Marvin Hubbard was born in Etowah County, Alabama, in 1912. His father was a tenant farmer who died when Marvin was only four years old, leaving his mom responsible for Marvin and his seven siblings. His mother remarried, and Marvin was not fond of his new stepfather, so he left school and home at age of ten. A relative took him in and began teaching the youngster the craft of bricklaying.
Marvin began dabbling in minor crimes and was often arrested. He soon developed a knack for escaping the local jails. Marvin met and married Lola Bell Johnson at age sixteen, and they soon had a child. For a time, Marvin was a responsible husband and father. That seemed to be changing. When Marvin was nineteen, he was arrested for grand theft auto. He was acquitted, but that was the beginning of a string of arrests, imprisonments, and escapes.
Marvin earned his Alcatraz destination. He was in Jasper, Alabama jail, and, as usual, escaped. This time, he had two other inmates with him. The three struck the warden, took his keys, and stole weapons from the armory. The three took a cab to Huntsville and, in the process, kidnapped the driver, Robert Poe, and another passenger, Coy Seales. When the cab suffered a flat tire, the three escapees flagged down a passing farmer, R.W. Dublin, and took him hostage. They loaded the victims into the truck and drove away. They drove into a rural area, tied the three hostages to a tree, and left. Soon the FBI was involved.
The hostages managed to get free. The three cons drove to Chattanooga, Tennessee. They were stopped by a police officer, Logan Stroud, who they managed to take hostage. A witness to the events contacted the FBI. When the group drove south into Georgia, they stopped at a house where they tied up their hostage while looting the home for food and supplies.
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The kidnapped officer escaped and went to a nearby home where police and FBI were called. Authorities showed up at the kidnapper’s location. A gunfight ensued, leaving one kidnapper, Kenneth Jackson, dead, and Marvin and the other escapee, George Mathis, were wounded.
The two surviving felons were convicted of kidnapping and stealing the autos and the guns. While held at a Knoxville jail, Marvin again escaped with eight other inmates. He was recaptured a week later, rowing in a boat on the Tennessee River. Marvin was sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. After being involved in a prison riot there, due to his extensive criminal record and multiple escapes, he was sent to Alcatraz in 1944.
The prison at Alcatraz was immortalized in story and legend. The Birdman of Alcatraz and Escape from Alcatraz put the legendary stories on film. The debate continues whether the Anglin brothers and Frank Morris survived their 1962 escape attempt. But, perhaps one of the island prison’s most dramatic and tragic events was the fatal three-day standoff that became known as “The Battle of Alcatraz.
Alcatraz Prison, also known as “The Rock,” was a maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island, just over a mile from the coast in San Francisco. It opened as a Federal Prison in 1934. Its unique isolation and modern security features make it escape-proof, according to authorities at the day. It immediately began housing the worst inmates in the Federal Prison system. One writer of the day said Alcatraz was “the great garbage can of San Francisco Bay, into which every federal prison dumped its most rotten apples.”
In 1946, Hubbard, along with three fellow inmates, Bernard Coy (Kentucky, bank robbery), Joseph Cretzer (Montana, murder, bank robbery), and Clarence Carnes (murder, kidnapping), began devising a plan to escape from the prison. All had escaped from facilities where they had been previously incarcerated, but Alcatraz was nothing like the others.
Coy was a cell house orderly, and Hubbard a kitchen orderly. These positions allowed the two to observe the guards’ procedures, schedules, routines, and facility layouts.
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On May 2, Coy was sweeping in the cell house, Cell Block C. When they knew the guard watching the weapons armory, Burt Burch would be away from his post, Hubbard asked to enter the cellblock area as he returned from his kitchen duties. The policy was for him to be frisked to ensure he wasn’t smuggling in any implements. As guard William Miller patted Hubbard down, Coy hit the officer from the rear with a ten-inch pair of pliers, and the pair overpowered him. They took his keys and released Cretzer and Carnes from their cells. Two other inmates,
The next step in the plan was to arm themselves, so they proceeded to the gun gallery. They were thought to have found a way around the system securing the weapons, and newspapers of the day reported that the inmates were able to enter and grab the entire stash of firearms. Burch returned as they were reportedly passing weapons to their fellow inmates, and the inmates overpowered him and tied him up. The events from then until May 4 would be what the press would call “a savage mutiny.” James Bennett, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said of the inmates, “With the feel of weapons in their hands and the smell of liberty in their nostrils, {they} have gone mad.”
Coy next went to the adjacent D block, where he released several other prisoners. Two of them, Sam Shockley and Miran Thompson, joined with the initial four. The group then put the two guard hostages, Miller and Burch, in a cell in C Block. The plan was to use Officer Miller’s key to exit the building, commandeer the supply boat when it docked for its daily visit, and then take the boat back to San Francisco.
When the inmates reached the door that would provide their exit, the lock on the heavy door was jammed, rendering the keys useless. There would be no escape, but the conspirators had come too far just to give up, they apparently thought.
The six returned to Cell Block C, where they captured other corrections officers as they made their rounds. Other guards who came to investigate were also captured. Soon there were twenty guards held hostage.
The group decided to kill the hostages so they could not testify against them. Cretzer opened fire on the officers, wounding five. At the same time, other inmates began firing at the guard towers, and the alarm was sounded, and efforts began by the administrators and law enforcement to regain control of the prison.
At this point, Carnes, Shockley, and Thompson decided to no longer participate and returned to their cells. Hubbard, Cretzer, and Coy told others they would not be taken alive and intended to fight it out.
The warden feared that the inmates had a large number of weapons, including machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Soon a group of officers entered the gun area and were immediately fired upon and returned fire. One officer was likely killed by friendly fire, and four others were wounded.
By now, the warden had reached out to the nearby Naval Station for help and was sent thirty Marines. Forty additional corrections officers were sent there as well. Police snipers circled the island in a variety of boats.
The prisoners had turned the main cell block area into what was described as a fortress. That evening, the Marines entered Cell Block C and were able to rescue the hostages. They were fired upon, with one hostage being wounded but all being saved.
The Marines had pushed the inmates back into a smaller area. The Marines fired rifle grenades at the space occupied by the combative inmates through the night. The following morning, an additional fifty-five Marines in battle gear arrived on the island. From the floor above, holes were blasted into the ceiling of the area the inmates occupied, and the Marines fired into it. Grenades were dropped through the holes to force the inmates into a confined area.
Around noon on the following day, the inmates reached out to the warden in an attempt to negotiate. The warden rejected any terms other than surrender. That night, the Marines fired a continuous barrage into the remaining resisting inmates’ occupied corridor. The following day, officers entered the corridor and found the bodies of Coy, Hubbard, and Cretzer.
