George H. Gregory - Alcatraz Screw

Copyright 2002 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 06 05 04 03 02

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gregory, George H., 19131996

Alcatraz screw : my years as a guard in America's most notorious prison / George H. Gregory.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8262-1396-0 (alk. paper)
1. Gregory, George H., 19131996. 2. Inmate guardsCaliforniaAlcatraz IslandBiography. 3. PrisonsCaliforniaAlcatraz Island. 4. United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, California. I. Title.
HV9475.C2 G74 2002
365.92dc21

2002023839

This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Kristie Lee
Typesetter: The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc.
Printer and binder: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group
Typefaces: Adobe Garamond and Frutiger Ultra Black

ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-6373-5 (electronic)

by Velma Avant Gregory

Following my husband's death on October 7, 1996, I continued efforts to find a publisher for his manuscript. I would like to thank the people who gave me advice, encouragement, and support throughout the process.

A special thanks goes to John W. Roberts for his suggestions on footnotes to clarify prison terminology, his help in establishing the chronology of events, and especially for writing a masterful introduction for the book. His experience as chief archivist for the Federal Bureau of Prisons makes him uniquely qualified for his contributions.

Rebeka Brady assisted greatly in preparing the manuscript. With her background in public relations and marketing, she supplied an objective point of view that was essential in many aspects of the preparation.

Encouragement from Dori Gores was exceptionally meaningful because of her professionshe is a book editor and former publisher. It was through her advice that I found a publisher.

Others to whom I wish to express my gratitude: Jolene Babyak, for help with details about Robert Stroud and so much more; Johnnie Brunner; Willis De-nome; Anne Diestel, who made available a number of the photographs and documents used in the book; Nora Harris of Harris Indexing Service, for indexing the book; Frank Heaney, who was a correctional officer on Alcatraz; George H. Gregory III, for advice and support; Zella Kotala, for proofreading; and Susan Little, for a first editing of the manuscript.

I also wish to thank the people at the University of Missouri Press: Clair Willcox, acquisitions editor; Jane Lago, managing editor; Beverly Jarrett, director and editor-in-chief; and Gary Kass, editor. I am deeply grateful to them for patiently answering my numerous questions and guiding me through the process of preparing the manuscript for publication.

by John W. Roberts

John W. Roberts is the senior archivist of the National Park Service and was formerly the chief of archives for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The opinions expressed in this introduction are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the positions of the National Park Service or the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Few subjects have been the focus of more misinformation than the former U.S. Penitentiary at Alcatraz. The imposing white prison perched upon a rocky island in San Francisco Bay is well-known as a location for gangster movies, as a staple of popular lore, and as a tourist attraction. But the inside story of life on The Rock remains as elusive as it was during Alcatraz's scant twenty-nine years as a federal prison.

Ironically, it was the U.S. Department of Justice that helped pave the way for the emergence of myths about the island prison. During the penitentiary's early years, the Justice Department mandated that its operations be cloaked by a policy of official silence. Prison administrators therefore seldom responded to the wild tales of abuse that soon emerged, and which gave Alcatraz its gruesome reputation.

In more cynical times, that policy might have been interpreted as a sinister cover-up, but the department's intention was quite mundane. Many of the inmates incarcerated at Alcatraz enjoyed the sort of fame normally reserved for movie stars. Being sent to the most secure prison in the country could burnish their celebrity image to a high gloss. Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, Doc Barker, and Robert Birdman Stroud were too famous as it was, reasoned the Justice Department, without further enhancing their role-model status for young toughs by allowing the public to stay up-to-date about their lives on The Rock. At Alcatraz, they could be cut down to size inside the walls by denying them the sort of privileges they had previously enjoyed in other prisons and by treating them like any other inmate. And they could be cut down to size outside the walls by stifling publicity about them. Or so the department thought.

The veil of silence inadvertently created an information vacuuma vacuum that was filled quickly by former inmates with axes to grind and by reporters with newspapers to sell. As outrageous stories about Alcatraz as America's version of Devil's Island proliferated, the Justice Department realized its mistake and began bringing judges, political figures, reporters, and even stars of gangster movies onto the island in an attempt to show opinion-makers that the facility was nothing like its increasingly notorious image. But it was too late. The mystique of Alcatraz, inaccurate as it was, had become part of American culture.

The lurid tales of brutality at Alcatraz are so familiar they may be considered clichs. They are also so outlandish they may be considered fabrications.

A 1994 motion picture, Murder in the First, took the legend about as far as it could go. It depicted an actual inmate, Henri Young, who, according to the movie, had never committed a violent act before being sent to Alcatraz on a minor first offense in the 1930s, but who was driven to homicidal insanity by the unspeakable conditions on the island. The film went on to show an aging and out-of-touch warden who was responsible for running three prisons simultaneously and was so seldom on the island that he had no alternative but to relinquish control of Alcatraz to an associate warden, a sociopath prone to committing atrocities against the inmatessuch as confining Young to a dark, subterranean dungeon for years and severing his Achilles tendons as punishment for an escape attempt. The movie concluded with the brutalized Young bravely triumphing over the prison in the only way he could, by committing suicide.

In fact, Young, far from being a minor first offender, was a career criminal with an extensive prison record who had robbed banks, taken hostages, and committed at least one murder before ever going to Alcatraz. The actual warden at Alcatraz at the time of Young's incarceration had previously run other prisons but was never warden of more than one prison at a time, and, contrary to the film's depiction of him as an infrequent visitor to Alcatraz, he lived on the island in a home just a few yards from the cell house and was there virtually every day of his fourteen-year tenure. The evil associate warden was entirely fictitious. Young was confined to his cell for several months following an escape attempt, but the movie's depiction of him languishing underground for years had no basis in fact. And instead of committing suicide, Young spent several years in other federal prisons following his murder of a fellow inmate (under circumstances completely different from those shown in the film), after which he was transferred to a state prison in Washington to serve a sentence for an earlier murder conviction. In the 1960s he escaped from that prison and was recaptured, and in the 1970s he was paroledonly to jump parole and disappear. As far as anyone knew, he was still alive at the time