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Aug 11, 2014 · Numerous films over the years include depictions of Alcatraz, but director John Boorman’s “Point Blank” (1967) was the first major motion picture to be filmed on location at the prison. The ...
Feb 1, 2024 · Transformation into a Federal Penitentiary. In 1933, the island was transferred from the U.S. Army to the Department of Justice, and in 1934, Alcatraz was repurposed as a federal penitentiary designed to hold the most troublesome inmates from other prisons—individuals who had a history of escape attempts or were exceedingly violent.
United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, also known simply as Alcatraz ( English: / ˈælkəˌtræz /, Spanish: [ a l k a ˈ t ɾ a s] "the gannet ") or The Rock, was a maximum security federal prison on Alcatraz Island, 1.25 miles (2.01 km) off the coast of San Francisco, California, United States. The site of a fort since the 1850s, the ...
- Inmate #85: Al 'Scarface' Capone
- Inmate #110: Roy Gardner
- Inmate #117: George 'Machine Gun' Kelly
- Inmate #325: Alvin 'Creepy' Karpis
- Inmate #594: Robert 'Birdman' Stroud
- Inmate #1428: James 'Whitey' Bulger
- Inmate #1518: Meyer 'Mickey' Cohen
Conviction:Tax evasion Time Served at Alcatraz:5 years (1934–1939) Post-Term:mental illness, death from syphilis By the time Al Caponearrived at Alcatraz on the morning of August 22, 1934, he was past his peak as a crime kingpin. He had been sentenced to an 11-year term in 1931 after several lengthy court cases that focused more on his errant decla...
Conviction: Armed robbery Time Served at Alcatraz:2 years (1934–1936) Post-Term:author, suicide Alcatraz was repurposed by the federal government from a military prison to a general federal prison in 1933 expressly to deal with criminals like Roy G. Gardner, the man who was nicknamed “King of the Escape Artists.” Gardner seemed to be an outlaw from...
Conviction:Kidnapping Time Served at Alcatraz: 17 years (1934–1951) Post-Term: died of a heart attack in jail It couldn’t be said that many of the criminals who ended up in Alcatraz were from good families, but Machine Gun Kellywas raised in a well-off Memphis household and even attended some college. A sudden marriage led him to drop out of school...
Conviction: Kidnapping Time Served at Alcatraz: 26 years (1936–1962) Post-Term: author, pill overdose Like "Machine Gun" Kelly, Alvin Francis Karpowicz saw kidnapping as an easier way to make large sums of money than bank robbing. Known as “Creepy” by fellow gang members for his unsettling grin, the native Canadian became the brains behind the Bark...
Conviction:Murder Time Served at Alcatraz: 17 years (1942–1959) Post-Term:death by natural causes in jail Possibly the most famous inmate in the history of Alcatraz is Robert Stroud, the so-called "Birdman of Alcatraz." This is due to a very successful 1962 movie (loosely) based on his life starring Burt Lancaster. The title of the film has given r...
Conviction:Armed robbery Time Served at Alcatraz:3 years (1959–1962) Post-Term:killed in prison Most people think of Alcatraz as a relic of past times, a chapter in a long-closed history of crime in America, but there are former inmates of Alcatraz who are still alive today. One of the most notorious is James “Whitey” Bulger, a man who began his ca...
Conviction:Tax evasion Time Served at Alcatraz: about a year, on and off (1961–1963) Post-Term: prison pipe attack, natural death Alcatraz wasn’t very far from closing when Meyer Harris “Mickey” Cohen made his two brief visits. Convicted of tax evasion for the second time in 10 years, Cohen served his time at Alcatraz in two parts – he was actually...
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- Aaron Randle
- 11 min
- The Hopi Nineteen. In 1894, when Alcatraz was still operating as a military prison, the U.S. government arrested 19 Hopi men for refusing to send their children to American assimilation boarding schools almost 1,000 miles away from their reservation in Oraibi, Arizona.
- Frank Lucas Bolt. Little has been documented about Alcatraz’s LGBTQ+ prisoners, but gay men did play a role in the infamous prison. In fact, it was a queer man, Frank Lucas Bolt, who served as the prison’s first official inmate.
- Al Capone. For notorious Chicago-based mobster Al Capone, doing hard time before Alcatraz was rarely that hard. During earlier stints in Atlanta and other prisons, Capone had recruited guards to work on his payroll and enjoyed special privileges—from home-cooked meals and cushy bedding to unlimited access to the warden.
- Robert Stroud, a.k.a. the 'Bird Man' of Alcatraz. By the time Robert Stroud was transferred to Alcatraz in 1942, he had already established himself as one of the most dangerous—and notorious—prisoners in America, with a rap sheet already decades long.
This is a list of notable inmates of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. An inmate register reveals that there were 1576 prisoners in total which were held at Alcatraz during its time as a Federal Penitentiary, between 1934 and 1963, although figures reported have varied and some have stated it to be 1557.
Among its famous denizens were Al Capone, George (“Machine Gun”) Kelly, and Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” Although Alcatraz was able to house 450 convicts in cells that measured about 10 feet by 4.5 feet (3 metres by 1.5 metres), no more than 250 prisoners ever occupied the island at one time.
