After reading my books from cover-to-cover, I began plotting my first visit to the island. I had prepared for my excursion by studying the various escape attempts, the lives of former inmates such as Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly and the chilling personal accounts of these and others that that were said to be the “rogues of society.”  During the first years when the island was open to the public, National Parks Service employees guided all of the visitor tours. As we hiked up the steep path to the cellhouse, I remember the stillness of the surroundings, broken only by the occasional screeches of passing seagulls. The misted smell of the ocean was thick and almost tropic. As the ranger guided us past the dimly lit cells, I lagged behind, blending into the shadows, absorbed by the incredible history of the now abandoned prison.

The highlight of my trip was meeting a former inmate who had come to the island to talk with visitors and to describe the eighteen years during which he had lived on “the Rock” as inmate #AZ-714. Clarence Carnes had been involved in a disastrous attempt at armed robbery at only fifteen. When a gas station attendant challenged Carnes and fought to disarm him, the young delinquent pulled the trigger and changed his life’s destiny in a matter of only seconds. Carnes was ultimately convicted of first-degree murder and he arrived on Alcatraz at the young age of only eighteen. One year later he participated in what would be considered the island’s most significant and catastrophic escape attempt, which would ultimately result in five tragic deaths. For his role in the escape and the murder of a correctional officer by a co-conspirator, Carnes received an additional ninety-nine years which was added to the life sentence he was already serving. His codefendants would receive the death penalty, and would later be executed sitting side-by-side in San Quentin’s gas chamber. He would therefore spend the vast majority of his life behind bars.

Seeing Carnes in person, I was amazed at how much he had changed since his arrival mug shot photos on Alcatraz were taken.  As I asked questions, his responses were terse and consistently evasive. He would respond by showing our group where an incident occurred, but avoided any details. He would simply nod as the National Park Ranger highlighted historical details and then would look away. I was also intrigued by his claim that despite nearly two decades on Alcatraz, there were still areas he hadn’t seen within the prison confines. He was soft-spoken and articulate. His hard looks had evolved into soft rounded features and he certainly didn’t resemble the cold-blooded criminal that I had read about.

A few hours later after the boat had delivered our group back to the boarding pier, I noticed Carnes sitting at a street vendor’s booth signing books. I tried to muster the courage to introduce myself and ask him a few questions about the ’46 events. But just as I approached him, he got up, motioned to the vendor that he was hungry and started walking away. Keeping a safe distance, I followed him through Fisherman’s Wharf, finally arriving at a food concession stand. Carnes purchased a hot dog and soft drink and walked over to the telescopes located at the end of Pier 45, which advertised a close-up view of Alcatraz Island for only ten cents. He dropped a dime in the first telescope and looked through it for about a minute. Noticing me, he turned and motioned to the telescope, inviting me to have a look. He said that if I looked quickly, I might be able to catch a glimpse of a group walking down the stairs from the recreation yard. Knowing his past, I cautiously accepted the invitation and watched him carefully as I positioned myself at the telescope. Eventually I was able to navigate through the scenery through the eyepiece as Carnes started walking away, gazing casually at the island every few seconds. I finally got the courage to approach him and introduce myself. I explained that I had learned who he was from two books I had read about the prison. He graciously shook my hand and allowed me to ask some unskilled questions about his long habitation on Alcatraz and the tragic events of 1946. Our dialog remained fairly superficial until a woman approached Carnes, interrupting the conversation.

The woman told Carnes that she had been a young girl during the 1946 escape attempt and that her father had brought her to Aquatic Park, where many of the correctional officers’ families had gathered to watch the events unfolding from the mainland. She explained that she had been terrified, seeing the flashes of light and hearing the thunderous guns. She told Carnes that she had hugged her father’s steel thermos, praying that it would block any bullets fired by the inmates and she described how that same fear remained in her thoughts every time she looked at the island. She jokingly commented that after the ’46 riot, she was annoyed at having to give up her bed to masses of visiting relatives. They all had come to hear at firsthand her father’s description of what he had witnessed from the mainland. They were all hoping to catch a glimpse through binoculars of a guard on the yard wall catwalk, or perhaps even the faint figure of an inmate.

The conversation then progressed to Carnes’s thoughts on being out of prison. He commented that when he was inside, he constantly thought and read about what people were doing on the outside, but once he got out, he couldn’t stop thinking about his friends on the inside and what they were doing. He said that the most difficult years of his life had been spent on Alcatraz, and that even now it consumed much of his daily thoughts. The woman made a parting comment that I still remember today. She offered to him that although they had followed different paths, and had lived their lives on opposite sides of the prison’s wall, they were both still haunted by memories of Alcatraz. Carnes nodded and smiled at her, then walked off, disappearing into the crowd of tourists along the pier. It would be several decades before I realized that it was during my conversation with Carnes that I began to write this book.

Each year over one million tourists board the island's ferry to visit what was once considered the toughest federal prison in America. Today, Alcatraz is one of the biggest tourist magnets and most famous landmarks of San Francisco. The island's mystique, which has been created primarily through books and motion pictures, continues to lure people from all over the world to see firsthand where America once housed its most notorious criminals. Cramped cells, rigid discipline and unrelenting routine were the Alcatraz trademarks and it became known as the final stop for the nation's most incorrigible prisoners. On any given day, thousands of visitors can be found wandering the island and taking in its unique history. The cellhouse now abandoned by the criminals who were once housed there, still has scars of the events to which the walls once bore witness. It is a journey into a dim piece of American history and few walk away fully comprehending. The clichéd expression "if these walls could talk" is taken to a deeper level.

Even today, decades after the prison’s closure, the name Alcatraz still evokes a variety of dark, forbidding images for many. In the decades of the prison’s active years, people would wander the shorelines of San Francisco, weaving their own mental images of the horrors that lurked behind the concrete walls and fencing. In some ways, Alcatraz became almost two distinct entities – the prison and the myth. In many cases, the Alcatraz that people still imagine was a cruel and vile chamber of horrors and to some former inmates, this may seem a valid perception of that environment. One such case was illustrated in an informal meeting between the late former inmate Jim Quillen and myself in the kitchen basement of Alcatraz, in August of 1997. Forty years earlier Quillen and a few fellow inmates had plotted an escape in the very same location. During our brief conversation, Quillen confided that returning to the main cellhouse had been a painful and difficult journey. It was obvious that even decades later, he was still troubled by the many experiences he had endured on Alcatraz.