Infamous America - ALCATRAZ Ep. 1 | “Fortress of Isolation"

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

The history of Alcatraz Island is written by the escape attempts. In the earliest days of American occupation, it was a fort. And from the very beginning, military prisoners tried to escape. As the fort became obsolete, the facility transitioned into a full-time military prison, and prisoners kept trying to escape. Then barracks on the island are converted into a civilian prison, and the real escape attempts begin. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fort Alcatraz was naturally remote and heavily fortified. But that didn't stop friends of Tom Poole from plotting to break him out. In March of 1863, 54-year-old Tom Poole and 19 other men gathered in a dark alley behind a hotel in San Francisco, California. They crept past saloons and sailors boarding houses on the Embarcadero. Poole, a former sheriff, and the others boarded a schooner moored at the water. moored at the waterfront. They quietly pushed the ship away from the wharf and anchored it in the bay to prepare to sail a daybreak. Then they all went below to sleep for a few hours. Poole's plan was to disguise the ship as a cargo vessel bound for Mexico. But once they cleared the

straight between the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, they planned to toss their cargo overboard. They had secretly outfitted the ship as a Confederate privateer. They had two cannons, and a large quantity of rifles, revolvers, and swords. They planned to ambush mail steamers laden with gold and silver, and then circle Cape Horn and deliver the money to the Confederacy. But for weeks, police on the West Coast had been hearing rumors that Confederates were attempting to outfit commercial raiding ships. The morning after Tom Poole and his men took over the ship,

they were swarmed by Marines and police. The federal government charged the pirates with three. treason and imprisoned them at Fort Alcatraz to await trial. Four months later, a suspicious guard caught visitors trying to bribe two other guards. The visitors promised the guards up to $1,000 each if they would help break out Poole and the others. The plan was for the guards to allow Poole and his men to board one of the prison's ferry boats. The rebel prisoners would force the captain to land in Marin instead of San Francisco. From there, The men could escape with the help of friends and family on the mainland.

As with most escape plans, there was the risk of an inmate or guard sounding the alarm. This was exactly what happened to Poole and his posse. The guards who had been bribed were chained and placed in isolated cells inside the island's citadel. Poole and two of his co-conspirators were quickly tried and convicted of treason. Later that year, Tom Poole swore allegiance to the union, and he was released from Alcatraz. Two years after that, he shot and killed a sheriff's deputy, and he was hanged in Placerville, California.

Poole and his co-conspirators remain best known for attempting to smuggle gold and silver to the Confederate cause. But they have another legacy as well. They were the first prisoners to try to escape Alcatraz. From Black Barrel Media, this is infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling some of the most infamous stories about the most notorious prison in American history. This is Chapter 1, Fortress of Isolation.

Alcatraz was fortified for a much bigger threat than just some would-be Confederate pirates. It was ready for a full assault on the West Coast. In August 1863, while Tom Poole and his men sat in the barracks of Alcatraz waiting for trial, the U.S. Army designated the island as the military prison for the war. for most of the territory west of the Rocky Mountains. The Army realized the strategic position of the island when it took control of California in 1848, after the end of the Mexican-American War.

In 1853, it started building a fortress on top of the island's sandstone outcropping, complete with a temporary wharf, shops, barracks, and offices. Fort Alcatraz was completed in 1859. By then, it included a row have enclosed gun positions and a fortified guardhouse to block the entrance road. The last line of defense was the three-story citadel on top of the island, which also served as an army barracks. The only access to the citadel was a drawbridge over a deep,

dry moat that surrounded the entire building. The structure was designed to hold as many as 200 soldiers with provisions and to withstand a four-month siege. In December of 1850, Captain Joseph Stewart and 86 men of Company H., third U.S. artillery, took command of Alcatraz Island. Fort Alcatraz was soon recognized as the most powerful coastal defense in the West. Besides its strategic defensive position, the island took on the role of serving as a stockade for enlisted men. Captain Stewart realized the cold water around the island made it an ideal place for a prison. The ocean was usually about 50 degrees, and the swift currents swirling around the island could be deadly. Eleven soldiers who arrived with Stewart were incarcerated in a cell block in the guardhouse basement.

Before long, other forts with less secure garrisons began to send their deserters, escapees and other prisoners to the island. When Civil War broke out in 1861, Alcatraz took on another role, that of defending the Union State of California from Confederates. Tensions ran high on the California coast because its population included both Union and Confederate supporters. The fort and its men were tasked with calming the threat of local war and protecting the city of San Francisco. The island soon became the most powerful fort west of the Mississippi River. The new fortress deflated Confederate hopes that it could take San Francisco Bay and bring California into the island.

the Confederacy. No one ever attacked the rugged island during the Civil War, but the government nonetheless increased military personnel on Alcatraz to over 350 men. After the war, the government sent the most vicious Confederate sympathizers to Alcatraz. At the same time, thousands of people migrated to the West, which spurred the Native American wars of the late 1800s. The cavalry often utilized Native American scouts. and if the scouts were convicted of crimes, they were often sent to Alcatraz.

They live next to some of the worst murderers, rapists, and other criminals in the West. One of the first Native Americans to arrive at Alcatraz was a man nicknamed Tom. Tom was a piute who was transferred from Camp McDermott in Nevada in June 1873. According to contemporary newspaper reports, Tom had killed a number of his own people six months earlier. The Paiutes turned him over to white authorities, but those authorities had no idea what to do with him. Tom's health declined while he was in jail in Nevada, so the government sent him to Alcatraz to get better while it figured out how to punish him for his alleged crimes. On the island, Tom was allowed to walk around freely, and his mood seemed to improve.

But a guard assigned to him turned his back for a time, and Tom saw an opportunity. He grabbed some bricks from a nearby pile and started bashing the guard's head. Another guard shot over Tom's head to try to get him to stop, but Tom turned and threw bricks at him. Finally, the sentries fired their guns squarely at the prisoner. It took six bullets to stop Tom. The last one to the abdomen finally killed him. Over the next two and a half decades, the U.S. government sent scores of Native Americans to Alcatraz. Most were accused of mutiny, or campaigning against the army, or escaping from other prisons.

Some were more famous than others, and were sent to Alcatraz to serve as examples in the hopes of quelling Native American uprisings. Then, in 1898, the United States began a new conflict, the Spanish-American War. America shifted its goals, priorities, and resources. The use of Alcatraz evolved with the shift, and the real break. Breakouts began. During the last few years of the 19th century, Alcatraz housed an average of 100 men at any given time. But in May of 1898, the Spanish-American War broke out. Soon, thousands of troops passed through San Francisco on their way to or returning from the Philippines. The U.S. government decided six soldiers could recuperate at Alcatraz. The soldiers had deadly diseases like yellow fever, malaria, and top of the United States. hyphoid fever. In 1898 alone, Alcatraz's population for both prisoners and recuperating soldiers swelled from just 25 to at least 450, though many of the prisoners and their caretakers died from the diseases. But sickness didn't stop men from trying to escape Alcatraz. In 1900, two prisoners

earned enough trust to be allowed to work on construction projects in San Francisco. While they were on the job, they simply walked away from the site. The same year, prisoner Jesse Adams packed himself into a freight box and was shipped across the bay to San Francisco. From there, he broke out of the box and made his way into the city, where he was re-arrested after being noticed by an alert policeman. A couple months later, Frank Kinney and two other prisoners escaped. Kenny had been convicted of deserting the army in the Philippines and joining an enemy regiment. Neither Kinney nor his fellow escapees were ever caught, and no one knows what happened to them. By 1900, Alcatraz had earned a reputation for being nearly escape-proof.

By then, it had a fair number of inmates who had been there for decades. Some had managed to get out of chains and past guards, but in almost every case, the water around the island defeated them. Still, prisoners continued to try. In 1903, Ralph Williams managed to get himself and a few others off the island, at least temporarily. At the prison print shop, they forged pardon letters. It's not clear what happened to the other escapees, but Williams was re-arrested when he tried to enlist in the Marines. And on April 2nd, 1906, just two weeks before the destructive San Francisco earthquake, convicted rapist Arthur Armstrong, and three other people.

prisoners made a break for it. They wedged themselves into a huge butter vat that they took from the prison bakery and pushed off to sea. The men hoped the tides in the wind would carry them to a beach on the mainland. Instead, the tide pushed the vat back to the island and smashed it on the rocks. The men were captured and thrown in solitary confinement. In the early 1900s, U.S. military ships became more powerful. The defensive purposes of Alcatraz became obsolete. For 50 years, Alcatraz Island had guarded California against potential enemies, including those from its own country during and after the Civil War. If the Spanish fleet had approached the Pacific Coast in 1898, Alcatraz would have played a vital role in San Francisco's defense. But all that lay behind it now.

Ahead, a different history would unfold. A grim, story of a military prison in a federal penitentiary, and even more desperate and elaborate attempts to escape. In 1907, Alcatraz was re-designated as the Pacific Branch military prison. Over the next decade, it placed a new emphasis on education and rehabilitation for its prisoners. Guards with formal training replaced infantry soldiers. Prisoners provided the labor to build a new cellhouse, which was completed in 1912. It was the largest reinforced concrete building in the world at the time. It contained four cell blocks with a total of 600 cells, each with a toilet and electricity.

By 1915, convicted men with less serious offenses could obtain military training, a remedial education, and vocational training. Throughout the decades before and after the World War I, most of the inmates who tried to escape did so by trying to sneak on to boats that were heading. to the mainland. Some men tried to swim the one and a quarter miles to shore. Some tried to get there by clinging to wooden objects. Most of those who tried to escape never made it to shore. They were either rescued and returned to the island, or they drowned. Most of these attempts barely warranted a sentence or two in the newspapers, but some were no worthy. In 1907,

a convict almost made it to San Francisco on just a log, but then he was hit by a ferry steamer. He lived, and the people on the steamer pulled him on board, but of course he went back to Alcatraz. In 1918, two prisoners stole officer uniforms from the prison laundry and boarded the ferry to the mainland. Their disguises worked, and they made it to San Francisco. But two days later, they were arrested in Modesto, California.

In 1927, modern technology joined a search for escapees for the first time. Airplanes from nearby Chrissy Field helped search for two prisoners trying to paddle their way to Sausalito. No one knows if they would have made it because a ferry captain picked them up and earned a $100 reward in the process. By the 1930s, military officials had begun to question the need for Alcatrans. World War I had been over for more than a decade, and the prison was draining the military's budget. In early 1934, the Army left Alcatraz. It took most of its prisoners to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas or Fort J. in New York. The citadel of the island fortress was now the property of the federal prison system.

It kept 34 prisoners who were left behind by the military as the worst of the worst. They were too dangerous to transfer to other prisons. During its 83 years as a military prison, at least 80 men tried to escape from Alcatraz in 29 separate attempts. Of those, 62 men were captured and returned to the prison. One may have drowned, and the fate of 17 others is unknown. Less than a year after the end of World War I in November 1918, Congress passed the Volstead Act in conjunction with the 18th Amendment and ushered in the era of Prohibition. Prohibition forbade the manufacture and sale of most kinds of alcohol in the United States,

and it brought a new generation of criminals to U.S. prisons. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, led the effort to crack down on these criminals. He needed a fearsome prison to send the criminals to, and Alcatraz fit the bill. Among the first gangster inmates to arrive at Alcatraz were Al Capone, the illustrious co-founder and boss of Chicago's racketeering empire, and George Machine Gun Kelly Barnes, the bootleggar who expanded into kidnapping and bank robbing. But the 1930s also heralded the arrival of prisoners

who were not well known before they arrived, and it was certainly war after they tried to escape. On April 27, 1936, 38-year-old Joseph Bowers tried to climb wire fencing that ran over the prison in center, A guard fired two shots as a warning and yelled at Bowers to get down. But Bowers continued to climb over the sharp wire. The guard ran for help.

By the time the centuries got back to the spot where Bowers was last seen, he was gone. His body, though, was splayed out on the jagged rocks below the high retaining wall. Bauer's intentions can never be known, but some called it a suicide rather than an escape attempt. Over the next few months, newspapers called for an investigation into brutal and abusive practices at Alcatraz. They argued that some of the inmates said Bowers was not trying to escape, but rather had been ordered to clean trash in the wire fences and fell to his death. Eight months later, in December 1937, convicted killers Theodore Cole and Ralph Rowe decided they would risk their lives to get off Alcatraz Island. The inmates already knew each other from time spent at McAllister Penitentiary in Oklahoma. Both of them had carried out vicious attacks during their young lives.

Cole committed his first armed robbery when he was just 14. In 1933, while in prison for other robberies, Cole murdered his cellmates. He stabbed the man 27 times with a homemade knife. In 1934, Cole managed to escape the Oklahoma prison by, concealing himself in a laundry bag. He took a man hostage in order to get away and he stayed free for a while. But several robberies later, Cole was recaptured and sentenced to 55 years in prison at Leavenworth. There, he rekindled a friendship with Ralph Rowe. Rowe was also extremely violent. He'd committed a string of armed robberies when he was a teenager and escaped from

the reform schools to which he was sent. Each new robbery was more brutal than the last. In one, he left an accomplice wounded and bleeding to death. In September 1934, Roe and another man robbed a bank in Sulphur, Oklahoma, and took hostages. Because this was a federal crime, Roe earned a 99-year sentence and a recommendation to serve his time at Alcatraz. As Cole and Roe worked their way through the prison system, they landed at Leavenworth, and they were ordered to transfer to Alcatraz. They were on the same train from Kansas to California. When they made it to Alcatraz, they maintained a close friendship.

They both took paying jobs at the match shop, where prison workers transformed old car tires into rubber mats for the Navy. At the mat shop, they planned their escape. For weeks, they studied the habits of the correctional staff. They identified potential loopholes in the security system. They stole a hacksaw and sawed their way through the steel sash window grill. They cleverly packed the gaps with grease and shoe polish to avoid detection. At 1.30 in the afternoon of December 16, 1937, a junior officer found inmates coal and row missing from their work detail.

He rushed around the mat shop looking for them, but only found punched out panes of glass and bent steel grilling. He ran to the phone and sounded the escape sirens. This was known among the staff as a 22 alarm. At the time, authorities believed Roe and Cole bent out the sawed bars using a heavy wrench and punched out the two panes of glass. Then they climbed through the window and dropped to the ground below. The convicts ran to a locked gate that led down to the waterline. The pair unfastened the bolts of the gate and then laid it over five rows of bar.

barbed wire to create a safe path down to the water. Then they jumped into lightweight flotation devices they'd made out of five-gallon fuel canisters. Theodore Cole and Ralph Rowe were never seen again. One inmate later wrote that it would have been impossible for them to survive the waters of the San Francisco Bay at that time. Severe rains that month flooded the Sacramento River. Because of this, all kinds of debris swept past the island of Alcatraz. including dead livestock and large sections of barns.

Without a proper boat, there was no way any human could survive those swollen currents. Another inmate wrote that he spotted Ralph Rowe struggling in the water, and then Rowe drifted into the dense fog and disappeared. Despite the fog and treacherous currents, the warden dispatched a search party. It sailed in circular patterns around the island, but it never saw any sign of the two escapees. For the three months after their escape, the FBI, the warden, and the San Francisco police searched for the men. They followed every lead.

They examined every corpse found floating in the bay, which, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, there were lots of at the time. Though no one knows exactly what happened to Roe and Cole, their disappearance signified a turning point in the history of Alcatraz. The San Francisco Chronicle said they were just a couple thugs from Oklahoma. and they'd managed to defy science and the natural hazards of the island and the guns of the guards. They shattered the legend that Alcatraz was escape-proof. But Roe and Coles' escape, whether they died in it or not, signified something else that no one could know at the time. That day in December, 1937, was the last time for nearly two decades that would-be escapees didn't use violence to get off the island. The prison was about to enter its bloodiest phase of existence.

Next time on Infamous America, the Great Depression and Prohibition bring a new crop of desperate prisoners to Alcatraz. The rough conditions pushed some inmates to extreme lengths to escape the island. Their attempts lead to assaults and murders of guards and inmates alike. That's next week on Infamous America. This season was written by award-winning author Julia Brickland. Primary research by Joey McAdams Original music by Rob Valier

Editing and sound design by Dave Harrison I'm your host and producer Chris Wimmer If you enjoyed the show Please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts Or wherever you're listening Please visit our website, blackbarrelmedia.com For more details and join us on social media We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram

and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.