Infamous America - ENCORE I ALCATRAZ Ep. 4: “The Hole”

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Alcatraz cools down for a few years after the battle, but eventually the escape attempts resume. Some inmates are desperate to flee the harsh conditions on the island. Some seem like they are simply wired to escape, regardless of the facility or its location. Those who fail and return to the prison inevitably end up in the isolation cells known as The Hole. 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

The name Alcatraz is the anglicized version of the Spanish name Alcatrazes. In 1775, a Spanish explorer was the first man to sail into San Francisco Bay and draw a map of the three islands that guarded the entrance. He called the biggest one Alcatraces, which usually translates to pelican or strange bird. In 1962, nearly 200 years after the island first appeared on a map, and nearly one of the island first appeared on a map, And nearly 100 years after America constructed the first building on the island, men imprisoned on it were still trying to find ways off. Nothing seemed to dissuade the inmates from trying to escape. Not the bloody battle of 1946, not the dangerous waters around the island, and not the problems

they would face if they actually made it to the mainland. It seemed some men were just wired to try to escape, no matter what. If they were in prison, they were going to try to break out. Simple as that. After all, many inmates at Alcatraz were there specifically because they'd tried to break out of other prisons, or they'd actually done it. When they arrived at Alcatraz, they didn't seem resigned to their fates. They just viewed the island as a new challenge. Every prison had its weaknesses. They just had to find the weaknesses of the rock and exploit them. But there was another factor as well. The tough conditions inside the prison. Alcatraz was the prison for the worst of the worst.

The inmates themselves, combined with abusive treatment from some of the guards, combined with rough living conditions, drove some men to try to escape. But even then, tough conditions certainly weren't unique to Alcatraz. Ask anyone who did time at McNeil Island in Washington State, or Folsom or San Quentin in California, or the notoriously brutal prisons in the south, parchment in Mississippi, or Angola in Louisiana, known as the farm. Whether it was life inside the prison or the basic human urge to escape confinement, the inmates at Alcatraz kept trying to break out. In the 18 years between the Battle of Alcatraz and the greatest escape, men tried everything they could think of. My relentless sleep problems

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The gummies are legal and delivered right to your door. At Mood.com, get 20% off your first order with our promo code, Infamous. Go to Mood.com and use the code infamous to get 20% off your first order. And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. And this season we're telling some of the most infamous stories

about the most notorious prison in American history. This is Chapter 4, The Whole. In October 1933, 17-year-old Anastasia Scott jumped into the chilly waters off Alcatraz Island. Her father was a sergeant with the prison guards, so she got permission to go to the island to do a test. She was allowed to try to swim to the mainland. She did it in 47 minutes.

A few days later, teenager Doris McLeod did the opposite test. She swam from San Francisco out to Alcatraz Island and back in two hours flat. She told reporters it was easy to get there. The hard part was getting around the island, but a strong swimmer could do it with little problem. Of course, Doris and Anastasia were young athletes. Doris had trained hard for the test. They weren't middle-aged men whose exercise opportunities were severely restricted. Nevertheless, the girls proved a point.

It was possible to escape Alcatraz by swimming. By the time Doris and Anastasia did their tests in 1933, at least three inmates had already tried the same thing. They were never seen again, and their bodies were never found. In another instance, two prisoners made it out of, their cell block and out to the edge of the island. They hid in a cavern to wait for high tide, but instead of floating out with the rising water, the water rushed in so quickly it trapped them and drowned them. In 1931, the body of a prisoner was found floating in the bay,

and at least five others flagged down passing boats when their makeshift flotation devices failed. And all this was before Alcatraz turned into a federal prison in 1933. Since that date, five more convicts had tried to swim away, two of them being Ralph Rowe and Theodore Cole. Eyewitnesses strongly suggested the two men drowned, but their bodies were never recovered. And other eyewitness accounts say the men were later seen in San Francisco and then other places in the United States. Roe and Cole were career criminals who seemed to fall into the category of the type of person who was just wired to escape. Floyd Wilson, who attempted the first big escape after the Battle of Alcatraz, was not. By July of 1956, Floyd decided he'd had enough of life on Alcatraz, and he was willing to risk his life to escape.

He'd been there for three and a half years, and he couldn't adjust to the routines of the isolated facility that was home to some of the most cold-blooded convicts in the country. Floyd wasn't a black-hearted killer like many of them, which was probably why he was. he struggled more than others. In 1947, during a very cold winter in Maryland, Floyd couldn't find work as a carpenter. He was desperate to support his wife and five young children. He set out to steal the $17 it would cost to buy a load of coal to heat their freezing home. Floyd held up a grocery truck that carried nearly $10,000.

The driver resisted. Floyd panicked and opened fire and killed the driver. He received the death penalty. But President Harry Truman sympathized with him and commuted his death sentence to life in prison. Floyd was sent to the federal prison in Atlanta. Sometime later, he was found with rope and pipe segments. It was a sure sign he was going to try to escape,

so he was sent to Alcatraz. Floyd's files indicate he was completely unable to adapt to the environment on the island. While it was common knowledge that lots of inmates never fully adjusted to the strict regiment of Alcatraz, it was especially true with Floyd. During his first year on the island, he was punished often. Most of the complaints in his file say he was insubordinate and performed poorly at his work detail. These reports also revealed that Floyd rarely interacted with fellow inmates. He didn't speak to anyone except older inmates and some correctional staff.

He insisted that he be fed separately, claiming that other inmates had threatened to kill him. By July of 1956, after three and a half years on the island, he was ready to launch an escape attempt from the Alcatraz dock. On the afternoon of July 23rd, 1956, Floyd was assigned to work with four other inmates on the dock. A trash bonfire burned at the end of the boat ramp. It was a regular chore on the island to burn garbage. the pillar of smoke that rose from the fire would not have caused alarm. Floyd grabbed a rubber tire and threw it on the bonfire. The tire produced an oily black smoke that mingled with the lighter-colored smoke from the garbage.

When the smoke was thick and dark, it screened his movements, and he ran. It took 20 minutes for someone to realize he was gone. When he wasn't present for the next headcount, the guards raised the alarm. sirens blared across the island and searchers fanned out to find him. Someone noticed that the fence was pried up near the bonfire. The opening was wide enough for Floyd to crawl under. He could have followed the seawall around until he was out of sight of the nearest guard tower. The Coast Guard immediately sent two patrol boats to cruise around the island,

and the FBI sent officers to the docks on the mainland where the prison boat was headed. The search for Floyd went on until, nearly three in the morning, when supervisors found him flattened up against a depression in the rock along the beach. Floyd apparently reached the area by climbing up an eight-inch sewer pipe from the beach. He was in one of the few places in the natural rock formation where he couldn't be seen from the beach, the water, or the area above. When Floyd was found, he was holding a three-foot length of cord and another section that was about 25 feet long. He wouldn't talk, but he wouldn't talk, but he was holding a three-foot length of cord, and another section that was about 25 feet long. He wouldn't talk, but it was obviously he planned to tie

together pieces of wood he hoped to find on the beach. In the end, he found the 50-degree weather daunting, and he hadn't decided if he could handle the one-and-a-quarter mile swim to San Francisco. Floyd Wilson's decision not to swim might have saved his life, but it meant he was still stuck on Alcatraz. A couple years later, three men faced the same decision. Two made the same choice, and one did not. Like so many other inmates on Alcatraz and elsewhere in America, Aaron Burgett was raised in a poor family with few opportunities. When he was 18, the Missouri native broke into a candy truck.

While serving time for that burglary, he broke out of a minimum security prison. He was captured, released, and then arrested again for other burglaries. In his early 20s, Bergett was committing armed robberies all over the St. Louis area. In May of 1952, Burgett was arrested with contraband weapons. At trial, he pled guilty and received a 25-year sentence. At Leavenworth Prison, he refused to cooperate with daily routines. He said he would rather die than be forced to serve his time there. His non-compliance earned him a ticket to Alcatraz.

Against all odds, Bergett seemed to turn himself around at Alcatraz. He made an effort to socialize with other inmates, and he learned to play the guitar. But all of this was a distraction. For months, Bergett collected sections of raincoats, plywood,

and electricians tape. He befriended an inmate named Clyde Johnson, and they started scheming their escape. Like Berget, Johnson was an ambitious robber. In 1949, while awaiting extradition at a Florida jail, he and another convict escaped with the help of Johnson's girlfriend. After four more armed robberies, Johnson was listed by the FBI as public enemy number two.

Because he was an escape risk, he was sent to Alcatraz. And because Johnson had escaped before, Aaron Burgett thought Johnson would be a good person to help with an escape from Alcatraz. Step one was the same as it had been for Joe Kretzer back in 46 before the Battle of Alcatraz. Be nice to the guards. Both men started being extra friendly to a guard named Harold Miller. In September of 1958, Miller had only been working at Alcatraz for about 10 months. He was brand new to garbage detail.

It was a tough and potentially dangerous job for the guards. Inmates on this work detail had to trim trees and shrubs. So they had access to sharpened gardening tools. Sometimes they even had axes. Burgud and Johnson knew you had to have a good conduct record to get on this detail. After getting themselves placed on it, they worked hard for six months. Then, when the relative new guy, Harold Miller, became their supervisor, they knew it was time to make their move.

It was perfect timing because the pair wanted to leave when there was a change from daylight savings to standard time. It would get dark sooner, and they would have better cover. At 2.30 in the afternoon, Harold Miller checked in at the control room and logged his assignment. As he and Bergett and Johnson walked down a path to the southeast tip of the island, the inmates convinced Miller they needed to take a detour to clean some drainage outlets. Miller agreed. They made the detour and completed the work. But as they walked back to the main work area, the inmates struck.

They grabbed the unsuspecting guard. Johnson put a paring knife to his neck. They tied him up and gagged him. Then Bergit and Johnson decided they'd have better luck if they split up. Johnson walked west and inflated a plastic bag he'd hidden under his sweatshirt. He'd planned to hide out until dark, but in the excitement of the moment, he decided to leave immediately. As soon as Johnson stepped into the water, the rushing tide tore the inflated bag. out of his hands. The current was so aggressive that it scared him, and he gave up all hope of escaping.

But he couldn't decide what to do next. When the guard, Harold Miller, failed to report in at roll call, the other guards immediately launched a search. Within minutes, the piercing sound of the alarm rang throughout the island. All guards were called to duty. After an hour of searching, they found Miller tied to a tree unharmed. The warden dispatched the Coast Guard. The fog rolled in thick that afternoon, and the boat had trouble with the search. But at 5 o'clock, it found Clyde Johnson. He was standing waist deep in 50-degree water shivering.

He did not resist capture. The same massive search effort that hunted for Clyde Johnson was also hunting for Aaron Burgett, but without luck. At about 3.15 in the afternoon, not long after the break began, A staff member heard cries of help, but he couldn't tell where they were coming from. Those were probably the cries of Aaron Burgett. The search effort turned up nothing on Bergett in the short term. Most people on the island assumed he'd drowned.

But days went by and he wasn't found. The prison brought in divers to search beds of kelp around the island. They thought they might find Bergett's body trapped in the seaweeds, but they didn't. More days passed with no sign of Burgett. But then on October 12th, 13 days after the breakout, a guard in a tower noticed a body floating a few hundred feet from the eastern end of the island. The Coast Guard retrieved the body. The face was decomposed beyond recognition.

Marine animals had feasted on the body. All the hair was missing, as were most of the fingers and toes. But the corpse was dressed in the standard prison unit. uniform, and the belt around its waist had Bergett's prison number on it. 991. The warden had to be sure the body was Aaron Bergett, so he had officers roll the body until he found skin on the inner sides of its thumbs that seemed to be in decent condition. He placed Bergett's fingerprint card from his file beside the right thumb, and carefully

determined the two were identical. It was Aaron Burgett. Burgett's partner Clyde Johnson was eventually transferred to another prison. He was paroled in 1971. But while on parole, he was convicted of armed bank robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and assaulting a federal officer, and another escape attempt. He died in a Kentucky prison in 1995. Johnson and Burgett were like many others on Alcatraz who thought about or tried to escape.

They often told others they would rather brave the cold and treacherous waters of San Francisco Bay, then serve out their sentences on the rock. At the same time, they thought they had to brave more than just the cold water. They thought they had to survive the sharks. One of the many myths about Alcatraz is that it was impossible to survive the swim from the island to the mainland because of man-eating sharks. But in fact, man-eating sharks were rarely spotted in the bay because it's partly freshwater. There of always been bottom-dwelling sharks in the bay, but it's only been in recent years, long after the prison closed, that Great Whites have been occasionally spotted. But inmates couldn't

have known that. And of course, the staff at Alcatraz kept the rumor of man-eating sharks alive and well. It was just one more deterrent. But the deterrent didn't work on some. The threats of sharks or hypothermia getting shot by the guards was still better than living at Alcatraz. Alcatraz was a special prison. In the 1930s, the head warden and the U.S. Attorney General decided that no prisoner could be directly sentenced to Alcatraz from the court system. Instead, it would be home to the worst of the worst from other prisons. Federal prisons took stock of their most difficult inmates, the ones with histories of bad behavior and escape attempts. And they sent them to the rock.

And the pipeline worked in the other direction, too. Inmates at Alcatraz couldn't be released back into society directly from the island prison. They had to earn their way to another federal prison before they could be considered for parole. The rules were stringent. Inmates were never allowed to explore the cell house on their own. They were marched from one location to another, always in some regulated manner. Contact with the outside world through things like newspapers or radio or TV was completely cut off. Prisoners were forbidden to have visitors for the first three months.

After that, they had to earn visitation rights through good behavior. And even then, the warden had to approve all requests. And even when they were approved, there were still restrictions. Inmates could have, at most, one visit per month, and the visitor had to be a spouse or a blood relative. There was no physical contact allowed, and the visit could last two hours maximum. Inmates had a little more flexibility with written communication. They could write letters twice a week, and they could receive up to seven per week.

Each prisoner was assigned his own cell. Because of this policy, there were fewer instances of sexual violence at Alcatraz than at other prisons. Most inmates were grateful for the privacy. Outside of privacy, they were given only the basic minimum necessities of life. Food, water, clothing, and medical and dental kids. For most inmates, the routine was exactly the same, day in and day out, year after year. A right could be awarded for good behavior, but just as easily taken away for the slightest infraction. In the mornings, each prisoner had to sweep his cell clean.

He had to be dressed and stand ready for a headcount. Then, most able-bodied men were marched to the mess hall for breakfast before work on the docks, in the laundry, the kitchen, or one of the industrial buildings. Inmates could also spend time in the library, but the books were carefully screened. Inmates were not allowed to read about sex or crime. After dinner, they returned to their cells, and it was lights out at 9.30 p.m.

Some inmates found this to be the worst part of their stay. When it was quiet and dark, and the wind was blowing in the right direction, they could hear all the sounds of San Francisco. Francisco. Some inmates complained that hearing these noises of fun and freedom, with torture. Prisoners who arrived after 1950 had it a little better than their predecessors. By that point, Alcatraz had stopped some of its most draconian punishments. Gone were the days when an inmate who refused to eat could be force-fed through twos that were pushed down his throat.

Also gone was the silence policy that was in place in the early years of the prison. For decades, convicts had not been permitted to talk to each other while they were in their cells, or in lineups, or during head counts. Some reports said inmates went insane because of the silence rule. One inmate chopped off two fingers from his left hand to get transferred out of Alcatraz and away from the silent system. In later years, other inmates used similar tactics, like slashing their Achilles' tendons. But not all the tough punishments disappeared over time. The whole stayed around. D-block was the most restrictive area of the prison and reserved for the very worst.

Those who could not obey the rules or who committed violence within the prison were put in D-block. They received only one hour of exercise per week. If their behavior stayed bad in D-block, they were put in one of five cells that were more restrictive than the cages they usually lived in. These five cells were collectively referred to as the hole. The cells had solid iron doors that blocked out all light. And then within the five cells of the hole, there was one that was reserved for the absolute worst. It had no toilet, just a hole in the floor. And prisoners were often thrown in the cell naked and without any blankets.

Some journalists tried to write about the prison with sympathy, and they often used the case of Robert Stroud to make their point. Stroud was the famous inmate known as the Birdman of Alcatraz. He raised birds in his cell, and he actually contributed to the study of his pets. Later in life, he was moved to a medical facility in Missouri, and reporters wrote about the effects of such an isolated prison on a man who'd spent the majority of his life in Alcatraz. But it wasn't the articles about the Birdman that caused rumors to swirl

about the island. It was money. As the 1950s moved into the 1960s, it was rumored that Congress was thinking about shutting down Alcatraz. The island prison was very expensive to maintain, and not just because of the inmates. Guards, administrators, and their families lived there too. Their children took a boat off the island every day to attend school. Nothing was produced or grown on the island. Boats had to bring everything. that was needed to sustain life. The warden and the staff ate in the same cafeteria-style room

as the inmates, and they ate the same food. You could take all the food helpings you wanted, but you had to eat everything you took. As the end of Alcatraz drew near, the prison had one last story to tell before its unique history came to a close. It saved the best for last. And the climax of the story happened less than a year

before the facility shut down for good. That year, 1962, Alcatraz witnessed one of, if not the, most incredible prison break in American history. Next time on Infamous America, four inmates devise one of the most elaborate escape plans ever conceived, and it leads to one of the great unsolved mysteries in American crime. If you've seen the Clint Eastwood movie, Escape from Alcatraz, that story is next week on the season finale of 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.

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