Letters From Alcatraz - Michael Esslinger [180]
At about the same time two other inmates who were assigned to painting details, Earl Egan and George Pichette, were walking up Park Avenue when they witnessed the activities that were transpiring just ahead. As Coy motioned them forward, Egan apparently indicated that he didn’t want any part of the escape. But the men weren’t taking any chances and Egan was also directed into the cell. Pichette had turned at the end of the cellblock and disappeared. The door of cell #404 was quickly racked closed, and Coy started running to the block control boxes and opening the cells of his other accomplices. Thompson, Cretzer, and younger inmate named Clarence Carnes all emerged from their cells in a state of near disbelief that Coy’s plan had actually succeeded, even to this point. Carnes seemed an unlikely type to participate in the escape, as he was the youngest inmate ever to be sentenced to the Rock at only eighteen.
When Coy had released his accomplices, he made a swift dash down the C Block utility corridor to where his tool set was hidden. Coy emerged from the passageway with a cotton pouch of the type that inmates generally used to carry their dominos into the recreation yard. While the other inmates stood watch for Burch in the West Gallery, and for any other correctional officers who might enter the cellhouse, Coy quickly stripped down to his underwear and with Cretzer’s help, smeared axle grease over his chest, head and extremities. He then briefly inventoried the tools in his sack and started climbing up the West End Gun Gallery from the juncture at Times Square and Michigan Avenue. Hand-over-hand, he scaled the barred cage until he reached the top.
An officer looks up toward the area where Bernard Coy scaled the gun galley. Using plumbing fixtures that had been fashioned into a makeshift bar-spreader; Coy quietly entered the Gallery and secured weapons.
The makeshift tool used by Coy to spread apart the bars at the top of the Gun Gallery.
Clenched in Coy’s teeth was the small bag containing his crudely fashioned bar-spreader device, which had been made from toilet fixtures in one of the prison workshops. He set the tool firmly between the two bars (which were approximately five-inches apart), and using pliers or some type of gripping wrench, he was able to exert enough force to create an opening nearly ten inches wide. With Cretzer eagerly watching his progress from below, Coy painfully squeezed his body through the opening and slipped into the West Gun Gallery.
Without delay, Coy secured a riot club and positioned himself in a low crouch so that Officer Burch couldn’t see him when looking through the window in the door. On Coy’s signal, Cretzer sharply tapped the recreation yard access door with Miller’s key ring, a standard indication to the gallery officer that the cellhouse guard needed a key for access. Burch was unknowingly being lured straight into an ambush. By now, Shockley had ceased his staged screaming fit and Corwin was sitting at his desk talking casually with D Block orderly Louis Fleish, the famed onetime leader of Detroit’s “Purple Gang” of the early 1930’s.
D-Block Orderly Louis Fleish.
When Burch passed through the doorway, Coy forcefully hurled the wooden door forward, throwing the unsuspecting guard off balance. With brutal force, Coy clubbed the officer and forced him to the floor, then strangled him till he lost consciousness. Inmate Jim Quillen later recalled that all of the residents of D Block could hear the struggle in the gallery, and the first rumor to travel down the row of cells was that the “hacks” were fighting among themselves. But the prisoners quickly realized that an inmate had amazingly managed to infiltrate the gun gallery.