Letters From Alcatraz - Michael Esslinger [112]
Machine Gun Kelly (without hat) enjoying his time on the Alcatraz Recreation Yard. Seated next to him (wearing hat) is Willie Radkay.
Basil “The Owl” Banghart and Machine Gun Kelly were close friends at Alcatraz.
Letters from Kelly to the Attorney General, requesting an immediate transfer from Alcatraz.
Inmate Willie Radkay, who occupied a cell next to Kelly, stated that he had many fond memories of getting to know him, and working together in the prison Industries along with Basil “The Owl” Banghart. Every day they would work side-by-side, enduring all of Kelly’s “big tales.” When asked about his most prominent memory of living next to Machine Gun, Radkay said that nearly every night Kelly would accuse Willie of snoring, reach out of his cell and slap him with a magazine.
Kelly wrote several remorseful letters to Urschel begging his help in pleading his case. His letters provide a genuine sense of the pain and loneliness he suffered during his imprisonment on the Rock. In one letter written to Charles Urschel on April 11, 1940, Kelly penned perhaps some of the most profound observations ever written on the subjects of crime, and time served on America’s “Devil’s Island.” He wrote in part:
I feel at times you wonder how I’m standing up under my penal servitude, and what is my attitude of mind. It is natural that you should be infinitely curious. Incidentally, let me say that you have missed something in not having had the experience for yourself. No letters, no amount of talk, and still more, no literary description in second-rate books, and books on crime cannot but be second-rate – could ever give you the faintest idea of the reality.
No one can know what it’s like to suffer from the sort of intellectual atrophy, the pernicious mental scurvy, that come of long privation of all the things that make life real; because even the analogy of thirst can’t possibly give you an inkling of what it’s like to be tortured by the absence of everything that makes life worth living.
Maybe you have asked yourself, “How can a man of even ordinary intelligence put up with this kind of life, day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year.” To put it more mildly still, what is this life of mine like, you might wonder, and whence do I draw sufficient courage to endure it.
To begin with, these five words seem written in fire on the walls of my cell: “Nothing can be worth this.” This – kind of life I’m leading. That is the final word of wisdom so far as crime is concerned. Everything else is mere fine writing...
George Kelly’s Leavenworth mug shot, taken in 1951 (top) and (bottom) the last known living photo of Machine Gun Kelly, taken just prior his death in 1954.
A telegram to the Director of the Bureau of Prisons, announcing George Kelly’s death in 1954.
Kathryn Kelly playing the piano at the women’s correctional facility in Ohio, and prison portrait taken during the same period.
R.G. (Boss) Shannon, takes a last look at George Kelly, during the famed gunman's funeral in Cottondale, Texas on July 27, 1954. Shannon also served time in prison for his part in the kidnapping of Charles Urscel.
Charles Urschel apparently never responded to any of Kelly’s letters. George “Machine Gun” Kelly would spend seventeen years on Alcatraz and was returned to Leavenworth in 1951. Kelly died of a heart attack on July 18, 1954. Ironically, it was his fifty-ninth birthday. Kathryn was released from prison just four years following Kelly’s death, and took a job at an Oklahoma hospital as a bookkeeper. Albert Bates died of a heart attack on July 4, 1948, while still an inmate at Alcatraz.
Morton Sobell
Morton Sobell
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
In March of 1951, Morton Sobell,