Alcatraz Prison, also known as The Rock, was one of the cruelest prisons in American History. The island was founded in 1775 by Juan Manuel de Ayala. It was named La Isla de los Alcatraces, or “Island of the Pelicans” because of all the seagulls on the island. It wasn’t long before America took the island over, making it a prison for Confederate soldiers and southern sympathizers. The conditions were rough even before it became the prison known for its cruelty.

The men were kept in the basement, attached to the stereotypical chains with large metal balls that you see on cartoons. There were no beds, heating or running water. After the war ended, more cell blocks and buildings were erected. In 1898, the prison was flooded with Spanish coming over from the Philippines. By this point, there were around 500 men in the prison at any given time, though many of the men were serving time for less than two years. The buildings were starting to fall apart at this point due to lack of care. Because of this, in 1904 the prison was put under construction.

The construction was completed in 1909. By this time, Alcatraz had already gained a reputation of being harsh, with punishments including solitary confinement, restricted diets, hard labour, and the dreaded anklet chain with a 12 pound metal ball attached to the end. The inmates were often used as servants, cleaning up and cooking for the families of the guards, and sometimes even watching the guard’s children. Despite this, the rules were less strict than they would become when the building became an official prison in 1933.

The cruel conditions lead to several escape attempts, but most who tried to escape drowned in the waters of the bay. In 1918, a group got as far as Modesto, California by stealing flu masks to protect against influenza, which had the added protection of hiding their faces. They stole guards uniforms as well, which allowed them to leave the prison. Shortly after they were recaptured, Alcatraz fell into disuse, but the prison wouldn’t be empty for long.

In 1933, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reopened Alcatraz with the assistance of Attorney General Homer Cummings. They wanted to open a prison that would be completely inescapable, and they believed that Alcatraz was the perfect place for this. Any who escaped the prison would not be likely to escape the waters of the San Francisco Bay. Construction began once more and the prison started hiring.

Among the first prisoners who were transferred to the prison was Al Capone, arguably one of the most famous gangsters of all time. Arrested in 1931 for tax evasion, the only charge that authorities could make stick, Capone was originally imprisoned in Atlanta for about 2 years before his stint in Alcatraz, which lasted about 4 ½ years. Before Alcatraz, Capone had had his run of the prison system, with prisoners and guards alike showing favoritism. When Al Capone got to Alcatraz however, the favoritism didn’t hold up, and Capone quickly got whipped into prison life.

One of the harshest methods employed to do so was known as “the hole”. The hole was a dark room with freezing temperatures that prisoners were thrown into for nearly every minor infraction. The hole was a merciless punishment. There was no furniture, and inmates were only given a meal once every couple of days. This, combined with the fact that prisoners were stripped of their clothing and kept completely isolated when they were thrown into the hole ensured that nearly all who spent time there came out only to be immediately sent to the hospital wing. This was often due to arthritis, pneumonia, or a break in the mind.

By the end of Capone’s stay in Alcatraz, he was spending nearly all his time in the hospital wing due to syphilis, which he had contracted when he was younger. When he wasn’t in the hospital wing, he was likely either in his cell or practicing the banjo. Instruments were one of the very few luxury items that Alcatraz allowed in. Several attempts had been made on Capone’s life at this point, leading him to isolate himself from everyone in the prison except Alcatraz’s other band members. Capone’s fear for his life meant that he was only able to practice the banjo with the band, or when he was in the showers. Capone died a few years after he left Alcatraz, but he wasn’t the only famous inmate in Alcatraz’s history.

Robert Stroud was another famous face at Alcatraz. If you don’t recognize his name, you may recognize his moniker as the Birdman of Alcatraz. Despite the name, Stroud didn’t have any birds in Alcatraz. Pre-Alcatraz, Stroud went to Leavenworth Federal Prison for killing a man when he didn’t pay Stroud after Stroud pimped out a prostitute to him. This became a life sentence when Stroud killed a guard and stabbed another inmate to death. In Leavenworth, the wardens allowed him to take care of canaries. Stroud had up to 300 birds at one point. The wardens believed that this would be a productive use of his time and hoped it would curb his violent tendencies. During this time, Stroud wrote down his observations on the birds, and ended up publishing two books, both of which were well respected in the ornithologist community.

Stroud was transferred over to Alcatraz in 1942, after he used some of the bird equipment to distill alcohol. This, combined with his murderous intent, ensured his transfer over to Alcatraz–without the birds. In Alcatraz, Stroud wrote another book on the history of the US prison system and an autobiography, both of which Alcatraz denied publication. The autobiography was published online in 2014, long after Stroud died of natural causes in Alcatraz in 1963.

Other prisoners included Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, George “Machine Gun” Kelly and Roy Gardner. Karpis was one of the few criminals that had been officially declared “Public Enemy Number One” and caught alive. He had been a part of the Ma Barker Gang, leading the gang with Doc Barker and Fred Barker. Karpis had a photographic memory and was reportedly very intelligent, causing him to be a priceless asset to the gang. The gang consisted of 25 members, and the FBI claimed that Ma Barker ran the gang with an iron fist, but this was refuted by Karpis in his autobiography and Harvey Bailey in his own. The FBI likely claimed that Ma Barker ran the gang to hide the fact that they shot a harmless 62 year old woman.

The gang came to an end when they kidnapped the wrong person–they had been kidnapping a string of bankers and charging ransom, but all the FBI’s resources were put on the gang when they kidnapped Edward Bremer, whose father was friends with President Franklin Roosevelt. It’s reported that J. Edgar Hoover arrested Karpis himself due to the pressure that was being put on him, but Karpis wrote in his book that Hoover hung behind until other officers gave the all clear. Karpis was captured in 1936 and stayed in Alcatraz for 26 years. He died at the age of 72, two years after he was released. The cause was ruled as accidental overdose, although others claim that the cause of his death may have been more sinister.

George “Machine Gun” Kelly was sent to Alcatraz in 1934. Kelly had once been a small-time criminal, only trying to make ends meet. This all changed when Kelly met Steve Anderson–and consequently, Anderson’s mistress Kathryn Thorne. Thorne and Kelly quickly fell into a relationship, and later a marriage, and it’s believed that Kelly’s upgrade from small-time criminal to bank robber with a machine gun was due to Thorne’s influence. Thorne herself came from a family of criminals, and she was the one who marketed her husband to other criminals and purchased him the machine gun.

In the end, Kelly and Thorne were caught in a similar way to the Barker gang–they kidnapped the wrong person. Kelly and Thorne kidnapped the oil tycoon Charles Urschel and demanded $200,000 in ransom. Upon getting the cash and splitting up the earnings, Kelly and Thorne skipped town. Urschel was smart though, and made sure to touch everything he could to make sure that his fingerprints got all over the ranch that he had been kept at during his short stint with Kelly and Thorne. This combined with the serial numbers on the money that Kelly and Thorne had been given ensured that they were captured shortly after, found the morning after an all night drinking binge.

Like many of the other criminals, when captured Kelly was sent to Leavenworth prison, but he was soon sent to Alcatraz when he started bragging that he would escape and rescue Thorne by Christmas. At Alcatraz, the Wardens reported that Kelly was the perfect prisoner, although the other inmates found his arrogance and bragging to be irritating. It’s said that Kelly often wrote letters to family members and a few to Urschel, begging with the man to plead his case. In the end, Kelly lived in Alcatraz prison for 17 years, after which he was returned to Leavenworth Prison, where he lived out the rest of his days, eventually dying via heart attack.

The reasons that Roy Gardner was sent to Alcatraz was similar to Kelly’s, but different from the other prisoners in that he was not sent to Alcatraz because of his crimes, but because of his tenacious ability to escape from officials. In his early life, he had been a part of the American Army, but abandoned ship in 1906, when he decided to travel south to Mexico. He smuggled guns across the border for a short while, and when captured was sentenced to death by firing squad, but he escaped with three other American prisoners in tow.

Gardner, unlike the other prisoners, was not a bootlegger or a part of a gang, but instead a bandit whose main source of income was through robbing trains and government vehicles. Before Gardner turned fully to a life of crime, he had owned a welding company, but this only lasted for a short while and after he gambled away all his money, he abandoned the company to start his career in robbery.

He became one of the most wanted men in America when he robbed a US mail train. He was captured and sentenced 25 years, but before he served the time, Gardner escaped from a moving train. He escaped once more several months later, by asking to use a restroom where an associate had previously hidden a gun. He was sentenced to another 25 years, and brought to McNeil Island Prison.

He escaped once more, by convincing two other prisoners to escape with him under the assumption that Gardner had paid off the guards. During a baseball game where the guards were distracted, Gardner and the others made a run for it. One of Gardner’s companions died, and the other was badly wounded. He had used them as a decoy to better his chances for escape, and it had worked. Gardner was captured again shortly after, in 1921. He was sentenced another 25 years, his sentence having increased from 25 to 75.

Gardner was captured one last time, and then sent to Leavenworth Prison. When he bragged that the prison would never hold him, he was sent to the Atlanta Federal Prison. He tried to escape several more times, one time burrowing a tunnel through a wall, and another holding two guards and the captain hostage with a revolver. Both escape attempts failed. In 1929, Gardner began a hunger strike and threatened suicide, leading to him being moved to Leavenworth Annex Prison, until 1934 when he was moved to Alcatraz. Gardner was granted leniency two years later, despite his earlier escape attempts.

Gardner published a book called Hellcatraz shortly after he was released, followed by a short film called You Can’t Beat the Rap and a longer movie called I Stole A Million. Despite Gardners sudden success, in 1939 Gardner locked himself in a hotel room and dropped a cyanide tablet inside a cup of acid, which seems like a truly horrible way to commit suicide.

Gardner may have been known as the King of Escape Artists, but the only inmates to have possibly escaped Alcatraz were the brothers John and Clarence Anglin, and their accomplice Frank Morris. The three men were reported dead by the FBI, but many believe that the men survived.

But how did these men escape the inescapable prison? For months on end, they used sharpened spoons to drill holes in the outer wall of their cells, which the men concealed with sheets. They put paper mache heads with their real hair on them in their beds to fool the guards, and using a raft and life jackets made out of 50 raincoats, they attempted to cross the San Fransico Bay. Reportedly, the Anglins had been looking at the tide levels in magazines for months, so although they would have had to leave at exactly the right time to survive the bay, there is a possibility that they survived.

But if they did, where did they go? There was a fourth man involved in the escape, Allen West, who was not able to make a big enough hole in time to go with the men. He told authorities the plan had been to go to South America–Brazil, specifically which was known at the time as a safe haven for criminals.

No bodies were ever recovered, but after the men weren’t heard from again for nearly six decades, many assumed that the men had drowned. There has been evidence in the past however that points to the theory that the men may have escaped a watery grave. The first tangible piece of evidence is a photo of the two brothers which surfaced 13 years after the escape, taken by a childhood friend of the brothers, Fred Brizzi. He claimed he had spent some time with them in Brazil while smuggling drugs, and had gifted the photo to the family of the brothers. Experts say that there is a high likelihood that the photo is genuine.

The Anglins family claims that for several years after the escape, the Anglin’s mother anonymously got flowers, and it’s a common belief in the family that at least one of the brothers escaped.

The most recent piece of evidence is a letter sent to the FBI in 2013. The letter was signed John Anglin, and reported that all three men had in fact survived the icy waters of the San Francisco Bay, but that John Anglin, who was 83 at the time the letter was wrote, was the last surviving escapee, but that he had cancer. Provided the FBI said on national television that Anglin would get treatment and only one year in prison, he would turn himself in.

The FBI did no such thing, and completely ignored the letter. When they finally came clean about the letter in 2018, Anglin’s family expressed dismay at having missed an opportunity to connect with the escaped convict, and the fact that the FBI hadn’t told them, even though they had been interviewed for a documentary in 2014, after the FBI had received the letter.

If he were alive today, John Anglin would be 89 as of May 2nd, 2019. His age combined with the cancer that the possible Anglin reported means that Anglin is likely dead.

Alcatraz closed the year after the men escaped, in 1963. Today, the prison is a tourist trap, with nearly 4,000 people walking in and out of the prison every day. Alcatraz may no longer be open, but the history its walls have seen has not been forgotten.

 

More Info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Gardner_(bank_robber)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Karpis
https://www.history.com/topics/crime/alcatraz
https://www.biography.com/news/famous-inmates-of-alcatraz
https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/robert-stroud-birdman-of-alcatraz
https://www.prairieghosts.com/gpalcatraz.html
http://wildsftours.com/why-is-alcatraz-prison-in-san-francisco-haunted/
https://www.history.com/news/alcatraz-escape-new-evidence-anglin-brothers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/01/24/a-man-claims-three-alcatraz-prisoners-barely-survived-a-1962-escape-and-that-hes-one-of-them/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8716854e4022
https://www.alcatrazcruises.com/blog/2018/06/08/anglin-brothers-escape/
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/01/26/relative-escaped-alcatraz-inmates-talks-about-alleged-letter/