Escape from Alcatraz by J. Campbell Bruce Read Free Book Online

policy, it was announced, to let prisoners have even the dubious freedom of leaving the island under guard for court appearances.”
    Capone’s attempt to bribe the guard remained a secret for three years. When the Chase sash-weight-hurling episode came to public attention, Warden Johnston denied it happened. As for the scrap in the music room, Johnston told newsmen: “I first heard the story from you newspaper boys. There wasn’t anything I could find to verify it. In fact, I think I can say that Capone doesn’t even know what Waley looks like.” (The press was not aware, of course, that Capone and Waley were fellow musicians.)
    The badgering and veiled threats by the other convicts, the attacks and fights, the spells in the pitch-black dungeon began to take their toll. Capone sought solace in religion, sang in the choir on Sunday mornings. It was too late. There were now days he kept to his cell and when the guards tried to coax him out for a meal, he backed into a corner, staring in terror. Other days he was a child at play, making and remaking his bed, prattling to himself. Or again, he would stand at his cell front and lustily sing “O Sole Mio.” At length, he was locked in an isolation ward—bug cage, to the convicts—in the hospital upstairs. His wife read about it, a month later, and rushed out to San Francisco. She was forced to wait until he had one of his lucid days, when he could be brought down to the prisoners’ side of the visitors’ room to stare through the bulletproof pane recessed in the three-foot-thick wall.
    Rumors began flying off The Rock early in January of 1938 that Capone was insane. Attempts to reach prison authorities were unavailing, but the reports had enough substance to make headlines. And then, in February, the Department of Justice in Washington broke official silence, announcing simply that Capone was in the prison hospital and that no insanity hearing was contemplated. Warden Johnston now talked to the press by phone: “I don’t propose to issue hourly bulletins on Capone’s temperature and pulse. He is being given the usual care and there is no intention to remove him. We have just as good a hospital here as the U.S. Medical Center at Springfield, Missouri.” He admitted that Capone’s wife had not been informed: “But she must know of his illness. The papers have been full of it.”
    Two weeks later the Justice Department issued a bulletin: Capone was suffering from “mental disturbances.… His condition is in no wise due to his confinement, but grows out of conditions originating prior to his incarceration.” There were vague hints of paresis, resulting from syphilis contracted in his youth. The Justice Department lapsed into another silence that endured until December, when it began employing paresis as though it were a diagnostic fact. Dispatches said Justice officials were debating whether to keep Capone at Alcatraz “for his own good, so he can continue under treatment there for paresis.” He was scheduled for release the following month, January 1939.
    One night early in January Capone was taken secretly off The Rock with six weights on each leg and escorted by three armed guards to the new Federal Correctional Institution on Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor, there to serve out the extra year he was originally sentenced to serve in the Cook County jail in Chicago for contempt of court. Warden Johnston wrote long afterward that Capone had spent his final year at Alcatraz in the prison hospital, and that upon his departure the psychiatrist then heading The Rock’s medical staff reported he was “in good physical condition, in good spirits, that he appeared to understand his difficulty, and that his speech was entirely relevant and adequate.”
    (Certain factors, in medical opinion, suggest paresis was perhaps a convenient coverup. Capone’s quick recovery, permitting removal to a minimum-security facility, contradicts the diagnosis: in those days before