Alcatraz never wаs no good for nobody

...remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie    //    remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie... *


* на фото сувенирная роба (вполне себе модная матроска)) из Алькатраса, США


... Alcatraz never was no good for nobody   //   The last 27 convicts left Alcatraz in leg irons and handcuffs on March 21, 1963 ...

In a way, they too were escaping from the Rock.  The last prisoner to get on the boat, Frank C. Weatherman, said when asked
how he felt about leaving: "Good… Alcatraz never was no good for nobody."


@


...из  цикла  сверхпознавательных  рассказов  =Архитектурные прогулки по Москве=

            -и- что-то вроде шутОчной рецензии   //   http://www.stihi.ru/2014/10/31/6947

...сегодня оказывается ещё и день работников СИЗО и тюрем       …а я и не знал )))))))


@


–  Почему я делаю это?
–  Потому что любишь.

   к/ф  «Антикиллер-2»


@


1. Кремль   //   возможно, от греческого слова «кремнос» - скала

И. Бусева-Давыдова, М. Нащокина -- «Архитектурные прогулки по МОСКВЕ», M. 1997, стр. 11


@


To: Петрович

Прошу прощения за глюки на стихах.ru !

Если   будете   в   Москве   в   ресторане   Петрович,
обратите внимание на паровозик до Петушков ::: )))

Backwind   27.11.2003 11:11

http://www.stihi.ru/comments.html?2002/04/07-526


@


– Что,  милицию  не  любишь?...
– Да, мы с ней как-то взаимно.

к/ф «Гетеры майора Соколова»

24.03.2014







@  @  @  @  @  @  @





//    remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie…

        ПОБЕГ    ИЗ    = АЛЬКАТРАСА =

//    remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie…



         Я   б   наверное  был  первым
         кто   сбежал   из   Алькатраса
         просочился  бы   сквозь стены
         растворился    б    в    унитазе
         и    летал    себе   бы    мирно
         по-над   морем   словно  чайка 
         позабыв   про   всё   на   свете
         и    про   счастье    вспоминая…

http://www.alcatrazhistory.com/interiorpage.htm







@  @  @  @  @  @  @







//    remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie…


Главный почтамт (ул. Мясницкая 26) --- очень интересное здание, построенное в "русско-византийском" стиле.
Композиционные стереотипы "византийского" стиля, характерные для церковных зданий, наложили на образ Главпочтамта
особый отпечаток. Центральная часть этого сооружения объемно и силуэтно имитирует древний храм, что выглядит странно,
учитывая его светское назначение. Центром композиции ризалита является гигантское полуциркульное окно с часами, декорированное
орнаментированным архивольтом. Под ним небольшая трехарочная галерея-лоджия главного входа, своды которой поддерживают колонны
из красного гранита с крупными металлическими капителями, также напоминающими византийские образцы, а внутри здания сохранился большой
операционный зал, металлический купол которого выполнен по проекту В.Г. Шухова. "Архитектурные прогулки по Москве". Издательство ВОРОН. 1997 год.


//    remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie…


If you can get to the Pan Pacific hotel, there are clothes
in my closet. You'll find some money in the bible. Room 26.

The Rock.


//    remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie…







БАЛЛАДА РЕДИНГТОНСКОЙ ТЮРЬМЫ
 
Оскар Уайльд 
/отрывок/
 
Возлюбленных все убивают,-
Так повелось в веках,-
Тот — с дикой злобою во взоре,-
Тот — с лестью на устах;
Кто трус — с коварным поцелуем,
Кто смел — с клинком в руках.
 
Один любовь удушит юный,
В дни старости — другой,
Тот — сладострастия рукою,
Тот — золота рукой,
Кто добр — кинжалом, потому что
Страдает лишь живой.
 
Тот любит слишком, этот — мало;
Те ласку продают,
Те покупают; те смеются,
Разя, те слезы льют.
Возлюбленных все убивают,-
Но все ль за то умрут?







//    remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie…
 






Goodspeed, where's Mason? Where's his

body? I wanna see that son of a bitch!



               

Vaporized, sir.

Excuse me, gentlemen.



   
               

What? Vaporized?

A body can vaporize?



   

               

Oh, yeah!

Absolutely, sir.











//    remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie…


The Rock is a 1996 action starring Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris about a Marine General (Francis Hummel) who seizes Alcatraz Island with a platoon of marines turned mercenaries, taking hostages and threatening to launch several rockets armed with VX poison gas into the heart of San Francisco. Stanley Goodspeed, an FBI chemical weapons expert, must team up with John Patrick Mason, a former Alcatraz inmate and British SAS operative, to neutralize the VX rockets before they can be launched.


//    remembering    ‘The Rock’    movie…


John Mason: Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Stanley Goodspeed: "I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts."
John Mason: Ah, an educated man.
[Stanley gives a modest wave]
John Mason: That, of course, rules out the possibility of you being a field agent.

@

Stanley Goodspeed: Hi, I'm an agent with the federal... FBI... Well, my, I'm Stanley Goodspeed.
John Mason: But of course you are.
Agent Paxton: Well, at least he got his name right.
Stanley Goodspeed: Of course I am.
John Mason: And you have an emergency.
Stanley Goodspeed: Right.
John Mason: And you need my help.
Stanley Goodspeed: Exactly right.
John Mason: Coffee.
Stanley Goodspeed: No, I'm fine, thank you.
John Mason: Offer me coffee.

@

[after Mason has killed a Marine, the corpse's foot twitches]
Stanley Goodspeed: You've been around a lot of corpses. Is that normal?
John Mason: What, the feet thing?
Stanley Goodspeed: Yeah, the feet thing.
John Mason: Yeah, it happens.
Stanley Goodspeed: Well I'm having a hard time concentrating. Can you do something about it?
John Mason: Like what, kill him again?
 
@

Stanley Goodspeed: How do you... do it?
John Mason: I was trained by the best. British intelligence. But in retrospect I would rather have been a poet. Or a farmer.
Stanley Goodspeed: Okay.

@

John Mason: Are you sure you're ready for this?
Stanley Goodspeed: I'll do my best.
John Mason: Your "best"! Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.
Stanley Goodspeed: Carla was the prom queen.
John Mason: Really?
Stanley Goodspeed: [cocks his gun] Yeah.

@

General Hummel: Did they bother to tell you who I am and why I'm doing this or are they just using you like they do everybody else?
John Mason: All I know is that you were big in Vietnam, I saw the highlights on television.
General Hummel: Then you probably have no idea what it means to lead some of the finest men on God's earth into combat and then watch their memories get betrayed by their own fucking government.
John Mason: I don't quite see how you cherish the memory of the dead by killing another million. And, this is not combat, it's an act of lunacy, General Sir. Personally, I think you're a fucking idiot.
General Hummel: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Thomas Jefferson.
John Mason: "Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious," according to Oscar Wilde.
[Hummel strikes him, and he falls to his knees]
John Mason: Thank you for making my point.
General Hummel: Where are the guidance chips?
[Points his gun at Mason's head]
General Hummel: WHERE ARE THE GUIDANCE CHIPS?
John Mason: I've destroyed them.
General Hummel: That was a bad move, soldier.

@

[Goodspeed just told the FBI that Mason is dead and Womack destroyed his pardon]
John Mason: Well, Stanley, I guess this is where we go our separate ways. I understand that you know the etymology of your name, Goodspeed.
Stanley Goodspeed: God speed, to wish someone a prosperous journey. Why?
Mason: If you fancy a journey, I recommend Fort Walton, Kansas.
Goodspeed: I was thinking of Maui.
Mason: [puts something into Goodspeed's hand] Forget Maui.
Goodspeed: [reads piece of paper] St Michael's Church, Fort Walton, Kansas. Front pew, right leg, hollow. Is this what I think it is [looks back at Mason, but he's disappeared] MASON!?
















Looking over his shoulder, he's alone on Alcatraz at night

// Johnson looks at a model of one fake head left in the cell as a tourist display. He knows how the men felt: "Ten years here? I'd go crazy before that."


By John M. Glionna
Los Angeles Time


ALCATRAZ ISLAND, Calif. — Each day at sundown, when the last tour boat departs from Alcatraz Island, one lonesome soul is left behind. He's the night watchman of Alcatraz.

Guided by the beam of his flashlight, Gregory Johnson inches down the gloomy infirmary ward of the island's retired prison, once home to the nation's most malicious killers and psychotic criminal malcontents.

"Hey, what's that noise?" he asks, throwing the light against the half-open door of a solitary-confinement cell. He pauses, shrugging off another unexplained Alcatraz phenomenon.

"Man," he whispers, "I couldn't imagine being out here at night without my gun."
Until the first boat arrives after dawn, the U.S. Park Police officer spends the night battling his nerves and imagination, patrolling the place once known as America's Devil's Island.

Over the years, Alcatraz was the last stop for 1,576 luckless hard-timers — murderers, mobsters, the nation's most-wanted crooks — many of whom officials feared couldn't be confined anywhere else.

Known as "The Rock," the 12-acre penal island was notorious for its cramped cells and rigid discipline that at times demanded total silence. The prison also inflicted its own brand of emotional torture. At night, as the stories go, inmates could hear women's laughter on the mainland 1.5 miles away.

Decades after the prison closed on March 21, 1963, with inmate Frank Weatherman's valediction, "Alcatraz was never no good for nobody," all that remains is the lore of the desperate men once locked up here.

"I don't believe in ghosts, per se," said Johnson, 38, a no-nonsense law-enforcement veteran. Still, holding a ring of oversized keys, he cautiously makes his moonlit rounds across the island, some areas wanly illuminated by ancient light fixtures, others dark.
His footsteps echoing, he walks the old cellblocks that once housed notorious bank robber and gangster Arthur "Doc" Barker and kidnapper Alvin "Creepy Karpis" Karpavicz, formerly Public Enemy No. 1.

He checks the crumbling medical ward where Robert "the Birdman" Stroud spent 17 years. He peers into the deserted laundry room where Chicago mobster Al "Scarface" Capone hustled among the industrial washers.

"There's no one out here"
 
Every now and then, the old prison plays tricks on his mind.

One night, as the buoy bells clanged and the foghorn moaned, he swore he heard clinking glasses, as if a toast were being made. He hears mice skitter on cellblock floors, and the wind howling outside often seems like crazy laughter.

"This is one creepy place after dark," he said. "It can make the hair on the back of your neck stand up straight."

For years, ferry-company employees were assigned to the island's night shift. Last fall, when the National Park Service, which runs Alcatraz, changed ferry services, Park Police took over until the new contractor begins work this month.

Officers watch the ferry docks and federal facilities, mindful of protesters or pranksters on motorboats.

Johnson initially balked at the duty he shares with other officers. "I said, 'You want me out there all by myself? Once you're there, you can't get off."

At first, he tried to tame Alcatraz by absorbing its history. He took the park service's audio tour, walking alone among the cellblocks, guided by the recorded voices of former guards and inmates.

Then he took a different tack: reveling in his fear.

Inside Capone's old cell — No. 200 on the second tier of B block — he watched horror movies on his laptop, flinching at each murder.

He soon questioned that decision.

"I like to be scared, but not that scared," he said.

"I had to remind myself, 'There's no one out here but me. So just put that stuff out of your mind."

Between 1934-63, the Civil War-era military-fortress-turned-penitentiary provided many inmates with the hardest time they ever did, in part because San Francisco's twinkling cityscape reminded them of the freedom they'd lost. Some found it too painful to even look at the skyline.

George DeVincenzi, a guard at Alcatraz from 1950-57, said the proximity of the California culture drove many prisoners nearly insane. "Yachts circled the island, and men on the third tier of C and B blocks could see girls in bikinis drinking cocktails," he said.

Eight people were killed by inmates. One guard was slain in the prison's laundry room in the late 1930s, and two others died during an attempted breakout by inmates in 1946. Five inmates were killed in random attacks. Five other prisoners committed suicide.

DeVincenzi witnessed a killing on his first day as a guard. He'd been assigned to the prison's barbershop. Easy duty, he figured. Early in his shift, as he was watching an inmate shave another with a straight razor, all hell broke loose.

"The barber's name was Freddie Lee Thomas, and suddenly he takes his shears and starts stabbing the man in the chair," DeVincenzi recalled. "He's slashing his neck and arms, and I'm blowing my whistle. Within moments, the man is dead, lying in a pool of blood. I guess the two were lovers.

"Freddie hands me the bloody shears. Then he leans over the body and kisses the dead man on the forehead. 'Goodbye,' he said. 'I love you.' "

"Overwhelmed by fear"

Years after the prison closed, the island's sense of seclusion remains. Until the use of cellphones, night watchmen relied on a dated ship-to-shore phone to reach the mainland.

Erik Novencido worked the night shift for 10 years. The worst part was walking inside the electroshock therapy room. Once he took a picture at night to show friends. When he developed the film, he said, the snapshot showed a face in the room staring back at him.

He never figured out what it was.

"Sometimes I was just overwhelmed by fear," he said.

Mary McClure, who spent 12 years working nights on Alcatraz until last fall, preferred the isolation. She couldn't wait for the last tourist to leave. "It was the standard fantasy of being alone on an island," she said. "Well, maybe not Alcatraz."

Even so, there were strange events. "Many times, at night in the cell house, I had the distinct sensation of being pinched on the butt," said McClure, 52, a former paramedic. "It happened with great regularity. I have no explanation for it, and I don't talk to people about it, because I know it makes me sound crazy."

Former inmate John Banner spent four years at Alcatraz in the 1950s. He recalls the squeal of the wind at night.

"Laying awake, listening to that wind, trying to hold on to what sanity I had left, I always thought of the brutality of that prison," said the onetime bank robber, who lives in Arizona.

Banner, 83, can't imagine facing Alcatraz alone, at night: "I don't believe in spooks, but why on earth would a person want to do that?"

"They're watching me"

When darkness comes, you don't leave Alcatraz; you flee.

Amid a driving rain, a ranger hands Johnson the keys to the island and hurries toward a ferry that whisks away the last of the day's 5,000 visitors.

Johnson stands amid the gathering seagulls. The big birds are everywhere, lined up on walls, circling like vultures.

They make him uneasy.

"It's like they're watching me, to see if I'm going to crack," he said, "like in that Alfred Hitchcock film, 'The Birds.' "

He makes a sweep for any tourist stragglers and settles in for the night.

Johnson's father was a prison guard in upstate New York. He has the job in his blood. But Alcatraz is different.

The last rays of sun now gone, the island fortress becomes the stuff of black-and-white 1950s crime photos. Johnson plays upbeat music on his iPod — Prince, Wham!, Michael Jackson — to lighten the gloom.

He earns overtime pay for his 18-hour shifts (3 p.m. to 9 a.m.), but sometimes, he said, "it seems like blood money."

At 8 p.m., dressed in a black cap and windbreaker, his radio squawking with Park Police chatter, Johnson winds his way up a switchback as birds dive-bomb from ledges. In the rain, the cell house looms ahead like a haunted castle.

He walks cellblock rows nicknamed Broadway, Sunset Alley and Seedy Street. He enters a solitary cell, its heavy iron door creaking. The tiny quarters remain black even after his eyes grow accustomed to the space.

He stops at the cell of Frank Lee Morris, whose daring breakout was immortalized in the movie "Escape from Alcatraz." Morris and two others left inside their cells dummy heads fashioned out of soap and toilet paper, complete with hair from the barbershop. The idea was to fool guards while the inmates left through holes chiseled in their cell walls.

Johnson looks at a model of one fake head left in the cell as a tourist display. He knows how the men felt: "Ten years here? I'd go crazy before that."

By dawn, the night watchman is weary of The Rock. Passing the keys to a ranger, he makes his own escape from Alcatraz.



@



(Reuters) - Fifty years after three convicts used spoons to burrow out of Alcatraz Island's federal prison and escaped on a raft made of raincoats, their relatives will pay their first visit to the scene of America's most famous jail break.
Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin, all serving time for bank robbery, vanished from the prison in San Francisco Bay on the night of June 11, 1962.
Although many historians think it's likely they perished in the frigid treacherous currents surrounding the maximum-security island prison, their bodies were never found and some believe it's possible they made it to freedom.
The trio's Houdini-like breakout from the supposedly escape-proof prison spurred the biggest manhunt since the 1932 kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby, and even inspired a 1979 Hollywood drama, "Escape from Alcatraz," starring Clint Eastwood.
Half a century later, the search for clues to the fate of the three men continues.
"No matter where the leads take us, or how many man hours are spent on this historic case, the Marshals Service will continue to investigate to the fullest extent possible," said David Harlow, assistant director of the U.S. Marshals' investigative unit.
Authorities have pursued thousands of leads in nearly every state in the union, he said. In 2010, for example, they exhumed a body from an unmarked grave believed, mistakenly it turned out, to contain the remains of one of the escapees.
If they survived, Morris would be 85, John Anglin would be 82, and Clarence Anglin 81.
For the first time in 50 years, the Anglins' relatives planned to visit the scene of the crime on Monday. Two sisters and two nephews want to see for themselves how the escapees used mess-hall spoons to gradually dig a small passageway through concrete walls to a ventilation shaft, how they left papier-mвchй heads under their blankets to fool guards, and how they glued 50 raincoats together into a raft.
To mark the anniversary at the prison, now a tourist attraction owned by the National Park Service, the Anglins' relatives also were scheduled to take part in a panel discussion with a former prison guard, the daughter of a warden and a federal marshal who continues to search for the escapees.
"We're remembering the escape of 1962," said Alexandra Picavet, a Park Service spokeswoman. "We are not celebrating it."

'THE ROCK'

Over the years, the mystery has captured the imagination of a public seemingly sympathetic to the villains. Nevertheless, federal marshals pledged to keep pursuing Morris and the Anglin brothers until they are arrested, are determined to be dead or turn 99.
U.S. Marshal Don O'Keefe said the investigation "serves as a warning to fugitives that regardless of time, we will continue to look for you and bring you to justice."
Alford Ray Anglin, John and Clarence Anglin's brother and co-defendant in the bank robbery that sent them to prison, died in 1964, when he touched a high-voltage security wire while trying to escape from an Alabama jail, according to a news story at the time.
Alcatraz, also referred to as "The Rock," opened as a federal civilian prison in 1934 to house some of the nation's most incorrigible criminals, and its better-known inmates included Al Capone, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, James "Whitey" Bulger and Robert Stroud, better known as the Birdman of Alcatraz.
The prison was closed in 1963 by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, citing the high cost of running the prison and badly needed repairs.