CHAPTER XXIII
Myfirst few months in the county jail were put in hard enough. About all I did was hate Irish Annie, and plan ways and means to revenge myself on her. I kept close track of her through friends and learned that her punishment began the day she got back to Canada.Her girls left her establishment when they saw her turn copper; her friends in the Tenderloin shunned her as if she had the leprosy. Finding herself cast out by these outcasts, she gathered up what she could and joined the gold rush to Alaska.
Then, just when my bankroll had melted away under the heavy expense of two attorneys’ fees and incidentals, and I was beginning to wonder if I would finish by having to eat the jail fare, a number of mysterious money orders came to me from Nome and Skagway. I couldn’t but think this was conscience money from Annie. This took the edge off my hatred and I began making excuses for her. After I had several hundred dollars, the money orders stopped coming. No letter or explanation came, and I remained mystified. At last a prisoner who was brought into the jail en route to San Quentin from Alaska put an end to my guessing.
Irish Annie was dead. My informant was very discreet and mentioned no names. “Certain people,” he said, “and good people, too, found out that she had a bunch of dough. They went into her crib, tied her up, and took it. When they went out, one of them said to the others: ‘Black is in the county jail in San Francisco. He ought to have one end of this money. That woman put him there.’
“They didn’t know she had snitched on you and objected to splitting you in with the coin. The first party, your friend, went back into the crib, and croaked her. When he came out he said: ‘I’ve done that for Black. Now, does he get his end?’
“You got it, didn’t you?”
I acknowledged the money and asked no questions. My attorney learned later, and told me, that when shewas found dead and her body identified, the police began a search for me, and the only thing that saved me was my jail alibi, the only alibi that ever convinced anybody.
With Annie off my mind I then began hating the pawnbroker. But before I went to Folsom he was charged with perjury in another case and went broke saving himself from a prison sentence, and I put him out of my mind.
I didn’t worry about the coppers framing me in. I started it. It was their business to put me away if they could, and if they hadn’t played my game I would have beaten the case on them. It has always been a question with me where this framing and jobbing started; whether the defense originally began it and forced the prosecutor and police to do it in self-defense, or whether it was the other way around. I never could find the answer; long ago I gave it up and filed it away with that other old question about the hen and the egg.
My attorney knew his business. He held me in the county jail till my last dollar was gone, and I refused to “write for more money” as he suggested. When I was leaving for Folsom he showed up at the jail and asked me for my watch, the only thing of value I had left.
“You won’t have any use for it up there,” he said. “Give it to me and I’ll get you a job in the warden’s where you’ll get something to eat.”
I told him to go plumb to hell.
I went to prison without any plans for the future. With good conduct I would have to do five years and four months and there was no use trying to look thatfar ahead. Two other prisoners arrived the morning I did, and the three of us were taken out to the office to have our prison biographies written—name, age, birthplace, occupation, etc. We were then photographed, measured, and weighed, and turned over to the captain to be assigned to work.
Richard Murphy (“Dirty Dick” the “cons” called him) was captain at that time. He had worked his way up from the guard line by cunning and brutality. He believed in “throwing the fear of God” into a prisoner the minute he arrived, by browbeating and bullying him, and every man went out of his office hating him. It’s more than twenty years since I left Folsom, but I can still see Dirty Dick’s short, squat figure on the flagstones in front of his filthy office. I can still see his pop-eyes and pasty face, his frog belly, his knock knees, and his flat feet.
I was the first to be questioned. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“San Francisco,” I replied.
“How long did you do in San Quentin?”
“Never was in San Quentin.”
“What other penitentiary were you in?”
“Never was in any penitentiary,” I lied, and I knew he knew I was lying, but wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of thinking he had bullied me into telling the truth.
“Hah, you’re a liar, and you know it. You can’t get anything like that by me. I’ll dig you up, and find out all about you. Use hop?”
“No.” I did use hop, had eaten it all the time in the county jail, and had a small portion secreted about me then. He again called me a liar and said to a convictrunner: “Here, Shorty, take this fellow to the stoneyard. Search him, and if you find anything you want, keep it.”
I had already been searched and had nothing but a handkerchief and a pipe. “No prisoner will keep anything belonging to me,” I said, looking at Shorty. He didn’t search me.
The captain called up the second man. “Where are you from?”
“Sacramento,” he answered.
“How long do you bring?”
“Ten years.”
“What for?”
“Grand larceny.”
“What kind of grand larceny?”
The little runner, Shorty, stepped up and said: “Pickpocket, captain.”
“Where do you belong?” Murphy continued.
“Chicago.”
“What’s your name?”
“James Brown.”
“You’re from Chicago, eh? And your name is Brown? What do they call you? What’s your monoger?”
The little runner stepped up again and said: “‘Chi Jimmy,’ captain.”
“Chi Jimmy, eh? Pickpocket, eh? The rock crusher for you,” said the captain. “Maybe you’ll be ‘Chi’ a few fingers before you get out.”
Which he probably would be. This was Murphy’s idea of a joke.
The third chap got about the same deal, and was waved away. “To the crusher with him, too.”
At that time prisoners were allowed, for economy, to keep the coats, vests, and hats they brought in with them, but were made to wear striped pants and shirts. As the last man turned away, Murphy saw he had a good hat. Calling him back he took it and threw it to his runner. “Here’s a hat for you, Shorty. If you can’t wear it give it to somebody else; it’s too good for the rock crusher.”
He knew all about us before we were brought to his office, and had us out there only to “throw the fear” into us and get a line on us by the way we answered his questions. He made three enemies right there. He received all prisoners that way and if they got insolent under his badgering he had them thrown into the dungeon for thirty days “to cool off.”
The dungeon was an empty cell with a solid door to darken it and contained nothing but a thin blanket, and a bucket strong with chloride of lime. In cases of this kind the captain signed the punishment order which included bread and water. Every third day the prisoner got a pan of beans. Most of them were so hungry they bolted the beans without stopping to chew them and a few dungeon sentences brought on stomach troubles that added to their misery.
My eight-year sentence was considered a short one at Folsom. I found nine hundred prisoners there whose sentences averaged twelve years. They were all hopeless. The parole law was a dead letter, inoperative. Only at Christmas or on the Fourth of July did any one get a parole. The place was a seething volcano of hatred and suspicion. Dirty Dick had in the twenty years he was there developed a perfect stool-pigeon system. A visiting warden, surprisedbecause there was no wall around Folsom, asked Murphy how he managed to keep the “cons” there. “That’s simple,” he said. “I’ve got one half of them watching the other half.” His system caused many murders and assaults and at last it climaxed in the bloodiest prison break in the history of California.
Opium was the medium of exchange in the prison. About three hundred men used it habitually and a hundred more, occasionally. Incoming prisoners smuggled money in and we bribed the poorly paid guards to buy hop at Sacramento. No prisoner was allowed to buy anything through the office. The trusties stole every movable article they could from the guards’ and warden’s quarters and peddled them to us in the prison for their rations of hop. The “cons” were divided roughly into three groups. One group played the officers’ game, working in the offices or holding down other soft jobs where they could loaf about the place and spy and snitch on the others. Murphy rewarded them all. He gave the best snitches the biggest beefsteaks. Another and larger group openly antagonized the officers, engineering hop deals, planning the murder of stool pigeons, and promoting escapes.
Between these two groups was a small bunch of convicts who did not handle hop or curry favor with the officers. They were the best conducted prisoners there, yet they were ground to pieces by the two stronger factions. They got fag ends of food in the convict mess and wore the patched-up clothes of the others.
I had some thought of getting off the hop when I got to Folsom and of keeping my nose clean and trying to shorten my time by making a parole. But I saw quickly all that was impossible for me and that I would belucky if I earned my credits. I joined the schemers and soon had my share of the opium which meant power and influence. We sold the hop to those who had money and with the money we bought more. Also we paid guards to smuggle in sugar, butter, and other food.
Conditions at San Quentin were the same. Martin Aguirre became warden there under Governor Gage. Aguirre introduced the strait-jacket punishment and I have been told he did it on the suggestion of a convict. This brutal and inhuman form of torture had been condemned in English prisons years before as dangerous to life and limb. Yet this man was permitted to revive it in California and its use was continued until Hiram Johnson became governor.
Let it be said to this humane and enlightened gentleman’s everlasting credit that one of his first official acts was to banish the jacket and other brutalities from California prisons forever. Captain Murphy welcomed the jacket as something superior to anything he had at Folsom in the way of punishment. Up to that time the prisoners were “regulated” by long terms in the dungeons on bread and water, loss of credits, or by hanging them up by the wrists till they were on tiptoe. When Dirty Dick saw what could be done with the jacket he came into the stoneyard and declared himself openly, “I’ve got something now that will make you tough birds snitch on yourselves.”
The killing and maiming of convicts in the strait-jackets are matters of record and too well known to call for any notice in this story. At Folsom I saw the jacket making beasts of the convicts and brutes of their keepers. I saw Jakey Oppenheimer transformed froma well-intentioned prisoner into a murder maniac whose wanton killings and assaults in prison brought him “under the rope” in the end. I saw the convicts throw their hats in the air and shout for joy when Warden Charles Aull died.
Thomas Wilkinson followed him as warden.
The tasks were increased, the food rations cut, and even the convict stripes were made thinner and cheaper. These abuses, coupled with brutal strait-jacketings for the slightest infraction of rules, crystallized all the hatred, despair, and hopelessness in the prison. All the convicts needed was an organizer, a leader. He appeared in the person of Dick Gordon. With a sentence of forty-five years and a prior prison experience, Gordon saw no chance of getting out on the square and began planning to escape. He was young—about twenty-three—modest, kindly, intelligent. He came to Folsom with a reputation for doing things on the outside and for being on the square. With great care and diplomacy he sorted out a dozen men and his plan was laid down for the getaway. It was simple and direct. Every Monday morning there were at least a dozen officers and guards at the prison office.
The warden was always there to get everything under way; the captain to try all prisoners for offenses committed between Saturday evening and Monday morning; the overseer to plan the week’s work; the commissary to give out clothing, and the turnkey to listen to requests for changing of cells. This meant there were always thirty or forty prisoners at the office.
The plan was for Gordon and his men to mingle with others at the captain’s office. When the signal was given they were to rush the officers, who wereunarmed, put a knife at the throat of every one, and march them all out through the guard line, using them as shields against the gatling-gun fire from guard towers that encircled the prison. For once Captain Murphy’s carefully built-up system of spying failed him; it toppled on him, crushed him, and brought about his dismissal from the prison.
His spies, when things were dull, often fabricated plots and stories to hold their jobs. Sunday, before the break, they reported to Murphy that something was brewing in the prison. He ordered fifty suspected men searched but nothing was found. The knives Gordon and his men were to use were being carried about by a “harmless” short-time convict, who kept by himself and was not suspected.
Murphy, finding nothing wrong after the search, put the reports down to over-zealousness by his stool pigeons and forgot them.
The next morning the knives were distributed and the dozen men dropped out of the line at the captain’s office as the men went out to work. Every officer in the prison except the doctor was captured.
The only guard that resisted was killed instantly, cut to pieces. The only officer that resisted was Cochrane, the turnkey, the man who personally laced up the strait-jacket victims. He was hated bitterly and every man that got near enough put a knife into him. He was cut a dozen times and left for dead. He recovered, and later took his grudge out by brutalities to prisoners who had never harmed him.
Gordon and his men marched their captives to the prison armory. Under threat of death the warden ordered the guard in charge to open it. Taking all thearms and ammunition they could carry they destroyed the balance and still using the officers as shields marched them off the prison grounds and into the woods. Here some of the escapes demanded Dirty Dick’s life for the things he had done to them, but Gordon had his way. “No murder” was his order and he enforced it. At sundown the captives were released. The escapes scattered. Gordon went his way alone and, though hunted for years, was never taken.
Five others of the twelve are still at liberty. The other six were captured here and there. Three of them were hanged, and the remaining three sentenced to life imprisonment, paroled after many years, and are living within the law.
When things cooled down the people of California wanted to know how men could be driven to such desperation that they captured and cut down officers and guards, rushed and took a gatling-gun tower with nothing but crude knives made in the prison blacksmith shop. This bloody affair called attention to the terrible conditions and proved the beginning of the end of prison cruelty in California.
After the break Folsom was a hell. The warden and Captain Murphy began taking revenge on friends of the escapes. We were brought into the office and questioned. I answered all questions respectfully, disclaimed any knowledge of the break, and avoided punishment at that time. Warden Wilkinson was removed and Archibald Yell of Sacramento took his place. He had no experience and was forced to feel his way slowly. He had to depend on Murphy. This put him in virtual control of the convicts and his lust forrevenge went unchecked. I was on his list and he soon got me. I had but three months to serve when I was slated for the strait-jacket. I knew the captain wanted to get my credits, which amounted to two years and eight months. Murphy had me brought into his office, where he said he had information that I was holding opium. If I had admitted this they could have taken away my entire good time. I denied it.
“Take him to the doctor,” the captain ordered. That meant I was to be examined as to my physical condition before they put me in the jacket. This worried me; I was not sure whether I would snitch on myself and give up the hop. Some stanch men had weakened in the jacket. I thought I could stick it out and made up my mind to. I had been flogged and starved and third-degreed before going to Folsom and had taken them all with a grin, but I was not sure of myself in the jacket. Many prisoners claimed they gave up information on themselves and friends while delirious or semiconscious in the jacket, and that was what alarmed me. I preferred death to the loss of my credits.
While waiting for the doctor I got word to a friend who was holding my hop to throw it in the canal at once. In this way I figured I was protecting my credits even from myself. The doctor OK-ed me and I was taken into the dungeon, where Cochrane, now recovered from his terrible wounds, was waiting with the jacket. I saw it was a piece of heavy canvas about four feet long and wide enough to go around a man’s body. There were long pockets sewed to the inner side of it into which my arms were thrust. I was then thrown on the floor face down and the jacket was laced up theback. The edges of the jacket were fitted with eyeholes and the thing was tightened up with a soft, stout rope just as a lady’s shoe is laced. It can be drawn tight enough to stop the circulation of blood, or the breath.
While Cochrane was tightening the jacket he said: “You fellows tried to kill me; now it’s my time.” When he had me squeezed tight enough he turned me over on my back and went to the cell door. “When you’re ready to snitch on yourself, Blacky, just sing out,” he said as he locked me in.
I will not harrow the reader with a description of the torture. The jacket is no longer in use and no purpose would be served by living over those three days in the “bag.” Every hour Cochrane came in and asked if I was ready to give up the hop. When I denied having it, he tightened me up some more and went away. The torture became maddening. Some time during the second day I rolled over to the wall and beat my forehead against it trying to knock myself “out.” Cochrane came in, saw what I was doing, and dragged me back to the middle of the cell. I hadn’t strength enough left to roll back to the wall, so I stayed there and suffered. A guard looked in and there was real sympathy in his voice. He said: “Why don’t you scream, make a noise? They might let you out; they don’t want to kill anybody any more.” I didn’t want my friends to hear me screaming; I kept still. It wouldn’t have done any good, anyway.
On the evening of the second day the doctor came and felt the pulse in my temple. He then ordered me taken out for the night. They took the thing off and I collapsed in one corner. There was a wooden cup ofwater on the cell floor and I took a small mouthful only, because it would make the jacket so much worse when I was put back in it. My fear of snitching was gone now. The very ferocity of the punishment had made me a wild beast.
I crawled around the cell looking for something I could use to open a vein or artery; I wanted to die. All I found was my shoes. I tried to dig a nail out of one of the heels, but only broke my finger nails. At last I loosened one of the small metal eyes where the shoe is laced and with the heel of my shoe beat it out flat on the cement floor. After rubbing the metal on the floor for an hour I got an edge on it sharp enough to open the skin but it would not cut the vein. Every time I touched the vein it jumped out from under my crude blade. The sensation was something like touching a live wire, like an electric shock. Finally I gave it up and lay down to wait for morning.
I had an opium habit, but suffered so from the jacket that I forgot all about the hop—another proof to me that the habit is mostly mental.
Cochrane came at eight o’clock the next morning. I denied having hop and out came the jacket. All that day I was only half conscious, dopey. I don’t think I suffered as much as on the previous day. Some time in the night they released me, and I lay on the floor in a stupor. I don’t know how long. Toward morning my mind cleared and I felt that another day would finish me. I decided I would send for Captain Murphy after they put me back in the jacket and ask him to take me down to the bank of the canal where I worked so I could dig up the hop from its plant and give it to him. I was liked by the “cons” and knewhe would go with me personally, so my friends could see him triumphing over me. At the canal, instead of giving him hop I intended to throw my arms around him and drag him to the bottom, where we would both “cease from troubling.”
The fourth morning Cochrane said: “You’re a damn fool; better give up your hop. You can’t finish out the day.” I waited for him to put me in. He held up the “bag” in front of me. I was sitting on the floor. “Get up,” he said. I didn’t; I couldn’t; I was too weak. With a gesture of disgust he threw the jacket out the door into the corridor. Motioning to a couple of trusty prisoners, he said: “Take him away.” They helped me to my cell and into my bunk. I lay there half dead, but victorious. My cellmate came at noon and slipped me a jolt of hop. I took it and felt better. He had not even thrown it away as I asked. “I knew you wouldn’t squawk,” he said, “so I held on to it.”
My three months passed quickly enough and I was released, still feeling the effects of the jacket. When I got out I held up my hand and swore I would never make another friend or do another decent thing. I borrowed a gun and got money. I returned to Folsom by stealth and flooded the place with hop. I went about the country for months with but one thing in my mind, a sort of vicious hatred of everybody and everything. As much as possible I shunned even my own kind—thieves.
Then back to San Francisco again where I fell into a stool-pigeon trap. Captain “Steve” Bunner, who now chases policemen, was then a very plain, plain-clothes “dick,” chasing burglars and stick-ups. He arrested me. He says I tried to shoot him but that hebears me no malice. I say he got me a twenty-five year sentence, and I bear him no malice; and to-day, while we are not exactly bosom friends, we certainly are not enemies. I had no money to take an appeal from this stiff sentence, but an attorney came and volunteered his services, saying: “I was in the district attorney’s office when you were sent to Folsom and I know you got jobbed. I’ll take your case for nothing.”
While waiting on appeal the great earthquake and fire occurred. All the records in my case were destroyed. I could not be sent to prison, and the attorney could not get me out, so I became a permanent fixture in the county jail.
The old Broadway county jail was a stout structure and resisted the quake, but was fire-swept and abandoned. When the fire threatened, all prisoners were removed to Alcatraz Island and later to the branch jail at Ingleside. I was there over six years and the things that happened there during that time would fill a book.
During the graft prosecution that followed the fire, Ingleside housed the mayor, the political boss of San Francisco, and many of the supervisors. A looting banker was there, many strikebreakers indicted for the murder of union men during the car strike, and soldiers for wantonly shooting down citizens while the city burned. Jack Johnson, the colored heavyweight champion, was with us for thirty days for speeding.
Money was plentiful in the jail. The grocer came every day, and we all got enough to eat. The political boss bought many books and founded a library. He also got a big phonograph that was kept going all day and far into the night. I was “appointed” jaillibrarian, and at once catalogued the books and installed them in an empty cell.
The jail was a cross between a political headquarters and an industrial plant. The political prisoners did politics, and the prisoners whose records were burned in the fire turned to industry.
We got contracts to address envelopes and sublet the work to others. We sewed beads on “genuine” Indian moccasins for a concern downtown. Best of all, we bought cheap jewelry from mail-order houses and sold it at a profit to visitors, giving them to understand that it was stolen stuff we had smuggled in with us.
One by one, those whose records were destroyed by the fire made application to have them restored in order to perfect their appeals. In the reconstruction of those records they lost their valuable points on appeal and one by one they were turned down by the higher court. I made no move, but decided to stay in the jail rather than go back to Folsom, although conditions there had been greatly improved by Warden Yell, who soon put Captain Murphy out and won the confidence of the convicts by treating them on the square.
At last a visiting grand-jury committee reported to the district attorney that there was a prisoner at Ingleside whose case had been pending more than six years, and recommended that something be done with it. He at once put me on the docket for restoration of records.
My attorney had retired, and with money I had saved from work and speculations in jail I got a new lawyer. I had all the criminal lawyers in San Francisco doped out like race horses by this time, and mychoice was Sam Newburgh. I had seen him beat some of the toughest cases that ever went to trial. Not only that, I had seen him go down in his pocket and give clients money after he got them out. He never weakened, never lay down, or ran out on a man—money or no money.
Newburgh at once threw down a most formidable barrage of objections and technicalities. The prosecution got busy and, as usual, the defendant was lost sight of in the smoke of battle. I had little hope of actually beating the case; the best I could expect was a new trial and maybe a sentence I could do instead of one that would do me.
But while my affairs were at this stage a new hope appeared. I had made a few new outside friends by this time. One of them especially, a fine, noble woman, who was interested in helping us all, concerned herself to do what she could for me.
About this time Fremont Older, now editor ofThe Call, had helped the late Donald Lowrie, whose writings did for American prisons what John Howard’s did for those of England.
This woman, who was one of Mr. Older’s friends, wrote him and said:
“By way of thanking you for helping Lowrie I am going to give you another man to assist. He is John Black, at the Ingleside jail. I wish you would see him.”
He called at the jail soon, but instead of having me out to the office he came down to my cell, squeezed his bulk through the doorway, and sat down on the edge of my bunk. Waving the guard away, he produced cigars, helped me to a light, and asked, in a voice thatrang to me like a twenty-dollar piece, what he could do for me. For once all my mistrust, suspicion, and hatred vanished.
I said: “Mr. Older, I’m afraid you will waste a lot of valuable time trying to do anything for me. I have twenty-five years. I’m guilty. I’m plastered over with prior convictions. The police hate me, the jailers dislike me because I tried to escape, and the trial judge is sore because I’ve done everything possible to obstruct the judgment.”
I told him I was a hop fiend, that I had used it for ten years, and was still using it. I told him I was tired of stealing and tired of living. I told him there was but one thing I could say for myself. I had never broken my word either to a thief or a policeman. I told him if he did help me out I would give him my word to quit stealing. He went away, saying: “This looks pretty tough, but I will try.”
He at once saw Judge Dunne, who sentenced me, and suggested probation on the ground of my long confinement and dangerous physical condition.
Mr. Older was the powerful editor of a newspaper and a long-time friend of the judge. He was stared at as if he had gone mad, and his suggestion met with a cold, flat, final turndown. He sent word to me that the judge was adamant and nothing could be done. I saw my case was tough indeed when he couldn’t help me, and began planning a getaway.
I will not say there is honor among thieves. But I maintain that the thieves I knew had something that served as a good substitute for honor. I thought over all my thief friends and at last chose one and sent for him. He got me saws, and I cut bars in my door.
On a propitious night he cut the window bars. I was too weak to pull myself up to the window, and he had to reach in, lift me bodily, and drop me on the ground outside.
Strange as it may sound, the fresh, cool night air had the same effect on me that the foul air of a sewer would have on a healthy, normal human. It overcame me. I was not able to walk at first, and my rescuer had to support me on our way to the car line.
Before daylight and before the escape was discovered I was safely planted in a room in Oakland, where I stayed and was nursed back to life, fed and protected by my friend.
After waiting for a couple of weeks for the hue and cry to subside, he stowed me away in a sleeper one night at Richmond on a northbound train with a ticket to Vancouver, B.C.
County constables and town whittlers beat up the jungles, searched box cars and brakebeams; city dicks explored the hop joints and hangouts for me and the reward offered, but I traveled safely as a first-class passenger on a first-class train.
No police officer who knows his business would think of looking in a Pullman sleeper or diner for a fugitive hop fiend yegg with a twenty-five-year sentence hanging on him.
Arriving safely at Vancouver, I took stock and found myself sick, weighing one hundred and ten pounds, with a ferocious hop habit, about ten dollars, and a big pistol—the gatherings of forty years.
Then came a foggy night. Necessity and Opportunity met, and I went away with a bundle of bank notes and some certified checks. The checks went intothe first mail box as an apology from Necessity to Opportunity.
Then began the toughest battle of my life. Opium, the Judas of drugs, that kisses and betrays, had a good grip on me, and I prepared to break it. The last words of my rescuer when he put me in the train rang in my ears:
“Good-by and good luck, Blacky. And you’d better lay away from that hop or it’ll make a bum of you.”