Infamous America - ALCATRAZ Ep. 3 | “Battle of Alcatraz”

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

The most violent escape attempt in the history of Alcatraz, and possibly the American prison system, rocks the island in May of 1946. Six inmates take over D Block and end up in a siege against prison guards, the FBI and the Marines. 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

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On Thursday afternoon, May 2nd, 1946, thousands of people gathered on the northern San Francisco waterfront. They stared in amazement at Alcatraz Island. The sounds of explosions and the crackle of gunfire reverberated across the water. The onlookers watched what would become known as the Battle of Alcatraz. During this time, six prisoners overpowered cellhouse officers and gained access to weapons and keys. In effect, they took control of the cell house. Their bloody confrontation with their corrections officers raged through the next day and the next night.

The conflict was so out of control that Alcatraz had to call in the Marines. When the battle finally ended on May 4th, 16 men were wounded, and two guards and three inmates were dead. Most historians mark this violent escape attempt as the most significant in the island's 29-year history as a federal prison. The Battle of Alcatraz started as an elaborate escape plot, but when it failed, its ringleaders decided to turn it into a fight to the death. 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. And a heads up in this episode, there's going to be lots of names. There's no way around it.

It's a crazy event, and it can't be told any other way. So hang on. Here's Chapter 3, Battle of Alcatraz. The brains behind the attempted breakout, sometimes called the Alcatraz Blastout, was Bernard Coy. But the idea came together through conversations with an inmate named Joe Kretzer. Joe had learned many lessons from his own failed escape attempt several years earlier, and now he and Coy used the lessons as a blueprint for their new plan.

Coy worked as the library orderly, a privilege that allowed him to move around the cellhouse freely. Over the course of several months, he organized five more prisoners to help him perform the audacious operation. One of the first recruits was Buddy Thompson. He boldly killed a Texas policeman, and it's successful. escaped from prison eight times. Another was Marv Hubbard. He'd kidnapped a traffic officer at gunpoint. He got caught, but then escaped from a Tennessee jail and landed at Alcatraz. Thompson and Hubbard were cool, self-assured, and didn't rattle easily. And of course, Joe Kretzer was in. Bernie Koi was sure he could count on Kretzer to go through with the plan, but he wasn't sure

how Kretzer would react to extreme pressure. Kretzer was a bit of bit of a hothead. He fit the mold of the type of guy who would shoot first and ask questions later. Kretzer had ended up at Alcatraz after a criminally impressive sequence of events. He'd robbed Banks in San Francisco and had shot and killed a U.S. Marshal in a courtroom, and had almost broken out of prison in Washington State. And all that was before he attacked several guards during his own escape attempt from Alcatraz a few years ago. Next was 18-year-old Clarence Carnes. Bernie Coy hadn't known him for very long, but he seemed eager to please.

Carnes was young and strong and would do what he was told. The real wild card was Sam Shockley. He was probably psychotic and definitely dangerous, and he'd been part of Joe Kretzer's escape attempt. Bernie Coy knew that if he didn't invite Sam Shockley, Shockley would raise such a clamor that he would alert inmates in other areas, and the guards. Shockley was in, basically because it was too risky to leave him out. By May of 1946, Bernie Coy had five men plus himself. They'd studied the routines of the

guards and the other inmates. They'd crafted a plan that gave each man a specific job. The plan was elaborate, and it had lots of moving pieces, and it relied heavily on brute force. For the first time in the history of the island. The inmates were going to go for the guns. They were going to fight their way off Alcatraz. May 2nd, 1946 began like any other day. At about 1.30 in the afternoon, Coy watched for what he knew would be the best time to put his plan into action. This was the point in the day when the number of guards would be at its minimum, and many of the inmates took naps. Coy watched a guard leave the cellhouse to go to lunch, and he knew it was time to go. The security force was now at its lowest level.

Coy ran to the library and made a tapping sound on the access door to D-block. This was the signal to four of his accomplices the escape plan had begun. Coy then went to the kitchen and signaled the fifth man, Marv Hubbard. Hubbard stopped his cleaning and quietly slipped a large butcher knife into the underside of his shirt sleeve. Hubbard finished his shift and got permission to go to the yard. As Officer Bill Miller started patting down Hubbard to make sure he wasn't about to smuggle anything out of the kitchen, Coy grabbed Miller from behind. He pinned the guard's arms behind his back and let Hubbard start punching the guard's head.

Within a minute, Hubbard had beaten Miller unconscious. Thanks to budget cuts from the year before, a nearby guard station was unmanned. No one saw the attack, and now Coy and Hubbard had taken control of the kitchen. He removed a set of keys from the guard's belt. Coy had studied the guard's actions over the previous months. He knew exactly which key would open the control box that contained the access levers to the cells. Coy dragged Miller into an unused cell and stripped him of his clothes. He then tied the guard up, gagged him, and locked him in the cell.

Coy then unlocked the cells of three more co-conspirators. He released Buddy Thompson, Joe Kretzer, and young Clarence Carnes. All three men walked out of their cells in disbelief. Koi's plan was actually working. But they couldn't waste time thinking about it. The most dangerous part of their mission was just getting started. With the help of Joe Kretzer, Bernie Koi smeared axle grease over his chest, head, hands, and feet. Koi had spent months losing weight for this part of the plan. He dropped 30 pounds, and had made himself as thin as possible. He climbed the West End Gun Gallery.

It was a barred cage that contained all kinds of weapons, guns, billy clubs, gas canisters, and more. When Coy reached the top of the cage, he used a homemade bar spreader and a wrench to widen the gap between a pair of bars. The bar spreader was made from parts of a toilet, but it did its job. Koi created a space about 10 inches wide.

Even with his new skinny body, it was still painful to squeeze through the narrow gap, but he made it. When he was inside, he grabbed a riot club and crouched low so no one could see him through the window and the door. Now it was time for Crazy Sam Shockley to do his part. In his cell down the tear from the gun gallery, he began screaming like a maniac. A guard called for assistance to help calm Shockley down. The nearest officer was the man aside to guard the gun gallery. That man didn't know Bernie Coy had penetrated the gallery and was lying in wait.

When the guard opened the door to D Block, Coy pounced. As the door began to open, Coy leapt forward and slammed the door into the guard's face. He smashed the guard against the bars of D Block and then hit him with the billy club. The guard was armed with a rifle and as he bounced off the bars, he held the weapon up, to block the crashing blows of the billy club. But Coy's surprise attack worked. The guard was dazed and stumbled backward. Coy grabbed the rifle and the two men struggled over the weapon.

Coy won the fight by hitting the guard in the back of the neck with the club. Coy took the rifle and then kept beating the guard mercilessly. Then he choked the guard with a man's own shirt collar. When the guard was finally unconscious, Coe dragged him into the gun gallery and tied him to a pole. He stripped off the guard's gun belt. Now he had a rifle, a pistol, and ammo. Next, he removed the guard's uniform, shoes, and a large key ring.

While all this was happening, inmate Joe Kretzer had surprised and overpowered another guard and locked him in the cell with the guard from the kitchen. With all the guards in the immediate area neutralized, Bernie Koi handed him. some supplies down from the gallery to Joe Kretzer. Less than 30 minutes after Bernie Koi made his first move, he and four of his men captured nine guards and locked them in two cells and the gun gallery. Then Koi did the thing that probably gives nightmares

to prison guards everywhere. He used the keys from the guards to open all the cells in the top two tiers of D-block. Dozens of the most violent criminals in America were now free. and the ringleaders had at least two guns, plus billy clubs and gas canisters. But there was a catch. The inmates were free of their cells, but they were not free of D-block.

Bernie Koi couldn't find the key that opened the door to the recreation yard. It was supposed to be on the key ring of the guard they'd captured in the kitchen. Koi had seen the guard use it dozens of times. It was labeled No. 107. But it was nowhere to be found. Koi and his crew had pulled off a historic feat up to this point. They were the first prisoners in the history of Alcatraz to get their hands on guns, but now they were stymied by one little key.

They had planned to get into the yard with hostages, shoot the tower guards, make their way down to the dock, and then hijacked the prison boat. But they couldn't do any of that if they couldn't find the key to get out of D-Block. Inmates Bernie Koy and Joe Kretzer stood at the door to the wreckyard and debated where the key might be. They were losing time and they were becoming more and more agitated. They went back to the source. They went to the cell where they'd locked the guard they'd captured from the kitchen. They thought his key ring was supposed to have the right key, and it had temporarily.

While the guard was on rotation in D-block, the key was on his key ring. When he was done, he was supposed to give it back to the guard. in the gun gallery, the one who was now tied to the pole after losing his fight with Bernie Koi. As Kretzer and Koi interrogated the kitchen guard, the man said he didn't know where the key was. He'd given it back to the guard in the gun gallery, so it must be there. But Koi had stripped the guard of all his clothes and had taken his key ring, so it couldn't be with him. Koy and Kretzer left in frustration. It would take a little while for them to figure out that the guard had lied. The key was in his shirt pocket. On this day, of all days, the guard had been

a bit lazy. He'd taken the key off his ring, but before he'd returned it to the guard in the gun gallery, he'd slipped it into his shirt pocket. Then all hell had broken loose on D-block. Now, an hour or so later, the guard sat in one of the cells with several other guards, and they could all hear the desperation of Bernie Coy as he searched for the key. Two of the guards asked Joe Kretzer if they could untie their companion to alleviate some of his discomfort. Surprisingly, Kretzer agreed. The guards untied the man with the key, and in the process, the man carefully slid the key to another guard. That guard hid the key behind the cell's toilet.

They performed the covert maneuver just in time because Bernie Koi realized the kitchen guard must have lied. The key had to be on him somewhere. Koi and Kretzer went back into the cell and aggressively searched the guard. The man stood his ground and told them again, the key had to be in the gun gallery. The inmates gave up the search and frantically tried to open the door with other keys. They thought there might be a duplicate on the key ring that was disguised with a different number, and they continued to be disappointed. And now things were really getting tense on D-block.

Crazy Sam Shockley kept insisting that the others let him beat one of the guards. Apparently the guard had insulted Shockley in some way in the past. Joe Kretzer and Marvin Hubbard had to point their guns at Shockley to get him to calm down. But they all knew the calm was temporary. It was only a matter of time before Shockley went completely off the rails. And the problems continued to mount for the escapees. With the doors to D-block locked, Not only could the men inside not get out, but the prisoners outside couldn't get in.

Inmates started to return from their work details, and they couldn't get into the cell house. Some reported to their supervisors that they saw inmates walking around aimlessly, who should be locked up. Finally, Bernie Coy returned to the guards in the cells. There was only one place the key to the recreation yard could be. It had to be in that cell somewhere. He searched the cell and found it behind the toilet. At last, they had the missing piece of the puzzle. Coy gave the key to Buddy Thompson, who rushed over to the door.

He slid the key into the lock and turned, and nothing happened. He tried it again, but it didn't budge. The inmates had no way of knowing the dead bolt lock on the door had been carefully designed to jam if it had been tampered with. Bernie Coy and his crew had tried to open it so many times with so many other keys that the safety measure had kicked in. The lock was frozen. By now, a guard in another section of the prison was very nervous. He called all the phones at the guard stations near D Block. No one answered.

At 2 p.m., 30 minutes after the breakout began, the guard called the warden at his residence. The guard said he was worried that something might be. wrong in D-block. He wanted to know what to do. The warden dumped all the responsibility onto the guard. The warden told the guard to act on his instincts. That left the guard in a predicament. He was deeply suspicious that something was wrong, but sounding the main alarm was a big deal. Once the siren was engaged, it would sound for three minutes with no way to deactivate it. And the siren would signal to the world that there was a major situation on Alcatraz. If the guard was wrong about his assessment, it would be a black eye on him, the warden, and the prison.

He debated with himself for about a minute. And then, at 207 p.m., the guard unlocked the siren cover and pressed the activation key. When the alarm blared on Alcatraz, the sound could be heard all across the bay and as far away as the town of Marin. The conspirators, Bernie Coy, Joe Kretzer, Sam Shockley, Buddy Thompson, Marvin Hubbard, and Clarence Carnes knew their chances of escape were almost non-existent. They knew the island would soon swarm with officers, but Bernie Coy was not ready to give up. He ran to the prison bakery, which had a view of two guard towers. He knocked out the panes of glass and took aim.

When two tower guards walked out onto the catwalk to check on the commotion, Coy fired. He hit one in the leg, and now the guards knew. the inmates had guns. Coy fired at other guards, and they took cover to stay out of his sights. But Coy was also in a covered location, and the guards couldn't get clear lines of fire. Captain of the guards, Henry Weinhold, decided he would go into the cell block and capture the shooter.

Weinhold was tough. He was a former Marine and a very by-the-book corrections officer. He grabbed a gas billy. It was a billy club with a gas canister fastened to the top. If he needed to, he could press a button and release the gas. Weinhold marched into D-block, and he immediately ran into Sam Shockley. Shockley had a grudge against Weinhold and tried to punch him in the head. But the captain ducked, which only served to enrage Shockley.

Weinhold punched Shockley straight in the mouth, and Shockley lost what little control he had left. He broke away from Weinhold and turned his rage on another officer and beat him brutally. And Weinhold was then captured by the other inmates. An assistant warden tried the same tactic as Weinhold. He grabbed a gas billy from the armory and charged into D-block on his own. But Bernie Koi saw the assistant warden before the man could load the gas billy. Koi fired two rounds at him. One of the bullets hit the gas billy and it exploded in the warden's face. Half blind and burned, the assistant warden retreated to the administrative offices. In spite of his pain and injuries, he and the head warden made the calls

they hoped they'd never make. They were required to call police departments in San Francisco, Marin, and Oakland, as well as federal authorities like the FBI, the Coast Guard, the U.S. Marshals, the Justice Department, and the Bureau of Prisons. All off-duty officers were assigned to posts on an anti-escape perimeter. The prison boat was searched, and then sent out on patrol around the island. In D-block, the six ringleaders were now desperate. They had no alternative plan for escape. Bernie Coy, Joe Kretzer, and Marvin Hubbard made a pact.

They would not be taken alive, and they settled in for a siege. The inmates shoved Captain Henry Weinhold into a cell with other guards. Weinhold now tried to reason with Joe Kretzer. Weinhold said the island would be surrounded by now. and the prison system had a rule, it would never trade the life of a hostage for the freedom of an inmate. Joe Kretzer took a new plan to the conspirators. He said that if they killed all the captives,

no one could ever identify the ringleaders of the escape plan, which of course presumed that none of the other inmates would talk. Buddy Thompson agreed. Sam Shockley loved it. Captain Weinhold told Kretzer to be sensible and stop before anyone was seriously hurt. In response, Joe Kretzer walked to the front of cell 404 and shot Captain Weinhold in the chest. Kretzer kept shooting.

Guard after guard fell to the floor. The captives in the next cell listened in horror as he loaded more bullets into the clip. He then stepped next door to cell 403 and started firing at the officers stuck in the tiny space. Kretzer thought about sparing the life of a guard he'd always gotten along with. but Shockley and Thompson demanded that no witnesses be left alive. So Kretzer raised his pistol to the guard's head, apologized, and pulled the trigger. The guards slumped to the ground.

Pools of blood started to saturate the cement floors of both cells. At about 3.30 p.m., the first detachment of Marines arrived at Alcatraz. The warden and his top guards argued about the best way to use their help to rescue their colleagues. In the end, it was decided that eight guards would storm the gun gallery and then enter D-block. As the guards entered the gallery, they were met with the acrid smell of tear gas and eerie silence. They began to move into D-block. One of the first guards through the door was Harold Stites. He'd been instrumental in stopping the last really violent escape attempt back in 1938,

the one where three inmates killed a guard with a hammer. But now, six years later, he and his fellow guards didn't know that Bernie Coy and Joe Cretzer could see their every move as they entered the gun gallery. Coy and Cretzer fired at the guards. Harold Stites exchanged gunfire with the inmates until he screamed that he'd been hit. Three other guards were hit during the assault, and they pulled their wounded back to the gun gallery. Harold Stites, the hero of 1938, bled to death. Throughout the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening, Marines, guards, and inmates exchanged fire.

All night long, Marines fired rifle grenades into the cellhouse. The buildings literally shook with explosions and gunfire. Hundreds of inmates who wanted no part in the melee had to find cover wherever they could. For many, all they could do was hide behind their mattresses and hope for the best. By 11 a.m. the next day, the situation was still so out of control that the Marines brought in heavier artillery, including anti-tank mortars and bazookas. One by one and two by two, inmates who were innocent of the breakout were ushered into empty corridors and told to lay low. Small brush fires started below the cellhouse. People from San Francisco could see smoke all around the island. The Marines brought in a tunnel specialist.

He drilled holes in the roof where Koi, Kretzer, and Hubbard were thought to be. He dropped demolition grenades into the cell block. With each detonation, the guards rushed in to look for any rebel inmates. At noon, the convicts managed to call the warden to discuss a deal. The warden responded with an ultimatum that would have made General Ulysses S. Grant happy. The only deal was unconditional surrender. That night, Marines and guards fired relentlessly on the cell block until about 9 o'clock. The next morning, Saturday, May 4, 1946, squads of armed guards periodically rushed into the cellhouse and fired down the narrow corridor.

And then finally, at 9.40 a.m., guards entered the corridor without receiving any fire in return. As they cautiously moved through the war zone of D-Block, they found the bodies of Bernie Koi, Joe Kretzer, and Marvin Hubbard. Coy had a loaded rifle at his side, and he was wearing Captain Weinhold's jacket. Kretzer lay next to him, wearing an ammunition belt in a guard's uniform. They were both cold. They'd probably been dead for hours. Marvin Hubbard was still warm, and had probably died only moments before.

They were all killed by gunshot wounds to the head. A few weeks after the breakout attempt, the three surviving ringleaders stood trial in San Francisco. Clarence Carnes, Sam Shockley, and Buddy Thompson were charged with their roles in the escape and the murder of a guard. They were not charged with the death of Harold Stites because evidence showed he may have died from friendly fire. Attorneys for the inmates said the men had been held under heavy duress at the prison.

They used examples from Henry Young's murder trial five years earlier. At Young's trial in 1941, after he'd stabbed an inmate to death for ruining his escape attempt, his lawyers argued that the brutal conditions at Alcatraz had dehumanized and brutalized him. The lawyer said the awful conditions were what drove him to break out in 1939 and to kill his fellow conspirator two years later. In the current trial, an inmate testified that Sam Shockley's mental state made him more of a victim than a conspirator. But Shockley and Thompson received the death penalty for their parts in the Battle of Alcatraz. They appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but on December 3rd, 1948, they were put to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin.

18-year-old Clarence, the youngest man ever sent to Alcatraz, was spared because his lawyer proved he had shown leniency to the officers who were held hostage in the two cells. After Joe Kretzer's shooting rampage, the conspirators thought the guards were dead, but Karnes noticed that most were still breathing, and he said nothing so that Joe Kretzer wouldn't come back and finish the job. Clarence Karns received extra life sentences instead of the death penalty. Then he experienced a real reformation. He became a model inmate at Alcatraz, and he became the prison's chess champion for more than 10 years. He was like a real reformation. He was later transferred to Leavenworth, and despite multiple life sentences, he was paroled in 1973.

He got work as a consultant on a TV show about Alcatraz, but he quickly spent his $20,000 fee. Clarence Carnes never readjusted to life on the outside, and he died broke and homeless. In two days of fighting on the island in May of 1946, three inmates died, two guards died, and many more were wounded. However, Captain Henry Weinhold survived the point-blank gunshot from Joe Kretzer, though Weinhold was permanently disabled. The Battle of Alcatraz endures as one of the most significant events in the history of the American prison system. In the aftermath, Alcatraz implemented incredibly strict procedures for work details. Most of the

staff never again let themselves form bonds with even the most trusted inmates. But regardless of the strict rules or the obstacles in their way, prisoners were still bound and determined to get off the rock. Ten years after the Battle of Alcatraz, the escape attempts resumed. And they all led to the big one in 1962. Next time on Infamous America, the escape attempts continue, but with little success. And you'll see what life was really like for the prisoners on the island, including the first one to be immortalized by Hollywood. The Birdman of Alcatraz.

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.