Frank Heaney

Transcript

Transcript

Ellery:   00:04    This is Tom Ellery, Park Technician on Alcatraz Island, March 31st, 1978. I've just done a tape interview with Mr. Frank Heaney who was an officer on Alcatraz from '48 to '50, one of the youngest officers here. And he lived on the island for a year’s time.

Heaney:              00:28    Okay you want me to answer these on the tape you mean or-

Ellery:   00:32    No, no, no. You can take one of those home, just where we were talking about Stroud was pretty interesting-

Heaney:              00:36    Yeah. Well the time that I was here, he was in the hospital and well I used to go in the deed as I remember it was strictly going in and shaking down his cell. You go in there and you never told an inmate when you're going to shake down his cell. We did that to everybody. Everybody had their cell shut down at different times. And so I'd go in there and say, "Hey Bob. It's time for you to get your cell done, shook down." He'd have a few four letter words for me but he'd always get out and we'd put him in another cell and I'd go in there. And because of that fact that I'm sure he wasn't going to try to escape or anything like that or he's not going to worry too much about contraband. It mainly was recreation for guards to go in there and just to read his materials. And just to go in there and I used to go in and read his novels that he was writing.

:             01:37    That was when he was in D-Block.

Heaney:              01:39    This was when he was in the hospital. I didn't know him when he was in D-Block. See he was in the hospital. I was here from December of '48 until September of '50 and all the time I was here he was in the hospital. He was never in D-Block when I was here. And I'd go in there and shake down his cell and look through his stuff and then read a few novels because it was a good way to goof off a few hours.

Ellery:   02:10    Right, right. So where would he be during those two hours? Would he still be in the cell?

Heaney:              02:16    He would be in another cell. We'd put him in another cell. And he'd just sit in there until we got through.

Speaker 3:          02:21    What would be a normal span of time as far as completing cell searches?

Heaney:              02:27    About a half hour, forty five minutes. I'd say two hours is extreme on Bob's.

Speaker 3:          02:38    Depending on how much [crosstalk]-

Heaney:              02:39    Depended on how much you wanted to read or if you had a lot of things to do depending on if you had more assignments or something. But that would be the one that most of them would long because everybody liked to read his material. Because he was a pretty interesting writer. As I said, the one that I read was about this... I don't know whether he was the captain of the guards or he was just a regular guard but he was in charge of the kitchen area and linen work. And what he really was, and according to Robert Stroud was that he was madame organizer or he'd be a pimp. And he would, for a certain amount of money, I guess gained from the outside, because the inmates aren't going to give him any money, he would give privacy to a couple of inmates.

Ellery:   03:28    Right, if they wanted to get it on.

Heaney:              03:30    Right and this was one of the books I remember. Now he wrote a lot of other books but I can't ever remember what they were about because this seemed to be the most interesting. This is over 30 years ago. I do remember that part. I doubt if it ever got published. The only one I remember of his being published was Robert Stroud's Digest of Birds.

Ellery:   03:48    That was pretty straightforward because he had too much sexual…

Heaney:              03:52    Right.

Ellery:   03:53    ... in that one. But what we have heard is that he was pretty notorious [crosstalk]-

Heaney:              03:56    I know it probably sounds devious but the most problem is that I remember was mainly sexual orientated. They had couples and once in a while that's when one of them would go crazy because they'd transfer them to another prison or something or transfer them to another area away from their lovers. And that would cause a lot of fighting.

                             I remember one time I got beat up is, I had to go in to a cell after a guy that was going crazy, was tearing up the cell because they'd transferred his friend. And this lieutenant and I went in there, this lieutenant was pretty good.

                             I'd say he was a good guard but he was in the wrong about that we weren't allowed to carry anything but they did have blackjacks. He carried a blackjack, I didn't carry a blackjack but they probably would've used it on me. I wasn't big enough to carry a blackjack.

                             So I just went in there and this guy, man he was cussing, he was cussing, swearing you know, he was so pissed he said, "Come on in here after me." And he says, "We've got to go in there Heaney." God dammit. There's no way in the world I want to go in that thing but you do, you have to go in there. So I went in there and he started swinging at me right on site so the lieutenant went in after me. And I was more of a diversionary thing, me going in there. Me being fed to the lion. Because you know that guy was tough you know and he racked that guy in the back of the head. He'd slammed me against the side and then he got ahold of something and racked the back of the head and he went down. Now it may sound cruel but believe me that was the best thing that happened as far as I'm concerned because we would've wrestled around there for another 15 minutes or so.

Ellery:   05:51    This is one of the small cells too, right?

Heaney:              05:52    One of the small cells. Just an ordinary cell. We were getting ready to put him over to the “hole” you know and we got him down and really was coming out so they dragged him and put him in the cell. Now when we brought him… him we put right into the cell to start with. A “stripped cell.” Because he was going nuts, he was tearing up the cell so we put him in a “stripped cell.” And what we had to do was, when we brought an inmate from population into isolation, the first thing we have do is strip them completely down and I don't know if you went through this but what they did, they strip them down. Okay you strip a guy down, he goes against a wall like this [crosstalk] and then one guy would have a flashlight and you'd look underneath there and then he'd go like this and then he'd have to look up his ass with it too. And every spot that he'd have on his body that could be a place there'd keep something, you'd look for it.

Ellery:   07:07    Did you say that before going to put them in a “stripped cell”?

Heaney:              07:11    Before putting them into yeah “stripped cell” or in the “hole”, just one of the regular ones. You'd strip them down and look everywhere with a flashlight. And rub his hair, look in his ears, mouth.

Ellery:   07:31    While you were here, nobody went underneath of the green doors in D-Block down in citadel while you were here, you don't remember?

Heaney:              07:40    You mean shimmy underneath them?

Ellery:   07:42    No I mean putting them down in there chained or anything like that?

Speaker 3:          07:46    Yeah directly below D-Block, there’s a-

Heaney:              07:50    I see what you mean, yeah.

Ellery:   07:51    Yeah that's what they would call the dungeons.

Heaney:              07:53    That's right the dungeons.

Ellery:   07:55    They weren't used extensively but-

Heaney:              07:57    I don't remember it, no. I don't remember anybody ever going under there. I've heard that too, where they have done it but-

Ellery:   08:03    But like '46 when D-Block was blown up and everything, they would keep them down there.

Heaney:              08:08    That could be yeah-

Ellery:   08:10    [inaudible] they kept them on A, A-Block.

Heaney:              08:11    I do know they told me about it, of course I wasn't here when Al Capone because he left in '46 and he was dying of syphilis, that's why they left. And they said, the inmates told me about him though that at the end there he was putting his clothes on backwards and everything else. He was really going nutty. So he wouldn't take the cure. Because at the time, I guess the cure was pretty painful [crosstalk] and he wouldn't take the cure and so he just stayed with the syphilis and it finally got to his brain and killed him. What I understand is he went down to this island that he owned down in Florida and died there. But they say he wasn't very well liked. At least that's what I understand.

Ellery:   09:01    By the other inmates?

Heaney:              09:02    By the other inmates.

Speaker 3:          09:02    So when you were referring to “stripped cell”, is there a distinction in your mind between “stripped cell”and “hole,” was there 1 of 9 through 14 of these “stripped cells”?

Heaney:              09:12    I think we went down at the end, the very end, as we came through... That wire case there, when I was there that was the Chaplin's office.

Ellery:   09:20    Oh was it? I didn't know that.

Heaney:              09:21    The Chaplin was in there. Because see the Chaplin and library kind of goes together. So the Chaplin's office used to be in there. That was the protestant Chaplin's. There was a protestant Chaplin that was full time. And there was a catholic Jesuit priest that came over and a rabbi from over in the city.

              09:43    And I remember they used to have movies. The only time I remember having movies, they had movies every holiday. And if they didn’t have a holiday, they had them not more than once a month. And they had them upstairs above that catwalk. I remember I used to take them up there.

Ellery:   10:07    Right opposite from the Visitation Area.

Heaney:              10:09    Right. I noticed they took the big bars, when you came into the main cell block, there used to be this gate that used to open up there and you would go through first gate and then you'd have to go through a second gate. And one gate had to be closed when the other was opened. We never had two gates open at one time, never.

Ellery:   10:31    So while you were here, you had mentioned that in an isolation cell that they don't get toilets. They were already blocked up. You said that there would be no toilet facilities in there.

Heaney:              10:51    I never really looked in there that close. But all of them had regular facilities except for one but it did have a hole so they could go in that little hole.

Ellery:   11:08    A drain, a drain.

Heaney:              11:08                   There was a drain in there yeah.

Ellery:   11:09    When was that filled up? Because that's concreted over now.

Heaney:              11:13    I see that yeah.

Speaker 3:          11:13    That was filled up I think after GSA [General Services Administration] yeah.

Speaker 4:          11:20    So were those three cells at the end, those were “stripped cells” and they would be in there with no clothes or, like a certain period of time?

Heaney:              11:27    Right. They had absolutely no clothes on at all because they'd tear them up. Generally they'd wear coveralls, that's what they wore, coveralls and slippers. Which sucks that they were tearing them up. They were tearing up their clothes and tearing up their cells and the mattresses. They'd put them right in the “stripped cell.” Then they'd stay there until they thought that were ready to come into the regular “hole.” The one that's got the facilities in it.

Ellery:   11:55    So you were usually going to 14 or the “stripped cell” first?

Heaney:              12:01    Yeah you'd be sentenced to go right into the “hole” yeah. But sometimes if they weren't too bad they'd just go right into isolation.

Speaker 3:          12:12    How did the circumstances change life?

Heaney:              12:15    When I was here, generally the Associate Warden. Sometimes the captain or guards did it but it’s generally the Associate Warden and once in a while the Warden. Once in a while. But it was generally the Associate Warden. About once a week. This is one of the reasons if I caught somebody doing a minor thing and if they didn't see me, I wouldn't turn them in. Because of the fact that I’d more than likely have to come on maybe my days off because they didn't give you any compensation to come to the trial board. And most of the time the Warden would say, "You shouldn't have done that. That's not nice. You're not going to do it again are you? Okay you just be good and just don't try to do it." And then that'd be the end of it.

Speaker 3:          13:07    Then you would just put them into one of the “holes” before they had any kind of hearing or sentencing if they are causing a lot of problems?

Heaney:              13:16    Yeah if they were causing a lot of problems. A lot of the things was if they were talking when they weren't supposed to be talking to anybody or things like that. That's what I used to talk about, don't do it again. But you still had to go to court. They made you go in there and listen because they'd ask you.

Ellery:   13:32    And they'd have the court right in D-Block then when they did have court?

Heaney:              13:38    No the court was down at the…because I'm talking about people that were in population ready maybe to go to…but they would take them out and bring them, from D-Block and take them down there.

              13:48    We also had, one of the funniest guys I've ever see, we had about three Nazi prisoners here. And one guy, he must've really went bananas because he wore nothing. He wore absolutely no clothing at all and he didn't eat much because all he was, was skin and bones. And he was in isolation all the time I was here. And they say he was in there years before that. He never left isolation and he never wore clothes because I remember him just walking around with no clothes. Because it was warm in there, you know they had steam heat. And I remember I was there the day they transferred him out of there and he wouldn't put on any clothes so they walked him down the main cell block and all the guys are whistling at him. This is the first time a lot of them remember seeing him and they brought him down to the boat and I forget where he went, he was released or what. But that was about 1949.

Ellery:   14:44    That was a German Nazi?

Heaney:              14:47    That was a German Nazi guy yeah. The guy was really loony. You wonder where they got these guys from. There was three of them that I remember, two were loony and one guy was real intelligent, real smart. It's the only guy I remember, I don't know how they go the other two guys. But I think they're all born Americans. See what they did is they had a U-boat [German submarine] waiting outside of Florida in '42 and they'd drop these guys off there and it was supposed to be saboteurs. And one guy, I don't know if it's the truth or not but he was supposed to be in Chicago or something like that and he was in a taxicab. And the taxicab was pulled over by the cops and he says “I surrender.” He thought that they caught him. Now I don't know if that's the truth or not what, that's what I was told.

              15:38    And I used to read some of these records. Because their records were always accessible to us. I used to read the records and actually I read Al Capone's and his was the only one that I knew of that read “Occupation: Gangster.” Most of them were Truck Driver or Salesman or something. But his occupation was Gangster.

Speaker 3:          15:54    Do the records that you read tell why they were sent here, to this particular facility?

Heaney:              16:02    Yeah. It would say that they were either an escape artist or they had a hard time keeping [inaudible] or incorrigible.

Speaker 3:          16:05    Do you remember what the record said on Al Capone? Why he was sent here?

Heaney:              16:22    I know he came from Atlanta, but… it probably was in there but I forget, I forget what the reason was.

Speaker 3:          16:29    What about Stroud? Do you know what the record said about him [inaudible]?

Heaney:              16:36    I can't remember to tell you the truth I can't remember what the reason was on any of those. After 30 years, I guess I... I more or less scanned through them and I kind of forget exactly, except I remembered that occupation because it struck me as being funny, “Gangster”, I'd never seen anything like that. Because they usually had some kind of occupation, Laborer, Truck Driver, or something. But I can't remember on any of them, the exact reason why they were sent here. I do know the general reasons, that they were escape artists or they were troublemakers. We had a lot of the Army prisoners here to you know?

Ellery:   17:14    Yeah that's a surprise but then you look at the statistics.

Heaney:              17:16    In fact this guy Barnes, he was an inmate that was one of the… I think he's living around this area but he was an Indian, young Indian and I guess they had troubles with him on the reservation. Because we had a lot of Indians too. Because they were thorough people you know. He was one of the ones that was in that '46 riot and they were executed. But they didn't execute him because he was a...

              17:47    In fact he was a guy that came back and told a few things. Some of the things, I forget exactly what he said, I didn't think were true, but he was here a lot longer than I was, some of the incidents that were supposed to happen. To my way of thinking, I don't think the guards or officers or whatever you want to call them were that bad. There were a few that were semi-sadistic but I think in the main, the guy just wanted to do his job. That's why I think that movie about Robert Stroud was pretty factual. It showed the guards. They just wanted to just do their time, just a regular job. They didn't want to take it out on anybody. They kind of made you that way. It was a “me against you” type attitude after a while with some of them.

Ellery:   18:33    Yeah, it would be. How about this, your letter of commendation from Warden Swope. Tell us about that in 1950.

Heaney:              18:40    Okay. I was down here waiting. I think I was sitting right here at the time. And it was during the evening meal and I don't know what started it but I think at the time I knew there was a lot of grumblings about the food. There were always grumblings about the food but the food was getting so they couldn't stand it. And evidently, we had an inclination there was going to be a riot in the mess hall. Because we had informers, everybody had informers. They'd get paid off with candy bars or cigarettes. So we got a call down here, all available officers in the area go up to the mess hall because there's a riot up there so I was issued a carbine and I went to the catwalk on the outside and then I remember looking inside and they were just tearing the place apart. And I felt sorry for the... Just the tables were being thrown up and all the silverware's getting thrown around.

Ellery:   19:54    Was there officers in there?

Heaney:              19:55    Officers in there too.

Ellery:   19:56    Trying to protect themselves?

Heaney:              19:59    Trying to protect themselves. And we didn't know when they were going to pull those gas deals. You know they had those gas canisters up there for full scale riots. They were just about to but they didn't do it. And I got a combination because I was there but I was very fortunate I didn't have to go inside. I was from the outside I had carbine.

Ellery:   20:22    So you didn't have to shoot anybody?

Heaney:              20:25    I did not shoot anybody no. No that would've been the last. Remember you mentioned that Thompson sub-machine gun, that would probably be the last thing you'd ever use because it's inaccurate, it fires all over the place. We've got to fire it down there, that's the worst thing. That's before we used to put on earmuffs and I couldn't even hear for a day.

Ellery:   20:49    Down there in the rifle range.

Heaney:              20:50    In that rifle range. An indoor rifle range, can you imagine. You had to shoot a Thompson sub-machine gun in that thing, in that thing without earplugs. We had to shoot the revolver, we had to shoot the 30 Odd 6 [rifle], we had to shoot the carbine. The only thing I never shot was the gas gun. Of course you just put a shell in and just aim it in a general direction.

Speaker 3:          21:12    So that dining hall disturbance, the way that pretty much ended was just that there were enough officers present that [crosstalk]--

Heaney:              21:21    I think more than that they just wanted to get their point over. It was a way to get rid of their frustrations. In other words, it's like a guy going on strike for more wages or something. That's their way of showing grievances, I mean real grievances. And actually they were bitching about it for a long time but that's the main, main way of getting their point over is that it's a riot. No officers were hurt. They made sure of that I guess. The word was out, the word was out. Let's do it at a certain time and throw the tables up, just really mess it up and get our point over that we just don't like this food. There going on like a mission. Once in a while somebody would put some soap in the food. So the inmate back there would be dissatisfied, he'd throw soap in the food and boy that really made them mad. And no matter how bad the food was they always kind of looked forward to that because that's the only time they really got together.

              22:16    They did talk. They tried to keep it down, the talking down because previous to the war, World War II, they weren't allowed to talk hardly at all. And I remember in D-Block, quite a bit of the recreation in there was playing chess. Each one would have a chess board and they'd holler up to the next guy [crosstalk]--

Ellery:   22:36    So that’s when they could talk to one another.

Heaney:              22:38    Oh they talked to each other. They'd say… one of the main two words that were used, particularly in D-Block, was the initials of M.F. Everybody was an M.F. and everything that they talked about was M.F. That was number one. They couldn't even say nothing without M.F. Like it was M.F. rook would go to the M.F. king or the M.F. queen would take care of the M.F… that's all you'd ever hear you know.

Ellery:   23:10    Well where did they have the chess sets from? Were they ordered those, or given those?

Heaney:              23:13    Yeah they were given the chess sets, even in D-Block, unless they were… These were the guys in D-Block for a while that seemed to be getting better, so they allowed them to play the chess. If they were still rebellious, they wouldn't allow them to have that game of chess. But these were the longer term inmates that they still felt weren't ready to go back to population yet but they allowed them a few pieces because they may be in isolation for about five or six months or something like that. And they felt well let's give them a chess.

              23:53    Can I have another cup of coffee?

Ellery:   23:56    Yeah sure.

Speaker 3:          23:58    How common would it be to have somebody in one of those lower cells say 9 to 14 with the outside door open, you know would that [inaudible]-

Heaney:              24:00    If you what?

Speaker 3:          24:07    If you just leave the outside door open, you'd have a pretty much just be a light cell in a metal box.

Heaney:              24:12    Oh you mean for the “hole”?

Speaker 3:          24:14    Yeah.

Heaney:              24:17    I think I remember I leaving those doors open once in a while. For a while.

Speaker 3:          24:24    And nothing [inaudible] is the fact that solitary confinement would be in tight security. Sometimes men would ask to be put there, if they were being threatened at all?

Heaney:              24:33    Oh yeah. You mean to go to isolation?

Speaker 3:          24:33    Yeah.

Heaney:              24:35    Oh definitely yeah. They wouldn't ask to go to the “hole” but they would ask to go to isolation, yeah, sure.

Speaker 3:          24:41    Yeah definitely.

Heaney:              24:41    Yeah they'd get ahold of one of us and tell us they feel that their life is being threatened. And once in a while, I don't know how they'd find out, I don't know whether it was an officer or what but they'd find out who the informant was and you'd almost have to get them out of the prison then. Because you can imagine how they treat an informant.

Ellery:   25:03    Yeah I can imagine that went pretty bad.

Heaney:              25:04    I personally didn't know any informants because they wouldn't let the average officer know who the informant is too because it would get back to the inmates probably, who the informant was. So I think only the ones who knew the informers were the Lieutenants, maybe the Captain of the guard and the Warden. But none of us, I didn't know who it was anyway.

Speaker 3:          25:27    That's too much of a chance for the informers.

Heaney:              25:30    Oh sure. No way in the world 125 officers could know who an informer was and not get to the inmates. Somebody would say it.

Ellery:   25:42    Frank, this boat's going to leave and there will be another one in 45 minutes that you could-

Heaney:              25:46    I could wait around that's all right.

Ellery:   25:47    ... great. That'd be great for us.

Heaney:              25:48    I've got time. I took the day off. I work 24 hours, I've been a firefighter that's why I work 24 hours. I've been meaning to come over here for a long time, you know you keep putting it off, putting it off, and then well I'm just going to come over here and do it. See I'm always going to bring somebody over but then I'm coming over myself because they may want to know some information and stuff I might give them like I'm doing now.

Ellery:   26:16                   Anytime you want to come back just come on back and we will        

                              take you around, for today if you'd like or another time maybe 

                              better day to take you anywhere you want to go.

Speaker 3:          26:24    Just like right now. Like you were saying the shower room.

Heaney:              26:27    The shower room yeah. [crosstalk]

Ellery:   26:28    The shower room is all stripped. [crosstalk]

Heaney:              26:29    Is that right?

Speaker 3:          26:29    There aren't any partitions in there. It just look like a large open shower room.

Heaney:              26:35    Who tore it down? You think the Indians did that or?

Ellery:   26:36    Either during Occupation [Indian] or GSA [General Services Administration] themselves. Or when the prison was dismantled, a lot of things left then. Most of the furniture for the apartments were all taken by people that were living in them in '62 and '63.

Speaker 3:          26:47    So we have this whole thing above here too. In reference to the towers we referred, what is referred to as the main tower [inaudible]-

Heaney:              27:03    On the main tower, the one they're talking about is right on top of the cellhouse. That was the main tower and I know that they were going to use it just occasionally because they felt you couldn't see enough things up there.

Speaker 3:          27:17    Did the others, like the Hill tower have better visibility?

Heaney:              27:19    Yeah the Hill tower was the one over here on the...the road tower… This was a dark tower. I'm trying to remember what all these towers were.

Speaker 3:          27:34    Is this after when you were here? [inaudible]

Ellery:   27:45    So the main tower was actually on top of the-

Heaney:              27:47    On top of the main cell block yeah. And I know they didn't have that manned all the time.

Speaker 3:          27:50    Yeah but then all of these other towers would have been manned, there more on the perimeter. Yeah, right.

Heaney:              27:57    Yeah, right. See instead of calling a guy a captain they call him a custodial manager. They changed the names. Actual he was a captain.

Ellery:   28:09    Here's our map and maybe you can point him out on here. It's the only map we have of our tour guide

Heaney:              28:11    This is the old power house here. And this was the officers quarters. I lived in here for a while.

Ellery:   28:23    You lived in 6402 huh?

Heaney:              28:24    Yeah.

Ellery:   28:25    Right on.

Heaney:              28:26    Let’s see number three, that would be a salad bar. And then I lived here in this old army barracks here.

Ellery:   28:35    Are you married?

Heaney:              28:37    I wasn't married at the time so I was in the bachelor's quarters. And I lived here about a year and I got so I felt like an inmate myself. So I just started going back and forth. I lived in Berkeley but see the reason… it was a hassle, I had to come across the Bay Bridge, fight the traffic and at that time we took the boat from the foot of Van Ness Avenue which is off Fort Mason. And we took the boat from there which is right of that pier, the fishing pier. I didn't know if you knew that.

Ellery:   29:12    Yeah I knew that.

Heaney:              29:14    Yeah that's where we took the boat from. So sometimes it took me two hours from the time I left Berkeley before I went to work it would be two hours before I got home. So that's four hours of just traveling time. So I lived on and off every so often. That's why I lived here for a while, then I went back home again. Then I got tired, I came back here. That's where I got put in these other quarters. I lived there and then I finally just stopped going there.

Speaker 3:          29:41    You did pay a minimal fee though for your barracks?

Heaney:              29:44    Very minimal, I paid, it couldn't have been more than five dollars a month.

Ellery:   29:49    So you could afford to move out whenever you really, it was getting to you too much?

Heaney:              29:56    That was the only reason. Economically, it's the best advantage to be here on the island. Because you didn't have any transportation costs and it's so cheap to live here. I didn't like the food. The food was terrible. In fact, there used to be a delicatessen that we used to go over to on…you know where the church is? That's where we used to all go to mass if you're Catholic. There was a church up the street there.

Ellery:   30:15    St. Lukes?

Heaney:              30:17    Not St. Lukes, no. It's about four or five blocks up on Van Ness. Anyway, we used to go to church and there was a delicatessen, that's where all the guards, because they used to have good sandwiches, we'd go in there and buy our food for lunches and things like that.

Ellery:   30:33    How about your commissary up here?

Heaney:              30:35    Well then the married guys would buy the stuff there. Sometimes the single guys instead of making the stuff. Because see we had no place to keep things. We didn't have refrigerators or nothing. We had no place to keep stuff so we'd either have to eat up here. Once in a while you'd see breakfast because they'd at least have post toasties or something like that. But the other food was terrible, I couldn't stand the food.

Ellery:   30:57    You mean in the inmate dining room.

Heaney:              31:00    Yeah did you know where the officers ate there?

Ellery:   31:02    I didn't know that [crosstalk]

Heaney:              31:03    Yeah well where we ate is, when you go right through where the steam tables are, you go through the bars area and it's right to your right. Off to the right. That room in there that's where we ate. That was our eating place.

Speaker 3:          31:20    I've got a question. There's a little tiny area, it looked like there was a tub or something located just beyond the metal doors to the right, passed the serving line going to your right just before you get to the door, there was a little tiny tub. It looked like you used it for washing something. It's a sink and it's tiled in and at the bottom of it there's a little area for the water to go down. What do you call that? What was that? I have people asking on my tour and we haven't got a clue what that was.

Heaney:              31:54    I guess if I see it I would know.

Speaker 3:          31:56    I thought it was a meat bath or something but it's in the wrong part of the kitchen for that.

Heaney:              32:00    Would it be for washing vegetables or washing your hands.

Speaker 3:          32:05    It's low.

Heaney:              32:05    It's low?

Speaker 3:          32:06    It's low to the ground. It's only got a rim about this high. It's just a question I-

Heaney:              32:11    Yeah right I can't recall that particular thing. If I seen it I might recall what it is. But I can't remember what it is. I can't remember what that is.

Speaker 3:          32:28    And how about the band room as long as we're talking about physical...

Ellery:   32:29    Recreational.

Heaney:              32:32    Well the band room was where the clothing room and where the showers were. That area that you walked down those stairs and you go in there. I remember, I think I told you about that incident when I first started to work here. They put me down in the band room and I had about a dozen inmates playing their instruments there. And I was there by myself. And all the sudden they stop playing and start staring at me. I was sitting there and they just stared at me. And I start sweating little bit, I couldn't figure out what's going on. And then I wanted to start scratching everywhere, but I didn't want to scratch because I didn't want them to laugh at me. But then I'd start scratching and then they'd grin. They'd keep on looking at me. And they did it for about 15, 20 minutes I guess. And then they gave up, they had their kicks on me I guess. And they really did.

Ellery:   33:28    How many of them were down there?

Heaney:              33:30    Oh about a dozen I guess.

Speaker 3:          33:31    Well what time did they get them to be down there to play the instruments?

Heaney:              33:35    About an hour or so as I remember.

Ellery:   33:39    Were you unarmed at the time?

Heaney:              33:40    Oh completely, always unarmed. Always. Always unarmed. The older officers carried blackjacks. I never carried a blackjack because they'd probably use it on me.

Speaker 3:          33:52    Was there anybody you could radio for help or anything?

Heaney:              33:54    Oh yeah.

Ellery:   33:55    What if they had jumped you at that point?

Heaney:              33:57    Well I could've hollered and-

Ellery:   34:01    Oh somebody upstairs would hear?

Heaney:              34:08    ... sure. You probably know that…They're not going to attack you unless you are means of escape or you have provoked them. They are not going to attack you. Why would they attack you?

Ellery:   34:18    Do time, get sent in “hole.”

Heaney:              34:19    Oh they know if they assault an officer they're really going to get it. And in fact the other ones… if somebody tried to they'd beat them up before they got to you because they feel they might be involved.

Speaker 3:          34:34    Just being around.

Heaney:              34:35    Just being around. I have never been assaulted deliberately. I've been assaulted trying to break up things like that in the yard. Most of it was not so much fights as there was knifing. See knifing is the way they liked to do it. What they do is, okay somebody was a “stoolie” or somebody was making a group of guys mad okay? They get him down to the yard and they have it worked out ahead of time. And then they get a shiv, some makeshift thing, a fork or something that they would've gotten. Made it into a knife.

Ellery:   35:09    Found steak bones yeah.

Heaney:              35:11    Okay all the sudden you see a gathering of inmates and then they all walk away and the guy would either have a thingy in him or it be way inside him or somebody would hide it. Usually they'd let it lay there because they didn't want it on them. Okay the guy got knifed. But I've never seen anybody get killed, they didn't want to go to death. But they wanted the guys to know what's going on. It’s nice and fast, everybody walk away, who did it? Nobody knows who did it. What happened? I don't know what happened. The guy is down there and he's knifed and he's bleeding. Nobody knows what happened.

Ellery:   35:52    Who did you put his assault charge or anything like that? 

Heaney:              35:54    Nobody.

Ellery:   35:55    A bunch of them?

Heaney:              35:58    Nobody. Nobody knew. You'd clear out the yard then and put them back in the cell and nobody would get blamed. Unless there was a “stoolie” that would turn a guy in later on. If you see an incident, you’re an inmate, there's no way in the world you'd ever tell a guard that you seen [crosstalk] right. You'd be the next one out in the yard getting stabbed.

Speaker 3:          36:20    You mentioned a system of informers or whatever there are people that-

Heaney:              36:24    That's what I understand.

Speaker 3:          36:25    Yeah.

Heaney:              36:26    I don't know that. I don't know that for a complete fact because they never told any of us ordinary officers.

Ellery:   36:31    I had the impression that you'd be put into solitary, mainly for the more major offenses at Alcatraz, they would be considered to be assaulting an officer, assaulting another inmate or other personnel.

Heaney:              36:46    If you were caught. But see this is knifing an inmate. This is knifing an inmate and nobody knows who knifed him. Because you've got say a dozen guys.

Ellery:   37:00    You can't see through them.

Heaney:              37:01    You can't see through them.

Ellery:   37:01    You just see this... By the time-

Heaney:              37:02    And they do go fast. It's a sudden merging of things. And the guys getting stabbed knows he's probably going to get stabbed too but what can he do. He can't go to a guard and tell him because… He knows he’s going to get it sometime.

Speaker 3:          37:18    Were there very many people that were in protective custody while you were there?

Heaney:              37:21    Oh yeah.

Speaker 3:          37:21    These were people that were kept as “stool pigeons” and were known to be-

Heaney:              37:25    That's what I understand, now I don't know. And actually the average officers didn't know who these so called “stool pigeons” were. There must've been “stool pigeons” because evidently, the “brass” seemed to find out things that we never knew about and the only way they could find out about it is from an inmate. And we wouldn’t be privy to this information, we had 125 officers. Somehow that's going to get to one of the inmates.

Ellery:   37:55    And then the grapevine-

Heaney:              37:55    Sure, through the grapevine.

Speaker 3:          37:58    We had another man who was a correctional officer and spoke to us on the tape and I heard him say that he thought that the value of human life, in terms of guards, was not that high. He said that if you were injured or killed in the line of duty, you could be replaced. Did you have that feeling? That your life was not at a premium, that they might put you in dangerous situations?

Heaney:              38:20    No. I don't think so. There was like what you talked about the “no hostage” stuff, that was for our protection. I felt it was for our protection. Because if they could take you at anytime and keep you as a hostage and get away with it, then it wouldn't have much protection. And I felt that was a protection. What I disliked about this place was it was so depressing. You'd come to work here and it was depressing. Just constant.

Ellery:   38:55    Tell us about the depression.

Speaker 3:          38:55    Yeah I think we share a lot of these.

Ellery:   39:01    We share that, that's for sure. The place itself is depressing.

Heaney:              39:04    Depressing yeah.

Ellery:   39:05    But what depressed you the most about it? That these guys were just here forever or just you in particular?

Heaney:              39:11    I worried about myself. I didn't care. At first I had a little bit of concern for the inmates. But I am more concerned for myself. You get this way. You get hard or you get self-protective. You don't care about them. Whatever they did to themselves, through own makings, you care about yourself. You're almost like an inmate yourself because you're locked up in that stupid cellhouse for eight hours. At least you get away from a block. But then when you live here you get this same atmosphere too. Particularly if you are single and there's nobody else. You can talk to the guys, the other single guys but then you run out of conversation.

Speaker 3:          39:54    What about the recreation hall?

Heaney:              39:56    Well that was kind of nice. Broke it up. We had kind of a Mickey Mouse bowling alley down there. And because you had to set the pins yourself, you had to go up there. They had no automatic pin setters. They didn't even have anything that would set it in there. You had to go up there and put them up yourself and then go back and roll the ball. And I forget, I think it may have been one of those. Did you ever hear of the “midget type”?

Speaker 3:          40:23    Oh yeah.  Duck pins.

Heaney:              40:25    Duck pins, I think it was a duck pin as I remember.

Speaker 3:          40:29    Well maybe later on they added pin setters because in the industry area up there, if you crawl around up there, there are two runs with pin setters.

Heaney:              40:34    Oh yeah? They might've added the pin setters too. I remember having to set those pins up there. That kind of bugs you. And it wasn't used that much, it was dusty.

Ellery:   40:47    What else was there? In the-

Heaney:              40:51    Well upstairs... Well in the lower portion I generally remember just that bowling alley. Upstairs they had a recreation area. They had a few weddings when I was here, receptions. Where the officers got married.

Ellery:   41:04    Was Tiny married here when you were here? She's one of the people that got married here. Tiny. I guess she was a daughter…

Heaney:              41:10    Well there's a daughter. I might have been here at that time. There was a father and a son that worked here. In fact I knew the guy his name was Hart I think. He was the officer that was here at the time of the Indians came in here. He's a real nice guy. And he was working for the GSA [General Services Administration] then I guess. You went from the Department of Justice to GSA. And watched that and then the Indians kicked them off. And he was a real nice guy. He was working here when I was here. He was an old timer on the island. He was one of the last ones to leave.

Ellery:   41:41    So what else was in the officers club?

Heaney:              41:45    Upstairs was kind of an auditorium type thing. And we used to have dances there and we used to play a lot of cards. This was kind of pre-television days because I worked here from '48 to '50 and T.V. in '48 to '50 was very minimal. And another disadvantage was that we had already DC [Direct Current] power at the time. Back then it was only DC power and actually you had to have a converter for anything you wanted to work on, any machinery or television.

Ellery:   42:16    Record players, juke box or something like that.

Heaney:              42:19    Right you couldn’t run anything like that because you had to have a convertor. All you could have was incandescent lights. And so we had to have a converter for everything, toasters and everything had to have converters. It was antiquated electric system.

Speaker 3:          42:31    Was there ever any alcohol available for the guards? When you have these big weddings and dances like this, were you allowed to have a bar open or anything like that?

Heaney:              42:43    I remember drinking. But I don't remember actually having a bar there. I think at the weddings we drank but they encouraged sobriety and I do remember it was real military type. When you addressed a captain, he was almost like it was in the armed forces. It was really strict. That's another thing I didn't like about it. I’m in the fire department, I’ve been in the fire department for 25 years and we have a semi-military thing but very, very minimal. You can call a guy by his first name whether he was an officer or not. But here they had a real strict system, a cast system. Like you do in the military.

Speaker 3:          43:44    Like we have in the park service.

Heaney:              42:43    It couldn’t have been as bad as we had it. It was really strict and we didn't socialize too much with any of the upper strata.

Speaker 3:          43:44    That's one of the questions I've always been asked. How much interaction did they have with the warden? Did you ever go inside the warden's home ever?

Heaney:              43:52    I went in there once.

Speaker 3:          43:53    Do you know how many rooms he had up there?

Heaney:              43:55    Oh it was nice. Real nice place. I only got to the lower area. But of course he had one or two inmates that used to work in there.

Ellery:   44:06    Did they really have “Machine Gun Kelly” serve him dinner at parties. That's what we've heard spoke.

Heaney:              44:11    No way in the world. I worked with George Kelly. George Kelly was down in the industries. He worked in the office when I worked down there and I was in charge of the shoe repair and the cleaning part. It was a small shop. I don't know if you know where that is. A real small shop off from where they had the washing machines, the dryers.

Ellery:   44:33    Yeah I've been to that small shop.

Heaney:              44:37    Did you ever hear of John Paul Chase? [crosstalk] Yeah I knew him. In fact Chase worked for me in that particular one and he was a guy that was caught with either “Baby Face Nelson”. He got caught in Chicago. Anyways, he used to be a rum runner up and down the coast here. He used to run in the alcohol, well scotch from Canada and from Mexico. These roads run up from Mexico and Canada. They used to have the drop like scotch or any of that stuff that was dropped in Mexico and Canada. Then they'd transport to this fast level boats that'd come down the coast and drop them off. Half Moon Bay, he told me Half Moon Bay was a place they used to make a drop. And he got away with it, he never got caught there.

              45:25    But evidently he got caught in Chicago and that I got to reading through this records. See he wouldn't tell me too much but evidently he got caught with, I think it was “Baby Face Nelson” in a shootout in Chicago. But he used to tell me about how the cops and them were always going up and down the street in armored cards. They used to shoot at each other and they had quite a time.

Speaker 3:          45:51    Not much has changed in Chicago.

Side 2

Heaney:              00:02    Smaller type. Oh, he was average size, I'd say. He was Indian, and he was one of the three that was involved. They were going to execute him. They executed two of them over at San Quentin, but they commuted his sentence because of his age. Very quiet guy, never heard anything out of him, and all the time I was here, he was in isolation.

Ellery:   00:29    You mean the “open-face” cells, right -

Heaney:              00:33    The open-face cells, he was always in isolation. I don't know if he ever went back to population. Did he ever go back? Did you ever hear? I don't know if he went back to population or not. No? He never did go back?

Ellery:   00:42    No.

Heaney:              00:45    You see, the word was out on certain inmates, like him, the word was out on him. He wasn't going to get anything. We weren't going to give him anything.

Ellery:   00:56    Give him anything, like what?

Heaney:              00:57    Any privileges. We were going to do the best we can against him, because he was in on this thing. Of course, I wasn't here in '46, I started in '48, but there was an officer killed, I think, or shot.

Ellery:   01:09    Yeah, a couple of them.

Heaney:              01:11    These type of things, they tell us about, and these are the things we are supposed to remember that Robert Stroud killed an officer, and he wasn't going to get out and he wasn't going to get any more than we could give him.

Ellery:   01:25    When did Stroud do that?

Speaker 3:          01:25    When he killed the officer in Leavenworth?

Heaney:              01:30    In Leavenworth? Yeah.

Ellery:   01:31    There was a rumor that Stroud was homosexual, was there anything you ever saw that about that?

Heaney:              01:35    I never heard, of course at the time that he was here, he was so old and he was so isolated that he had no opportunities, but I understand he killed a guy in a whorehouse in Alaska.

              01:57    He was either running the place and the guy wasn't going to pony-up with the money or something like that, he had some kind of a problem.

Speaker 3:          02:02    The story we heard was more romantic, that it was a girlfriend or something of that order that was being mistreated.

Ellery:   02:08    Well, that's a movie.

Heaney:              02:09    Oh, yeah. Who knows what the truth is, even what I know may not be the truth, but I think that was what happened. That's supposed to have been what happened, that he was involved like that up in Alaska.

Ellery:   02:23    Have we got any opinions of any other prisoners? Any other famous ones.

Heaney:              02:30    Let's see, well, I always remember George “Machine Gun” Kelly because he's even been on television and any older person does remember him. Very distinguished fella, very well taught. He used to act as the altar boy when the Catholic priests came over, there was a Jesuit priest come over, he was the altar boy. He meticulously dressed, always -

Ellery:   03:00    Even in prison here.

Heaney:              03:02    Even in prison. Meticulously dressed, just the opposite they say when he first came in. He was rebellious, bad acting, hard guy to get along with, but when I was here he was doing real good time; worked in the office, did everything the way you are supposed to do, real quiet. Looked like a bank president or something. The guy was so distinguished looking. He had slightly graying hair. I understand he died of a heart attack later on back in Leavenworth or something. But he was a real distinguished guy, and as I say, he worked on industries next to me and this Paul Chase, he worked with me, and he was quite a character. He was a nice guy, seemed like. He was always on me to bring him candy bars; always on me to bring something. I never did bring anything to him. I was tempted to because he was such a nice guy. Not razor blades, but maybe candy bars, but then I always had in the back of my mind, once I started, I'm stuck. He's got me.

Ellery:   03:57    Why do you think they wanted razor blades? You'd mentioned that. Suicide? Kill somebody? Use them as weapons or what?

Heaney:              04:02    No. Because the razor blades that they used were terrible. They only issued razor blades. They were government-issued razor blades, real dull, although they had sharpening devices, but they wanted a good shave, and they only had this cold water to use, you know? And an old bar of soap, so then they’d like to have a nice sharp razor to shave by. And they had to shave, they had to shave, you know.

Ellery:   04:29    Yeah, that's right. You have to shave.

Heaney:              04:32    You have to shave. We used to go around, did you ever see a shaving board? We had a board with all of the blades on it, yeah, and go and issue it and then go back and pick them up. And those places, you know the door opening…we had to keep all the inmates away from there. I don't know why. It was so stupid, because those inmates knew, they'd say, "We know how to open it." I says, "I know, but I can't have you around here." So we had to get them away, so they wouldn't know how to open the door, any child can learn how to open the thing, but that was one of the tricks you had to do. You just had to keep them away from there.

              05:11    They had to make sure that they never read one of these assignments, you know like the assignment thing? You had to make sure that they never, ever read anything like that.

Ellery:   05:19    So they would know where you were.

Heaney:              05:20    Where you were, where the job assignments were being assigned.

Speaker 3:          05:22    So which towers were unmanned?

Heaney:              05:26    Right. They wouldn't have allowed anything like that.

Ellery:   05:28    Were the towers all, the five of the, were they were always manned all the time?

Heaney:              05:32    They were generally always manned, even the one that was...that was the Hill Tower, I think, over there. I didn't see it, because I couldn't see from up there.

Speaker 3:          05:45    [inaudible] From the west side down.

Heaney:              05:47    Oh, they took that one off. It's down now. There used to be a tower there. That was manned 24 hours a day. This was manned 24 hours a day.

              05:56    The one that...there's a little one there that's on the catwalk up there, that was only manned, that was for us to use in bad weather. We were supposed to come out of it every so often and walk up and down the…those are lousy jobs. God, it was boring. Cold, boring, you've got to walk up and down. Jeez, I hate it.

Speaker 3:          06:19    What, outside the rec yard, you're talking about, catwalk?

Ellery:   06:23    And also the that goes over to the shops.

Heaney:              06:25    Yeah, that was manned, where the framework was, that was only manned once in a while, and then there was one way down at the shop area. That was manned when they worked in the industries and they took them off when the industries closed at 4 o'clock, and they brought them up.

              06:42    They used to bring them up and then come up that side of the hill, and they used to go through a metal detector. No, they didn't go through a metal detector then. There was a metal detector from the entrance of the main cellblock down into the yard, and we used to “shake down”, personally, “shake down” the inmates going in and out of the kitchen area. That was the personal “shake down.” You make them stand up there and you got to go through -

Speaker 3:          07:07    Oh, what, the cooking crew?

Heaney:              07:10    The cooking crew, and the mess hall crew all had to be personally “shook down.” Not taking the clothes off, like they would them put in isolation, but just go through your regular search.

Speaker 3:          07:23    What's the longest you know of anyone staying in isolation?

Heaney:              07:28    Couple of weeks, that I remember.

Speaker 3:          07:28    Do you remember what the offense was? Are there any real offenses that stick out in your mind for a person staying in the “dark cell”?

Heaney:              07:37    Assault.

Speaker 3:          07:38    On an officer?

Heaney:              07:39    Oh, really on an officer, yeah. That would -

Ellery:   07:42    You had mentioned, when we were walking down, that the biggest reason, if you had to say, of all the reasons that somebody went to the “dark cells”, is homosexual behavior.

Heaney:              07:53    I wouldn't say that was what we thought the most dangerous offense is.

              07:58    Anything to do with an officer is the most grievous offense. Anything other than that is minor.

Speaker 3:          08:03    There was the board who actually decided whether the men went into solitary and for how long, I believe.

Heaney:              08:09    I don't remember them having a board, I always remember mainly…but they did sometimes have…the Associate Warden generally ran it, the Custodial Manager, or the Captain of the Guards, or the Captain of the Officers, whatever you want to call it. He would do it in lieu of the Associate Warden. Maybe on a more grievous offense they’d have more of them, I don't remember, because I didn’t go…I only seen a couple of them when they went down there, because you would have to bring somebody down there. I tried to avoid it because I didn't want to be involved in it. Because I didn't want to go down there and-

              08:44    Well, not so much then. Generally, you do it on your days off and they made you come back, they didn't pay you. I didn't want to go back there.

Ellery:   08:53    Where did they have it? You said they didn't have it in D Block. They had it in the main cell house.

Heaney:              08:59    They may have had D Block, ones for D Block, but I remember it being down at the end where you first come in, when you come to the main cell block and where you got the visiting things off to the right down there. Down in that area, down in there.

Ellery:   09:18    Sort of near A Block.

Heaney:              09:20    Yes.

Speaker 3:          09:22    [inaudible] you're coming in there and it's -

Heaney:              09:24    Oh yeah, oh yeah. It would be right up there, right off the Warden - I was right, we came up those stairs, we'd walk through the Warden's office. That was a real nice place. That was the Warden's office, that's where I got hired.

Speaker 3:          09:36    Okay.

Heaney:              09:38    And that control place, that's where...see, they had these sliding doors. Here's where the sliding doors...somebody took them off.

Ellery:   09:45    It's been gone for years, I’m sure.

Heaney:              09:48    Those doors were never opened at the same time. One had to be closed before the other could be opened.

Ellery:   09:57    Even the Armorer couldn't open all six doors to freedom, from the inside cell house to the outside.

Heaney:              10:03    Yeah, right. They always had a check system in there to make sure couldn’t come all the way through.

Ellery:   10:08    You had to go in like locks and then go back [inaudible].

Heaney:              10:14    But like I said, the homosexual activities generally precipitated most of the incidents -

Ellery:   10:24    Because we have heard from other officers that generally in the shower or something like that, it wasn't really going to cause problems they’d ignore it. They'd ignore it in some cases, or -

Heaney:              10:39    Maybe they usually did –

Speaker 3:          10:39    You'd have to take them in and report them to the -

Heaney:              10:46    Well, I witnessed an incident down in the yard one time. There was two inmates and the yard is not quite the place to do, to delve into too many activities of that nature, except that...let's just say that one was stroking the organ of the other one, and I witnessed it and I walked the other way. They didn't see me, nobody seen me witness it, and I walked away because it would have meant that I would have turned them in, and that offense probably would have meant, "You are bad boys and you are not going to do that again, are you? Don't do it again." And that's what it would amount to.

Speaker 3:          11:30    But they wouldn't have been put into isolation for that.

Heaney:              11:31    Oh, I don't think so -

Speaker 3:          11:32    [inaudible].

Heaney:              11:32    I don't think so, no. I don't think so. [crosstalk] Unless they were connected too many times. It depends how many times they got involved in it. Yeah, if they thought that they would keep doing it every day or every week or something then they'd figure, "Well, let's put them away for a while and maybe they won't do it for a while."

Ellery:   11:48    I wonder why. Why did they want…because this was jealousies among other inmates or something -

Heaney:              11:54    Why would they want to stem this type of activity?

Ellery:   11:57    What? It's a prison, I can see -

Heaney:              11:58    The reason that they stem this is because they felt that it would be out of control. Control is the number one thing if you...once you allow a person to do something then it mushrooms and if one guy will do it, they'll all do it. They have to crack down sometimes, because then it would be -

Ellery:   12:18    It couldn’t have been from any moral thing that was evil or anything, would they?

Heaney:              12:22    It's not from a moral standpoint at all, I don't think. It's mainly for control. It's where do you make your stop? You've got to and anything like that…They felt it would have a mushrooming effect. And where would they stop doing it? Actually, you had no privacy here, so where could you find private areas? It's not like having a bathhouse in San Francisco or something like that, you know?

              12:51    It could get into bribing the guards. Maybe like Stroud wrote about, like maybe bribing a guard for having a private area or something.

Speaker 3:          13:00    Maybe it was another part of the prison you weren't aware of.

Heaney:              13:04    Yeah. It took me a lot of years to even talk about it, to even think about it, but I was propositioned quite a few times myself by some of the inmates. I think at the time I was pretty naïve and -

Ellery:   13:23    Because you were young, too -

Heaney:              13:24    I was so young and I know that if I was an inmate coming in here, I would have been involved, willingly or unwillingly, into a lot of homosexual activities.

              13:41    [crosstalk] Because of the fact that they all went after the young ones.

Ellery:   13:42    Was there a lot of prison rape here and stuff like that?

Heaney:              13:47    No, because of the fact there wasn't an opportunity to like they talk about. There probably is in San Quentin where there's a -

Ellery:   13:57    Like Short Eyes [1977 film], they just have a real heavy, you know people are being raped.

Heaney:              14:03    There was a lot of forced, where you say, "You better do it because if you don't I'm going to get you later on." But there's no opportunity, there isn't anybody maybe coming down the cell block and maybe somebody yanking them off to the side. There's none of that. It was just that, you had better be my chick. They used to call them chicks. That was the guy's chick or boyfriend or something like that, and they would make a pre-arranged time and -

Speaker 3:          14:33    I mean they time, it was a [inaudible] process, they didn't have to drag somebody aside right away.

Heaney:              14:32    They had all the time in the world. They didn't have to do any forcible rape, they just bided their time because there was no privacy for it. They had to get a spot. I felt sorry for the young guys coming in, they were going to get it in just a matter of time. They just couldn't avoid it.

Ellery:   14:58    Seems like your job then was just trying to break it up, it was like holding back a tide, you know?

Heaney:              15:05    Yeah.

Ellery:   15:06    Like you say, it was inevitable, it was going to happen.

Heaney:              15:09    I got propositioned twice and I just thought maybe the guys were friendly at first. As I said, I was kind of naïve and I just thought that a lot of them look friendly and a lot of times they were friendly because they had nothing else...a lot of them they were friendly because eventually they would proposition me for razor blades, candy bars, tailor-made cigarettes, cigars, anything they weren't allowed. Books that they weren't allowed, there's certain kind of books, magazines. And they'd try to get in your good graces in order to get these things from you eventually, and that's what I found. So I was suspicious of anybody after a while.

Ellery:   15:49    Yeah.

Heaney:              15:49    Because eventually if they were friendly to you for over an amount of time then they were after you for something.

Speaker 3:          15:55    Were you ever propositioned by any fellow guards?

Heaney:              15:59    No, I never had any problem. No. No, it was just two inmates, and they had beat around the bush about it and then finally they just came out and said what they wanted. They said, "Mind if I look [inaudible]" or something like that. Then I knew, okay, you know. Then I always stayed away from then on, because I thought they were friendly for just...but then I figured out well, that was why they were friendly.

Ellery:   16:30    They could have gone to “the hole” just for that -

Heaney:              16:34    Oh, if I had turned them in. Yeah, of course I never said it. I’d wouldn’t say anything like that. How could I go up and…you know. They didn't mean to do nothing, all they did was proposition me. I would have laughing stock of the place, you know.

                             The first day I came to work I remember walking down Broadway, the main cell block, walking down there and I don't know if I said this before, but I was with an older guard, an older officer and they were whistling at me and they were saying different things about how they would like to get me, you know? And whistles and the rest of that stuff.

Ellery:   17:14    Was that pretty common like whenever a new officer comes in? That would be a sign of disrespect sort of thing, wouldn't it?

Heaney:              17:21    Yeah. This would be for guys up above, though, and you didn't know where they were because these were the ones that were out of sight. You didn't actually hear them. They knew you were coming down and they could see you and it was after you passed their presence and the guy says, he told them before, he says, "They may be putting it on you because you're a new screw here and they're going to really lay it on you, and you're so young." I looked about 18 years old, that's why the Warden didn't want to have anything to do with me. He knew I was going to have problems, which I did, and they whistled and hollered and said dirty things to me and he said, "Don't say nothing, don't look around, try to look impersonal as possible", and that's what I did. I was highly nervous, but I tried to just look straight ahead and walk down the cell block.

Speaker 3:          18:11    So what sort of preparation training did they give you?

Heaney:              18:15    At first I didn't have too much. Did you see my time there? I got this actual training certificate in, what year was it -

Speaker 3:          18:23    That was 1950, it looked like. It was after you'd been here two years.

Heaney:              18:32    Yeah. I was here for a while. So they give me...I wasn't here too much longer before I left. So they had me down, this was a formal thing, they had me down there and taught me a few ways to handle individuals...Jiu Jitsu, I guess, in a way, and a lot of firing guns. I had a lot of that. It wasn't as highly trained as you'd think.

Speaker 3:          19:02    Did you ever work in a gun gallery here, I might have missed that.

Heaney:              19:05    Yeah. I think I worked every job there is, because eventually, if you're here for about two years, you're going to work every job. I worked in every gun gallery; every tower. I've worked in -

Ellery:   19:14    What do you think was the best job? Or the least boring.

Heaney:              19:19    The best job was what they call Island Patrol, because it was interesting. You walked around, except, one time I was on Island Patrol and I was fairly new and the older guards they loved to put the new guys on, they'd say, "Be careful when you walk down by the industries at night time, because once in a while the inmates get out." And no way in the world are they going to get out, but I didn't know that. They had a stupid foghorn up there and that thing will scare the hell out of you, and I thought I was going to have a heart attack going through there. I had a .38 [handgun] out and I was just scared to death, because I looked through every corner and then I still remember my Frankenstein monster when I was a kid or something like that, and listening to these tales that they tell me about. In fact, that was one of the scariest times we ever went through, was just my own imagination going through there, and telling me that there was a couple inmates maybe loose down there, you know?

Speaker 3:          20:20    I'm going to have to leave in a second, but there's one question I've always wanted to ask people who were here and that is, at the time you were here, did you ever feeling that you were a part of a really incredible thing in history? A historical moment, or did you feel like you were just doing a job?

Heaney:              20:33    That's why I went to work here, I felt it, but then after a while, you don't get that feeling anymore, you just get a feeling you've just got to come to work and you just put in your eight hours and you leave. I did at first, and then I got so that I disliked it, and disliked it, and then I hated it, and it's like some kind of a job you just think, "Well, what am I going to do? I've got to do something else." And I think I was about ready to quit and the Korean War started, see? And I was in the reserve and I got recalled back in the services and when I got out of the service, I didn't quit until I passed examination for the fire department. I went to the fire department and when I passed the probation, I came back over here and quit. But, remember you were talking about hardly anybody ever coming over here, which is very true. But we had movie stars over here all the time.

Speaker 3:          21:20    Yeah?

Heaney:              21:21    Oh, we had movie stars, what they would do is they would write to somebody in Washington or something. It was tough getting on this island. They didn't allow too many people, but they had connections, and I was always touring some movie star through here.

Ellery:   21:35    Not through the cell house, though.

Heaney:              21:36    Oh yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah. These were some of the ones that I remember, they were making a movie, it was Sam Spade at the time, it was Howard the Duck?

Ellery:   21:49    Oh yeah?

Heaney:              21:50    He went through here. I seen him go by me, you know. There was a guy named John Sutton. He was an old time movie star, but who else?

Ellery:   22:01    They'd show them everything, huh? Like, just -

Heaney:              22:03    Oh yeah, we'd take them to the main cell block, we'd take them to the mess hall, we'd take them up to the hospital, we'd take them down to Industries. They weren't allowed in the yard at the time that there was inmates in the yard, we wouldn't let them do that, but we'd bring them to all the places. I don't think we brought them to D Block, we didn't bring them to D Block. We brought people, like penal people, people that came from other areas, they could come through it. We always had visitors, but mainly movie stars...people disconnected with the penal service, but we had foreign visitors from other penal institutions that we'd take to every place, even D Block.

Ellery:   22:41    Inmates would be sitting right there in those cells?

Heaney:              22:44    Oh, sure.

Ellery:   22:46    Did the inmates say anything? Cat calls or anything?

Heaney:              22:49    Oh, no. No, only if like me coming down, they knew I was new. It was fantastic, how they knew what was going on. They had a great mind that wouldn't quit. They knew what was going on in that place. That's why I got a kick when you started talking about the sharks, you know?

Ellery:   23:06    Yeah.

Heaney:              23:08    No way in the world…they all knew they were sand sharks that day, you know?

Speaker 3:          23:14    How often did they actually get a chance to get out and see movies up in the auditorium?

Heaney:              23:18    As I remember, about every holiday they had a movie. I'd say they had about ten to twelve movies a year.

Speaker 3:          23:29    So practically one a month.

Heaney:              23:31    About one a month.

Speaker 3:          23:32    Jeez, that's not doing so bad.

Heaney:              23:33    Not too bad, no. Not too bad.

Speaker 3:          23:36    Was there any brutality?

Heaney:              23:38    There was a couple knifings when they were in there.

Ellery:   23:40    Oh, in the movie?

Heaney:              23:41    In the movie.

Speaker 3:          23:42    Did the guards ever direct any violence towards the...did the guards ever have any recourse to violence towards any of the inmates?

Heaney:              23:53    Yeah.

Speaker 3:          23:54    Did you ever see any beatings taking place?

Heaney:              23:57    Yeah.

Speaker 3:          23:57    Were those things that were reported to the Warden, or -

Heaney:              23:59    No. Just amongst ourselves. Inmates that we wanted to get, that maybe acted up. I didn't. Now, don't get me wrong. In the main the officers were like ordinary people, there was a few of them that I'd say that are out of line. They took advantage of the situation to get inmates. I'd say the inmate...if you wanted to punish an inmate and you couldn't do it through normal channels, you'd do it on your own channels. You'd use the opportunity to use a little [inaudible] on them. But very minor, very minor, and not enough to really talk about it, not saying that this would be the norm.

Ellery:   24:41    Well, of course, when the inmates come back that's what they talk about the most. They said, they had these stories of being beaten and all that -

Heaney:              24:48    They were beaten, but they were...and there may have been beatings that I didn't see either, you know?

Ellery:   24:57    Well, that's what I said, the inmates would [crosstalk] -

Heaney:              25:01    And that could be true, yeah.

Ellery:   25:03    Oh, this is a hellhole, there was never a prison that was more inhumane. That's what they're going to say, you know that.

Heaney:              25:09    They're going a prejudicial view towards it.

Speaker 4:          25:18    Well, what about the visitation of the inmates, could they have visitors once in a while?

Heaney:              25:19    As I remember, the inmates were allowed visitors once a month. Family, close friends, had to be on a list, and they were allowed over here and talking about an hour through that intercom system. The lawyers were allowed to talk to them. They had one of us sit in there but as I remember, they made us sit far enough away that we couldn't understand...we were allowed to listen to the talking of the visitors, but we weren't allowed to talk between the lawyer and the inmate because that's a client, that's personal -

Ellery:   25:57    They had absolute privacy then.

Heaney:              26:00    As I remember, they had absolute privacy, a privacy of talking. They were visually seen.

Ellery:   26:06    Oh they were, yeah. [Inaudible] they were actually inside the room?

Heaney:              26:14    Right in the room, and they would be discussing things right in the room, one on one, like you and I are talking together.

Ellery:   26:20    Did they have like a table or something?

Heaney:              26:21    They had an old table in there.

Ellery:   26:22    Could they have passed something underneath?

Heaney:              26:24    They possibly could have, we were supposed to see that nothing was passed. Naturally, see, when a lawyer talks to an inmate, an officer is not supposed to be listening in. And nobody is supposed to be listening in because that's a client relationship. It's confidential, so, we weren't allowed to listen.

                             As I remember now, we weren't allowed to listen to anything the lawyer was saying to the inmate, but took look at them visually, there was somebody in there watching them. So, I don't know if anything ever got passed to them. I don't think so, it might have -

Ellery:   27:04    Where would you be standing?

Heaney:              27:06    I never did it.

Ellery:   27:07    Oh, they'd probably be in the room with them though, or just out in the hallway or something?

Heaney:              27:16    Yeah, they'd probably be outside. See, I never had anything to do with the visitors myself, and I remember talking about the policy that they had. They didn't let me do a lot of things because they thought I was too young and inexperienced, so they kept me mainly working in the gun gallery, the towers, working with the older inmates in the industries, in the main cell block, in the kitchen area, in the isolation. They even let me in the isolation at times, because they had another guard watching me. To tell you the truth, they just didn't trust me, I guess I was just too young.

Ellery:   28:02    They probably thought you would get hurt or something.

Heaney:              28:06    Well, they felt I wasn't old enough, or I wasn't sophisticated enough to handle a large amount of inmates, which I was glad they didn't, you know? I probably couldn't have, maybe at the time, I wasn't colonized enough for them. I was 23 by the time I left. At the end there, I was getting more colonized but of course, I was pretty naïve, and they used about every means possible to try and get anything out of me.

Speaker 4:          28:37    So the inmates couldn't discuss current events or [inaudible], is that true?

Heaney:              28:48    Current events --

Speaker 4:          28:49    I know they would cut everything out of the magazines and they couldn't read the newspapers -

Heaney:              28:54    Yeah. They could talk about current events, broad current events, they didn't want them to get into specifics of things that might aid them in doing anything on the outside, that might be an escape attempt or something that a guard would feel would be illegal. Now, from what I understand, is if he didn't like a conversation, he'd just pull the jack out, the phone jack. Yeah, oh sure, he could pull the phone jack out and he may not get that visitor for a year, or maybe never. If they didn't like they way the conversation was going.

Ellery:   29:29    Well mainly they didn't want them having knowledge of current events so that they couldn't plug into maybe their buddies, other members of their gang, or something like that.

Heaney:              29:38    Right, yeah. See, they were just supposed to be just talking with relations or, understand, close friends, but -

Ellery:   29:47    Close friends could come, then -

Heaney:              29:49    If they were on a list. They compiled a list and I guess if they didn't have any close relations, they might allow a friend over. As I remember, as I remember -

Ellery:   29:58    Not an ex-con, though.

Heaney:              29:59    Oh, no. We have a list, just those people on the list was the only ones allowed to come over, and that's it. They'd come over, we'd bring them up to the main cell block, and that's the one they took care of. Trying to think of anything more, there was a lot of things, two years, it's like a lifetime in this place, all the incidents that happened.

Speaker 4:          30:39    Did the inmates have any special rituals or things they would do. Did they celebrate holidays or birthdays or -

Heaney:              30:48    They allowed them to…They didn't have radios when I was there, no radios, and nobody had television anyway. No radios, but they were allowed to listen to the World Series in the yard, over the general loud speaking system, and as I remember, that's the only time they ever listened to the radio, was to the World Series, and that was the general population on the outside in the yard, and what they did on the outside was they played a little bit of softball out there, and they generally played cards with these little dominos, and gambling. You couldn't prove it, they weren't allowed to gamble, but they were gambling.

Speaker 4:          31:27    We heard that they gambled work? Like if they worked on [inaudible] work instead of gaining credit for the work they’d done they’d give it to another person? Was there any -

Heaney:              31:43    I don't know about that but I know…at Christmastime they were allowed a certain amount of tailor-made cigarettes. They had no tailor-made cigarettes here, it was all roll your own, roll [inaudible] type thing that was grown at another penitentiary. All they wanted… because at the end of the cell blocks, close to the mess hall, they had kind of a slot and they could pull out a sack whenever they wanted. So they had access to these really old cigarettes, but actually they liked to have tailor-made cigarettes -

Ellery:   32:16    Where does that come from? Where does that cigarettes…that just came directly from -

Heaney:              32:19    From some penitentiary down south, that's what they told me, that it was grown in a penitentiary down south and they set it to through out the, the penal system, the federal penal system.

Speaker 4:          32:28    Were they allowed to smoke only in certain areas?

Heaney:              32:31    Only in certain areas, yeah.

Speaker 4:          32:33    Were they allowed to smoke in the dining halls? Somebody asked me that.

Heaney:              32:35    No, no. We'd march them in and each officer was assigned one or two tables. You'd stand there, and you'd watch them, and as I remember they were only allowed a fork and spoon, no knives. Nobody was allowed a knife, they never had steak or nothing, so they never had to worry about a knife. They stand down there and whatever food they had they got from the food table. I don't think they ever went back, nobody ever went back. You mentioned, Tom, that possibly someone might have went back -

Ellery:   33:09    Back to -

Heaney:              33:10    To the “steam table” to get some more food.

Ellery:   33:12    Yeah, I said one time. One time.

Heaney:              33:14    I don't think they're allowed. I don't remember if anyone was going back, because see we didn't want anybody, everything was going to under control, and so inmates going back to get more food, that's kind of out of control. Everybody's got to move. Everything is done, okay, the lieutenant stands on Broadway and blows a whistle, that means time for us to open up all of the cell blocks. The inmates stand in front of the doors. He blows the whistle again, the first tier goes out, and then when that tier goes in, then the next tier comes down. Everything is in an orderly fashion, everybody walks in an orderly fashion, and then the next tier comes, and then the last tier comes down, and they all orderly line up and you don't get too many inmates grouping at one time because you got problems, you don't want too many at one time.

Speaker 4:          34:11    You would march down with each group, with fourteen inmates?

Heaney:              34:14    No, at meal time, that's when you had your most amount of officers on duty in the main cell block. Everybody came out, the ones that worked down in the industries, we'll all meet there in the main cell block for each meal time. And, each one of us would go to the box, the opening box, and on the sound of the whistle down below we would open up the doors. And then he'd blow the whistle and then the inmates were supposed to stand in front of the doors, and they'd blow the whistle, and then the inmates, they knew how to do it. They would file out, single file out of the doors, like one tier at a time. And then they would file into the mess hall, and I can't remember if it was continuous, ongoing, or you told them if the next one goes or not, but I know that nobody ever bunched up, you tried to keep them in control. And they went down from one end of the “steam table” to the other.

                             They started during the war because they used to ask how the war was going. They never knew what the news was, so they had a big chart. They had one inmate assigned, they'd put the headlines on this chart just going into the mess hall. They had great big blackboard and he'd put on the big top news events. Non-sexual, anything that had not to do with anything had to do with crime and just news events, and that's how they would find out what was going on. That started during the war, understand, the silent system stopped during the war, too. Before the war, the silent system…they couldn't talk. They couldn't talk in the mess hall, maybe they could talk in their cells, I don't know, but they weren't allowed to talk in the mess hall. But they were allowed to talk when I was there. Trying to keep it down to a minimum amount of talk though.

                             They're always trying to keep everything to a minimum, and they marched into the mess hall and they'd get in that line and they'd get the food and they'd march over and as I remember, they had to stand up at the table until the last one got to the table and they would sit down in unison. And then they'd eat in unison. And everybody sat there and you had to eat every scrap of food on your plate. Everything had to be eaten, and you would check their food and if they didn't eat that food, as I remember, they didn't eat the next day. That was it, they were off.

Speaker 4:          36:53    And the food really was terrible?

Heaney:              36:56    To my standards, it was terrible. I'll say, it's edible, and we even had a few officers, they didn't want to spend a buck would even eat it and I said, "How the hell can you eat that stuff?" Food's food, you know, or something like that. I couldn't take it.

Speaker 4:          37:15    We heard it was the best food of any prison in the United States.

Heaney:              37:19    Oh, who told -

Speaker 4:          37:21    I don't know where I picked that up -

Heaney:              37:24    No, I'd say it's wholesome food. Dietarily it's wholesome, but I remember the vegetables. I always remember the string beans because you couldn't eat those string beans unless you peel all the strings out, you'd chew and chew and chew. It was the worst grade of string beans going, and I don't want it be said that it's not wholesome food, but it was completely unappetizing food, but not less unappetizing food.

Speaker 4:          38:00    Did they ever really give inmates [inaudible] in the “hole”, like where they would –

Heaney:              38:00    You mean alcohol -

Speaker 4:          38:09    No, no. One of the former inmates came back and worked for the park service for a time as a tour guide –

Heaney:              38:13    Is that the guy that give the thing into the Tribune? I'd say most of those things, if they're not lies, they're complete -

Ellery:   38:26    Exaggerations.

Heaney:              38:28    Yeah, exaggerations.

Speaker 4:          38:28    Because he said that they would throw together everything that all the other inmates were eating in a blender and then give it to the guys in solitary, or give them two meals, bread and water, the third meal would be what the inmates called a “Blood Mary”, and that would be just a conglomeration of everything else.

Heaney:              38:49    Oh, no thank you, no.

Speaker 4:          38:51    I just wonder if anything like that could possibly do that.

Ellery:   38:52    They're on a restricted diet, they call it.

Heaney:              38:54    I worked here form '48 to '50, so I can't say what went on. I can say almost what went on previous, because well I garnered inmates and officers both. After 1950, I couldn't say. Generally I think a person, even if he isn't familiar with the prison system would think that's a farce, because they wouldn't allow us something like that. They couldn't have relaxed it, because when I was here, it was really strict. It was strict on us. We had it strict, that's why I disliked it so much. It reminded me of the military so much. Our relationship with our officers, our superiors was a real strict relationship, and no way in the world they would allow anything like that to go on. Just like I told Tom, they would wheel in a steam cart into the D Block and from there, it was measured out by so many calories and then they would have an inmate dish it out and another inmate taking it up to him, and we would watch what going on. And it was all done dietetically as so many calories -

Ellery:   40:14    This was a story about the “hole” that you get your food in a paper cup. You wouldn't have a lot of dishes, you wouldn't have spoons, you wouldn't have a fork, so you just get a nice little paper cup to be filled up with everything there was. Pour it in there, blend it up, sometimes.

Heaney:              40:36    That could have been true. It could have been true after I left, because the prison was open for 13 years, it closed in '63 and that was 13 years and they could have been more permissive, or not so much permissive as being more lenient towards the inmates because when I was here, they didn't have radios, they didn't have...very few magazines, a restricted amount of books, and privileges were really lean, and they could have had something like that later on. I don't remember it when I was there. I don't remember that. I just remember them having a restricted diet.

Ellery:   41:16    So they would get the same thing as anybody else if you were in the “hole.”

Heaney:              41:23    They would get the same as the ones in the same part of isolation, yeah.

Speaker 4:          41:31    Did you [inaudible] how long people remained in the “hole”?

Heaney:              41:33    Yeah, as I remember, not more than a couple weeks. As I remember if the guy kept throwing his food out then we would put him on just water. We used to put them on bread and water, they wouldn't give them a meal. Yeah, I remember that, not giving them a meal, just giving bread and water and that's it, but it was their own liking. They chose that, if they throw it back at you or they spit on you, they would be usually treated like, you know.

Ellery:   42:03    Yeah.

Heaney:              42:06    We never felt it was cruelty, if they want to bring it on themselves; if they don't want to eat, let them go hungry. Because nobody ever starved, I don't think, not that I ever heard of. There was some slash...we had a lot of slashed wrists. We had a lot of that, a lot of slashed wrists. I don't think they really wanted to commit suicide, it's mainly to get into the hospital, because that was a good time. The hospital was good duty, you know? And this one guy, the only time I remember them eating feces, there was one guy that was supposed to have done that. Actually eating shit...excuse me, I shouldn't have brought it up.

Speaker 4:          42:52    It's all right.

Heaney:              42:56    These two guys they both come up. They were lovers and he extremely wanted to go and get transferred back to this...another good time was to get transferred to the medical facility back east. Springfield, yeah. And that's doing the ultimate, they’ll do it by anything. Now, this guy, he’s doing the ultimate I guess and I think he finally got transferred back there, but it would take quite a bit of...I mean they'd try to do every loony thing in the world to get transferred out of here, and actually go back to Springfield because that would be a good time, but I think this guy finally did. But you've got to do it over a long period of time because anybody can go through an act and if you can prove your act, I guess long enough, you might get your transfer. But it actually couldn't be a long-term act because they'd all be doing it, most of them would be doing it.

Ellery:   43:54    That's what this medical technician told us that, if you were real crazy, then you could be sent back to Springfield. So what they would do is, then they had close observation for two to three weeks, and that was up in those tiled rooms. And you would be stuck in there and that was it.

Heaney:              44:09    I never witnessed any of that, myself, but I know it went on, yeah.

Ellery:   44:16    You went through the trials of hell really, to really prove you were crazy.

Heaney:              44:17    And if you go through that...well, this one inmate, I told you about that German prisoner that…the one that was all the time. They finally sent him back to the nuthouse, but he proved his point, because he did it for a long time. It's pretty tough to stay like he did, just not eat and practically eat nothing, and roll around naked all the time, and just being in isolation, not even wanting to get back into population.

Speaker 4:          44:55    Prisoners of War there?

Heaney:              44:58    There was, yeah. These were saboteurs, they didn't execute them. I don't know why they didn't execute them because spying is usually an executionary offense, but these were, three of them, as I remember, three inmates that were landed from a U-Boat in Florida that worked their way up in the Eastern part of the United States and were subsequently caught. I don't know if they even got into the sabotage activities before they were caught, and they were getting close to being released then I was because they were war-time prisoners, but see, I think they were all born Americans, so that made it a little tougher on them. I think if they were Germans, they would have been released a long time before that, but they were Americans that went back to Germany.

Speaker 3:          45:50    Do you know if they came to Alcatraz?

Description

Interview with Frank Heaney who was one of the youngest correctional officers on Alcatraz between 1948 and 150. He later became a Park Ranger on the Island in the 1970's

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