A few hours later after the boat had delivered our group back to the boarding pier, I noticed Carnes sitting at a street vendor’s booth signing books. I tried to muster the courage to introduce myself and ask him a few questions about the ’46 events. But just as I approached him, he got up, motioned to the vendor that he was hungry and started walking away. Keeping a safe distance, I followed him through Fisherman’s Wharf, finally arriving at a food concession stand. Carnes purchased a hot dog and soft drink and walked over to the telescopes located at the end of Pier 45, which advertised a close-up view of Alcatraz Island for only ten cents. He dropped a dime in the first telescope and looked through it for about a minute. Noticing me, he turned and motioned to the telescope, inviting me to have a look. He said that if I looked quickly, I might be able to catch a glimpse of a group walking down the stairs from the recreation yard. Knowing his past, I cautiously accepted the invitation and watched him carefully as I positioned myself at the telescope. Eventually I was able to navigate through the scenery through the eyepiece as Carnes started walking away, gazing casually at the island every few seconds. I finally got the courage to approach him and introduce myself. I explained that I had learned who he was from two books I had read about the prison. He graciously shook my hand and allowed me to ask some unskilled questions about his long habitation on Alcatraz and the tragic events of 1946. Our dialog remained fairly superficial until a woman approached Carnes, interrupting the conversation.
The woman told Carnes that she had been a young girl during the 1946 escape attempt and that her father had brought her to Aquatic Park, where many of the correctional officers’ families had gathered to watch the events unfolding from the mainland. She explained that she had been terrified, seeing the flashes of light and hearing the thunderous guns. She told Carnes that she had hugged her father’s steel thermos, praying that it would block any bullets fired by the inmates and she described how that same fear remained in her thoughts every time she looked at the island. She jokingly commented that after the ’46 riot, she was annoyed at having to give up her bed to masses of visiting relatives. They all had come to hear at firsthand her father’s description of what he had witnessed from the mainland. They were all hoping to catch a glimpse through binoculars of a guard on the yard wall catwalk, or perhaps even the faint figure of an inmate.
The conversation then progressed to Carnes’s thoughts on being out of prison. He commented that when he was inside, he constantly thought and read about what people were doing on the outside, but once he got out, he couldn’t stop thinking about his friends on the inside and what they were doing. He said that the most difficult years of his life had been spent on Alcatraz, and that even now it consumed much of his daily thoughts. The woman made a parting comment that I still remember today. She offered to him that although they had followed different paths, and had lived their lives on opposite sides of the prison’s wall, they were both still haunted by memories of Alcatraz. Carnes nodded and smiled at her, then walked off, disappearing into the crowd of tourists along the pier. It would be several decades before I realized that it was during my conversation with Carnes that I began to write this book.
Each year over one million tourists board the island's ferry to visit what was once considered the toughest federal prison in America. Today, Alcatraz is one of the biggest tourist magnets and most famous landmarks of San Francisco. The island's mystique, which has been created primarily through books and motion pictures, continues to lure people from all over the world to see firsthand where America once housed its most notorious criminals. Cramped cells, rigid discipline and unrelenting routine were the Alcatraz trademarks and it became known as the final stop for the nation's most incorrigible prisoners. On any given day, thousands of visitors can be found wandering the island and taking in its unique history. The cellhouse now abandoned by the criminals who were once housed there, still has scars of the events to which the walls once bore witness. It is a journey into a dim piece of American history and few walk away fully comprehending. The clichéd expression "if these walls could talk" is taken to a deeper level.
Even today, decades after the prison’s closure, the name Alcatraz still evokes a variety of dark, forbidding images for many. In the decades of the prison’s active years, people would wander the shorelines of San Francisco, weaving their own mental images of the horrors that lurked behind the concrete walls and fencing. In some ways, Alcatraz became almost two distinct entities – the prison and the myth. In many cases, the Alcatraz that people still imagine was a cruel and vile chamber of horrors and to some former inmates, this may seem a valid perception of that environment. One such case was illustrated in an informal meeting between the late former inmate Jim Quillen and myself in the kitchen basement of Alcatraz, in August of 1997. Forty years earlier Quillen and a few fellow inmates had plotted an escape in the very same location. During our brief conversation, Quillen confided that returning to the main cellhouse had been a painful and difficult journey. It was obvious that even decades later, he was still troubled by the many experiences he had endured on Alcatraz.
In my approach to assembling the information presented here, there has been no attempt to minimize the allegations of brutality, though the facts often times argue the opposite. I am bringing forward a more factual and balanced view through the eyes of those who lived and worked on the island, both inmates and officers. This book is intended to reflect a blend of perspectives, researched and derived from a variety of sources. The historical framework comes from both published and unpublished archive materials, supplemented by extensive interviews with a multitude of former inmates as well as correctional officers and their families. Statements of historical and technical fact are as precise as I could make them, given the resources at my disposal. Errors doubtlessly remain, as there are simply too many sources with contrasting perspectives to consider. I have made every attempt to verify information against archival record and the knowledge of those involved. Nevertheless, there is certainly some information included in this text that is reported as fact, but has most likely been embellished over the years. I don’t necessarily believe that anyone has intentionally set out to falsify history, but when source information is derived primarily from personal memory, details become impure with time and thus historical interpretation tends to fall into the trap of extrapolation, rather than adhering to essential fact.
During the initial phases of my research, I received a letter from former Alcatraz inmate Willie Radkay, who wrote in part: “Nobody wants to print the facts, even if it comes direct from the source himself. Artistic license is used to alter true incidents and events, and even the language used by the cons, whose jargons weren’t spoken in church circles.” This statement emerged as a common theme of discussions and interviews with former guards and inmates alike. In communicating this history, I felt it was important for the reader to understand that I am aware of the limitations of recollection and memory. I have chosen to maintain the integrity of the source material and to reconstruct events based on period documentation, unless the original sources contain obvious errors. This may challenge the opinions of many who are versed in the history of Alcatraz.
Too often in historical works, writers have filtered events in a fashion that they felt would better acclimatize their readers to the subject matter. Often as a result, the characters of individuals and the sense of place are lost. One of my favorite examples of image softening is the famous portrait of General George Washington crossing the Delaware in 1776, by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. Most people would probably prefer to believe that Washington stood stately and commanding in the prow of the boat, a model of dignified leadership before his men. But as historian Kenneth Davis later discovered during his research, the truth was much different from this romanticized image. When documenting his experiences with General Washington, General Harry Knox made an entry in his journal commenting that on this historical occasion, when stepping down onto the boat, Washington poked him with the tip of his boot, remarking: “Move your fat ass Harry, and not too fast or you’ll swamp the boat.”