Alcatraz was sold to the country as the prison nobody could leave, and in twenty-nine years no escape was ever confirmed; the one man known to have reached the San Francisco shore alive did it in December 1962 with a shirt full of surgical gloves

On August 11, 1934, the Justice Department opened the prison it had spent a year promising the country, and reporters were on the San Francisco waterfront waiting for a trainload of the worst men in the federal system.

Fourteen prisoners came in quietly from McNeil Island, in Washington State, and the papers missed them entirely.

Warden James A. Johnston had wanted a small first group, to rehearse the receiving routine he had worked out on paper. When the celebrities landed later that month he knew where every man would stand.

Why the Army had the island first

Juan Manuel de Ayala put "Isla de los Alcatraces" on his chart of the bay on August 12, 1775, and he was labeling the island now called Yerba Buena. Frederick Beechey, a British surveyor in 1826, moved the name across to the rock. (Translators still argue over whether the word meant pelicans, gannets or cormorants; the birds are the one constant in this story.)

Army engineers began fortifying the island in 1853, and by early 1865 a garrison of 433 worked 105 cannons that were never once fired at an enemy. The fort's real work was holding people, starting with Confederate sympathizers.

In November 1894, nineteen Hopi men from Orayvi were arrested for sedition after refusing to hand their children to federal boarding schools. Lomahongiwma, Yukiwma and Heevi'ima were among them. They spent most of 1895 sawing logs into shorter lengths, and their keepers took them on supervised outings to see San Francisco public schools.

The concrete cellhouse everyone photographs went up between 1909 and 1912 to a design by Major Reuben Turner. When the Army gave the island up in October 1933, Attorney General Homer Cummings and prisons director Sanford Bates got what they wanted: somewhere to send the men other wardens could not hold.

What Al Capone actually did there

He did laundry.

Capone arrived on August 22, 1934, at the end of a three-car train from Atlanta that was rerouted to Tiburon, uncoupled from its locomotive, rolled onto a railroad barge and towed across by tug. He was registered as AZ-85. After a year of asking he got a prison band that practiced twenty minutes a day; he played banjo, later mandola.

The syphilis he had carried untreated for years finished him. Doctors tried inducing fevers to burn it out, which nearly killed him, and by 1938 he was not coherent enough to be a prisoner in any useful sense. He left for Terminal Island in January 1939. He is the reason most people can name this island, and he spent his years on it folding sheets.

The two days in May 1946

Bernard Coy studied the cellhouse gun gallery for months and got into it. Six men ended up loose in the block with rifles, and one door stood between them and the dock.

They could not open it. Officer William Miller had kept key 107 on him against regulations and hidden it in a toilet; by the time the prisoners found it they had jammed the lock trying everything else. Miller was shot by Joseph Cretzer and died the next day, and Officer Harold Stites was killed by friendly fire. Two Marine platoons came over from Treasure Island and drilled through the roof to drop grenades into the corridor below.

Did anyone escape Alcatraz?

Officially, no. Over twenty-nine years, 36 men made 14 attempts: 23 were caught, 6 were shot dead, 2 drowned, and 5 are carried as missing and presumed drowned.

Three of those five went out on the night of June 11, 1962. Frank Morris was AZ1441, John Anglin AZ1476, his brother Clarence AZ1485. Over months they widened the ventilator holes under their cell sinks with sharpened spoons and a drill built from a stolen vacuum cleaner motor, then built a workshop on the block's vacant top tier. The dummy heads they left in their bunks were soap, toothpaste, concrete dust and toilet paper, finished with hair swept up in the barbershop. Their raft ran six feet by fourteen, sewn from more than fifty raincoats.

Allen West's cement had hardened around his own grille. He was still chipping at it when the others left, and he stayed.

Nobody noticed until seven the next morning.

Here is the whole of the physical evidence. A paddle turned up on June 14 about 200 yards off Angel Island, with a plastic-wrapped packet holding photographs and addresses of the Anglins' relatives. A life vest washed up near the Golden Gate on June 21 and another off Alcatraz the next day. No bodies, then or since.

The FBI closed its file in December 1979, concluding the raft sank. The U.S. Marshals Service never closed anything, and the three remain on its wanted list. In 2013 the San Francisco police received a letter from a writer claiming to be John Anglin; the analysis came back inconclusive. Photographs said to show the brothers in Brazil in 1975 were rated "more than likely," well short of an identification.

Nobody knows. Everything that supports survival is material that could neither convict nor clear a man in court, and the people who repeat it tend to leave that part out.

The water, though, can be beaten. On December 16, 1962, John Paul Scott got out a kitchen window and swam for the city on water wings made from a knotted denim shirt stuffed with inflated surgical gloves. Teenagers found him on the rocks at Fort Point, too cold to stand. He was taken to the Presidio hospital and returned to his cell.

Why Alcatraz closed

The escapes did not close Alcatraz. The plumbing did.

The island has no fresh water, so nearly a million gallons a week had to be barged out to it, and salt air had been chewing the concrete for half a century. Restoration was put at three to five million dollars. Each prisoner cost $10.10 a day against $3.00 at Atlanta, for a population averaging 260 to 275 men.

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered it shut. On March 21, 1963, the press was invited to watch the last 27 inmates walk down the corridor the guards called Broadway. Frank Weatherman, AZ-1576, holder of the final number issued, was the last man onto the boat T-451. Asked how it felt to be leaving, he said Alcatraz was never no good for anybody.

Who took the island next

On November 20, 1969, 89 people landed and claimed it as Indians of All Tribes, under an 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie provision covering abandoned federal land. Richard Oakes and LaNada Means led it and John Trudell broadcast from the island; marshals took off the last fifteen on June 11, 1971.

They never got the cultural center they asked for. Nixon's message to Congress of July 8, 1970 repudiated termination, and the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act followed five years later.

The island now

The National Park Service took over in 1972, and the site became a National Historic Landmark in 1986. More than 1.5 million people go out every year, returning roughly $60 million.

The birds have done better than anyone. Brandt's cormorants started renesting in the early 1990s with a handful of nests and reached 3,301 breeding pairs in 2021, which is why the west side closes to visitors from February through June.

In May 2025 President Trump said he wanted the penitentiary reopened, and the budget request submitted in April 2026 asks Congress for $152 million against a job outside estimates put past a quarter of a billion. Nothing has repealed the 1963 ledger. Whatever Congress decides about the buildings, the water still has to come across on a barge, and the cormorants will be nesting on the west side again in February.

Sources

• Federal Bureau of Prisons, "Alcatraz," on population, escape statistics and the closure costs
• Western Neighborhoods Project / OpenSFHistory, "Train to Alcatraz: A Closer Look" (2018), on the August 1934 arrivals and the Tiburon barge
• National Park Service, "Hopi Prisoners on the Rock," for the 1894–95 imprisonment and the men's names
• The Mob Museum, "Chicago crime boss Al Capone transferred to Alcatraz 90 years ago this month," and History.com, "How Al Capone Spent His Time in Alcatraz"
• Wikipedia, "Alcatraz Island," "Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary," "June 1962 Alcatraz escape," "Battle of Alcatraz" and "John Paul Scott"
• KQED, "Trump Asks Congress for $152 Million to Reopen Alcatraz" (2026), and Audubon on the Alcatraz seabird colony