7 Alcatraz Prisoners Who Served Time on the Notorious Island

Inmate No.: 85
Conviction: Tax evasion
Time Served at Alcatraz: 5 years (1934–1939)

By the time Al Capone arrived at Alcatraz on the morning of August 22, 1934, he was past his peak as a crime kingpin. “Scarface” was a few years into his 11-year term, handed down in 1931 after several lengthy court cases that focused more on his errant declaration of income than his reputation as a killer and bootlegger. At Atlanta Federal Prison, the convicted tax evader had what might be called “the run of the place”: furnishings in his cell, frequent visitors, and easily bribed guards.

It was this favoritism that resulted in a transfer to Alcatraz. Here, the warden and guards were immune to his cash and influence, and Capone had to toe the line or face solitary confinement.

By the time of his arrival at Alcatraz, Capone was in a bad way. He was suffering withdrawal from cocaine addiction, and untreated venereal disease had begun to impair his body and mind. His last year at Alcatraz was spent in the prison hospital. The Capone who left Alcatraz in 1939 was a sickly, incoherent man who would live out his final 8 years in seclusion at his Florida mansion. He died of heart failure in 1947 at age 48.

Inmate No.: 117
Conviction: Kidnapping
Time Served at Alcatraz: 17 years (1934–1951)

George Kelly Barnes was raised in a well-off Memphis household and even attended some college. A sudden marriage led him to drop out of school, and he got involved in bootlegging during Prohibition.

Kelly then met and married a more experienced criminal named Kathryn Thorne. Thorne groomed her new husband for success. She bought him a Thompson machine gun and, soon, the two robbed banks Bonnie and Clyde–style throughout the South. Word of “Machine Gun Kelly” spread.

The couple misstepped when they kidnapped an Oklahoma oil tycoon named Charles Urschel. They successfully obtained a $200,000 ransom and began to live large, but the Bureau of Investigation (soon to become the FBI) was on the case. In two months’ time, Kelly and Thorne were caught, convicted, and sentenced to life.

Kelly served his time at Alcatraz quietly. He was so well-behaved that other inmates began to refer to him as “Pop.” He worked in the office, served as an altar boy, and reportedly regretted his life of crime. When he left Alcatraz in 1951, however, it wasn’t to go free; he was transferred to Leavenworth federal penitentiary, where he died in 1954 on his 59^th birthday.

Inmate No.: 325
Conviction: Kidnapping
Time Served at Alcatraz: 26 years (1936–1962)

Alvin Francis Karpavicz, later known by the last name Karpis, saw kidnapping as an easier way to make large sums of money than bank robbing. Called “Creepy” for his unsettling grin, the native Canadian became the brains behind the Barker family, a bank-robbing gang known for their viciousness during the early 1930s. In a relatively short time, Karpis became one of an elite group of “public enemies” that also included John Dillinger and “Pretty Boy” Floyd.

Karpis and Ma Barker’s boys worked with assorted accomplices to kidnap millionaire William Hamm for $100,000 in 1933. This job was so successful that they did it again, kidnapping a banker named Edward Bremer for $200,000. J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI made it his personal business to track down the offenders. Hoover personally took Karpis into custody in 1936 after agents barricaded his Plymouth Coupe on a street.

Karpis has the ignoble honor of being the longest-serving inmate at Alcatraz, outlasting its official use. Karpis finished his time elsewhere and was deported to Canada upon release in 1969. He died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills in 1979 at age 72.

Inmate No.: 594
Conviction: Murder
Time Served at Alcatraz: 17 years (1942–1959)

Robert Stroud, the so-called “Birdman of Alcatraz,”
was made famous by a 1962 movie of the same name loosely based on his life and starring Burt Lancaster. This suggests Stroud raised birds at Alcatraz, but the prison didn’t allow animals of any kind. Stroud actually conducted his experiments with canaries at Leavenworth.

Initially sent to McNeil Island for stabbing a bartender at age 21, Stroud was an unruly and dangerous inmate. He attacked fellow prisoners and did his utmost to sow dissension. At Leavenworth, he stabbed a guard to death, and his sentence was upgraded to life. Prison officials isolated Stroud and allowed him to pursue his interest in bird care to keep him occupied. Stroud wrote two well-regarded books on the topic.

After his transfer to Alcatraz, Stroud filled his time by writing Looking Outward: A History of the U.S. Prison System. He left Alcatraz for another prison in 1959 after his health began to fail and died four years later at age 73.

Inmate No.: 996
Conviction: Conspiracy to commit espionage
Time served at Alcatraz: 5 years (1952–1958)

New York City native Morton Sobell became one of the most infamous figures of the Cold War era for his connection to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Sobell befriended Julius after joining the Soviet-aligned Communist Party USA. Working for the aircraft and marine engineering division of General Electric in Schenectady, New York, after the start of World War II, Sobell began relaying secret military-related data to Rosenberg, prosecutors alleged.

Among the information connected to the Rosenbergs were documents about the Manhattan Project, the J. Robert Oppenheimer–led U.S. initiative to create an atomic bomb. The couple was sentenced to death for conspiracy to commit espionage and later executed in 1953.

Sobell, who denied his guilt, received a 30-year prison term and was soon transferred to Alcatraz. He served time at multiple prisons before he was paroled in January 1969. Much later in 2008, Sobell admitted he had stolen classified military documents for the Soviet Union near the end of World War II and afterward—but only about artillery and radar devices. He died at age 101 in January 2019.

Related: New Evidence Might Exonerate the Rosenbergs

Inmate No.: 1428
Conviction: Armed robbery
Time Served at Alcatraz: 3 years (1959–1962)

James “Whitey” Bulger began his career of crime as a gang member in Boston in the early 1940s and eventually served prison stints for armed robbery and assault. His involvement in a long-running crime syndicate implicated him in almost 20 deaths.

Bulger served his first serious prison sentence at Atlanta. During his three years there, he voluntarily enrolled in the CIA’s MK-Ultra program, an experimental “mind control” operation that involved hypnosis, hallucinogenic drugs, and even abuse. Bulger regretted participating in the experiments and happily left the program upon his transfer to Alcatraz in 1959.

Transferred again in 1962 and freed in 1965, Bulger became deeply enmeshed in Boston’s Irish mob. Rising in rank to become one of the city’s crime bosses, Bulger dominated the region in the 1970s and ’80s with his gambling, bookmaking, and drug rackets.

In 1994, under investigation, Bulger went on the run and remained at large for 16 years, a longstanding fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. In 2011, he was finally tracked down, and in late 2013, he was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms for various crimes. Inmates at the U.S. Penitentiary Hazelton in West Virginia killed 89-year-old Bulger shortly after his arrival there in 2018.

Inmate No.: 1518
Conviction: Tax evasion
Time Served at Alcatraz: About 1 year, on and off (1961–1963)

Alcatraz wasn’t very far from closing when Meyer “Mickey” Cohen made his two brief visits. Convicted of tax evasion for the second time in 10 years, Cohen served his time at Alcatraz in two parts; he was bailed out for six months in the middle, the only prisoner ever to be so removed. The bond was signed by Earl Warren, who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court under John F. Kennedy.

Born in New York, Cohen made his name in Los Angeles. Stints as a newsboy and boxer put him in touch with gambling interests. His willingness to do whatever was necessary made him indispensable to Bugsy Siegel’s Jewish mob. Under Siegel’s tutelage, Cohen rose up the ranks, privately eliminating anyone who stood in his way while publicly hobnobbing with Hollywood movie stars and running a string of “legitimate” businesses. A publicity hound, Cohen made good copy for the daily newspapers, brushing off several attempts on his life as comic inconveniences.

The fastidious Cohen referred to Alcatraz as “a crumbling dungeon.” When the prison closed in early 1963, he was transferred to Atlanta, where his luck finally ran out. An inmate with a grudge (some sources say a former Alcatraz inmate) smashed Cohen in the skull with a lead pipe. Cohen never walked unassisted again, and a bout with stomach cancer slowed him further. He died in 1976, four years after his release, at age 62.