At the time, Clarence and Al were fugitives from the Florida state prison (it was Clarence’s fourth escape), and John had just wrapped up a stretch for grand larceny. For the Alabama job John drew ten years, the others fifteen each.

Clarence, assuming a prerogative of the warden, tried to ship John out of Leavenworth. He cut the top out of a big bread box and the bottom out of another. John sat in one, and Clarence set the other on top, then packed in loaves of bread. A truck was ready to haul John and other boxes out to a prison farm camp when a supervisor, apparently wondering why the helpers had struggled to hoist that particular double box onto the vehicle, grew suspicious. He pulled out a few loaves, and in no time at all the warden exercised his own prerogative and shipped John out, to The Rock.

Clarence came along in January, and the brothers occupied adjoining cells, Nos. 140 and 142, just four down the row from Morris, on the theory that, as Blackwell later explained, they might want to discuss family affairs in the evening hours. (Two other brothers lived side-by-side between Morris and the Anglins.)

The Anglins were the roughneck type, the direct opposites of the introspective Morris. John was thirty-two, of medium build with blue eyes and blonde hair; Clarence a year younger, but huskier, almost six feet. Wilkinson, who knew them too at Atlanta, said they were “more on the natively cunning side, throwbacks to the swamp country, more impulsive, more given to action than Morris.”

In June of that year, 1961, Warren Madigan took over the top post at McNeil, noted for its rehabilitative work, and there his talents flowered. His associate at Alcatraz, Blackwell, became acting warden, and on November 26, 1961, was officially named keeper of The Rock. Blackwell moved Arthur M. Dollison, superintendent of the shops, into his old spot as associate, to oversee the prison and, in Blackwell’s absences, to act as warden.

Warden Blackwell, a man of picturesque speech and Pickwickian bent, soon stamped Alcatraz with his own good-natured personality. Unknown to the world at large, The Rock softened, lost much of its grimness, even some of its old and unrelenting monotony. It took on, unbelievably, the aspect of a school for wayward girls. He added more variety to the games in the yard, but that wasn’t what did it. He posted a new purchasing privilege: the men could buy crochet needles (four inches long, in exciting colors) and slender knitting needles (both plastic, too brittle for less delicate use), along with yarns of all hues, patterns and, an obvious complement, instruction books. In the evening hours before bedtime, the nation’s most desperate and hardened criminals, at first clumsily, and then deftly, were soon crocheting doilies, pink or blue booties, and gorgeous bedspreads garnished with red-yarn rosebuds. Knitting needles flashed in fingers that once knew only triggers as the erstwhile bank robbers purled one, seldom dropped two, and skeins of yarn sped wondrously into sweaters. Blackwell did impose one stern rule: these new Rock needlemen must not cover their own beds with the spreads, nor wear the sweaters (every shade but gray), nor use the doilies as place mats at mess. They went out as gifts—booties for sister’s new baby, a bedspread for Mom, a sweater for Pop. Blackwell took a fancy to some of the doilies, proudly hung them on a wall in his office.

Dollison too, as overseer, had a distinctive influence on The Rock—no startling innovations, such as Blackwell’s, but a gradual change that seemed to sift down through the echelons. A more relaxed atmosphere began to exist among the custodians, no doubt partly induced by the clicking of knitting needles, a sound not normally associated with menace. And so the officer on the floor in the cellhouse rarely made a patrol in the four hours before lights-out, unless out of curiosity to see how a sweater or a bootie was taking shape. The rap of the rubber mallet on the bars in the weekend security checks abated to a languid tap, then into long silences. The cell shakedowns stirred less and less dust, finally became hasty glances. Upstairs in the hospital the MTAs and the duty officers for the most part still looked upon the sick as goldbrickers; outside, the guards at the gun ports and in the gun towers were still ready to pepper away; but inside the feeling seemed to be: the doors are locked, everything’s tight, the men embroidering doilies.

The convicts were not taking over the joint by any means, but this slackening had an infectious effect. Mealtime became playtime, the mess hall abuzz with chatter, the air filled with doughy missiles as the fun-loving felons now flung wadded bread at the guards, whose only reaction was to duck and glower. In the after-lockup hours men talked to neighbors at their cell fronts in louder voices, or called to friends across the corridor or the tier above or below; convicts with banjos and guitars plucked livelier tunes, and cornetists tootled away. Beneath this clamor, the quiet ones tended to their knitting. And in Cell 138 Morris was weaving an escape plot.

One morning in the brush shop, after the guard had made a half-hour count and left, a coworker handed Morris a small flat bottle and said, “Hold it a second.” He expertly filled the vial with white glue from a half-gallon jug, recorked it and slipped it back in his pocket, under the coveralls. “Just cork and glass,” he said. “It’ll go through the Snitch Box.”

“What if you’re frisked?”

“Ten days in TU. Figure the odds: about once in thirty times I’m pulled out of the line. Maybe I’m clean, so that jumps the odds sky high. Same with snitchin’ from the mess.”

This led to talk of the security-tight cellhouse, and the convict chuckled and said, “There’s a way out if anybody had the nerve. What block you in?”

“B.”

“Well, there’s a shaft right over your head you can climb out of onto the roof.”

He then related what was common knowledge among older prisoners. Willard Winhoven, released in 1959 after serving twelve years on The Rock for robbery, had been an inmate-electrician. In 1957 he removed a fan motor from a ventilator shaft over B Block, and no replacement was made.
¹
The guard supervising the work had commented after removal of the blower: “A good way to get out.”

For a moment, this revelation seemed to alter things. A daytime break under cover of a fog held the hazard, with the half-hour counts, of alerted guards swarming with rifles. That tower guard’s target practice on a drifting log had had an unsettling ring. An after-dark departure had the advantage of getaway time, perhaps half a night. Fine, except the shaft was out of reach: bars ran to the ceiling, and the steel door to the top of the block was always locked.

“How do you get up there?”

The convict grinned. “Ask the bull for the key.”

¹
Willard Winhoven related the story of the removal of the shaft motor in 1957, along with the guard’s comment, to a reporter for the San Francisco
News Call Bulletin.

Chapter 17

I
F THE VENTILATOR SHAFT
, an escape hatch just thirty feet above his head, had tantalized him at first, Morris doubtless put it out of mind once he had explored its possibilities. He was a plotter who picked over minutest details before acting, and there simply was no way to reach the top of the block except on a detail with a guard. At night, impossible. Only way off The Rock was still in a thick fog, outside the cellhouse.

On a fall evening in 1961, Morris sat clipping his fingernails. The clip, two inches long, had a pair of pivoting arms that lay, one upon the other, on its surface. The longer arm, with a tapered tip, swung out and doubled back to serve as a lever to snap the nail-clipping jaws. The shorter one had a file, and a pointed end to clean under nails.

Morris clipped the last nail and swung the lever back in place, pulling out the other to clean under a nail. Then, as a man in a musing moment might absently open and close a penknife, he kept swinging the file-cleaner out and in. At length, he snapped it back in place and gave the clip a little toss. As he caught it his eyes fell on the air vent below and to the right of the wash bowl. He stared, fascinated. And then, still staring, he slowly slid the cleaner out again and ran his thumb over the sharp point. He got up, scouted the corridor, then went swiftly to the rear and knelt at the vent. He picked at the concrete at the edge of the metal grille. Nothing. He picked harder … very hard. A few grains fell to the floor. He tried the opposite rim, a firm grip, a stiff jab. Bits came off. He chipped at the top. Miniature flakes tumbled down the black grille. He jabbed at the bottom. Tiny fragments gave way.

He stood up, trembling. A weary prospector had stumbled onto a rich lode. He knelt again, inspected the gouging. Small scars showed. He wet his thumb, gathered a thumbload of fallen particles and pressed them into the tiny gap at one side of the grille, then smoothed it out, his thumb a trowel. He did this all around, then moistened a corner of his blue handkerchief and wiped the grille and the powdery residue off the floor. He stood back. The vent looked untouched.

Then began the wrestling. It’ll take time to loosen that grille, maybe a week, maybe longer. How to hide the work? Let the towel sag? West’s accordion case! But West was still in solitary. He’d buy his own. What kind? Size? He couldn’t say:
Oh, big enough to cover the vent.
Wait for West. Ring him in on it? He’s a talker. The Anglins? Too impulsive:
Okay, what’re we waitin’ for? Let’s go!
This called for planning.

Details, details. Once the grille came out, what? Crawl on through? Too small. How thick was that wall? How big a hole did he need to squeeze through? Could he do it alone? The hole—he’d be digging
in
the hole. No lookout. And the bull comes by. He had to ring in West, after all. The Anglins? Clarence had a real knack for breakouts. But not yet, not yet. John’d stand watch for Clarence, Clarence for John. Away they’d go. He’d wait for West—and pray he left his heels alone.

Next morning he cased the end of the cell block, the width to the utility door, the depth of a cell. He gauged the wall’s thickness at maybe a foot. He cut a two-foot length of wood, reed-slender, in the shop and stuck it in his belt at the back. That night he angled it through the grille, touching the side wall until the tip slipped off the far edge. The wall was about eight inches thick. A drill? He glanced up at the light hanging in the center of the cell. Out of the question. He’d need a motor.

He checked the library catalogue and next morning left a request for a book on structural engineering. He studied up on concrete and mortar. He learned that damp concrete, if heated suddenly, tended to spall or chip out in cone-shaped flakes as the steam escaped. Enough heat might cause the concrete to crumble even if dry. But there were drawbacks here: this concrete did not seem damp; in either case, there was no means, short of a welder’s torch, to apply sufficient heat.

Details, details. How big a hole—to squirm through at an angle? Shoulder width sixteen, maybe seventeen inches—he’d need an exit about ten inches high, fourteen wide. The vent was now six high, ten wide. He chipped at the concrete again. Damn tough. Take weeks. What if they shook down his cell some Saturday? And looked behind the accordion? Hell, he’d be playing it down in the basement!
This thing needs more planning.

How to hide the hole … how to hide the hole … he climbed out of bed to go to the toilet. Those hiding places in the base—covered by paper painted white! Very simple. A sheet of paper pasted over the hole, a black grille painted on it. Paste …? Glue! Snitched from the brush shop. As the con said, the odds were with him.

Paper?
Over an
air
vent? Rumple sure as hell. Make a bull curious, a
rumply
metal grille. Take something stiffer than paper. Cardboard. Must be some around the shops. He’d ask one of—uh, uh, let’s not go asking a lot of questions.… He’d make his own, by God!
Papier-mâché!
He’d made it as a kid in grade school—a Halloween mask, a Christmas crèche, something like that.