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6 days ago · Capone is believed to be responsible for 300 deaths over the course of his time as head of Chicago's criminal underworld. ... Alcatraz was a military prison back in 1918, and Simmons was one of 30 ...
May 2, 2019 · Updated: Mar. 25, 2022. This is the real story of a prisoner at the infamous Alcatraz prison, incarcerated at the same time as Al Capone. f11photo/Shutterstock. This article was originally...
- Bryan Conway
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- The Hopi Nineteen
- Frank Lucas Bolt
- Al Capone
- Robert Stroud, A.K.A. The 'Bird Man' of Alcatraz
- Morton Sobell
- Robert Lipscomb
- Ellsworth 'Bumpy' Johnson
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 schoolsalmost 1,000 miles away from their reservation in Oraibi, Arizona. From the late 19th century well into the 20th, the federal government, following a policy of “save t...
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. Bolt was serving in the U.S. Army in Panama when he was convicted of sodomy in 1932 and sent to serve time at a Pacific area military priso...
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. That all stopped when Capone arrived at...
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. Stroud first entered the penitentiary system more than 30 years earlier, in 1909, when he was convicted of murder and imprisoned in Washington State...
At the height of the Cold War, Morton Sobell was sent to Alcatraz after being convicted, alongside Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Though nailed for conspiracy, Sobell wasn’t convicted of providing the Soviet Union with stolen nuclear secrets like the Rosenbergs. Still, FBI DirectorHoovercalled Sobell’s offen...
By the time Robert Lipscomb arrived at Alcatraz in 1954, the African American Cleveland native had spent most of his adult life in midwestern prisons for auto theft and counterfeiting. Suffering from paranoia, depression and an abusive childhood, Lipscomb was declared psychotic and institutionalized by the age of nine. A psychiatric evaluation, how...
Infamous Harlem crime boss Ellsworth Raymond “Bumpy” Johnson was another of the many oft-overlooked Black inmates housed on the Rock. Johnson came to Alcatraz in 1952, at the height of his reign as the so-called “Godfather of Harlem,” after he was sentenced to a 15-year stint for a drug conspiracy conviction. Johnson served the majority of that sen...
- Aaron Randle
- 11 min
- Inmate #85: Al 'Scarface' Capone. Conviction: Tax evasion. Time Served at Alcatraz: 5 years (1934–1939) Post-Term: mental illness, death from syphilis. By the time Al Capone arrived at Alcatraz on the morning of August 22, 1934, he was past his peak as a crime kingpin.
- Inmate #110: Roy Gardner. 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.”
- Inmate #117: George 'Machine Gun' Kelly. 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 Kelly was raised in a well-off Memphis household and even attended some college.
- Inmate #325: Alvin 'Creepy' Karpis. 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.
Mar 5, 2021 · To be an inmate in Alcatraz meant your days were regimented, your cell was tidy, and you had very few opportunities to interact with others, much less the outside world. By the time the prison closed in 1963, conditions had improved a bit, but Alcatraz never lost its reputation as the strictest prison ever operated in the United States.
Feb 2, 2022 · But what was life like in this notorious prison before it shut in 1963? One inmate per cell rule meant people actually asked to be imprisoned at Alcatraz. Alcatraz had 336 cells measuring 5 feet by 9 feet, each with a cot, a basin, and a toilet.
Aug 11, 2020 · In Chicago, Al Capone led a huge crime ring.Not only were these criminals robbing people blind, but they were getting away with it. Gangsters devised new ways to escape prisons. Inmates started riots and attacked guards.
