Clark Howard - Six Against the Rock: The Searing True Account of Six Unstoppable Men and the Most Spectacular Jailbreak in American History

Clark Howard

To the men ,

guards and convicts alike ,

who did time on

Alcatraz.

And to the men who died there.

On May 2, 1946, one of the most daring and ingenious escapes in the history of American prisons was attempted. On that day, six convicts serving a collective total of 283 years plus three life sentences captured the big cellhouse on the island penitentiary of Alcatraz and staged a prison mutiny that seized the attention of the country. In the middle of San Francisco Bay, while tens of thousands watched from nearby shores, the six convicts waged an incredible battle against almost impossible odds.

The siege of Alcatraz lasted forty-one hours. Ending it required the combined efforts of prison guards not only from Alcatraz but also from San Quentin, Leavenworth, McNeil Island, and Englewood prisons, along with forces of the San Francisco Police Department, the United States Army, Navy, Air Corps, and Coast Guard, and finally, two assault companies of U.S. Marines.

This book is an hour-by-hour narrative of that incident, and of the men on both sides of the battle. The scenes depicted on the following pages have been reconstructed from eyewitness accounts, overheard conversations, personal narratives of men involved, newspaper reports, and records and documents both public and private. Dramatic license has been used in recreating the gamut of emotions that always surface in moments of stress and desperation, but on the whole the battle which newspapers described as six against the Rock is described exactly as the many contributors to the book remember it. The people in the bookfrom the President of the United States to several inmates mentioned only onceare real people. The name and ethnic background of only one person has been changed. That is the person represented by the character of Dan Durando. The reason for the change will be obvious to the reader.

Much of the narrative in the book is being written for publication for the first time. The research and documentation of those scenes that will probably be controversial is contained in the Afterword. Individual versions of specific incidents may differ, but this, we believe, is how it happened.

Thursday, May 2, 1946

6:00 A.M .

Cecil Corwin had just finished shaving. He was up early; it was his first day back on the job after a two-week vacation. He had slept well the night before and felt rested, but for some reason he kept yawning. The early hour, he imagined; during his vacation he had fallen into the habit of sleeping a little later than usual.

As he finished in the bathroom and got dressed, Corwin hummed a soft, happy tune. He was a musical man by nature; the tune was one of his own, an original melody he had composed in his head while on vacation. He had not had time yet to sit down at the organ and commit it to paper.

The vacation had been a good one: enjoyable yet restful. Corwin and his wife Catheryn had taken the train down to Fresno to visit his brother and sister-in-law. The four of them had gone by car from there up to Yosemite National Park. It was one of their favorite places; during those last two weeks in April it had blossomed out in its full magnificence. Corwin and his wife had visited there a number of times before, but they never tired of it. To Cecil Corwin, nature, like music, was beautiful.

Straightening his tie in the mirror, he examined his face for a moment. He decided that he looked pretty good for a man of fifty-two. Although he did not know it at the time, he bore quite a resemblance to a British actor some fifteen years younger than he, named Michael Rennie. Corwin himself was a native of Nebraska, the son of a circuit minister.

As he was standing at the mirror, the aroma of coffee reached him. Breakfast was almost ready. It was his habit to eat a hearty meal in the mornings: orange juice, scrambled eggs, two or three slices of toast with jam, and plenty of black coffee. A good breakfast, he felt, helped make a good day.

Before he left the bedroom, Corwin picked up a pocket-size book of Shakespeare and slipped it into one of his jacket pockets. He liked to read Shakespeare at work while he ate lunch, and if he had any other idle time.

On his way to the kitchen, Corwin paused to look out the bay window of the living room. He and his wife lived in Apartment 12 at 2955 Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. From the third-floor window, Corwin had a splendid view of San Francisco Bay and the island a mile out in the water where he worked.

Cecil Corwin was a prison guard.

The island out in the bay was Alcatraz.

In Cellblock B on the island prison, Alcatraz inmate number 415 was also starting his day. Bernard Paul Coy, from Kentucky, lean, almost frail-looking, was standing at the single-faucet sink in his five-by-eight cell, washing his face and upper body in cold waterthe only kind available to prisoners in their cells. Coy had just had a hot shower the previous nightWednesday evenings and Saturday mornings were shower and clothing-exchange timesbut because he liked to keep as clean as possible, Coy took cold-water sponge baths at least twice a day.

Called Bernie by some, Barney by others, Coy had just passed his forty-sixth birthday ten weeks earlier. He had been on Alcatraz for nearly nine years, since July of 1937. His crime, bank robbery. His sentence, twenty-five years.

When he finished washing, he briskly rubbed himself down with the coarse prison towel and put on an undershirt and denim prison shirt. He combed his thick black hair straight back, rinsed off his comb and put it on the cells single shelf, and sat down on his bunk to wait for the morning distribution of razor blades so that he could shave. His beard, like his hair, was dark and heavy; he liked to shave closely every morning, even though with cold water it was not a very pleasant task. It always made him feel better, nevertheless, if only because the daily ordeal was over.

Sitting on his already carefully made bunk, Coy took the makings from his shirt pocket and carefully rolled a cigarette. Usually he did not smoke before breakfast, but this particular morning he was a little tight, a little tense inside, and he knew a smoke would help him ease up some. The cigarette he fashioned was neat and well constructed, as it should have been after nearly nine years of practice. Since his arrival at this prison known as the Rock, he had smoked nothing but roll-your-owns. Because Alcatraz was a minimum-privilege penitentiary, tailor-made cigarettes and other niceties were prohibited.

As he smoked, feeling the raw prison tobacco burn his throat and stir up acid in his stomach, Coy looked at one of the canvases stacked on the cells lidless, seatless toilet. It was a landscape, like nearly everything he paintedthis particular one a Kentucky hillside in the fall, the way he remembered it from his boyhood. There wasnt a prettier place in the world, he was convinced, than the Kentucky countryside in the early fall. Unless it was the Kentucky countryside in the late spring. At one time, Coy had worked as a house painter and had traveled all over western Kentucky, painting houses and barns for a contractor. That was before the Depression, when there was work. Back when the young Bernie Coy had believed he could get ahead in life by honest labor, regardless of his background.