Alcatraz Page 9

  Bennett reported that he personally compelled another guard to resign in the light of testimony that the guard had offered to do favors for influential inmates. He also suggested that when the Bureau of Investigation completed its investigation it should send a copy to the warden with a demand that he explain how these problems developed under his administration. Bennett concluded his report by noting the problems posed by high staff turnover and the use of inmates rather than civilians as secretaries, clerks, hospital attendants, and even as mail censors. He offered this explanation of the reasons for Atlanta’s problems:

  An inmate who has always had to buy off some District Attorney, Prohibition Agent or other Government official is indeed surprised when he gets to the penitentiary and finds that there is at least one branch of the Government which is trying to be honestly run. It is no small wonder that he will think that it is necessary for him to depend upon the almighty dollar to ease the period of his confinement.67

  A week after this report was submitted to Director Bates, another problem at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta became a headline in the New York Daily News: “Rich U.S. Convicts Buy Vacations; Probe Bares New Scandal in Prisons.” The article included photographs of Leavenworth and Atlanta under the heading, “Prisons? Naw, Just Winter Quarters,” and went on to describe the situation as “a federal prison scandal of national importance.” The reporter explained how wealthy New York convicts, mainly “racketeers and bootleggers,” paid bribes ranging from $800 to $1,000 to staff in exchange for summer transfers from “hot Atlanta and Leavenworth cells for more pleasant confinement in Army detention camps.” Three Manhattan jewel thieves, he wrote, “were discovered enjoying the summer breezes of the harbor [at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island] . . . when the federal prosecutor believed they were safe in Atlanta—to which he had heard them sentenced only a few weeks earlier.” These illegal transactions, the paper claimed, had been traced to the deputy wardens, a prison chaplain, and other “minor prison officials who are considered merely the collectors for more important figures in the prison administration.”68

  The problems of special treatment and influence peddling were particularly troubling in the case of Al Capone, who had been sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in May 1932. During these early days of the newly organized Bureau of Prisons, most of the Atlanta guards—working-class men of limited education hired at low wages—were accustomed to doing favors for convicts they liked and certainly for those who could pay. It should not have been a surprise to Bureau headquarters that many Atlanta employees were genuinely impressed by Capone’s celebrity status. Their prisoner had been described in the press as a folk hero, a Robin Hood who donated money to soup kitchens and arranged jobs for the down-and-out. No less an authority than Damon Runyon had written, “It is impossible to talk to Capone without conceding that he has that intangible attribute known as personality, or, as we say in the world of sport, ‘color.’”69 Students at Chicago’s Medill School of Journalism included Capone when asked to list the ten “outstanding personages of the world . . . the characters that actually made history.” (The other finalists were Benito Mussolini, Charles A. Lindbergh, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, George Bernard Shaw, golfer Bobby Jones, President Herbert Hoover, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and Henry Ford.)70

  Ordinary citizens tended not to pass moral judgment on Capone’s activities. According to biographer John Kobler, they generally accepted his own claim that he was a “public benefactor” providing a service that had merely been labeled illegal:

  You can’t cure thirst by law. They call Capone a bootlegger. Yes. It’s bootleg while it’s on the trucks, but when your host at the club, in the locker room or on the Gold Coast hands it to you on a silver platter, it’s hospitality. What’s Al done, then? He’s supplied a legitimate demand. Some call it bootlegging. Some call it racketeering. I call it a business. They say I violate the prohibition law. Who doesn’t?

  At the Charleston, Indiana, racetrack thousands stood and cheered Capone when he appeared with his bodyguards, waving his clasped hands above his head like a prizefighter entering the ring. U.S. Attorney Johnston was appalled during the American Derby at Washington Park to hear the band strike up “This Is a Lonesome Town When You’re Not Around” as Capone, a sunburst in yellow suit and tie, took his seat and to see droves of race fans rush forward, eager to shake his hand.71

  Between 1929 and 1931, seven books about Capone were published, a magazine titled The Inside Story of Chicago’s Master Criminal sold 750,000 copies, and Howard Hughes began work on a movie about the life of Capone. The script called for the film to depict fifteen killings, including the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.72 The movie encouraged the press and the public’s thirst for knowledge of how the “Big Boy” was doing as a prisoner—a thirst that proved to be too powerful for Atlanta officials to satisfy with terse, formal statements.

  Eight months after his arrival at Atlanta, newspapers across the country carried an International News Service series authored by “Ex-Convict no. 35503,” a man prepared to reveal all about Capone’s life in the Atlanta penitentiary. The Baltimore News headline for January 23, 1933, read, “Capone Leads Soft Life in Atlanta” and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin caption for the story was, “Capone Coddled in Atlanta Prison.” According to the ex-convict writer, who claimed that he had worked with Capone in the Atlanta shoe shop, “the big shot” was able to get just about anything he wanted, had plenty of money, and wore silk underwear, suits tailored for him in the prison tailor shop, and special shoes. His work assignment in the shoe shop was described as “a joke,” since it was limited to an hour or two in the morning, after which he left the industries area for visits, treatments in the hospital for his ailments, or to play tennis. The ex-prisoner reported that Capone spent many nights in the prison hospital where the beds were softer than the cell bunks and was allowed to purchase food from the commissary that was far better than the regular fare; in the prison hospital he was addressed as “Mr. Capone.” As the series continued, it alleged that Capone was allowed a cell with a number of other “big shots,” and that he was receiving abundant legal advice not only from his own lawyers but also from a cellmate who was a former judge serving federal time for using the mails to defraud.

  Despite Capone’s near-folk-hero status, the special treatment he was reported to be receiving at Atlanta did not reflect well on the federal prison system. Warden A. C. Aderhold tried to refute the charges; in a letter to Director Bates he denied that Capone was allowed to leave the prison at night (he had been out of the prison twice for daytime appearances in the U.S. district court), that he had special hours on the tennis court (he was allowed thirty minutes per day, the same as other inmates), and that Capone spent excessive time in the hospital (he had been hospitalized on only two occasions on doctor’s orders), and he had not been issued silk underwear, tailor-made suits, or special shoes.73

  Later in 1933 the Washington D.C. Times published an article under the headline, “Capone Becomes Fine Tennis Player,” which reported that Public Enemy no. 1 was playing tennis for one and a half hours on weekdays and all afternoon on Saturdays and Sundays. FBI Director Hoover noted on a copy of this story, “This kind gets more recreation than we do. No wonder prison ‘walls’ fail to instill fear.”74

  The desire of the press for information about Capone led a deputy U.S. marshal to allow a newspaper reporter to pose as another deputy and accompany him while delivering prisoners to the penitentiary. Since U.S. marshals often asked for and received a tour when they delivered prisoners, the bogus deputy marshal was allowed to look around the prison and to ask questions about Capone. A guard, assuming he was chatting with a fellow employee of the Justice Department, commented to the reporter, “We would need to put Capone in a cage in front of the prison if we satisfied the curious visitors. . . . Three thousand persons asked to see him each week. Other prisoners still glare at him. Each new prisoner asks to be put near Capone.”75 Several weeks later a
United Press news release described Capone’s life in Atlanta, characterizing his eating habits as those of “a starved lion.”

  Bureau headquarters, worried about these claims of preferential treatment, sent Assistant Director Austin MacCormick to Atlanta to investigate Capone’s living conditions. Without prior notice to the warden, MacCormick arrived at the prison during the noon meal and asked to be taken immediately to Capone’s cell. In a 1979 interview, MacCormick described this visit:

  [Capone] succeeded in getting into one of those eight-man cells with a bunch of big shots of the underworld. . . . [At that time] an inmate could order food from downtown and it would come into [the prison] in brown paper bags. . . . A guard told me that the inmates had been getting rotten food at the noon meal and night meal. He said it looked like a dog threw up . . . and so these eight big shots with money could order [food] . . . into their cell. . . . I saw a big chicken and pie on the table.76

  Capone’s conduct at the Atlanta Penitentiary inevitably became the subject of FBI investigations. In September 1934 a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent reported that an inmate at Atlanta had informed him that Capone was the head of an organization that smuggled drugs into the penitentiary through a member of the medical staff. That same month Warden Aderhold notified BOP headquarters that a particular guard was the subject of persistent rumors that he smuggled letters out of the prison for Capone. Three months later the guard was confronted with evidence that he was “living beyond his means,” and his resignation was accepted “with prejudice.”77

  In late January 1933 Warden Aderhold wrote again to Bureau headquarters denying a newspaper story titled, “Santa Claus Capone,” based on the report of an ex-Atlanta felon that on Christmas Day Al had donned whiskers and distributed boxes filled with candy, cake, and tobacco to his fellow convicts. The most that could have happened, said the warden, was for Capone to share some of the Christmas gift boxes that he, like all other inmates, was allowed to receive. A few days later, however, Aderhold received an angry letter from Director Bates, disputing his claim that Capone was being treated like all other prisoners:

  I recently wrote you sending a newspaper clipping with reference to Al Capone being Santa Claus and you replied giving your explanation of the matter. I am now informed that at the time of the visit of Mr. Finch, our inspector, there was a large table in the cell piled high with boxes of candy, nuts and fruits; that the walls of the cell in which Capone lived were decorated with pictures and that he had monopolized the whole cell to the exclusion of the other inmates; that there were several padlocked boxes in the cell; and that it was quite obvious that special privileges had been granted in the matter of furnishing Capone’s cell allowing him to keep goods which would be perhaps contraband with anyone else and also permitting him to lock boxes containing property. Mr. Finch did tell me that you knew nothing about this matter. It seems strange after the number of letters which we have written about his man. I don’t know what more we can say to impress upon you the importance of this matter and the wishes of the Department. Certainly somebody in the institution must have known when this tremendous quantity of Christmas packages came in and must have realized that one man could not use them all. Please advise me whether or not you are prepared to give your personal and continuous attention to this matter from now on.78

  Warden Aderhold responded that the best solution would be to put Capone in a single cell.

  The experience of trying to manage Public Enemy no. 1 provided an important lesson for Sanford Bates and his associates at BOP headquarters. Sending celebrity criminals to the big penitentiaries at Atlanta and Leavenworth would inevitably afford opportunities for inmates and unsophisticated employees to do favors for these celebrities, whether it was for the sake of associating with notorious offenders, making a profit, or simply experiencing the excitement of conveying information to eager reporters. Even though most of the stories about Capone’s soft life at Atlanta were not entirely accurate and many were misconstrued, his image as a big shot receiving preferential treatment, conducting business from behind prison walls, and manipulating gullible prison staff was not the picture of incorruptible federal justice that Homer Cummings and J. Edgar Hoover were trying to establish.

  Federal officials had tried to reform the existing federal prisons, but the attempts to establish higher standards of employee conduct, hold wardens more accountable, enforce rules uniformly, and restrict press access to certain prisoners had met with only limited success, especially when it came to high-profile prisoners such as Capone, Bailey, and Kelly. In 1933 J. Edgar Hoover and officials in the attorney general’s office came to the conclusion that the only way to effectively control and punish the nation’s “public enemies” would be to establish a new federal prison where influence peddling, special privileges, and opportunities for escape would no longer be possible.

  2

  A NEW FORM OF IMPRISONMENT

  On October 12, 1933, Americans listening to the Flag Association’s radio series heard U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings announce that the federal government was building a new prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay for convicts with “advanced degrees in crime.” The prison, he explained, would symbolize the federal government’s determination to reestablish law and order in American society. “Here may be isolated the criminals of the vicious and irredeemable type,” said Cummings, “so that their evil influence may not be extended to other prisoners who are disposed to rehabilitate themselves.” Among the prison’s first inmates, he promised, would be Machine Gun Kelly and Harvey Bailey, and Al Capone would soon follow.1

  Cummings’s address signaled the final phase of an executive branch plan to act decisively against the wave of crime that was widely perceived as a threat to American society. When the first inmates arrived on Alcatraz less than a year later and were locked up securely on the island fortress, the capstone of that overarching campaign would finally be in place.

  The federal anticrime crusade had begun in 1929, more than four years before, instigated by newly elected president Herbert Hoover. Described as a “rational social engineer” by criminal justice history scholar James Calder, despite his notable lack of success in coping with the deepening Depression, President Hoover was predisposed to deal with the crime problem in new and different ways. When he came into office, J. Edgar Hoover had “cleaned out the Bureau’s hacks, nuts, and incompetents,” in his effort to reform a major component of the federal crime-fighting apparatus.2 The president recognized, however, that much more had to be done, with people across the country concerned that gangsters and thugs were free to prey on the public. In his inaugural address, he proposed a major federal effort to fight crime—becoming the first president to mention crime in his initial speech to the nation.

  A believer in the power of enlightened leadership, science, efficiency, and innovation, President Hoover realized that the federal government had a major role to play in meeting the transjurisdictional challenges posed by state- and locality-based law enforcement.3 He recognized, too, that the federal criminal justice system, as it was then constituted, was not adequately filling this role.

  The president checked off the first major item on his reform agenda in May 1929 when he appointed the National Law Observance and Enforcement Commission and charged it with investigating the scope and character of crime in America and the agencies arrayed to combat it. Chaired by George W. Wickersham, who had served as attorney general during the Taft administration, it became popularly known as the Wickersham commission. Although the commission’s reports on Prohibition received the most attention, it made an impressively broad-based effort to examine crime and the criminal justice system in the United States, aiming, in the words of Calder, to “draw on intellectuals and practitioners and employ new social science information from the fields of criminology, law, political science, psychology, public administration and sociology.”4 The commission’s report on federal prisons, released in 1931, would play an important rol
e in shaping the regime established at Alcatraz two years later.

  While the members of the Wickersham commission set about forming committees to examine the major issues in the administration of justice, President Hoover looked for a progressive penologist to expand and professionalize the federal prison system. He selected Sanford Bates, then Massachusetts commissioner of corrections, as the new superintendent of prisons. Bates had risen to national prominence as a result of his reforms in Massachusetts, which included creating the first special camps for male and female delinquents, enacting a wage bill for prisoners, and consolidating all jails and county houses of correction into a single agency.5

  According to historian Paul Keve, Bates had turned down the position of superintendent when it was offered during the Coolidge administration; the salary was low, and his family did not want to move to Washington, D.C. More important, Bates was not assured that Coolidge and his chief advisors would advance the reforms he regarded as necessary. Three years later, Bates accepted the leadership of the federal prison system, convinced that prison reform was in fact a top priority for President Hoover and his attorney general, William D. Mitchell.6

  After Sanford Bates was sworn in as superintendent on June 1, 1929, he began to assemble new headquarters staff. Austin H. MacCormick, president of the Osborne Association, a prison reform group, was appointed assistant superintendent, and Bates induced James V. Bennett to leave his post at the Federal Bureau of Efficiency to take on the responsibility for developing federal prison industries. Held over from the previous administration, William T. Hammack was charged with developing a career civil service system and a staff training program. Meanwhile, Bates prepared legislation to reorganize the office of the superintendent (subsequently changed to “director”) of prisons into a new Bureau of Prisons (BOP).