Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [92]
Jimmy’s loyalty to friends had no limits, even if the friends lived far from Southie. Two such friends were from Alcatraz, where Jimmy served time from 1958 to 1963. Jimmy often wore the belt buckle engraved with “Alcatraz, 1934–1963” that FBI agent Nick Gianturco had given to him. Clarence Carnes was a close friend of Jimmy’s during his years there, and the two of them had been involved in fights. Carnes had come to Alcatraz in 1945 at age eighteen, the youngest inmate ever imprisoned there. He’d been part of the May 1946 escape attempt in which six prisoners killed two guards and the Marines were called in to restore order. Carnes was spared the death penalty that two of the escapees received because he had not taken part in the murders of the two guards.
After Carnes died in 1988 and was buried in a pauper’s grave outside a Missouri prison hospital, Jimmy made arrangements to have his body exhumed and buried in a Native American funeral in Oklahoma. Jimmy had the funeral home take care of the details, and then he and Theresa flew out to Oklahoma, rented a car, and drove to the burial ground. The arrangements cost him $15,000 to $20,000.
The stories that Carnes was gay and died of AIDS were bullshit. He was an alcoholic, which was why he had gotten into trouble in the first place. At age sixteen, drunk, he’d held up a gas station and killed the attendant, for which he received a life sentence at Oklahoma State Reformatory. After an escape attempt there, he was transferred to Leavenworth and later sent to Alcatraz.
Even when he was eventually paroled, Carnes violated his parole and ended up back in prison where, on a dialysis machine, he died at age sixty-one from cirrhosis of the liver, not AIDS. At the Native American funeral ceremony, Jimmy met Carnes’s relatives, who thanked him for what he’d done.
Carnes wasn’t the only friend from Alcatraz whom Jimmy remembered. During a visit to Alcatraz after his release, Jimmy met Whitey Thompson, a former inmate who was now giving tours there. Thompson had been at Alcatraz from 1958 to 1962, but he hadn’t been a high-profile inmate, and he and Jimmy hadn’t known each other. None of the different guys from Alcatraz whom Jimmy had kept in touch with remembered Thompson, either. But when Thompson told Jimmy he was writing a book about his experiences at Alcatraz, Jimmy gave him $1,500 toward the book.
In 1989, after Jimmy got a copy of the finished autobiography, titled Last Train to Alcatraz and later retitled Rock Hard, he was furious. Whitey Thompson had written about another inmate, Alvin Karpis, referring to him as Creepy Karpis, the name law enforcement, which liked to give people nicknames to make them seem more sinister, had hung on him. Karpis had been with the Ma Barker gang and had served time in Alcatraz from 1936 to 1962.
Jimmy told me Karpis’s own explanation of how he’d been captured in 1936. J. Edgar Hoover had declared him Public Enemy #1. When the feds finally surrounded Karpis and threw their guns on him, Hoover was around the corner hiding behind the bushes. He yelled out to his men, “Is it safe? Do you have him?”
“It’s all right, boss,” they told him. When they had subdued Karpis on the ground, Hoover came out from the bushes and put the handcuffs on him. That way, he could say he was the one who got Karpis.
No one who knew Karpis ever called him “Creepy.” But one time Karpis and another guy were digging an escape