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relatives and wives of prisoners given permission to visit the island for one hour a month could only look at their husbands, sons, brothers, or fathers through thick bulletproof glass and talk through a guard-monitored telephone. Visitors and the men behind the glass were warned that any conversation relatedto crime, prison life, or other prisoners would result in immediate termination of the visit. Written communications between inmates and their families and their lawyers were severely limited, censored, and retyped by guards to eliminate the possibility of secret messages being conveyed into or out of the prison.
    The occasional official statements released over the years by Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington, D.C., and by Alcatraz wardens never satisfied the interest of the outside world in what was happening to Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly, to Ma Barker’s son Dock, to Alvin Karpis, Public Enemy no. 1, to kidnapper Thomas Robinson, to Floyd Hamilton, confederate of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, to the Fleisch brothers of Detroit’s “Purple Gang,” and to other prominent gangsters of the 1930s and 1940s, including Basil “The Owl” Banghart, John Paul Chase, partner of Baby Face Nelson, and confederates of John Dillinger, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and the Barker-Karpis mob. Bay Area reporters also wanted to hear about the well-known local bandit from Napa Valley, Roy Gardner, one of the country’s last train robbers.
    With only scant information about what was happening on the island, and able to observe directly only the occasional signs of trouble—escape sirens, sounds of gunfire, searchlight beams piercing the dark waters around the island, armed men on boats, stretchers being carried from the prison launch to waiting ambulances and to hearses—reporters relied on speculation and their imaginations in putting together the stories they knew the public craved. In addition to local newspaper accounts, articles about Alcatraz appeared in nearly every national magazine, from
Life
and the
Saturday Evening Post
to men’s magazines such as
True
and
Saga
. These were predictably sensationalized and wholly or partially fictitious. Anthony Turano’s 1938 article “America’s Torture Chamber,” for example, articulated a common theme—that punishment on the Rock, even for what the Bureau would call “the worst of the worst,” had gone too far:
    The [prison’s] immured tenants are constantly tantalized by the view of several alluring cities. On clear days they may even see the vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the closer sections of San Francisco. The barbarous effect is the same as chaining a starving man to a wall and spreading a feast beyond his reach. . . . One of the announced purposes of this regime of systematic cruelty was the general terrorization of the entire prison population of the federal government. The inferior convict who became unruly in such purgatories as Fort Leavenworth and Atlanta was threatened with a transfer to the full-fledged inferno of Alcatraz. Thus, the quality of therotten eggs in the general basket would be improved by picking out the most putrid ones for individual wrapping. . . . It may not be easy to wax sentimental about the tough hides of such personages as Al Capone and “Machine Gun” Kelly. . . . They must be securely segregated, of course, for the protection of the law-abiding population. [But] it is not easy to perceive the sociological wisdom of transforming convicted scoundrels into raving maniacs. Their summary execution would reflect more humanity and official dignity than the maintenance of a costly suite of torture chambers. . . . Alcatraz stands as a monument to human stupidity and pointless barbarity. 3
    With pronouncements such as Turano’s setting the tenor of the public’s response to Alcatraz, prison and Bureau officials found themselves with precisely the public relations problem they had tried to avoid. Ironically, the secrecy