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

penicillin there was no reliable cure for syphilis or paresis. And if indeed paretic, he would have been sent to the Springfield Medical Center for the drastic treatment then employed, along with arsenicals: an induced malarial fever to burn out the syphilis—and no more than 20 to 30 percent ever showed any improvement.)
    In 1940 he was taken to a rendezvous in the Midwest and released to his wife, who took him to their walled hideaway in Florida. Here in 1947, at the age of forty-eight, he died of a complication of heart attack, stroke, and pneumonia. Scarface Al Capone, who in his hoodlum heyday had lavished $25,000 funerals on underlings slain in the Chicago gang wars, was given a simple burial.
    Only a few years earlier, the one Alcatraz inmate who had befriended him, Roy Gardner, had also regained his freedom. Early in 1937, headlines reported Gardner’s departure from The Rock. His time served, he was released through Leavenworth. Alcatraz by now had become an island of mystery, and Gardner drew the veil aside with “Hellcatraz,” as told to James G. Chesnutt, in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin. It was a grim portrayal that, as such exposés often do, soon faded. He sold his life story to the movies ( I Stole a Million starring George Raft) and for a time lectured to women’s clubs. At the 1939 World’s Fair on Treasure Island he ran a concession, admission ten cents, on the theme: Crime Doesn’t Pay. Neither did the concession. He stopped by a mortuary, selected and paid for a coffin. He hung a sign on the hall door at the hotel to warn the maid: Danger, Stay Out, Call Police. Then, mixing the same ingredients used at San Quentin, he transformed the bathroom into a lethal gas chamber … his last headline.

Chapter 5
    T HE COUNTRY’S MOST VICIOUS and desperate criminals share The Rock with children of all ages, infants to teenagers. Most of the custodial and clerical staff commute from San Francisco, but about a third, bachelors and fifty-seven families, dwell below the prison heights on four acres terraced into the island’s southeastern tip—the slope blasted by the Army Engineers in the 1850s to provide a protective cliff on that side. Theirs is a strange sort of village life, in the shadow of gun towers, under the brow of a brooding prison that once did, and might again at any moment, explode into murderous mutiny. Ever present is the menace of being taken hostage by armed escapees; but they live a normal life, just as other San Franciscans go about their daily affairs without a neurotic fear that the San Andreas Fault underfoot might at any moment slip a bit and shake the city’s cornices loose.
    In some respects, the Rock dwellers can boast the choicest residential site in the Bay Area, as picturesque as any isle in the Mediterranean. To awe-struck tourists, purchasing an intimate glimpse at rows of binoculars on Telegraph Hill and the end of a pier near Fisherman’s Wharf, the island, much of the year a vivid splash of ice-plant pink, bears the deceptive appearance of a precipitous Capri minus castellated villas and bikinis. Weathered, red-roofed cottages set in flower gardens line one edge of this terrace or middle level; and on the south side two modern apartment houses with picture windows and balconies stand above the rocky shore, not so magnificent as the apartment towers along Rio’s Copacabana but offering an unsurpassed panoramic vista: the Golden Gate span and its after-dark strands of sodium-vapor lights, the serrated skyline of San Francisco, the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, the landmark Campanile of the University of California and the cities crawling up the surrounding hills, the verdant mass of nearby Angel Island. Only a section of the Marin County coast to the north is invisible, blocked off by the prison crest.
    A path leads down through a grove of eucalyptus trees to an esplanade along the leeward shore, a few feet above the surf, with benches to enjoy the flat marine view or