Inseparable: An Alcatraz Adventure
It is one of America's great enduring mysteries...
....what happened to three inmates who, in 1962, escaped from Alcatraz in a raft they constructed inside the prison? INSEPARABLE is a novel based on the escape was published by DX Varos in June, 2022, on the sixtieth anniversary of the escape.
In this novel, two of the escapees, the Anglin brothers, are helped to freedom by a thirteen year-old boy. He finds them, barely alive, on a tiny beach just south of Sausalito, where he lived with his mother, a Korean War widow. In the novel, the boy helps the Anglins evade the cops, the FBI, the Coast Guard, an obsessed member of the media – as well as the boy's mother.
NOTE: Last year Dan Willis, the owner of DXVaros and publisher of this novel, passed away. After a year in probate, with his executor still without access to sales data, we have been given the rights back to our work. Happy to report my book is back on Amazon in both Kindle and Paperback here.
Me and Whitey Bulger (kind of...)
On June 22, 2011 Whitey Bulger, who had “taken it on the lam” in 1994 (after a rogue FBI agent tipped the South Boston criminal of an impending indictment) was captured. Nowhere in the world was this story bigger than in my adopted home of Boston, Massachusetts. To appreciate how huge, a bit of context is required.
I moved to Boston in 1981 and was immediately struck by the duality of one this country's oldest cities. On the one hand is what I call the “George Washington slept here” history, that of a city which proudly touts its pivotal role in the American Revolution. In the other hand are the neighborhoods hard by the Constitution, Freedom Trail and the Tea Party ship. They are the Boston populated by descendants of immigrants who had spent generations fighting for survival against nativist prejudice(s).
No immigrant group carries a bigger chip on its shoulders than the Irish. This was especially true in Southie (that's South Boston to you.) Their defense of their own can be vociferous. It was even more so when talk came to Whitey Bulger. In the early 1980s I remember someone saying to me, in almost reverential tones, “Yea, he's a criminal but... he's keeping drugs out of Southie.” Whitey was the stuff of legend. But in the 1990s, we learned the legend was a load of crap. Whitey wasn't keep drugs out of Southie, he was making a fortune dealing junk... ruining hundreds of lives while murdering dozens to cement his hold on the drug trade. And it was all under the care and protection of that rogue FBI agent. As detailed in Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neil's Black Mass, Whitey earned his protection by helping the Feds take down the Italian mafia. In other words, he was a rat. More on that shortly.
Okay, so now back to June 22, 2011. I happened to be in San Francisco that week on vacation with my family. On the very day we had taken a tour of Alcatraz we returned to our hotel to see the news bulletin on a TV in the bar that Whitey Bulger – #2 on of the FBI's Most Wanted Fugitives (bin Laden was #1) – had been captured.
This. Was. Huge. So huge I said to hell with my cell phone's roaming charges and called my buddy Marty back in Southie. Wiseguys were already laying odds on how long Whitey would last in the joint after conviction (which everyone knew was assured.) Turns out he didn't even last a day after his transfer to the U.S. Penitentiary, Hazelton in West Virginia. There, the wheelchair-bound Bulger was beaten to death by two inmates. A wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family against the Justice Department was dismissed.
Flash forward to the Fall of 2020 when I began work on INSEPARABLE. During my research I discovered Whitey had been an inmate at Alcatraz at the same time Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin escaped in their homemade raft. Which meant Whitey, along with every other inmate, would have heard about prisoner Allen West. He was supposed to be the raft but couldn't get out of his cell in time. West turned informer to lessen his punishment for his role in the escape. He became... a rat. This was too good to pass up. Now I had a way to get Whitey – that erstwhile Boston legend – into my book. Here's an extract from page 179...
Prisons are notoriously poor places to keep a secret, and word of Allen West's cooperation with authorities had spread to all corners of Alcatraz. Every inmate had an opinion, but none were stronger than prisoner AZ-1428, a bank robber from Boston who resided in Block C, Cell 314. He had heard of Allen West's cooperation with authorities, how he was telling the bulls everything he knew, including details of how Morris and the others had constructed a raft big enough for four men. Some of the inmates were willing to forgive Allen West for singing. After all, the other three were already gone and nothing he could say would be of much help to the authorities, anyway. But prisoner AZ-1428 was not so forgiving. Disgusted at how quickly Allen West had flipped, Whitey Bulger kept repeating “What a fucking rat.”
