I suppose my childhood was very much the same as that of any other kid who was born and raised in East LA, particularly during the Depression years before World War II. I was born April 5, 1922, the fourth boy and seventh child. Everyone I came to know in East LA had the same things in common: we were all poor, from large families, and doing everything we could to survive. By the time my two younger sisters came along, I had five sisters and three brothers as well as my mother, Dolores, and father, Jesús. Eleven of us...

The year was 1935 and I was thirteen years old. Even at that young age, I had heard many bad things about Preston, and I dreaded the idea of having to go. Early in the morning on the scheduled day for the transfer, a police officer in civilian clothes came to my cell and waited for the officers to unlock the door. As he waited, I could see him looking me over, probably to determine if I was big enough to give him any trouble. At that time I stood about five feet two inches, if I stretched a bit,...

Immediately after being booked, I was taken into a room and interrogated about the Tudisco murder by Detective Harry Freeman and some of the other cops from Homicide. There were Secret Service agents present in the room as well, waiting their turn to ask me about the stolen stamps.

Freeman started off right away. He punched me in the left eye while I was still handcuffed, but I refused to make any statements until my attorney was called. I didn’t know it at the time, but my attorney was on his way over to get me released on a writ...

I figured I had to do something now before the guard sounded an alarm, so I shot up quickly and told him not to move a muscle. It turned out to be a guard named John Harris. A terrified look came over his face, and he began hollering, so I knocked him off his feet with a flying tackle I had long practiced on the football field. I told Dillon to cover Harris’s mouth while I found something to tie him up with. He tried to cover Harris’s mouth with his hand, but Harris managed to bite down hard on...

Newly arrived in town, I found a small apartment that I liked and rented it for a month, until I could get myself situated. Not long after Dillon was caught, I was walking down a sidewalk with a couple of friends when I spotted a cop car slowly cruising down a sloping street in our direction. My instinct told me that I had been spotted, and I told the others to keep walking while I lagged behind. I stepped over to the curb and tried to hide behind a telephone pole.

The squad car came to a stop about a...

We went back across the street after breakfast and walked over to municipal court, where we took seats in the spectator section. The district attorney’s office had filed charges against me for numerous burglaries and robberies. I was also accused of hijacking a truck containing $250,000 worth of cigarettes. I had supposedly committed all these crimes since my escape from McNeil. That was the reason the U.S. marshals hadn’t come to pick me up right after my release from the hospital, because they were waiting for the disposition of state charges.

I had not been informed that those charges had...

Dillon and I were taken back to McNeil to await our transfer to “the Rock,” as it was nearly always called: Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Three days later I was awakened at one in the morning and taken out of the cell house to be handcuffed, shackled, and ferried to the mainland for our journey to San Francisco.

It was 2:00 a.m. exactly when we left, and we were driven nonstop all the way to San Francisco Bay and down to the waterfront facing Alcatraz Island. We arrived at the ferryboat dock at about six that evening when the sun had...

In isolation, you were locked up all the time and fed in your cell. On Tuesdays we were allowed to go to a small exercise yard for about an hour. This was all the outside activity we saw during the entire week. D block, the isolation block, is made up of three tiers, each holding fifteen cells. The general policy at Alcatraz was that between forty and fifty men were to always be locked up in isolation, about a fifth of the total population. The cells in isolation are like the cells in the general population, but they face a...

As I mentioned, Joe Cretzer was finally released from the hole around April 1946, and soon he brought up the subject of escape. From that point on, the idea took hold with Bernard Coy, Blackie Thompson, Clarence Carnes, Marvin Hubbard, me, and a few others.

From the beginning, the key aspect of the plan centered on the possibility of climbing out of the main cell house through one of the skylights in the ceiling. These were constructed of large panels of glass fitted together and positioned to form a slight arch over the opening in the roof. The prison designers...

Not long after the shooting started, Cretzer unlocked the door leading into the dining room. From there he shot a few rifle rounds at a guard named Levinson, who occupied the gun tower overlooking the yard. Levinson dropped to the floor inside the tower and did not attempt to return fire. Later we learned that he never moved a muscle for almost five hours until other guards took his position in order to shoot into the cell house. Before they climbed Levinson’s tower, the guards thought he might have somehow been captured because he never answered the phone, despite their...

It became a routine: after the authorities had confined me to isolation for a few weeks, I would retaliate once back in the general population, when the opportunity presented itself. I derived a great deal of pleasure from never being directly linked to the many “accidental” catastrophes that occurred on Alcatraz. To me, that is the true essence of sabotage. Even my fellow prisoners were not aware of the things I was doing, and it amused me to hear them discuss the possible culprits whenever they suspected that one of the deeds was not an accident.

I found myself striking...

As I stated before, I never got a transfer from Alcatraz, because I served as a witness for Clarence Carnes. As a result, James Bennett, director of federal prisons, hated me and took my testimony as a personal affront. But I never went to talk to that bastard about seeking a transfer, as all the other men received, and I waited for my release from Alcatraz.

Bennett had been the director of all federal prisons since 1937, and I soon learned he had a vendetta against me. The first time that I knew he had it in for me personally...

I was sent back to Alcatraz for thirty months. I rode back on the very same ferry that had taken me away. Then, I had been happy to be leaving the Rock, and now, as you can imagine, my spirits were pretty low. The boat made a regular run from San Francisco to the island several times a day. It would take provisions out to Alcatraz, sometimes dropping off the mountains of laundry that the inmates washed for the armed services. Its last run was about ten at night.

I used to watch the boat from the hospital ward, where...

I later learned the details of the events that led the LAPD to me. A robbery had occurred at a store called the MORE Discount House on Sepulveda and Santa Monica Boulevards in West Los Angeles. It seems that a messenger had picked up some money and was driving off the store lot when a man wearing a mask jumped in front of the car, forcing the messenger to slam on the brakes. In the messenger’s confusion, the man rushed over to the passenger door, flung it open, and hopped in. He pulled out a gun, and the messenger tried...

They executed many men while I was on death row. I personally know of nineteen people who were executed in the gas chamber during my time on the row. The first man I knew was actually a young kid, about nineteen years old, named Alexander Robillard. He was executed just about the time I got to San Quentin, in April 1961. Then Ronny Rittger was executed around June 1961. Next they executed Jimmy Linden, in July. David Combes was executed around October, and Jimmy Kendrick in November.

I remember Jimmy Kendrick. He was so fed up with death row that...

For the entire four and a half years that I sat on death row, I worked doggedly through my appeals. I labored over my case almost every day, poring over law books and providing information to my attorney. In our opening brief to the Supreme Court of California, we first drew their attention to all the errors that were prejudicial to my case during my trial, and we followed up by pointing out problems in the proceedings themselves.

We brought up the issue of the lineup, the illegal search and seizure, and the exclusion of Mexican Americans from the jury...