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Nov. 26, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
53:56
Edition 499 - Jolene Babyak

Jolene Babyak's father helped to run the notorious island-prison off San Francisco... She has fascinating tales of life there, the many infamous inmates - including Al Capone and the famous "escape..."

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is certainly Howard Hughes, and this is definitely the unexplained.
Oh, I hope you're feeling good.
I'm recording this on a miserable, cold, grey, rainy day, and we're literally at the time of year now where we get daylight that ends at about 4.30 p.m.
I just have to think forward to the end of lockdown and the dawning of spring.
I wish I could just hibernate, but you can't.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
I've had some really nice ones.
Please keep them coming.
If you want to send me an email, go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Designed and created by Adam.
Thank you, Adam.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
And, you know, more importantly than any of it, thank you very much to you for being part of this.
I'm not going to hang about here.
Special guest on this edition of The Unexplained from my radio show, a slightly longer version of a conversation that I had with Jolene Babiak.
She lived as a kid on Alcatraz because her dad was helping to run it, as you'll hear.
And she is well aware of the famous escape or attempted escape.
You know, the one that spawned the movie with Clint Eastwood?
That escape from Alcatraz, the place that they said you couldn't escape from.
Maybe you could.
And maybe you couldn't.
We'll find out a little later in this conversation about Alcatraz.
It's slightly different from the stuff we normally do, but I think it's fascinating.
And I think the unexplained has got to be a broad receptacle where you can put a lot of things in.
As long as it's interesting, then, you know, it gets in and on.
So, I don't think I've got anything else to say, really.
Thank you very much for all the emails.
Please keep them coming.
When you get in touch, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And as I say, I'm very grateful for you keeping me going and keeping in touch during this miserable time of lockdown.
Okay, let's get to California now.
And to Jolene Babiak, we're going to talk about Alcatraz.
Jolene, nice to have you on the show.
How did I do?
You did great.
You did forget Leon Russell.
He had a song called Going Back to Alcatraz.
Oh, really?
Well, now, you know, I would have imagined that Johnny Cash would have done that, but he didn't, did he?
No, Sam Quentin was more than Folsom.
Sam Quentin, I hate every inch of you.
I love Johnny Cash.
I'm mighty proud of that ragged old flag.
Now, you look only just reading on the web about you.
You have had a remarkable life.
Talk to me quickly before we talk.
I thought what we do in the first segment, we'll talk about Alcatraz, why they built it there, and what kind of a place it was and the sort of regime there.
Then I thought in the second segment, we'll talk about some of the inmates and the way the place ran.
And then in the third segment, we'll talk about the escape.
Does that work for you?
That works for me.
Okay.
But first of all, your story, how you came to be, I think, a little girl and perhaps a little older than that, actually living on a prison island.
Yeah, it was kind of an amazing twist of fate.
My father was forced into the job by the Depression.
He had got a college degree, but he graduated in 1933, and his father had just died, so there was no, you know, and there were no jobs, right?
He was living in Ohio at the time.
And he and my mother were married and were expecting their first child by 1936, 35 or 36.
And eventually he had to, he decided to apply to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons as a guard.
And so he took the job in 1938.
He had a college degree, so he was underweight.
And there was a famous story in my family that he had sat down in front of Leavenworth, Kansas, and ate five or six pounds of bananas to gain the weight.
I doubt that he actually gained the weight, but I think the college degree stood.
He just wanted for him.
But hang on for a second, though.
There was a height and presumably a height and weight requirement for that?
Oh, sure.
I mean, they wanted strong-looking men.
My dad was skinny and tall.
He was about six feet, but he was skinny.
And they wanted some bulk in there.
And he, you know, I don't think he made it.
But the college degree, like I said, I think held in its stead.
And they hired him, and he worked at Leavenworth Penitentiary, which in lots of ways was somewhat more dangerous than Alcatraz.
It was a huge federal penitentiary during the Depression in the middle of Kansas.
That's a good idea.
I thought Leavenworth was also a military base.
Yes, well, there's a number of things in Leavenworth.
There's like five prisons.
There's the U.S. Penitentiary.
In the United States, we have a difference between federal prisons and state prisons.
You may be unaware of that.
Let me just give you a little background here.
When the automobile supplanted the horse as the means of getaway, the U.S. government had to have new laws.
Because if you rob a bank in California and run to Nevada and Colorado, the California cops have no jurisdiction.
They can't come and get you.
So by crossing state lines, you have now entered into a new crime, which is avoiding arrest by crossing a state line or stolen cars.
So these are federal crimes, and federal crimes required federal or U.S. government prisons.
So, for example, murder tends to be a state crime.
But if you run across state lines to avoid arrest, or kidnapping, right, is also presumed to be interstate, then the U.S. government can bring in the FBI and bigger resources, more money to follow you throughout the country and pick you up and then take you back.
And you can be liable for both state and federal crimes.
I always wondered, you know that I'm a big fan.
We were having a little conversation before this of the old TV series, The Fugitive, with that wonderful actor David Janssen.
And I learned from that how it was possible for Inspector or Lieutenant Gerard, who was pursuing him because the fugitive, David Janssen, Richard Kimball, had been wrongly convicted of his wife's murder and because of a train wreck was able to escape.
But he crossed state lines.
He crossed state lines to live as a fugitive.
And Lieutenant Gerard was able to pursue him because he did that.
Yes.
Right.
Yes, because murder would be a state of Illinois crime in that case.
But once you cross the state lines, then it does bring in the FBI.
That's why kidnapping is a federal crime.
The federal crimes are bank robbery, because banks are insured by the federal government, crossing state lines to avoid arrest, income tax evasion, murder on a government reservation or, you know, so those are the basic federal crimes that will bring in more resources.
And then that's why you had on Alcatraz, despite the fact that it was the most maximum security federal prison in the country, had a lot of guys in there who were car thieves.
But car theft is a state crime.
However, what are they doing?
They're going across state lines.
So if they can't get them on some other event, I mean, there was one guy on Alcatraz, Mr. Spear, forgetting his first name, but he had bombed an airplane in which 42 people had been killed.
But the bomb disappeared over the Gulf of Mexico, and they couldn't prove it.
But they got him on crossing state lines.
It's a stolen car.
Okay, and is that why sometimes we are surprised in the United Kingdom at the phenomenal jail terms levied for certain offenses that we don't punish that harshly here?
Right, yes, that's probably, yes, because it could be a lot of crimes back in the middle of the day.
So if they can't get you on one thing, they'll make sure they get you on another.
Well, you know, they only got him on for five years.
Mr. Spear only had five years.
He had state crimes behind him, but they couldn't put the airplane crash on him.
And, you know, he had dynamite in the car.
He had a stolen car.
One of the victims on the airplane.
So he had everything except for the smoking gun or the smoking gun.
Yeah, no bodies.
No bodies.
So they couldn't really prove it.
And everyone knew he did it.
He'd taken out an insurance policy.
But they only got him for five years on crossing state lines.
So that's kind of, you know, the government has various ways to get you if you have committed some crimes.
Okay, so there is your dad.
He ate the bananas.
He put on enough weight.
He had a degree that was in his favor.
And he's at Leavenworth.
Yes, Leavenworth was about 3,600 men.
Alcatraz never had more than 280 men.
And so Leavenworth was one of the big penitentiaries.
It was the Alcatraz of its day, along with Atlanta, also a big pen, and McNeil Island.
Those were the three major federal prisons.
And yeah, he was at Leavenworth.
I don't think it was a job he probably enjoyed much.
And then during the war, I think he worked, he was dispatched over to the, he joined the military.
And I think he was dispatched over to Fort Leavenworth, which had a military prison.
And my father used to tell me, I mean, you know, tongue-in-cheek, of course, and he said, Joe, if you ever commit a crime and you get a choice between state, federal, or army prisons, pick army last.
Yeah, no, I am told that some of those army prisons were really hard.
And listen, you won't know this, I don't think.
But I'm quite familiar with Gloucester Jail in the UK.
And Gloucester Jail is now a kind of tourist attraction because they say it's haunted.
But I remember visiting Gloucester Jail as a journalist, and it scared me.
It was a pretty rough place.
But in the war, the American military used it to house some of their prisoners, some of their people.
And there were executions there.
It was a hard damn regime.
Yes.
Yes, the military was always known for harsh treatment, for sure.
There were guys that were convicted one day, and about two days later, they were executed.
There was no appeal.
I mean, I don't think it's no longer quite that draconian, but certainly.
So your dad was in a, You know, he had to pick, well, the remnants of people from train lines after, you know, after terrible accidents and that sort of thing.
He had to do all the things that other people wouldn't do.
Your dad had a tough, hard job with tough, hard people.
How much of that did you know about when you were a kid?
Oh, almost nothing.
By the time I was the thirdborn and came up later, he'd already been in the prison system, I don't know, I'd say 15 years, maybe 12 years.
And he had moved over into industries.
So every federal prison has industries where the prisoners earn money actually for jobs that they do.
They don't earn much money, but they do earn money for jobs that they do for the U.S. government.
And they make products that are like Army uniforms or uniforms for prison or furniture refinishing for other institutions.
Right, so prisons have a purpose.
So it's just like the Shawshank redemption that I always thought was kind of fiction.
You know, the prisoners were there building roads.
Yeah, well, state prisons would do that for sure, particularly in the South.
When I was a kid, we would go through the South and I would see the chain gangs.
Those were real things, very shocking to me.
And they'd be in those striped clothing.
But that's state prisons.
So federal prisons often had prison industries, and he eventually became the superintendent or the director of prison industries.
So by the time I knew him, he didn't wear a uniform as a guard.
He wore a suit, and he was not an overseer, but he was usually the, he was the office manager for a while, and then he became the assistant superintendent.
And then on Alcatraz, he became the superintendent of industries.
So did that mean he'd done the hard yards then?
Any possibility that he may have found himself having to wrestle back some recalcitrant offender?
That wouldn't have been, by the time you came into the world, he wasn't doing that stuff.
No, not at all.
And the industry's superintendents, particularly if they're nice, decent people, which my father was, were usually appreciated by the prisoners.
They had the better, the industry supervisor could bring in the best working prisoners, and the prisoners realized it was a way to earn some money and good time because you got industrial good time, which was a day off a month, one day off your sentence every month.
So this was good.
In addition to other good time awards, you could get industrial good time.
So they wanted those jobs.
And so they were probably usually nice to my father, and he was a decent man, so he didn't have any interest in targeting anyone.
There were some men who didn't like him for various reasons.
I have letters in my possession of prisoners who were mad, and then they would profusely apologize, you know, in subsequent letters.
And would some of those people be a risk, unbeknown to you as a kid, a risk to him?
Because, you know, when some of those people get out, if they eventually did, and they had a grudge against him, they might get him.
Unbeknownst to me, completely, there's always a risk if there's an escape attempt and they will take hostages.
Generally, they don't kill people, but yes, if you're known as a bad guard, it's even more risky.
But I was not knowledgeable of any of those possibilities ever.
Even on Alcatraz, I never even thought about it.
Was your dad a rehabilitation?
I don't know.
This is probably not a word, but you'll know what I mean when I say it.
Was he a rehabilitationist?
Was he, you know, clearly by the sounds of him, he was a man who had some notion of the prisoner's welfare.
He did, and I would find out years later, sometimes from prisoners, that they appreciated his, you know, his decency.
I'm trying to think of a gentleman now, Tom Kent.
My father had written a really wonderful note about him having an Irish, sunny personality.
And Kent was unaware of the note.
And I met him years later when he was out of prison, and I was able to show him the note of my father.
And Kent, you know, had only nice things to say about my father.
And then most of the prisoners that I've met over the years, about 25, most of them never knew who my father was.
They weren't there at the same years, or they didn't work in the industries.
But there were a few who, one pulled me over, I never, I had forgotten his name, but he lived in Mexico, pulled me over and said he thought my father was a very decent man.
And when you say he pulled you over, was this when you were living there?
No, not at all.
No, we weren't allowed to go anywhere near a prisoner.
But a couple years later, we had an alumni association.
And on Alcatraz, which is a national park now, they used to have reunions every year.
And the inmates, the former inmates, with the officers, it was always very unusual.
You'd see these, you know, in the beginning when they have these reunions, the prisoner would be sitting on one side of the boat looking askance at the guards.
And the guards would be sitting on the opposite side of the boat.
And they were all like, you know, but at the end of the weekend, they'd be having their arms around each other, showing each other their grandchildren's photographs.
I mean, it was just amazing.
And then it became a regular thing.
So I met a lot of former prisoners this way.
And were most of those people who went through Alcatraz, which we'll talk in depth in the next segment, which is coming up in just a couple of minutes, but we'll talk about the actual place itself and the people in it.
But the ones who you met, clearly they were very keen never to put themselves in a situation where they have to go back inside the jail.
Yeah, you know, as my father used to say, age rehabilitates.
People get older.
They can't run as fast.
And they begin to realize that they have wasted their lives in prison, you know.
And so they have different ways of expressing that.
But yes, age rehabilitates.
You know, they still had some of their tendencies.
One man that I knew, and I liked him very well, but he was definitely a pathological liar.
And I don't go around saying that, you know, willy-nilly, but he definitely was a pathological liar.
He could not help but lie.
And they had some very conservative black versus white attitudes.
And if you irritated one of them, which I had done on a number of occasions by making some comment, you could get what they called a thousand-year stare.
Oh, boy.
And they will look right through you.
And I used to take Bart, our Bay Area Rapid Transit to work, and I got that stare once from a guy.
And I was never really sure what it was, but he was a stranger.
And my eyes happened to lay on him.
And I got that stare from him, which said to me, do not look at me again.
And I obeyed.
I saw that stare and I knew exactly what it was.
And you could get that from prisoners if they thought you had wronged them in some way.
So they had some tendencies.
You could see, you know, you could see that the anger was still there and the bitterness and everything, but they had eventually mostly rehabilitated themselves.
Right.
Okay.
And last question in this segment, and then we have to take some commercials and move forward.
What was the experience then?
You can tell me what ages you were there, but your dad is moving up the ranks there.
I think he becomes assistant governor after a while, and I think he got to run the place, certainly filling in at one point.
But anyway, what was it like being young, not being connected with the prison, but having to live next to it?
Oh my God, it was wonderful.
But not because there was a prison.
I mean, you know, although that was the cachet, you know, when you went into the city, living on Alcatraz was, oh, my God, no one even knew anybody lived there.
But it was an island, and there were 60 families living there.
I came when I was seven, and I lived in this big building right off the dock, which still exists today.
And there were tons of kids my age.
There must have been 12 or 15 kids my age.
And we went to school in San Francisco, so I got a boat ride at least twice a day.
And San Francisco was a glorious city.
It was only a mile and a quarter away.
It's just under two kilometers, right?
It was just beautiful cityscape, right?
And a very exciting city.
City by the bay.
Oh my god, it was just glorious in the 50s.
It was like a jewel.
And we had been living in Indiana, you know, so it was landlocked Indiana.
And there we were living off the coast of this gorgeous city.
So it was really wonderful for me.
And I would see prisoners going up and down the hill in trucks.
They'd be on the back of a pickup truck.
And would they see you?
They would see us and they would wave at us, you know, and you'd shyly wave back at them.
And I had an incident, you know, I had an incident when I was that age, because we lived on the island twice, and the first time was when I was seven to nine.
And I had an incident where there was a cyclone fence, and I guess a prisoner had found a little handball.
And they were cleaning up.
He and a guard, maybe two prisoners and a guard, were cleaning up and cutting back a shrubbery, and they found this little handball.
And he showed it to me, and I knew exactly what it was, because the handballs came from prisoners.
I already knew the kids coveted the handballs.
I'd been shown a handball, and that was the coolest thing you could get on the island.
And he showed it to me, and I wanted it, and I looked at the guard, and he nodded, and I walked over to the fence, and this guy knelt down and squeezed it through the cyclone fence, thereby making me the coolest kid on the island that day.
And maybe the only day.
But then I immediately had a dilemma, a word when I was eight that I did not know what it meant, but I knew how it felt.
And that was I was supposed to be polite to an adult, but I was not allowed to talk to a prisoner.
So did you say thank you?
I doubt that I did, but I remember, I don't remember that so much, but I remember that dilemma of just like, oh my God, what am I going to do now?
How do I solve this problem?
I probably ran away and didn't say anything because not speaking to a prisoner was a paramount rule on Alcatraz.
Well, you established some kind of connection.
Hold that thought, Jolene.
Fascinating material.
I knew it would be.
Jolene Babiak lived as a young person, a child, on Alcatraz because her dad was helping run the place.
We're talking about Alcatraz with a person who knows.
So, Jolene, there is your father on Alcatraz.
You said he had two spells of service there.
Were they close together or were they spaced apart?
No, he worked there for nine years, one time, nine years.
We only lived on the island for two periods.
In the beginning, when I was seven to nine, then we moved to the city and bought a house.
About half the staff lived in the city.
And then when he became the associate warden or what you would call the deputy governor, we were required to move back to the island.
And I was 15 at that time.
And we spent almost exactly a year there the last year.
So he worked there for nine years.
And that year when you were older, was that easier or more difficult than the year when you were young?
Well, more difficult.
But, you know, because 15 is a difficult year for anybody, anywhere.
And you didn't look at the prisoners long enough to get their attention because that was more awkward as a 15-year-old.
So I was probably shyer and, you know, more introverted.
But in lots of ways, it was more exciting because I was much more aware of things.
I was aware of the prison more than I had been when I was seven.
Were you not scared, though, because there must have been men in there who'd committed terrible, heinous crimes.
And there you were coming of age.
You know, they were so far removed from us.
They were really literally on the other side of the island.
I mean, when I was living as a seven-year-old, the prison was just up the hill from me.
I could see the prison when I went to bed.
But I didn't think about that.
I really didn't.
You know, because you're seven and you just don't assume that you're in danger.
When I was 15, I was a block away, at least.
I could still see the prison, but it was a long way away.
I didn't know any of the crimes.
My parents never talked about the prisoners, except my dad would tell the funny stories.
But he would, you know, I knew nothing about the prisoners.
It wasn't a topic of conversation, and it wasn't hidden from us, but it wasn't a topic.
So I was not afraid at all.
And we haven't said this, but we should.
The range of offenses, I mean, you've told me about a couple of things, but the range of offenses presumably from crimes like murder on down.
Tell me the range of inmates and offenses.
Bank robbery, mostly bank robbery, crossing state lines with stolen goods, usually cars, bombing an airplane, rape, murder on a government reservation.
All the crimes were represented.
Men who would be in state crimes on state charges such as murder or whatever, who would escape and then cross state lines.
And then, you know, because of the escapes and crossing state lines, they would then be convicted and sent to federal prisons, which were harder to escape from.
So you had all, you know, there were Army prisoners there.
You had, you know, there were Native Americans there who had killed on an Indian reservation.
So all the crimes were represented from state to federal.
Understood.
And did you have to be a particular escape risk to be put on this island prison?
That helped for sure.
Now, you know, usually the escapes were not spectacular.
They were often from Juvie, juvenile detention centers.
There'd be four or five, like Frank Morris, the guy who escaped in 1962 and was later portrayed by Clint Eastwood.
He had escapes on his record, but they were mostly from Juvie.
He walked away from Juvie.
Juvenile prisons.
Juvenile prisons.
And then he was found near a window that had been tampered with in Atlanta, and that got him sent to Alcatraz.
So sometimes it could be very minor, but if you had a little history of it, and he was a smart guy, and it was in his record that he was capable of long-term planning.
Oh, so that should have got people thinking.
Yes, absolutely, because the guards would look at this and they'd go, oh, okay, so we need to watch out for that.
We need to keep a Special eye on this person, but maybe they should have given him a bit more observation.
I want to talk about the escape, claimed escape, that people know from that Clint Eastwood movie in the next segment, because it really is the crux of this story, and it's quite an exciting and chilling tale, too.
Give me an idea of the range of people and their stories there, then.
Some of the ones who made an impression on you.
Well, certainly the famous prisoners.
I never saw anybody who was famous, but there were a number of people.
Was Al Capone there, for example?
Al Capone was there, Machine Gun Kelly, Creepy Karpus.
Karpus worked for my dad.
He was still there when I was there, and my father would sometimes speak.
I know about Machine Gun Kelly and Al Capone.
What about Creepy Karpus?
What did he do?
Karpus was the Karpus, you remember Ma Barker.
Yes.
Ma was either mentally ill, probably had a personality disorder.
She had four or five children, all of whom were criminals, three of whom.
Gangster.
Head of the gangster family, yeah.
Yes, yes.
But as Harvey Bailey once said, Ma couldn't plan breakfast.
But, you know, again, that's the federal laws that came into effect because, you know, Minnesota was, Minneapolis, Minnesota was one of the crime cities.
There were a number of crime cities in the Midwest, Kansas City, in Hart Springs, Arkansas, Minneapolis.
And they would, the gangsters would go up to Minneapolis and they had it in with the cops.
So they'd pay off the cops up there.
And this is in the 30s, right?
And so the cops would overlook any crimes as long as the criminals didn't commit crimes in Minneapolis.
So they'd run across the street basically to St. Paul, rob a bank there, and then run back.
And, you know, so Minneapolis tended to be a hotspot of criminal activity.
So you had those were the gangsters in those days, the Barker gang, the Karpis Barker gang, Al Capone, of course, Chicago, and Machine Gun Kelly, you know, was famous really for a very brazen kidnapping.
And kidnapping was the crime of choice in those days.
You rarely see that today, you know, because in the United States, it's mostly estranged parents trying to steal their children.
Because there's no way to get the money anymore.
And, you know, the ransom kidnappings are sort of a thing of the past.
So those were the kinds of men, you know, and Karpus was the only one who was still there.
Harvey Bailey was still there when I was seven, I think, and then he was gone.
Mickey Cohen.
Cohen is remembered in movies more in real life.
He was kind of a publicity hound.
He was a Las Vegas guy, along with Bugsy Siegel.
Bugsy was killed around 1935, and Mickey Cohen sort of took his place as the big-time gangster.
When you say that Bugsy was killed in 1935.
It's a famous murder.
He was sitting in his living room reading the newspaper and somebody shot through his picture window, went through the newspaper and killed him.
I was like, wow.
You know, not only is that horrendous, but it's also bad luck, isn't it?
If somebody can't exactly see you, but they can see the newspaper, they still get you.
My God.
I mean, I hate to lie, but, you know, yes, that was a spectacular murder.
And Mickey was like, yeah, well, that worked out for me.
Mickey was a character.
He was a character, and he was on Alcatraz.
Did he, presumably for a crime like that then in America, you either go to the chair or you stay in prison for a very, very, very, very long time.
The chair tends to be state, although some, I guess Trump is condemning some men to right.
So in the case I'm learning about the American system, so for murder, if it's a federal offense like that, you end up in Alcatraz.
You ain't going to the chair, usually.
Usually not.
You know, we don't use it too much.
The feds usually have used it for treason or, you know, the Rosenbergs in the 1950s were spies and espionage and things like that.
So usually the feds didn't use it that often.
And, you know, you weren't sentenced to Alcatraz.
You were sentenced to federal prison, and it was your behavior that brought you to Alcatraz.
Right.
So these were people who needed to be, all of them needed to be kept a bit of an eye on.
Or they were notorious, like Al Capone.
Sorry to keep rapping on here.
What you're saying is fascinating.
But just to say that Al Capone, from what I read, had a reputation of being very studious, almost like a businessman in prison.
Well, he was a businessman.
He was very well organized.
He had a tendency to kill everybody in power above him, so he sort of ran up the ranks.
Yeah, he was a businessman.
He had the Chicago police on his payroll in some cases.
He had the politicians under his...
And then, of course, prohibition was in effect, which prohibited the sale and transportation of liquor.
And so, of course, many of the original gangsters were bootleggers, right?
As we say.
And they were running rum.
And the politicians like to drink just like everybody else.
So, yeah, and Capone was, but, you know, Capone had syphilis.
I mean, his life was remarkably short.
And I think he died when he was about 47 or just turned to 48.
He'd been in prison for, you know, 11 or 12 years.
I've forgotten exactly.
So his life was effectively over by the time he was about 35.
Was he a Mr. Big in prison?
In other words, did other prisoners go to him to make things happen or get things done?
Apparently when he was in Atlanta, and that was the reason why he was shipped to Alcatraz on one of the first trains that came out there in 1934.
He had some people under, you know, he had money and he had more privileges than other prisoners.
And the feds, you know, Atlanta had been run on the old patronage system.
In the old days, when the governor got the job, then the prison warden got his job.
When the governor lost the election, then the prison warden won.
So sometimes the wardens would do things to curry favor.
And, you know, these gangsters could keep things calm, you know, by their power in lots of ways.
And Capone apparently Had a lot of power at the U.S. Penitentiary at Atlanta, and they shipped him out to Alcatraz.
He was number 84, I think.
84th prison.
85, maybe?
I'd have to look.
85.
When you were part of it all, were there, we read a lot about in this day and age, but also in previous day and ages more so, prison riots, prison trouble.
Were there tense situations that perhaps you got caught up in simply by being there?
You know, there's a famous story in my family because my mother was putting me to bed.
And as I said, when I was seven, the prison was just up the hill.
You could see it from my bedroom window.
It was all lit up and everything.
And there were men rioting one night.
And I said, what is that noise?
Because I couldn't recognize the noise.
And she said, oh, just the prisoners letting off steam.
And I doubt that she slept well that night because you could hear it.
But I went right to sleep.
I went, oh, okay.
You know, again, it wasn't a thing in our family.
Although my father increasingly became more tense over the years.
I mean, when he was superintendent of industries, there were 100 prisoners in there.
And he had prisoners in his office, you know, working side by side with him.
And they were men he trusted, and they trusted him.
But I mean, you know, when the chips are down, that doesn't count for much sometimes.
And so I think there were times when he was tense.
But again, I was only aware of that kind of in retrospect.
So it's almost like, isn't it, we hear in some professions, maybe even in my own broadcasting profession, that when I was young and blase, I was not as aware of the things that could go wrong as I am now that I'm older.
And maybe your dad was the same.
Yeah, and your father was a policeman.
And there you go.
Well, exactly.
I mean, he became very aware of changing times, but also of the risk, the risk involved in doing that job.
And he didn't bring it home, I'm sure.
No.
Sometimes he would tell us a few things, but I would say 99.9% of the stuff that he was involved in, I had no idea.
Right.
No.
Yep.
Same as my father.
And, you know, there would have been days when he would come home.
Sorry to talk about this, but just quickly, because I think your dad probably much the same when he'd had to deal with something absolutely terrible.
And he would come home, wash himself, remove the uniform, dress again, sit down and have his nighttime meal.
And, you know, who knows what he'd been involved in, what he'd had to deal with that day.
So your dad must have been much the same.
Yeah, wouldn't even talk about it, really.
I knew nothing.
We talked about what I did in school and what my mother did, what was in the news.
We didn't talk about it.
I think let's park it there and then we'll come back and we've got a good quarter of an hour or more to talk about the famous escape case.
Jolene Barbiak, we're talking about Alcatraz and the thing that many people, maybe most people associate Jolene with Alcatraz is the famous attempted or actual escape.
Talk to me about it and the people involved in it.
Oh, they were very interesting characters.
Frank Morris was capable of long-term planning, as I mentioned before.
He was about 35, nice-looking guy, full head of hair, very bright, very bright, always had been in prison since he was 13.
And not a very, you know, Clannis would have played him in the movie, but he wasn't the most interesting character of the men.
Then there were the Anglin brothers, and they were kind of interesting, not too terribly bright, not very sophisticated, very poor boys, mostly car thieves, you know, show-offs when they were kids, robbed one bank in a small town in Alabama that was probably about as big as your average kitchen in the UK.
This town, they robbed a bank and they drove into town in 1958, late 57, 58.
They drove into town in a large stolen two-tone Cadillac, which was probably as wide as the town was big, or as long.
And everyone in town saw the car.
And one woman remarked that, yeah, she remembered the car because it was exactly the kind of car she wanted.
So they were strangers in town, and they robbed this bank, and they got away with $17,000.
They had two cars, three brothers, two cars, one bank.
And they dumped one of the cars with Clarence Anglin's prints all over it.
Clarence was an escapee.
It took the FBI agents two days to ID the prints and it took them four days to pick up the boys who had gone to Ohio, from Alabama to Ohio, about 900 miles.
And then the prosecutors gleefully told them that in Alabama in 1958, you could get the death penalty for bank robbery.
So there was a very short trial.
They were given a federal sentence and sent to different institutions.
Then they were both sent to Leavenworth eventually, and then they tried to escape in a very stupid escape attempt in Leavenworth, and that was an automatic transfer to Alcatraz.
So those were the Anglin brothers, John and Clarence.
And then there was a fourth guy who's a minor character in the movie.
His name was Alan West.
And Alan West was probably the originator of the idea.
Alan West was extremely manipulative.
He'd been in state prisons, army prisons, federal prisons almost every day since he was 11.
He was the son of an abusive World War I vet.
He'd lost a leg in World War I, so there might have been PTSD in there.
Abusive alcoholic, which was a lot of the history of these guys, you know, head injuries and abusive relationships with their parents.
And Alan West was a, one prisoner told me West didn't walk, he slithered.
That kind of says a lot, doesn't it, in a very couple of words, yeah.
Absolutely.
And so West was a very manipulative man.
He organized the escape attempt.
In the movie, Clint Eastwood plays Frank Morris because Morris Was the brightest, and everybody knew the Anglins weren't in charge.
But Alan West's participation wasn't well known.
So those were the four guys that were eventually involved.
West didn't go, and he couldn't get out of his cell, so he claimed.
So, what was it?
Right.
So, there are four people.
Of course, we see three in the movie, and now I know why.
West, who was the originator, you say, of the idea, didn't go.
I'm just surprised that the four of them, we know that West came up with the idea, and one of them was very bright, and two of them weren't.
I'm just surprised that they'd have the idea in the first place, because this place, you know, is impregnable.
It's impossible to escape from, or was always reputed to be.
It was always reputed to be because it was surrounded by water.
And the old joke is that the guards used to cap, you know, just a fish and capture the sharks and cut off the fins on one side so that sharks would roam around the island constantly.
How terrible.
No, just an old joke.
Okay, well, I'm glad it is a joke.
Okay.
We did capture sharks.
They were mostly leopard sharks, very unthreatening small sharks, but they would leave them around as fertilizer, and the prisoners would see them, so they believed the whole shark thing.
Okay, so part of it was myth, part of it.
Yes, mostly the bay is still inhabited mostly by leopard sharks.
There are other sharks.
Occasionally, the great whites will come in.
It's very unusual.
Usually a drought will bring them in or something change in them.
So if you're going to get off there, a helicopter, which is unlikely, to say the least, or it has to be some kind of method of doing it by water.
But the problem with that is you face the fast-flowing currents, don't you?
The possibility that there might be one shark that has the capacity to rip your leg off.
Yeah, we have swims from Alcatraz every year, five or six a year.
So who do do it?
Hardy people who do it.
And these people, you know, they'd have been in the exercise yard, time in their hands.
They probably had time to work out and be fit.
But nevertheless, you have those things to overcome.
Plus, you have perimeter fences and presumably incredible defenses and protections.
Yeah, the water was considered the last and certainly most resolute defense.
Alcatraz is situated in such a way so that incoming tides are coming in from the Pacific Ocean, which is three miles away, and washing across Alcatraz and then outgoing is going out to the Pacific Ocean.
So that's the problem.
You can't, much of the day, you actually can't go north and south.
You can't get to the city because you're being swept either east or west, and there is no land for you to bump into.
So that's the real problem.
When they do the swims, they do it at slack tide, for about half hour, 45 minute window.
And these guys won't have had tide tables.
How would they have known all that?
No, well, they might have had rumors and such, but when you make a hole in the roof, you have to go tonight.
You know, you don't wait around for the right tide.
And that's the way that it's portrayed in the movie, isn't it?
I mean, the way that we see it in the movie, I think it's a dark and stormy night, and Clint Eastwood character leaves a Papier Mashy paper mash head that he's painted in the bed so that they think there's somebody in the cell.
And they all get up onto the roof, the three of them.
They made some kind of boat and they go go.
Right.
Right.
And I was asleep when that happened.
So that is what happened then?
That is exactly what happened.
They weren't paper-mâché.
They were made out of concrete, actually, cement powder.
Concrete heads, okay.
Cement powder and soap, in some cases, soap chips, and painted and everything else, and blankets making look like the beds.
You know, there was an interesting thing.
The reason why there were four is that you have to have a buddy.
You've got to have a buddy who watches out for you while you dig, and then you watch out for him while he digs.
So they were two and two, West and Morris and the two Anglin brothers.
And then that night, you know, West claimed that he couldn't get out of his cell, and there's some evidence for that, but he also may have chickened out, you know, may have decided that he didn't really want to go.
It's hard to know, isn't it?
They got to the roof.
Yeah, they got to the roof.
So did they have to go across by digging progressively over a period of time and then up?
How did they do that?
Well, so if you stick your two arms out in front of you, you know, like parallel, each arm represents a row of cells.
Between your arms would be a utility corridor, which was just an empty space about three feet wide.
That's where all the pipes connected into each cell.
So they were able to get through the back of their cell into that utility corridor, and they used the pipes as a ladder.
And there may have been a wooden ladder back there that was used occasionally for the plumbers to go back and repair things.
It's unknown.
But they used the pipes mostly as a ladder to climb to the top of the block.
And the top of the block is separated from the ceiling by about eight feet.
And then they were able to work on an old vent and push it through eventually.
And the vent, you know, of course, came out on the ceiling.
And so they worked up there for probably about six or eight weeks.
Once they got through their cells, which took three or four months, five, four and a half months, I think.
Once they got through that into the utility corridor, then they started going up and down the utility corridor and working on that vent.
And then up there on the top of the block, they made life jackets.
They made a life raft.
Outro raincoats.
Raincoats were old World War II rubber-backed cotton that held water.
And nobody noticed any of this going on.
Well, John Anglin worked in the clothing room, and so he could probably occasionally get away with an extra raincoat.
But, you know, the excavations, once you get into the service tunnel, then it's easier, but you've got to get there first.
Right.
And that's why you have a guy watching while you dig, and then he watches while you dig.
And they had mirrors, and so they could.
And the guards, you know, at night, it was mostly done at night.
The guards are not walking around patrolling in the movies.
They're sitting at their desk, writing their reports, occasionally getting up, Making sure the inmates are all in.
And no one thought anyone could escape at night.
You know, where were they going to go?
Right?
And so.
And presumably they'd be picked up by powerful searchlights that presumably were constantly circling the perimeter.
Well, you know, yes, the searchlights, guards in the towers would maybe hear a noise.
One of the sad things, you know, you never have a situation like an escape attempt in which you don't have staff cutbacks.
And one of the potentially dangerous things was they shut down a tower there at night, a 24-hour tower.
They used to have five towers, and eventually at the end they only had three towers, and two of them were in 24 hours.
And one of them was shut down at night, and it saved two salaries.
It saved an evening watch and a morning watch salary.
So if you have staff cutbacks, it's going to be towers, right?
And your periphery becomes a little more permeable.
And one of the towers was shut down at night.
So they managed to pull this off on, I think it was the night of June the 12th, wasn't it?
Well, I think it was June the 11th that was discovered on the 12th.
All right.
So they pulled this off.
And did the staff waking up in the morning just discover that they weren't there?
And was that the only trace of what had transpired?
Pretty much.
There were some noises heard.
There were some noises heard.
When they got out on the roof, the seagulls would have just flushed up and squawked.
There wasn't anything in the file.
You know, there's a daily watch record.
And years later, I was able to see that watch record, but there were about 12 pages that were excised with a razor plate.
No one knew who did it, whether it was done in the prison, whether it was done later in the archives.
So there are aspects of this that are still a mystery.
Sure, yes.
Those pages are missing.
It might not have been 12, but it was probably at least four pages that were missing.
It was double-sided.
You know, as we get to the crux of this and the back end of this conversation, the question that has haunted everybody for all these decades is, and how many decades?
Four or five here now.
It was 1962.
1962.
So, you know, it's nearly 60 years, close on.
Yes.
Were they, since no trace was ever found of them as far as we know, were the three of them able to do it?
Was one or two of them able to do it?
Did any of them manage to get away?
So I have, you hear, you hear me.
I'm a very logical, rational person.
So let me just give you a rundown statistically of how this works out.
Today in the United States, we have 2 million people behind bars.
When I was a kid living on Alcatraz, we had 100,000, both state and federal prisoners.
Of the 100,000, 25,000 were federal prisoners.
Of the 25,250 or about 1% were on Alcatraz.
Of those 250 in any given year, only 40, roughly 40, because some, it doesn't bear repeating, but some men went twice, some were accused of escape attempts and didn't go, hadn't gone.
So roughly about 40 men tried to escape.
So you're talking about a fraction of 1%.
Those men tend to be unrealistic.
They tend to be noticeable.
They have been noticeable all of their lives.
That's why they got themselves to Alcatraz.
They are, if they made it to land, they are in prison clothing.
They are desperate.
They don't have any food.
They can't contact anybody.
And if they do, that's a felony for that person who maybe harbors them.
So, you know, where do you go?
You know, how do you get away?
You have to start stealing immediately.
And usually you want to steal a car.
That's the biggest thing.
And that gets noticed.
There's a plate there, and there's a missing car, and there's a direction, and there's actual sightings.
None of that came up.
Nothing of that sort.
There were rumors of various things, but they were all disproven in the end.
People in Nebraska claiming to have seen those three guys and yada, yada.
But they simply disproved.
Almost nothing, as good as damn it.
No sign whatsoever of any of them, which would be incredibly unusual.
However, if they'd been caught by the tides, swept under, partly eaten by shocks, there would be something that would turn up eventually.
The sea, as they say, gives up its dead.
Well, not necessarily.
Bodies don't always come up in cold water.
Bodies come up in warm water.
And people from Lake Michigan know this.
You know, bodies don't always come up in cold water because the bacteria has slowed.
In warm water, the bacteria is more active and the bodies float up.
So you think the answer to the mystery is that the probability, which is all we can have, the balance of probability says, that they were swept so far down that they would have decomposed slowly, hence no sign, and that's the end of the story.
But the one thing they did do was get as close to getting away as anybody ever had.
You know, they accomplished the thing by mysteriously disappearing.
They accomplished something that was remarkable, that always made that escape attempt so famous.
They disappeared.
So there's endless speculation.
They left on outgoing tide.
This is the other thing.
They left on what's called the high, high tide.
And that's the biggest volume of water going the fastest speed out the gate towards Hawaii.
So within three miles, they were in the Pacific Ocean if they made it that far.
And bearing in mind, all they had was something that was made out of raincoats.
That's not going to protect you.
So that's the probability.
But what a fascinating story.
Just to end it, and very quickly, your dad, did your dad pay a price for that escape attempt?
Oh, probably.
He was at the end of his career, And as associate warden, you're going to have to wait until somebody retires to get transferred.
We were transferred to a minimum security institution, which was, my mother told me later, which was the government's way of punishing my father.
He had been on duty, he'd been acting warden when it happened.
It doesn't really mean anything, but the federal government always liked to blame somebody.
And so, yes, the warden came out unscathed and was actually at another institution when another escape attempt occurred.
But we were transferred to a little dinky prison in Texas and transferred and the island closed.
So he probably was punished.
Do you think that was unfair?
Yeah, you know, it is what it is.
It's life.
Hey, Jolene, thank you so much for sharing this story.
It's only fair for me to be able to give you the chance to publicize your website, anything that you've written, anything that you want my audience to know.
Oh, I've read six books, but my biggest book was Breaking the Rock, The Great Escape from Alcatraz.
And then the most fun of my books was Alcatraz's Most Wanted Profiles of the Most Famous Prisoners on the Rock.
That's a fun book about all those big timers.
So people can look those out and indeed just word search you on Google and they'll find you.
We're totally out of time, Jolene.
A privilege to talk with you.
I'd love to speak with you again if you would like to do that.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Jolene.
Wow.
What a story.
And we'll do more, I think.
Got to talk with her again.
Jolene Babiak, the story of Alcatraz and that possible escape or maybe not from it.
What do you think?
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained Online.
So until next we meet, my name is still definitely Howard Hughes.
This is still definitely The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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