Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (63 page)

He tried to throw the press off the scent. "Capone is not headed for Alcatraz," he said, when the train was two days out of Atlanta. "That's one point on which all the newspapers were wrong."

The only adverse incident occurred near Yuma, when Capone, thrashing about in an effort to find a comfortable position, accidentally kicked open a radiator valve. The car, already steaming in the desert heat, became an inferno. Capone broke out in such a violent rash that Ossenfort had to sponge him down with alcohol.

During the four-day journey the prisoners ate and slept, if they slept at all, in their seats. Neither leg irons nor handcuffs were removed so that when a prisoner needed to use the toilet, his companion had to go with him.

In a final detour to preserve secrecy, the train was taken through Oakland to Napa junction, 50 miles farther north, then switched to tracks winding south again to the rarely used bayside depot at Tiburon, a little yachting center across the water from San Francisco. No passenger car had stopped there for twenty-six years. Yet despite all the precautions, when the train pulled in at eight thirty on the morning of the twenty-second, about 200 people, nearly the entire population of Tiburon, were standing by the tracks while offshore hovered a launch full of reporters and cameramen. Railroad detectives and Department of justice agents, brandishing rifles, kept the crowd at a distance. A small boy, seeing the grimy, stubbled faces through the car windows, called to one of the agents, "Are there men as bad as Al Capone on that train? Ma says there are." "Listen, Sonny," the agent replied, "there's no Capone or anybody by any name on that train. They may have been Capones once, but they're just numbers now." Such, in truth, was Warden Johnston's essential purpose-to destroy the prisoners' sense of identity.

The prisoners' cars were backed onto a barge with rails and detached from the rest of the train. Convoyed by a Coast Guard cutter, whose gun crew held their rifles at the ready, the barge moved behind a tugboat past rows of anchored yachts, out into the choppy bay. Low-lying clouds hid the sun and a light wind blew from the west. As the barge bumped against the Alcatraz dock, the Atlanta guards struck off the prisoners' leg irons, but not their handcuffs. Two by two they hobbled ashore, ankles swollen from the bite of the iron, every muscle stiff, stinking with the sweat and dirt of the long train ride. Walking between two files of Alcatraz guards, they started up the steep, spiraling roadway to the top of the island.

At the rear entrance to the cell house, Warden Johnston sat on one side of a desk, a deputy warden and Warden Aderhold on the other. As Johnston called out the names of each shackled pair of prisoners, a guard brought them inside from the yard and removed their handcuffs. Aderhold turned over their commitment papers to the deputy warden, who assigned them an identification number according to the order of their commitment. Capone was 85 (counting the military prisoners and those transferred from McNeil Island). "I could see him nudging the prisoners near him and slipping them some corner-of-the-mouth comment," Johnston wrote in his memoirs of Alcatraz. "As he walked toward me he flashed a big, wide smile. . . . It was apparent that he wanted to impress other prisoners by asking me questions as if he were their leader. I wanted to make sure that they didn't get any such idea. I handed him a ticket with his number, gave him the instructions I had given every other man, and told him to move along."

The guards led them to the bathhouse to be stripped, medically examined, and their ears, nostrils, mouth and rectum probed for contraband, such as narcotics or coiled watch springs, which, when straightened, could make an efficient saw or weapon. For weekday wear they were issued gray denim slacks and shirt; for Sundays, a blue denim uniform, and for cold weather, a wool-lined pea jacket. The fronts and backs bore their number stamped in letters legible at 20 yards. Finally, given sheets, a pillowcase, towel, comb and toothbrush, they were taken to their cells, where they would spend about fourteen hours out of every twenty-four, seven days a week. Capone drew the fifth cell from the right, third tier, block B. When the last prisoner had been locked up, Johnston wired Attorney General Cummings: FIFTY THREE CRATES FURNITURE FROM ATLANTA RECEIVED IN GOOD CONDITION INSTALLED NO BREAKAGE. Within a month, more than 100 more crates arrived from Leavenworth and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

It was Johnston's policy to listen to any prisoner who wished to talk to him, and when, the following day, Capone requested an in terview, the warden had him brought to his office. "What can I do for you?" he asked blandly.

"Well, I don't know how to begin," said Capone, "but you're my warden now and I just thought I better tell you I have a lot of friends and I expect to have lots of visitors and I want to arrange to see my wife and my mother and my son and my brothers."

"You will be able to see your wife and your mother and your son," Johnston told him. "Your brothers may visit you, that is, all your brothers except Ralph who has a prison record [he had just been released from McNeil Island]. . . . You may receive one visit a month from blood relatives, but only two persons may visit you at the same time."

"Warden, I got a big family and they all want to see me and I want to see them all. I don't see why I can't have them all come at the same time."

"They cannot all come at the same time because the regulations limit the number of visitors to two relatives at one time. That rule will apply to you as it will govern all other prisoners."

"How about my friends, Warden, when can I see them?"

"Capone, your friends and associates will not be permitted to come here as visitors."

He smiled feebly. "It looks like Alcatraz has got me licked."

Johnston granted his request for another interview the next week. "Don't get me wrong, Warden," Capone began. "I'm not looking for any favors, but you know maybe some of these other cons ain't got any friends, but I gotta lot of friends. Maybe you don't know it, Warden, and maybe you won't believe it, but a lotta big businessmen used to be glad to be friends with me when I was on top and they wanted me to do things for them."

"What kind of businessmen conducting legitimate enterprises would need any help from you?"

Capone gave his version of the Chicago newsboys' strike and how, acting in behalf of Colonel McCormick, he ended it. "The big boys always sent for Al and they were glad to talk to Al when they needed Al, but they sure put the boots to me when they got me down."

"That is very interesting," said Johnston. "You may want to tell me some more sometime."

To gain the kind of leadership he had enjoyed at Atlanta, Capone tried to dispense favors to his fellow inmates. He offered to have money sent to their relatives, to buy musical instruments for those who, like himself, wanted to play in the prison band (he had taken up the tenor banjo). Johnston thwarted all such gestures. When it became apparent that Capone could not obtain the smallest special consideration, he lost face, as Johnston intended him to, especially among the small fry who composed the majority of the Alcatraz population. They mocked him to his face. They threatened him.

The men who conceived the Alcatraz prison did not even pay lip service to the principle of rehabilitation. What Cummings and Bates had in mind was a custodial and punitive institution. There would be no rewards for good behavior other than the usual reduction of sentence by ten days out of every forty served and work credits, no trusties, only punishment for breaking rules. A policy of maximum security, the Attorney General believed, combined with minimum privileges and total isolation from the mainland, would serve as a deterrent to Public Enemies and those who would emulate them. It deterred them no more than the prospect of the electric chair, the noose or the gas chamber reduced the homicide rate. In fact, despite the propaganda emanating from the Attorney General's office, comparatively few big-time gangsters ever went to Alcatraz. There were not enough of them to fill the cells. The "notorious mail robber" might be an obscure wretch who had broken into a postbox. Some inmates were first offenders. If the new prison profited anybody, it was the wardens of the old ones. Alcatraz took some of the strain off them. No court could sentence convicts to Alcatraz. Only those already serving terms could be transferred there, if the warden so recommended and the director of the Bureau of Prisons approved. During the thirties a decline was noted in prison mutinies, race riots, escapes, aggressive homosexuality, and killings, which Cummings ascribed to the prisoners' fear of ending up on "the Rock." ("I closed Alcatraz in 1963," wrote Bates' successor, James V. Bennett, in his autobiography, "because it was too costly to operate and too typical of the retributive justice that has no place in our philosophy.")

"It was necessary to admonish [Capone] several times, when he was being instructed in the rules and routine," Johnston recalled, "but no more than other inmates for they all found the regulations stricter than any to which they had been accustomed in other prisons. After the first tenseness was over he got in line and made an average adjustment in work and behavior."

His day began at 6:30 A.M. with the clanging of a bell and a burst of electric light. He had twenty minutes to dress and make his bed. To shave, he had to shove a matchbox through the bars of his cell. A guard would place a razor blade in it and allow three minutes before returning to reclaim it. At 6:50 the bell sounded again, the floor guard took the morning count. A third bell signaled that all prisoners were accounted for. Fourth bell: breakfast. The turnkeys, standing inside locked steel cages, pulled back a lever, and with the din of a cannonade all the heavy steel cell door bolts simultaneously shot back. Falling in between his neighbors, Capone shuffled toward the mess hall adjoining the cell blocks. The prisoners ate ten to a table, with the Negroes segregated. They all sat facing the same direction. Armed guards watched from a steel-barred gallery above. The prisoners ate in silence. Talking was forbidden not only in the mess hall, but in the cell blocks and the bathhouse. In the recreation yard during the morning and afternoon recesses they could talk for three minutes and on weekend afternoons for two hours. This rule of silence was later relaxed.

The food was served cafeteria-style from a steam table. Bad food had caused more prison riots than perhaps any other single factor, and Johnston was determined to provide three palatable meals a day with a calorie value of at least 3,100, 1,000 more than the Bureau of Prisons specified. Typical breakfast fare consisted of oatmeal with milk, fried bologna sausage, cottage fried potatoes, toast or bread with margarine, and coffee. Capone learned to clean his plate, for if a prisoner left a scrap, he got no food the next day. Recognizing the calmative properties of nicotine, Johnston also issued to each man three packs of cigarettes a week, and for heavy smokers he installed a tobacco and cigarette paper dispenser in every cell block so that they could roll their own. But he would not approve a commissary such as most prisons had, where the men could buy, with the few cents a day they earned in the workshops, candy, chewing gum, soda pop. At the 7 A.M. mess-hall bell the officer heading the guards' table raised his arm, and the prisoners rose. When he dropped his arm, they started back to their cells. A snitch box they passed on the way discouraged attempts to palm cutlery. It buzzed the first few times Capone passed it until the guards realized he was wearing metal arch supporters and replaced them with plastic ones.

No prisoner could wear a watch. Bells told the time. They rang for one reason or other about every half hour. After a brief interval in their cells, the prisoners were counted again and lined up according to their assigned workshop. Capone's first job was operating a mangle in the basement laundry room, to which the Army posts around the bay area sent their wash. (A private stationed on nearby Angel Island wrote home that his laundryman was none other than Al Capone.) Prisoners working outdoors or by a window endured the further torment of seeing ocean liners steaming through the Golden Gate, motor cruisers, sailboats and ferries skittering across the bay, the green and wooded hills of Marin County to the north and to the south, the San Francisco skyline-all within two miles.

Midmorning. Bell. Recess. Bell. Work. 11:30. Bell. Prisoners counted. Bell. Noon. Bell. Lunch. 1 P.M. Bell. Work. Midafternoon. Bell. Recess. Work. 4:30. Bell. Prisoners counted. Bell. 5:30. Bell. Supper. Bell. Back to cellblocks. Bell. Prisoners counted. Bell. 6:30. Bell. Lockup. 9:30. Bell. Lights out.

The routine was varied on the weekend to allow for religious worship Sunday morning, a weekly bath and two hours of leisure both Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The prisoners could spend their free hours exercising in the yard or pursuing a hobby indoors. Capone, who learned to read music and improvise, usually chose to play his banjo with a five-man combo he had organized. He sang, too, and composed a song entitled "Mother."

In their cells before lights out the prisoners could read books or magazines borrowed from the prison library, but to intensify their sense of isolation, Johnston denied them newspapers and radio. The deprivation led Capone to commit his first offense. He tried to bribe a guard to talk to him about the outside world. It cost him the loss of some good behavior credits.

Correspondence was also severely restricted. A prisoner could write one letter a week to a relative and from relatives receive no more than three. He could correspond with nobody outside his family except his lawyers. Censors read all incoming and outgoing mail, deleted any portion that did not confine itself to family affairs, and sent on a typed copy of what remained. The first letters Capone got from his wife were so drastically expurgated that he, not yet familiar with the system, upbraided her for her laziness when she visited him. "If you're too busy to write," he said, "don't send telegrams."

There were no fixed visiting days. Each monthly visit, limited to forty-five minutes, had to be arranged through Johnston, a pass is sued and instructions given on where and when to board the island boat. A sheet of plate glass, floor to ceiling, separated visitor and prisoner. At head level ran two strips of steel a few inches apart, perforated by quarter-inch holes, with a thin sound diaphragm sandwiched between. The holes were staggered so that no object could pass through. To vibrate the diaphragm, voices had to be raised to normal speaking level. Thus, the guards present could hear every word exchanged and interrupt if forbidden topics were broached.