Al House Never Gives Up Hope: The Incorrigible Life of a Florida Super-Bandit
written by Halley Reed
additional research by Samantha Bulgerin
On March 29th, 1924, the weekly payroll of the Hav-A-Tampa cigar factory arrived via armored truck, as usual. The money was placed on office manager T.W. McElvery’s desk to be counted. Just a few minutes afterwards, three men approached bookkeeper Ramon Martinez and spoke to him. Not speaking English very well, Martinez assumed they were tourists looking for a tour of the factory. Martinez led them to the business office. When he opened the door, two of the men rushed past him and pulled out revolvers. The third clubbed Martinez over the head and guarded the door. One of the bandits kept a gun on the captives and told them to face a wall with their hands up. The other bandit filled a sack with the payroll money. Quickly and quietly, the three bandits made their way out of the building and into a car where two more men waited for them. They made off with over $24,000.
In 1924, Tampa was quite used to crime. In the 1910s, its reputation had earned it the nickname of “the wickedest city in the south.” By the 20s, it had been upgraded to “the damnedest city this side of Hell.” The population of Tampa was exploding due to a massive state-wide real estate boom, aided by the steady wealth of the cigar, railroad, citrus, and shipping industries. The so-called “underworld” of Tampa had long been ruled by Charlie Wall, the heir of two of Tampa’s wealthiest and most influential families, who spurned respectable society and took up a life of gambling and crime. Using his wealth, criminal network, and family connections, he rigged elections and got his cousins and supporters elected to just about every important political office in Tampa. The police answered to him, and he used the police to put all his rivals out of business. While Wall’s initial wealth came from gambling, specifically, a lottery-like game called bolita, prohibition brought in a new opportunity for criminals to make money. With its large port and direct shipping connections to Cuba, Mexico, and the Caribbean, Tampa was one of the nation’s largest bootlegging hubs. Property crime surged to an all-time high. No bank or safe was safe. City Hall was broken into and robbed. Even the criminals weren’t safe, as two of Tampa’s most notorious Sicilian mobsters, Santo Trafficante, Sr. and Ignazio Antinori, both reported their cars stolen.
The Hav-a-Tampa robbery, pulled off so quickly and smoothly, was sensational, even for Tampa. It made headlines in newspapers across the country.
Tampa Chief of Detectives Pearson told The Tampa Tribune, “At any rate, the job was done by the cleverest bunch of bandits operating in this territory. They made a clean job of it, and left none of the tell-tale marks usually found after an amateur robbery. They were professionals, well-informed concerning the location of the office, the money, and the chances for interruption… It must have taken weeks and possibly months to have mapped out their program, for it worked with clock-like precision.”
The police were left with hardly any information about who the bandits might be, only sketchy eye-witness descriptions. Still, detectives searched through criminal records in hopes of finding someone who fit the description, and seven days later, a private detective named Fred Thomas identified one of the men as Albert Ross House, who was wanted in Indiana in connection to the robbery of the paymaster of the Carpenter Construction Company.
The second bandit was initially identified as Michael Murphy, another Indiana criminal and an associate of House’s, but who was serving jail time in Chicago during the time of the robbery. Two men who lived at House’s last known address identified the second bandit as “Big Paul” Huhn, also from Indiana, and the third bandit as “Jew Al” Weeden, a criminal with so many aliases that his real name is impossible to ascertain.
“Big Paul” was arrested at Terre Haute, Indiana, on April 13th. Standing at 6 ft., one inch, and weighing 220 pounds, he was well-known to Indiana police and an easy find. Exactly one month later, he was given the maximum sentence allowed by law: twenty years at Raiford State Penitentiary. With Huhn in jail, the search continued.
On August 13th, in Farmersburg, Indiana, a robber identified as House tried to rob the Citizen State Bank only to be shot by one of the cashiers. Wounded, he ran to a waiting car and sped away. About two miles out of Farmersburg, he lost control of the vehicle, crashed, and ran away through an adjacent field. A posse of 300 men was called to search for House, but to no avail.
As all this was happening, a grand jury investigating the Hav-a-Tampa robbery recommended a new trial be held for Huhn. The request was granted, and in March, Huhn was released from prison on bond.
The police, however, weren’t convinced that Huhn was innocent. When he was released, they followed him to a home on Central Avenue. The next day, on March 17th, police raided the home and arrested not only Huhn, but Al House and two of their fellow gang members, Lester Gildre and John Kennie, as well as a woman claiming to be House’s wife. Along with the bandits, police found an enormous cache of weapons, burglary tools, and safe-cracking equipment, all of which had recently been stolen from the Knight & Wall hardware store. Charlie Wall’s phone number was written by the telephone. The woman turned out to be Teresa “Dixie” Cohn, the wife of notorious wire-tapper Mack “The Count” Span.
House confessed that he was in Tampa at the time of the robbery and staying with “Jew Al.” He claimed to have been “double crossed” by one of the “higher ups” in Tampa. He claimed that Huhn had fallen for the higher up’s woman, and that they had left together on the night of the robbery, and that in jealousy, the higher up made Huhn the “goat” of the robbery. Later, it would be reported that in the weeks before the robbery Huhn had been seen with Molly McCann, and ex-girlfriend of Charlie Wall’s. As far as any further details, House refused to say.
“I’ve never ‘squawked’ on another man yet,” he told The Tampa Tribune, “And I don’t expect to this time if there is any other way out of it.”
During all this, House never spoke with an attorney, claiming, “I don’t need one.”
On the morning of March 23rd, the guards of the Hillsborough County Jail awoke to find that House had escaped. Using ten-inch hacksaws, he sawed through the iron bars of his cell window, climbed down the wall below, and then used a ladder to climb the outer wall.
Several weeks later, a letter was received by The Tampa Tribune bearing House’s signature and fingerprints. In it, he asserted the innocence of Teresa and Big Paul. He went on to explain that he’d been brought to Tampa by “Two men, one a gambler and fixer, the other, a man who opened an office in Tampa about a year ago on Franklin St. I will not give their names because I would give up my life before I would snitch on anyone.” House confessed to having “pulled” the Hav-a-Tampa job, and that $4,000 of the $24,000 had been given to the fixer. He insisted that “Big Paul” had been framed, and said that they’d known each other in Terre Haute for the past five years.
At one point in the letter, House writes, “I wish to say that I am not the worst criminal at heart, as I turned down jobs for which I would have received good money during my winters in Florida.” He says the “higher-up” had offered him $8,000 in total to “bump off” local bandit “Australian Jim” Lucas, State’s Attorney R.E.L. Chancey, and former police constable turned bootlegger and gambler Norris McFall.
“Australian Jim” Lucas, allegedly, “Had pulled off too many jobs for him, knew too much, and was talking.” Unbeknownst to House, Lucas had actually been missing for several months, and was believed to have been “planted” at the bottom of Tampa Bay.
R.E.L. Chancey was to be eliminated “on account of some wire-tapping trouble in the past and to keep him from molesting his business in the next four years.” Chancey was the first politician in Tampa to seriously challenge Charlie Wall and his political machine since Wall had come to power. In 1931, he would run for mayor, unseating Wall’s cousin, D.B. McKay, who had reigned as mayor since 1910 with only four years of interruption, during which one of Wall’s other cousins served as mayor. Chancey would use his power as mayor to significantly diminish Wall’s influence and wealth, and, along with the ascendance of the Sicilian-American mafia, would be one of the major forces that pushed Wall into “retirement” in 1938.
Norris McFall, who had recently left the Tampa police force and opened his own high-end speakeasy and gambling joint, “Was getting too damned smart and that they were always crossed in politics, and Mr. McFall knew the game too well and was getting too strong. He also mentioned that Mr. McFall had run a bunch of his confidence men out of town about four years ago and that he hated his insides.” In 1928, McFall was shot thirteen times in his own back yard as he put his car in his garage for the night. He died six days later, after informing the police that as the gunmen ran away, one yelled, “That’s what you get for fooling up with Charlie Wall!”
House ended his letter by complaining that he wished he had never come to Tampa and that it had left him “broke but free, so that I can thank God for small favors.” He signed his letter, “Respectfully yours, Al House, Yegg and Bandit.”
In his memoir, Freedom From Florida Chains, Al House writes, “Why I was born has always been a puzzle to me, and possibly to others.” He was born “one mile east of the village of Youngstown,” August 4th, 1894, to Hallie Maude Leach, 16, and Charles Dammeran Brown, 19. Brown was from a wealthy and well-respected family, and Hallie came from a farming family. They were briefly married, but quickly parted ways. As a young single mother struggling to support her son, Hallie rarely stayed in one place very long, going in between Terre Haute and Champagne, Illinois. On February 7th, 1903, Hallie married James C. House, whose name Al would carry into adulthood. However, within two months, James C. House died, once again leaving Hallie to raise Al alone. Al’s schooling was spotty, and at eleven he left school to assist his mother full-time. A few years later, Al and Hallie moved to Newell, South Dakota, where they set up a bakery. In 1909, Hallie married James A. Brubaker. A drought forced them to move back to Indiana in 1911.
In 1912, House left home to join the Navy. In Freedom From Florida Chains, he describes an uneventful service of training on the Great Lakes and then serving on the battleship U.S.S. Kansas. At the end of 1912, he was listed as A.W.O.L. Later in life, after being denied veteran’s benefits, House claimed to have been shanghaied by enemy forces. He claimed that for three years, he was kept below deck and forced to do “drudgery.” He escaped with the help of a Norwegian fellow prisoner when the ship was close to the shore near Veracruz, Mexico. The two jumped off the ship and swam to shore. “They shot us both… we were bloody as hogs. He helped me, or I would have drowned. He was a strong swimmer.” He was nursed back to health on shore, and later made his way back to Terre Haute by hitchhiking and catching trains. Because he was never officially discharged by the Navy until 1957, House would claim that he was owed 45 years of back pay, as well as compensation for his ordeal, and he and his mother would spend many years unsuccessfully petitioning and suing the Navy for it.
After making it back to Indiana, House “became a roamer.” In the spring of 1917, he settled down, and on April 21st, he married Fern Gregg. The two opened a bakery that provided them with a steady income. After the enactment of prohibition, House immediately got into bootlegging. He made trips to Florida where he bought the liquor that he sold in Indiana and Illinois for great profits. During this time, he also engaged in other forms of banditry. In 1923, he was charged with robbing the payroll office of the Carpenter Construction Company in Youngstown. Not long after that, he made a fateful trip down to Florida.
Al House, according to Al House, was only ever guilty of bootlegging and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Freedom From Florida Chains makes no mention of committing any robberies. House said that in March 1925, he went to West Palm Beach on a routine bootlegging run. He said that he and a companion were in a movie theater watching the silent film Birth of a Nation. At one point, he thought that the sound effects of the film were too realistic, and left, suspecting that there was a robbery. Upon being told that there actually was a robbery, and that the police were looking for two men driving a Hudson Coach, House decided to go to Tampa. He drove through the night and arrived at the house of Teresa Cohn. He said he went to sleep on a davenport, only to be awoken in a few hours by the knocking the police.
After escaping from jail, House spent a week hiding out in the home of a woman named Mary Green while Fern made her way down from Indiana. After renting a car, Al and Fern drove up to Waycross, Georgia, where they abandoned the car, and then took a train to Toledo, Ohio. In the meantime, Tampa police hired a Pinkerton detective by the name of Ralph Navarro.
In Toledo, House claimed that he happened to meet with Molly McCann, who had fallen upon hard times since leaving Tampa, and that Fern took her in out of pity. McCann quickly learned of a large reward set out for information leading to the arrest of House, and wrote her ex-boyfriend Charlie Wall, who told the Tampa police, who told the Toledo police.
When he was arrested, House told the arresting officer, “It’s lucky that there were so many of you, or you would have had a fight.”
House was extradited back to Tampa, but not after newspapers had a chance to speak to him. The Tampa Tribune described House as, “A dapper man, a ‘gentleman bandit,’ so to speak. He is affable, has a streak of humor, but when the questions get too warm, he just looks at you with a disapproving look. He is not boastful, but he wants you to know that he is a big timer.”
Back in Tampa, Teresa Cohn told the police everything. She explained how Ed Vestal, a private detective often employed by Charlie Wall, had smuggled House the saws that he used to break free.
“I am not interested in Albert House anymore,” she said, “He left me to rot in the jail at Tampa, and he has not spent one five-cent piece to provide for my comfort.” She explained that she claimed to be his wife only after he told her that if she was his wife, she wouldn’t be held prisoner.
When showed a photograph of Fern House, she said she knew her and that the two had been in a fight in Indianapolis in July, 1924, “I was with House in an automobile, and this woman was looking for him. She found us together in the machine and she started fighting me. I beat her. She knows me all right, and she knew that I was in Florida with House, for she sent him letters while we were here together.”
Cohn’s testimony, along with the testimony of eye-witnesses, and the letter sent to The Tampa Tribune, were all used as evidence against House. Under questioning by the police, House pled guilty to the Hav-a-Tampa robbery, as well as burglaries of the Knight & Wall hardware store and the Maas Brothers department store, and Judge W. Raleigh “Put ’Em Away” Petteway sentenced him to twenty years in prison for each robbery, plus ten extra years for possessing burglary tools.
“I want to get up to Raiford,” said House, “I’m an industrious guy, and as I’m a baker by trade, I guess they’ll put me in the bake shop there. Maybe I can even make a little jack giving a series of lessons to the authorities there on how to cope with various criminals. I guess I could run a pretty good class on criminology.”
About a week after being sentenced, House was caught sawing through his window bars again, and placed in solitary confinement under constant guard.
Raiford Penitentiary was built in 1913 as a place to house infirm prisoners who could not be leased for labor. Prisoners were housed in five wooden buildings, segregated by gender, race, and whether or not they had tuberculosis. Soon afterwards, the Florida legislature enacted a law providing for the establishment of a State Prison Farm. 600 acres of land was cleared and put to use growing crops and raising livestock using convict labor. In 1919, former state senator J.S. Blitch was put in charge of the prison, which had grown to about 18,000 acres in size, with 4,000 acres under cultivation. Blitch brought in a series of reforms mean to cut costs and improve conditions at Raiford. Even as the prison population rapidly increased, he managed to cut the amount of money spent in half. He created an honor system that put well-behaved prisoners in charge of running the facility, along with privileges like theatrical productions and weekly baseball games. The Tampa Tribune ran a glowing report, “Superintendent Sim Blitch will go down in Florida’s history as one of the, if not the greatest humanitarian that has ever lived in the state.” In 1924, the famed “Old Sparky” electric chair that would eventually end the life of serial killer Ted Bundy was built and installed as a “humane” alternative to hanging. The facade of reform hid the horrific conditions in which prisoners actually lived.
In 1921, 22-year-old North Dakota resident Martin Tabert was sentenced to three months hard labor after being caught in Florida riding a train without a ticket. He was leased to work for the Putnam Lumber Company in the small community of Clara in Dixie County. Soon, Tabert grew ill with oozing sores, headaches, chills, and fever that went untreated. When he claimed to be too weak to work, the camp whipping boss, Walter Higginbotham, put Tabert on his severely swollen feet and flogged him between fifty and seventy times with a leather strap. Tabert was placed in his bunk, where he lost consciousness and eventually died. The resulting scandal, along with lawsuits brought by the Tabert family, led to the banning of the practice of flogging prisoners. In 1923, Florida became one of the last states to end the practice of convict leasing. However, very little actually changed. Beating prisoners still continued. Instead of working for private companies, prisoners were set to building state and county roads and laboring on state-run prison farms.
The first prisoner to be sentenced to be executed by “Old Sparky” was a 13-year-old Black boy named Fortune Ferguson, Jr. He was convicted of raping an 8-year-old White girl. He appealed the decision and made it all the way to the Federal Supreme Court, but the conviction was upheld. In 1927, he became the 14th prisoner to die by electricity in Florida. He was 16 years old.
Al House arrived at Raiford on November 15, 1925. He was put in shackles and set to work digging ditches. A few days later, he received a telegram informing him that his wife, Fern, had been shot and seriously wounded after the police came to break up a fight in a roadhouse where she was living. Her wounds left her paralyzed from the waist down, and she died two weeks later from an infection.
Clearly, it was time to get out. In February, a box with two revolvers hidden in a false bottom was found in House’s cell. House claimed that two prisoners tried to frame him so that they might obtain a pardon, going so far as to perfectly mimic his mother’s handwriting in a note. For this, House was given his first lengthy stay in solitary confinement.
At this point, Raiford had no designated building for solitary confinement. Prisoners were kept in wooden “sweatboxes.” “There was no ventilation whatsoever, and the only way I could tell that it was night time was because the light diminished the cracks in the side of the box… It was impossible to lie down, as the box was only 3 feet square. I had to squat-down to rest in an awkward position.” After a few days in the sweatbox, House was placed in the death cell adjoining the death chamber housing Old Sparky.
In the late summer, a solitary confinement unit with six cells was finally built, called the “Flat-Top.” A special cell was built specifically for House. He was placed there before the concrete had time to cure properly. “You could not strike a match on the walls- they were so damp,” House described.
But Al House wasn’t deterred so easily. In August a guard found a note that House and fellow inmate Haywood Register passed between themselves detailing plans to bribe a guard with $2,500 dollars and make for the open country.
According to House, he was able to get out of solitary by bribing an influential trusty by the name of J.J. Mendenhall with a diamond ring worth $2,500. He was sprung free on Thanksgiving Day. However, not long afterwards, House got word about Blitch and Mendenhall planning to shake him down for more money.
Shortly after noon on January 7th, 1927, House and two other inmates, Tex Williams and Arthur Thomas, made a grand escape. They dashed from the prison yard and into a waiting automobile. They headed north towards the Okeefenokee Swamp. A posse was sent after them. Warden Blitch, in a car with a one-armed trusty named Marion Highsmith, broke ahead of the posse in pursuit of the escapees.
Around sundown, near the small town of Baxter on the Florida-Georgia state line, Blitch caught up with House and his companions. Blitch’s higher-geared car overtook House’s and cut the escapees off, forcing their car to come to a screeching halt.
“The whole thing looked like ‘Hell a-poppin,’” House recalled. A gunfight broke out between Blitch and House, in which both were shot twice.
What exactly happened next can only be described as the Florida version of Rashomon.
As reported in The Tampa Tribune, House immediately surrendered after being shot. Marion Highsmith, fearing a fake-out, attacked House with a club and beat him unconscious. The rest of the search posse soon arrived, took Blitch and Highsmith to the closest hospital, and House and his companions back to Raiford.
House’s version of events differs quite a bit. As he put it, Blitch fell down “as if he were dead” after being shot. Highsmith continued to shoot, but his gun jammed. The three escapees approached the car. House took a chunk of ice from a nearby ditch and used the cold water to wash Blitch’s face. House’s companions encouraged him to, “Kill the son-of-a-bitch, Al, while you’ve still got the chance!” but House refused. He flagged down a passing car and told the driver to bring Blitch to a hospital.
House and his companions took one of the cars and set off north again. Not long afterwards, a group of deputized hunters carrying shotguns came upon him and began shooting. After blowing out a tire, the three escapees ran into the swamp. They entered “A large cypress pond thickly wooded with trees and underbrush.” However, the search posse soon surrounded them. Williams and Thomas surrendered while House decided that he would “Stay and shoot it out.” House crawled further through the palmetto bushes, but was shot in the back by a member of the search posse. House returned fire and grazed the shooter on the jaw. Suddenly, a male voice told the posse not to shoot anymore. “I realized then that I had a sympathetic friend- and I needed one!” wrote House. The kind stranger told House to throw down his gun. House approached the man with his hands up. The man, named Marshall Yawn, took House to his place, “A typical ‘cracker’ homestead.”
Soon, the search posse, led by Captain Piney Gordon, came upon the Yawn home. Captain Gordon pointed his gun at House’s head and warned that he was going to shoot and “Blow [his] damn brains out!”
Yawn responded, “If you don’t put that damn pistol back in your holster damn quick, I’m gonna blow the hell out of you, in thirty seconds!” House peacefully surrendered to the posse, still under Yawn’s protection. Yawn went on, “If any of you men from the State Farm stop your car on the highway, before you get to that prison farm, I’m gonna blow the hell out of you with this Winchester! I know damned well you’re gonna shove him out of the car and then shoot him and say he was tryin’ to escape!… I’ll be right behind you all the way- remember, and I’ll be watching close!” No record exists of anyone by the name of Marshall Yawn living in Baker County, or any of the six counties encompassing the Okeefenokee Swamp.
The Tampa Daily Times gave its own version of the events: After the initial exchange of bullets, House hid behind the radiator of his car, and called out that he’d been hit. Blitch came to look, and House shot him twice. Highsmith tussled with House’s companions. At one point, a good Samaritan drove up, and Blitch left Highsmith and the Samaritan to guard the convicts, taking the Samaritan’s car. At that point, House jumped into the high-powered police car, fought off Highsmith, and drove off with his companions. When Blitch returned, he and Highsmith continued to pursue House. The police car threw a tire, and another gunfight began when Blitch found the convicts. The convicts ran into the woods, and Highsmith followed. A farmer came to help Highsmith, but when he saw the trustee’s striped trousers, took him for an escapee, and drew a gun on him. Eventually, when joined by other armed men who had formed a posse in search of the convicts. When they found House, there was a brief exchange of bullets. House was grazed on the top of the head, and “He lifted his arms to surrender, and then fell over like dead.”
Upon returning back to Raiford, a guard captain determined that House wouldn’t die of his wounds, and threw him back into Flat Top without receiving any medical treatment.
Nowadays, the psychological harm done by long-term solitary confinement is well known and well documented. In a groundbreaking article in the November 1983 edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, psychiatrist Stuart Grassian defined a specific syndrome caused by long-term solitary confinement, called SHU Syndrome. Symptoms include panic attacks, hallucinations, paranoia, loss of impulse control, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, and most notably, significant deterioration in cognitive ability with difficulty in thinking, concentration, and memory.
The way House described it, a prisoner feels, “Very flighty, fearful to lie down because of shortness of breath, and over eager to get just a slight view, even, of sky or open places where one can catch a view of the moon and stars or sun, day or night-time, and your nerves are frayed and one cannot make up his mind to quit walking back and forth even in a small enclosure for fear he will die!”
Prisoners with mental illness kept in solitary confinement often show a significant worsening of their illness. Many inmates show long-term psychological damage. But the time he was eventually released from Raiford, Al House spent a cumulative eleven years in solitary confinement.
“My cell was completely devoid of anything except the toilet and wash basin,” wrote House, “I did not have a cot to sleep on, or a blanket to put on the concrete floor. Every night- through the winter months- I would huddle up in one corner of the cell and try to keep warm! I had been losing weight constantly, and was down to about 90 pounds. My left side had become paralyzed and I lost the use of my left arm and leg almost totally.”
In November, The Florida Supreme Court voided the 20-year sentences of Lester Gildre and John Kennie, declaring that the search warrant that led to the raid of the house where Gildre and Kennie were staying with House had been illegal. Gildre and Kennie were granted a new trial, and House was requested for testimony. He was brought back to Tampa, where two doctors examined him and assessed his ability to testify.
Dr. D.G. Meighen declared, “House is not capable as a witness. He is mentally and physically unfit to testify to facts, in my opinion, and his testimony could have no bearing whatsoever in the case. Mentally his wholly irresponsible.”
Sheriff L.M. Hiers gave a more succinct assessment, “House is batty — entirely off. He is not shamming. It would be impossible for him to play insane so perfectly.”
On December 1st, House was carried into a Tampa courtroom by two deputies, as he could not walk on his own. He was put in the witness’s stand for two hours.
The Tampa Tribune described, “He made a pitiful figure on the stand, apparently comprehending little and groping to form simple thoughts. In contrast with the former Al House, the sharp-witted bandit, he looked and spoke the part of a mere shell of a human being.”
House took credit for the Hav-a-Tampa, Maas Brothers, and Knight & Wall robberies, saying that he’d blown the safe at the hardware store with nitroglycerine. A tiny spark of his former wit was shown when the solicitor asked, “How do you fix a safe to blow it?” and House replied, “Well- er- well, do you want to blow one?” In the end, he refused to say anything that might incriminate Gildre & Kennie. The jury was unable to come to agreement, and a mistrial was declared the next day.
A flurry of letters appeared in The Tampa Tribune throughout December. Most were sympathetic to House, and argued that he should either be given hospital treatment at Raiford or sent to the Chattahoochee State Mental Hospital. House was turned to Raiford on January 8th. He was kept in Flat Top, but was granted hour-long sun baths three times a week.
In the meantime, Lester Gildre pled guilty to the charges against him, and was re-sentenced to four years in prison, of which he had already served two. In another two years, he would walk free. John Kennie jumped bond before his trial, and on September 11, 1928, his charred body was found in the smoldering remnants of a barn in Angola, Indiana.
At about this time, the Johnny J. Jones traveling carnival displayed a wax museum of famous outlaws, including Jesse James, Cole Younger, Wild Bill Hickok, and Al House. Mrs. Brubaker filed a $10,000 suit against the company for “minimizing [House’s] chances of ever getting parole or pardon,” but nothing came of it, and House languished in Flat Top for another year.
On January 10th, 1929, a letter sent by Burr Leach, House’s uncle, appeared in The Tampa Tribune.
“House belongs in a hospital,” he wrote, “They say they are afraid he will get away. That can’t be the reason for he is a helpless man slowly dying… House has done nothing to justify such treatment. Nothing justifies murdering a sick man by inches in a place like that.”
Seven days later, a reply from Warden Blitch appeared, “[House] is lazy and just won’t work and has a violent temper that he daily nourishes against the day when he will get out of here and wreak his vengeance upon his sworn enemies. Al is an incorrigible and there is not a hospital in the state that will have him, so I believe the ‘Flat Top’ is the only solution of this problem.”
Gradually, House was allowed longer periods of time in the yard surrounding Flat Top, which was situated by the prison hospital building. From a small hole in the fence around Flat Top, House had a view of the hospital porch where he could observe the comings and goings of hospital patients. It is from here that he alleges to have witnessed several murders by poison.
On October 22, 1929, a drug-addicted Flat Top inmate named James Roundtree asked the prison doctor, Dr. Vandervere, for “something to calm his nerves,” and was instead given a deadly dose of chloral.
House claims to have witnessed the poisoning deaths of Pearl Kenney, Joseph Schuelfino, V.G. “Old Man” Moore, Amore Amato, Morris Barnett, and A.G. Gaskill. Kenney was brought to the hospital for an unnamed illness, was placed on the operating table, given a large overdose of anesthetic, and left unattended. House claims that the others were brought to the hospital, given a glass full of aconite or cyanide, and died within ten minutes. When describing their deaths, House gives the prison number and date of death of each inmate. Death records verify that each inmate did indeed die in Raiford on the date claimed by House, with their deaths were listed as “cardiac insufficiency” or some other cause that wasn’t poisoning. House attempted to contact the family members of some of the dead inmates, but no inquests were ever called into their deaths.
The murders continued outside of the hospital. On July 5th, 1929, an inmate named Robert Reid was found with his throat cut and a knife “placed in his hand in a position that would have been humanly impossible for him to use to inflict the injuries upon himself.” Nonetheless, Reid’s death was determined a suicide. House accused inmate J.J. Mendenhall of the murder.
Before Raiford, Mendenhall was a wealthy and influential businessman who frequently appeared in the newspaper society pages with such descriptions as “prominent orange grower,” “all-around capitalist,” and, “man who does things.” Originally from Cincinnati, his first wife died in 1895 after an alleged accident in which a shotgun went off in Mendenhall’s hands. Within a year, he married his house keeper and moved to Clearwater, where he built considerable wealth for himself. In 1915, Mendenhall murdered Susie Eliot, a young woman with whom he’d been having an affair, and her mother, who had allegedly threatened to charge him with violating the Mann Act. He was charged, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.
Fortunately for Mendenhall, the quality of life of a Florida prison inmate could easily be improved if he had the money to pay for it. Mendenhall immediately curried the favor of prison officials and set about taking advantage of Warden Blitch’s honor system by doing good work and being a “model prisoner.”
A 1919 article on a sheriff’s visit to Raiford reported, “Mendenhall is carpenter foreman at the farm and has charge of all new construction work, as well as repairs. Temporarily, during a lull in building activities, he was superintending a squad of negro women at work in one of the fields.” In 1928, when the building of a new housing facility for Raiford was called for, Mendenhall was put in charge, saving the state thousands of dollars that would have otherwise been spent on a private contractor.
According to House, Robert Reid’s sister, Gladys, “Had been keeping company with Mendenhall for many months when he learned of the large amount of insurance on the life of her brother.” A few days after the death of Robert Reid, Mendenhall and Gladys left Raiford on a “general delivery” business trip to several major northern cities. Mendenhall returned to Raiford without Gladys. House alleged that Mendenhall had murdered Gladys and taken her money, but census records show that she was still alive in 1940. Whether or not House’s accusations about Robert Reid bear any truth remains a mystery, as Reid’s death went un-investigated.
In 1930, after construction on The Rock was completed, Mendenhall was granted a conditional pardon by the governor of Florida, despite the protests of numerous women’s groups. In 1932, he was given a full pardon and restoration of citizenship. In 1934, he was again accused of double murder, that of Mary Rae Anderson and her mother, Laura Mae Green. Mendenhall was engaged to Anderson and in charge of the women’s finances. At one point, Green suspected that Mendenhall was stealing from them. Mendenhall asserted his innocence and insisted that the elderly woman who had been “like a mother to him” had murdered her own daughter and then stabbed herself through the heart. After a long trial, Mendenhall was acquitted. He died a free man in 1951.
In 1930, Al House was still kept in Flat Top, but was finally allowed to receive regular visitors. On March 11th, a photograph of House, his mother, and step-father was printed in The Tampa Tribune with the caption “Al House, the bandit, is working, getting fat, behaving at the Raiford prison.” A month later, he was again featured, looking dapper in a vest, tie, and striped prison pants, in a “life at Raiford” photo spread.
Shortly after this, House was allowed out of Flat Top, which had been his home for five years, and into The Rock. At this point, he requested from Warden Blitch a transfer to one of the state road crews, saying that life in prison was making him “simple and goofy.” Blitch agreed, but Secretary of Agriculture Nathan Mayo, who was the top boss of prisons in Florida, quickly put a stop to that.
In February 1931, House made his first appeal to the state pardon board for clemency, but was denied. Shortly afterwards, he was employed in the prison canning factory, where prisoners who were disabled or ill with diseases like syphilis and tuberculosis were mostly employed. While working there, House noticed that the bulk of the canned goods were going to the women’s dormitories at Florida State University.
“A great portion of these girl students were rich men’s daughters, that paid a good sum of money out to educate them, and they were supposed to have the very best of everything at the College.” So, House and other inmates employed at the factory began writing letters and placing them in each case of canned goods, “How their nice string-beans and pears and tomatoes are handled or prepared by old germ-laden and syphilitic diseased convicts.” The shipments to the university stopped soon afterward.
That October, House again applied for pardon, and was again denied. The day afterwards, a simple comment appeared in the editorial section of The Tampa Tribune, “Al House never gives up hope.”
In the middle of 1931, House received a new cell-mate, a 19-year-old New Jerseyan by the name of Arthur Maillefert. His first trouble with the law came in 1930 when police found a siren in a car in which he and a friend were driving. He was told by a judge to leave Florida, but ignored these orders. A year later, he robbed a gas station in Daytona Beach, and was arrested. On his way to stand trial in Volusia County, he jumped, still handcuffed, from a moving police car into the Halifax River. Deputies assumed he’d drowned. They dragged the river, but found no body. The next day, Maillefert stole a motorcycle, and was arrested near Titusville. He received a nine-year prison sentence.
House described Maillefert, “He was such a congenial and likable boy. I read the wonderful letters he would write to his mother and brother. One day (being only a boy of 19) he received a letter from his mother at Westfield, New Jersey, and it told about his little dog that had been killed, and I thought his heart would break. He came to prison with a pair of riding-boots on. I can see him yet as he looked and talked.”
In November, Maillefert was shipped to the Sunbeam Prison Camp in Duval County. On June 1st, 1932, he refused to do his daily work, claiming illness, and was beaten with an axe handle and rubber hose and then placed in a sweatbox for the day without being given food or water. The next day, when he again refused to do work, he was stripped naked and a 50-pound barrel was placed over his head and nailed in place so that he couldn’t remove it. The barrel prevented him from sitting or lying down. He was kept in the prison yard during the day, where his body was bitten by gnats and mosquitos. At night, he was again thrown in the sweatbox without being fed.
The next day, June 3rd, Maillefert managed to gnaw through the wooden boards enough that he could slip his head through. After that, he took off running, grabbing an old blanket to cover himself. After a mile-long chase, guard Solomon Higginbotham and two bloodhounds re-captured Maillefert and brought him back to camp in the back of a truck. Maillefert was put on the ground, and at that point, he was so weak from exhaustion and lack of food, that when a puppy he’d befriended came up to lick his face, he didn’t have the strength to brush it away. Warden George Washington Courson nailed 17-pound wooden stocks on Maillefert’s feet. He was then placed upright in a sweat-box with a chain tied tightly around his neck and hung from the rafters. When Maillefert was able to take a drink of water, Courson declared the chain wasn’t tight enough, and tightened it. After that, “Captain Courson called all the convicts and told them to take a good look at ‘this bastard’ and let this be a lesson to them!” The door was closed, and Maillefert, too weak to support the weight of his body, was strangled to death.
Four years earlier, a Black prisoner by the name of Henry Ridley had died under similar circumstances, after being severely beaten and then thrown into a sweatbox for four days without food or water. This only caused minor scandal. A small investigation was held, but nothing came of it. However, the gruesome death of a White northerner at the hands of a brutal southern prison system caused a nation-wide outrage.
An editorial in The Jacksonville Journal wrote, “If the evidence thus far given against these prison officials is true, it means that we have had at the very door of this fair city a condition that is unspeakably horrible. A condition better fitting the Dark Ages or the Inquisition. We shudder in horror over the tales of Devil’s Island. It is possible that we have a Devil’s Island right here in Florida.”
That October, a grand jury indicted Higginbotham and Courson and charged them with manslaughter. Sixteen convicts were brought in to testify against them.
R.R. Killinger, the doctor who examined Maillefert’s body, said, “There were many bruises on the back portion of the thighs, on the calves of both legs and that on the buttocks were large, dark bruises about the size of both hands. The darkened condition indicated that those bruises were caused at least 24 hours prior to death.” He said that the inside of Maillefert’s stomach looked “as if it had been washed clean,” and that the right side of his heart was dilated and his lungs showed “signs of pneumonia.”
When the trial was finished, Higginbotham was acquitted, but Courson was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum sentence of 20 years of hard labor. Courson appealed, and a year later, a court reversed the conviction. A new trial was ordered, but never happened. In the end, Courson never spent a day in prison.
In his memoir, House wrote about how Maillefert intended to write a book about his experiences and call it Please Listen, The Gulf Wind.
“And now, dear readers of this book, as the aging or old ‘raconteur of stone walls and prison chains,’ after 40 years of imprisonment looks back — reminiscing about the fine young, noble and handsome face of the boy, Arthur Maillefert (‘Jersey’), only 19 years of age and, think many times of his intended title for his book and things that this young mind sought to write about — for all of you — the readers — to ponder over and through and, someday, enjoy! It was, don’t forget! — ‘PLEASE LISTEN, THE GULF WIND.’”
On June 20th, 1932, Warden J.S. Blitch died. An obituary in the Tallahassee Democrat praised, “[Blitch] is widely known over the entire country for his humane methods in dealing with convicts.”
Before the funeral, Blitch’s body briefly “laid in state” in the main dining hall at Raiford for inmates to view. House described, “Some inmates came to look at him, the majority didn’t. They said ‘They had seen too damn much of him when he was living,’ and ate too damn much of his sorry grub, too many years, to ever wish to see any more of him, — and if he went to Heaven, they all wanted to be in Hell.”
Assistant Superintendent Leonard Chapman took over Blitch’s role, and life at Raiford continued on as before.
In 1933, the Flat Top building was expanded to include 42 cells and a death cell where prisoners awaiting executions were held. The death cell’s first occupant was Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian anarchist whose assassination attempt on president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami had been foiled by a wobbly chair. Zangara instead hit Chicago mayor Anton J. Cermak, who eventually died of his wounds. House says that he made a few visits to Zangara while he was housed at Flat Top, but that his attempts at conversation were met with icy silence. Zangara was electrocuted on March 20th, 1933, after expressing dismay that no news photographers had come to witness.
For a brief time, House was kept in Flat Top in a cell beside “murderer’s row,” where the condemned inmates were kept. The head keeper there was a man named J.H. Dowling, a corpulent man who House described as “garrulous,” and “exceedingly cruel,” who would walk up and down the corridors singing, “Oh, it won’t be long, it won’t be long, they’ll call my number and name, and I’ll be gone!”
House described watching the condemned be carried away for execution, “Some of these were wild and frightened, crying all the way… Some of these men had to be assisted down the narrow corridor to their doom. A doctor would offer to give them a shot of morphine to steady their nerves, but over half of them refused it. Most of the condemned would seem to be in a stupor and walked slowly, with eyes straight ahead, as if walking on a cloud. As they reached the electric chair room, a brine-soaked sponge would be placed on their shaved heads and the hood pulled down. Three minutes later they would be dead.” The bodies of unclaimed, deceased inmates, including Zangara, were buried in the prison cemetery, called “Gopher Hill” for the gopher tortoises who dug their burrows there.
House was assigned to work at the prison bakery, making pastries to be sold at the prison canteen. Every Christmas, he made a fruitcake for Judge W. Raleigh Petteway, but Judge Petteway never ate them, afraid of any extra ingredients House may have added.
On November 25th, 1934, House and his mother were dealt a severe blow when his step-father died, leaving Mrs. Brubaker without any means of support. Shortly afterwards, the state Board of Pardons again denied a pardon for House, which House said was due to the fact that they didn’t have the money to make a sufficient bribe.
After this, “Realizing that I had not the ghost of a chance to get out alive to be with my mother… waiting on the Pardon or Parole Board for relief, I somehow started to more fully investigate my case and the legal aspects involved.”
House had no means to get the law books he needed, but “I did the best I could, I saw some old cast-off books on law, I studied them constantly and finally succeeded in getting hold of — among others — ‘THE SOUTHERN REPORTER’ published by the West Publishing Company at St. Paul, Minnesota. It gave the reports and Opinions of the Supreme Court of Florida and various other southeastern states, and what they held in certain cases. I finally started to study Constitutional Law written in 1925 by Lawrence B. Evans, a volume that contained some 12 or 13 hundred pages.”
House began conferring with a lawyer-turned-inmate named Michael C. Jones, and through him, House was able to get in touch with a semi-retired lawyer named Edwin L. Bryan, who promised him that he could get a writ of Habeas Corpus from the Florida Supreme Court. In December 1935, he was granted a new sentencing. The following February, he went back to Tampa.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” he told The Tampa Tribune, “I know the folly of crime and when I get out I’m going straight. Considering the good records I have for the last few years and the time I have served, I think the judge might give me a chance. I’m going to try to have a talk with him.”
House was resentful that Lester Gildre and John Kennie had been freed in the earlier appeal to the Supreme Court, and that “Big Paul” Huhn had also been freed after serving eight years of his sentence. Brought before Judge Petteway once again, he claimed to have had nothing to do with the Hav-a-Tampa, Knight & Wall, and Maas Brothers robberies. He said that with no legal counsel, the county solicitor had pressured him into making a guilty plea or else he’d be given an un-specified murder charge.
The judge reduced his sentence from 70 to 50 years. Perhaps a small victory, but not the resolution House wanted. He once again appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, claiming that Judge Petteway had no authority to pass sentence again, and that House should have been granted his request to withdraw his original guilty plea and enter a new, not guilty plea. In February 1937, the Court upheld Judge Petteway’s sentence.
In late summer, Mrs. Brubaker lost her home. She re-located from a twelve-acre country property to a small house in Jacksonville where she rented out the extra rooms for income. Mrs. Brubaker was able to find work in a WPA sewing room, but she was still living hand-to-mouth with lawyer’s fees and gasoline for trips to Raiford taking up most of her income.
In March, 1938, the United States Supreme Court granted House a writ of Habeas Corpus, directing that the state of Florida had to show just cause for holding him. He argued that because the search warrant that lead to his arrest had been illegal and much of the evidence against him thus inadmissible, his final ten-year sentence should be void, just as the sentences of Gildre and Kennie had been.
It was a pretty convincing argument, and, according to House, “Nathan Mayo, Prison Custodian, was so scared that I would get out that ‘he shook like an aspen-leaf in a forty mile gale,’ for in those days he knew that the prison system of Florida would be thoroughly exposed to the last degree by my mother and me.”
On March 28th, the Supreme Court found that, even without the evidence gathered in House’s arrest, there was still plenty of evidence against him, and thus the state of Florida did indeed have just cause for holding him. House was left without legal recourse. The only way he could get out of prison was through pardon or parole.
In May, a gun was found in House’s cell, and he once again found himself in Flat-Top. House insisted it wasn’t his gun, in fact, it wasn’t even in his cell. He blamed its appearance on a group of prisoners who were plotting escape. Prison officials didn’t believe him.
Warden Chapman told The Tampa Tribune, “Al House is a bad actor. He spends all his time trying to escape. He does this year in and year out. He’s plotted escapes dozens of times, and got away once.” Police charged Mrs. Brubaker with mailing the gun to him. She was arrested and briefly brought to the women’s ward at Raiford, but the charges were soon dropped.
At this point, Al House had been in prison longer than any other White convict not serving a life sentence. House blamed his lengthy stay and his lack of pardon on a number of things. He claimed that prison officials were afraid that he’d air dirty secrets about the prison and how the whole system was run. More often, House blamed his lack of pardon or parole on Charlie Wall, even long after Wall had fallen out of power and “retired” from his position as crime boss. House claimed that at one point, Mrs. Brubaker turned to Wall asking for help in getting him out of prison. Wall agreed to meet her in Plant Park at midnight. As she went to the agreed meeting, she was “hemmed in between two dark figures of men,” one of who appeared to be holding a knife. Luckily for Mrs. Brubaker, a friend of hers just happened to be standing in some nearby shrubbery and was able to whisk her away from Wall’s assailants.
For the next few years, House fell into a reliable pattern of going into Flat Top, getting out of Flat Top, and getting into Flat Top again, interspersed with petitions to the Board of Pardons that would invariably be denied. Briefly, he was assigned to a hard road camp near Pensacola, where the captain was fair, and conditions were at least better than Flat Top. But staying out of trouble was never Al House’s strong suit, and an uncovered escape plot got him sent back to his old home.
Flat Top still had its regular visitors, one of whom was the prison chaplain, Reverend Leslie Shepherd, who oversaw every execution at Raiford. As described by House, he “would stroll down the corridor with a burning cigarette in one hand and a Bible in the other. He would speak so consolingly to the man while blowing cigarette smoke in his face!”
According to House, Brother Shepherd would stop and spend long hours conversing with his favorite convicts, who were all “Homo-sexuals and those ‘good-looking-boys’ convicted of sex crimes. These homo-sexuals were called ‘gal-boys’ and ‘sweet-mammas’ in the prison language used, and ‘punks.’” Brother Shepherd would inquire, “all about their intimate selves and sexual relations with other convicts… ‘which of the two ways they liked it best,’ and if they were still a ‘virgin.’” House goes on, “The only prisoners at Flat Top that received any favors from ‘Bro’ Shepherd were the ‘girls.’ He would bring them expensive Bibles or dictionaries — candy and cigarettes, along with perfumes or cosmetics — to enhance their feminine beauty… I tried to get him to bring me a dictionary and a large-print Bible, but he always told me that he forgot it.”
When not pampering his favored young convicts, Brother Shepherd would solicit funds for a chapel to be built on the grounds of Raiford. He sent letters to the friends and family members of convicts, having convicts all sign their name so that he couldn’t be charged with mail fraud. While construction of the massive main housing unit at Raiford took just over two years, construction of a small chapel at Raiford took over seven years, with each year $50,000 being officially budgeted from the state of Florida for its construction. Clearly, Al House wasn’t the only clever con man at work at Raiford.
More terrifying than Brother Shepherd was the hospital orderly John “Crip” Moncrief, who House describes in grotesque terms, resembling classic movie monsters, with a shortened leg and a love of mercilessly torturing inmates. According to House, Moncrief would often use inmates as his personal dart board, using syringes as darts. Moncrief would wrap up inmates in straight jackets, feed them castor oil, and then rub the resulting excrement in the inmate’s face. House claims that when he was recovering from a hernia operation in the hospital, when Moncrief came up on him and tore the surgical tape from the fresh suture, nearly undoing the operation. In another incident, a young inmate was in the hospital with a gangrenous toe. Rather than waiting for the doctor to come and perform a proper amputation, Moncrief, without using any anesthesia, used pruning shears to cut the toe off. In yet another incident, Moncrief grew tired of delivering regular shots to an asthmatic death row inmate named Chester White, and declared, “I will save the state from having the trouble of putting you in the electric chair. You won’t need any more shots now!” before giving White a deadly overdose.
In 1940, two stories once again brought severe scrutiny to Florida’s prison system. In 1935, a prisoner named Harry Blosdale escaped from a chain gang and made his way to California, where he married and lived a respectable life for the next five years. When he applied to a civil service job, he submitted his fingerprints, and was found out to be a wanted fugitive. The state of Florida tried to extradite Blosdale and have him serve out the rest of his sentence, but Blosdale turned to California governor Culbert D. Olson. Blosdale told of horrific abuse, how he had seen prisoners repeatedly whipped, force-fed castor oil, locked in sweatboxes, hung by their wrists, and fed a starvation diet. He told of prisoners who had lopped off hands and feet to escape the chain gang. He showed where his ankles were still scarred from the shackles that were put on him. Most horrifyingly, he told of how Florida prisons did the same as the prison camps of Nazi Germany and extracted gold teeth from the mouths of executed prisoners. Olson blocked the extradition, citing Florida’s use of cruel and unusual punishment.
The second blow to the state’s reputation came with the Supreme Court ruling in Chambers vs. Florida. In 1933, a fish dealer named Robert Darsey was walking home when he was hit over the head with a hammer and sticks and then robbed. He quickly died of his wounds, and immediately, an angry mob of White citizens began rounding up and arresting Black men. One man had a noose put around his neck, but was saved by a sheriff’s deputy. For five days, those arrested were held without being charged with a crime. They were threatened and beaten and interrogated until, finally, four men broke down and confessed. Jack Williamson, Walter Woodward, Charlie Davis, and Isaiah “Izell” Chambers were all charged with the murder, quickly convicted by an all-White jury, and sentenced to death. They were sent to Raiford and held in solitary confinement on death row.
In less than a month, Warden Chapman issued a statement declaring he was ready to electrocute the four men the following week. The quadruple execution would be a first for the state of Florida. Luckily, an attorney named D.W. Perkins filed a writ of error to the Florida Supreme Court and was able to obtain a stay of execution.
For the next seven years, the four men waged an exhausting legal back and forth, during which they were kept in solitary confinement. Finally, on January 6th, 1940, a 32-year-old attorney named Thurgood Marshall argued the case of Chambers vs. Florida before the United States Supreme Court. The Court found that the four men had been denied the due process of law guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment, and was the first case in which state courts were unequivocally held accountable for observing due process.
The men were forced to wait another two years to be granted a new trial. In 1942, they were acquitted of all charges and allowed to go free. Unfortunately for Isaiah Chambers, seven years in solitary confinement had been too much for him, and he was committed to the state mental hospital at Chattahoochee.
House saw the rulings as a great opportunity, and studied the cases thoroughly. He prepared a petition for the writ of Habeas Corpus and submitted it to the State Supreme Court in the August of 1943. He claimed that he’d been denied his due process by being denied an attorney and tricked into making a guilty plea by being led to believe that doing so would grant him a short sentence.
House’s attorney, Edgar J. Waybright, told the Associated Press, “I don’t know how long he has studied the law, or how, but the legal phraseology of the document speaks for itself of the knowledge House has acquired.”
The following November, another Associate Press article appeared in newspapers across Florida, “Long Term Convict Has Become Legal Advisor to His Prison Pals.” The article noted that “An abnormal number of petitions for Habeas Corpus have come directly to the supreme court here in recent months… Most of them have the same distinctive capitalization, punctuation, and form of the one House prepared and had a Jacksonville attorney file for him.” Most of the petitions that House wrote failed. However, with his own case, he managed to get his case through to the U.S. Supreme Court. On February 5th, 1945, the in the case of House vs. Mayo, the court sided with his claims, and he was granted a writ of Habeas Corpus.
House declared to the Associated Press, “The U.S. Supreme Court has dealt me a royal flush, and of course, that beats four aces, we all know that. I now have the best go, so to speak, on my newfound luck. I never was one to kick any one after he was down, although I can’t say the same for the state and a few of its officials in bygone years, especially in my case, but I come here with some principal and dignity. I therefore wish to leave with some of these attributes.”
Warden Chapman was dismissive of House’s legal efforts, citing his past failures, “Al didn’t get his change, nor his parole, and he’s been hot as a firecracker ever since.”
Under a heavy guard, House was brought from Raiford back to Tampa to once again stand trial, this time with a lawyer by his side. However, when he presented his case in court, the judge decided that he had failed to carry the burden of proof, and ruled against him.
However slowly, reform was coming to Florida. In August 1945, an article appeared in The Miami News telling the story of Salvatore B. Amendola, a Navy veteran from Connecticut who came to Florida looking to start a farm. Shortly after arriving in the state, Amendola was arrested on a minor vagrancy charge. The judge mistook him for an Italian prisoner of war and sentenced him to six months of hard labor without the opportunity to pay a fine. While performing his sentence, Amendola was unable to keep up with the other convicts, who were well-seasoned to hard labor, and found himself thrown into a sweatbox on three occasions.
The story broke at the time that Japan was formally surrendering to the United States. American soldiers who survived Japanese P.O.W. camps were coming back and telling stories of how they had been tortured and kept in sweatboxes. Unlike the sweatboxes in Florida, the sweatboxes in Japanese prison camps were ventilated and had both bedding and room for the prisoner to sit and lie down.
Newspaper editorials across Florida began calling for the abolition of the sweatbox. The Tampa Tribune sent a reporter to investigate conditions in Florida prisons, and he came back with a horrifying account of teenage boys not only being held in adult prisons, but cutting their heel tendons to avoid the cruelties of the hard labor they were subjected to.
A 17-year-old boy told his story, “The boss told us we had to keep up and one of the other boys fell behind and the boss hit him. The second day he beat me. He beat four of us together and he put us in the box, three together. Then they took us out and put chains on us. The boss said was going to kill me and I cut my foot, and they made me work for a day with my foot cut.”
Nathan Mayo ordered investigations for cases of unjust conviction and punishment and for cases of children in adult prisons. Newspapers still cried for more. The Tampa Tribune demanded that those who were responsible for Salvatore Amendola’s mistreatment be “held up to both official and public censure, publicly reprimanded by Governor Caldwell, who should also apologize in the name of the state to Amendola, his family, if any, to the Legion and to all war veterans for the outrage perpetrated upon him by Florida public officials. He should also issue an executive order forbidding the use of the sweatbox, pending its abolition by the legislature.”
Instead of being abolished, daytime partitions were removed from sweatboxes, enlarging them enough that prisoners could lay down. For as small a gesture as it was, this was the beginning of a wave of gradual reforms that would bring real change to Florida prisons. In 1946, the use of leg-irons was done away with, effectively ending the chain gang. Prisoners were still subjected to hard labor, but they were no longer chained together with heavy stocks that caused open sores on their ankles.
All this reform, however, didn’t do much for House, who spent most of 1946 in Flat Top after being caught receiving money for his legal services. On March 13th, at about 1:30 AM, Pasco County sheriff Leslie Bessinger carried American Legionnaire Joseph W. Coleman into Flat Top and left him in a cell there.
According to House, “The man was supposed to be under the influence of liquor, or just getting over it. But that was all fake; the man had had his head beaten off at the Sheriff’s jail before being brought to Raiford Prison Flat Top cells.” Sheriff Bessinger, a former hard-road prison camp captain, had beaten Coleman with a blackjack so severely that he feared that he would die. Rather than giving Coleman medical attention, he drove him up to Raiford and dumped him in a cell in Flat Top, where the death would be off his hands.
“He was shoved into a cell, naked, and the cell had no light-bulb in it; it had no water faucet in it; or even a blanket to spread on the cold cement floor for him to lie down on and the concrete was cold and damp in North Florida in March.”
For ten hours, Coleman called and begged for help. He repeatedly asked to see a doctor, or to just be given some black coffee or just water, but his pleas went unanswered. Coleman’s death certificate declared that he’d died from a “cerebral hemorrhage due to chronic alcoholism.”
On June 4th, twelve inmates, including two murderers, managed to escape from Raiford. Although they were quickly re-captured without violence, the incident was such that Governor Caldwell called for the Federal Bureau of Prisons to survey the Florida prison system and submit recommendations for improvements.
The reforms suggested mainly centered on rearranging prison populations into smaller, more specialized groups. Raiford was to be classified as a maximum-security prison designated for long-term offenders and “the worst of the worst.” Young offenders with less serious crimes would go to smaller prisons located throughout the state, where they could be given an education, vocational training, and a chance for reform. The small hard labor road camps scattered across the state would be consolidated into permanent facilities where well-behaved Raiford inmates could go as a reward. In the short term, guards who had previously faced low pay and 12-hour days received shorter working hours and a significant pay boost.
On August 7th, 1947, a Black inmate named Eva Mae Phelts was performing hard labor in a Raiford field three weeks after a major operation. When she told guard Shelley Rozier that she was too weak to work, he offered to let her rest in exchange for sexual favors. Phelts refused, and after going back to work, collapsed. Rozier kicked Phelts several times, and she called him a “Dirty Hitler son-of-a-bitch.” Hearing that, Rozier shot her six times. She was buried at Gopher Hill.
For Al House, his time at Raiford was drawing to a close. Through meritorious gained time, his sentence would be finally completed in 1951. In recent years, he’d stayed out of trouble, mostly spending his days reading in his cell. On April 15th, 1949, Mrs. Brubaker appealed to the pardon board for clemency. She claimed to be deathly ill and unable to take care of herself. In June, Mrs. Brubaker was hospitalized, and her son was granted a day’s furlough to go visit her. Finally, in November, Nathan Mayo recommended Al House for parole.
The Associated Press reported, “Mayo, who said he had done perhaps more than any other to keep House in prison for 24 years, proposed that he now be released to take his ill mother to the Mayo brothers for treatment.”
Even Warden Chapman expressed optimism, “I think Al has finally decided not to throw his life away.”
House was granted a conditional pardon. If he left the state of Florida and stayed out of trouble for the remaining two years on his sentence, he would be given a full pardon. If he didn’t, he’d be sent back to prison, this time with his ten years of “gain time” once again added to his sentence.
Mrs. Brubaker advised House not to take the pardon. He argued that the final ten years of his sentence were illegal and that he could still challenge it in courts.
“It’s outrageous saying he can’t come back to the state,” she told The Tampa Tribune, “This is my home and his. They can’t run me out of the state and they can’t run him out, either.” She added that her health had improved greatly, enough that she no longer needed to go to the Mayo Clinic. She said she would meet her son at Raiford, and from there they’d go straight to Terre Haute, where they’d live on a farm.
“So we brought the ‘old violin’ back with us,” writes House, “‘To the banks of the Wabash,’ the land of the beautiful sycamores, in Indiana, where she often times played on the ‘old violin’ and as she played it again, tunes like “The Last Rose of Summer” and others, no doubt her wonderful and tired mind was made happy in, the thought and great consolation, that she and I had at last — while she still lived — “FREEDOM FROM FLORIDA CHAINS!”
On January 15th 1951, Al House was arrested in Jacksonville. He told police that he didn’t realize he’d be arrested again if he only came back to Florida to “get my mother and drive out again. I thought it meant I couldn’t settle here.” An hour and a half before House’s arrest, another man, Harold E. Fields, was arrested while driving a car full of guns and safe-cracking equipment. He told the police the car belonged to House.
During his time out of Raiford, House had written the body of Freedom from Florida Chains, been employed at a law office writing legal briefs, and gotten involved with a gang of criminals who robbed post offices across the south. In eight months, they had stolen $500,000. House was charged with one specific robbery of a post office in Valparaiso, in which $340,000 had been stolen.
In court, House pled innocent. One of his co-conspirators, Ulas Lassiter, pled guilty and then testified against House. It took a jury only ten minutes of deliberation to find House guilty. Lassiter received a five-year sentence, while House received ten years in federal prison. House’s federal prison records indicate that between 1951 and 1958, he spent time at Alcatraz, Ft. Leavensworth, and Atlanta, but they don’t specify when he was at each institution.
In the 1950s, the federal prison system was undergoing massive changes. Alcatraz, the nation’s first maximum-security prison, was proving too expensive to keep up, but the other federal penitentiaries were ill-equipped to take in those who were deemed “the worst of the worst.” Newer, smaller prisons with more specialized populations were being built all over the country. Under the guidance of reform-minded director James V. Bennett, federal prisons adopted what was called “the medical model,” which treated crime more as something that should be cured rather than punished.
As Bennett put it, “Society need have no concern about our prisons being made so attractive to the men they will want to return. Imprisonment, being shut out from life, is punishment enough. Our job is to return that man to society better fitted to adjust himself to it with an attitude of mind that will not stand in the way of that adjustment.”
In federal prisons, there were no chain gangs and no sweatboxes, and rule infractions were met with loss of privileges rather than with beatings. Inmates were kept one to a cell. Away from Raiford and his reputation and the guards and officials with personal grudges against him, House had a much better life.
But, being Al House, he wasn’t satisfied to sit idle and just wait out his sentence. In 1956, he tried to get his conviction overturned by claiming that Ulas Lassiter had told him that he’d be given a lighter sentence if he didn’t testify on House’s behalf. In court he presented a letter that Lassiter had written explaining how federal officers had given him the deal. However, a prison guard came forward with his own testimony. He said that he found it suspicious that House had asked for the letter to be notarized, and when he asked Lassiter about it, “He broke down and told me that he had been under constant pressure from House to make the statement in court,” adding that Lassiter had written the letter “under force and threats of a very grave type.” The judge turned down House’s petition, and he returned to federal prison to wait out his term.
In 1958, House was given a conditional release, and he returned to Raiford to serve the rest of his original sentence, which was reinstated when he violated the terms of his conditional pardon.
A lot of changes had been made in the eight years he was away. In 1955, Warden Chapman retired and handed over the prison keys to Dewitt Sinclair. In 1956, a riot spurred by poor food and severe over-crowding ended when guards opened fire on inmates. Eight were wounded, and one inmate named Casmir J. Bonis was killed.
As a result, the state prison system was re-structured. Previously, Raiford had operated under the domain of the Department of Agriculture while the road prisons were under the Department of Transportation. All the state prison systems were brought together under the newly-formed Department of Corrections, and Richard O. Culver was named as its Director. Under Culver, Florida officially adopted a new correctional code, similar to the one that had been at use in federal prisons for years. Minor offender prisoners were sent to smaller road prisons across the state where the guards were unarmed. Serious offenders and incorrigibles like Al House were sent to maximum-security Raiford, which, in 1958, was stuffed to twice its maximum capacity.
That year, state senator Charley Johns came forward with accusations of abuse at Raiford. He told stories of prisoners being handcuffed to their bars in stress positions, being tear-gassed, stripped naked, sprayed with high-powered hoses and forced to sit on salt. During all this, one prisoner named Talmadge Sellers died. This resulted in a long, petty political power struggle between Director of Prisons Culver and Warden Sinclair. In the end, it was determined that the guards were acting under the orders of Captain James H. Dunn, who was acting under Culver. Dunn and his men were all fired and indicted with charges of brutality. Culver was also eventually fired, but escaped indictment. After a contentious trial, the fourteen indicted men were acquitted of committing any crimes. The eleven guards were reinstated to their jobs and given back-pay.
To House, all this was legal ammunition that he could use to challenge his sentence. Before he even left Atlanta, he challenged his extradition, using the cruel and unusual punishment claims that had previously saved other convicts from Florida. However, without the threat of chain gangs and sweatboxes, such an argument had lost its legal teeth. Back at Raiford once again, House immediately sent a Habeas Corpus petition to the Florida Supreme Court.
When Assistant Attorney General Eugene P. Spellman made his argument to keep House in prison, he called House, “The dean of Raiford lawyers,” and declared, “There has probably never been one individual whose name has appeared more often on the docket of our courts than has that of our petitioner.”
House claimed that he’d been illegally imprisoned and kidnapped after being released from federal prison. His petition was denied. So he went to the U.S. Federal District Court in Jacksonville what would be his 30th bid for freedom. He was allowed to argue his case, and appeared as his own lawyer, with a nice suit, smart-looking spectacles, a thick legal file, and Mrs. Brubaker looking on. The judge denied his petition. House appealed to the U.S. District Court of Appeals in New Orleans, but was once again denied. Finally, in September 1960, he asked Governor Leroy Collins for seven months extra gained time, but was denied. On February 13th, 1961, Al House finally completed the sentence he’d received in 1925.
Two months after House’s release, a safe in the tax collector’s office in the Baker County court house was blown open with nitroglycerine and about $100 taken. Deputy Wilbur Mobley spotted House near the courthouse and began running toward him. House quickly halted a passing car occupied by D.E. Webb, his wife, and his brother. He pointed his gun at the driver and told him to drive as fast as he could.
“He was the wildest, most desperate looking man I’ve ever looked at,” Webb later told the Associated Press. Deputy Mobely pursued House and Webb in his patrol call, and was quickly joined by Baker County Sheriff Ed Yarborough. Eventually, though, the car ended up on a dead-end road. Deputy Mobely fired a warning shot over House’s head, and House surrendered peacefully.
In court, House represented himself and pled guilty, and told the judge that when he broke into the courthouse, he’d been “out of his mind,” after taking drugs for head pain. In the epilogue of Freedom From Florida Chains, he insist that he’s innocent. He explains that the sheriff had unlawfully taken possession of the manuscript of his memoir, and given it to a staff writer of The Jacksonville Times-Union. House says he went to Macclenny to ask the sheriff to return the manuscript, and was hitch-hiking when the deputy saw him in the car and chased them down. Whatever the truth was, he was sentenced to another 14 years in prison.
After the trial, he told the Associated Press that he wasn’t interesting in pursuing his studies of the law, “I’m a sick old man, and after 36 years in prison I’m suffering from a bad case of claustrophobia. I’m writing a book about my life and I plan to do more writing at Raiford.”
But the 14-year sentence wasn’t the worst thing to happen to House that spring. On June 30th, Al House’s closest ally and fiercest defender, his mother, Mrs. Hallie Brubaker, died at the age of 83. Her son was granted a day’s furlough to attend her funeral.
Even if House was staying out of the jailhouse law business, another Raiford self-trained lawyer would soon shake up the Florida legal system. On August 4th, 1961, Clarence Earl Gideon was tried for robbing a pool hall in Panama City. He was a drifter with a long criminal record who had previously spent ten years behind bars. This time, he fiercely insisted that he was innocent, but he was too poor to afford a lawyer, and the state of Florida refused to grant him one. He was quickly convicted and sent to Raiford.
The legend goes that Gideon immediately hit the prison library and began studying law. From there, he hand-wrote a letter requesting a writ of Habeas Corpus. The truth is that while Gideon may have learned the law and hand-wrote his petition, he was assisted by Joseph A. Peel, Jr. Peel was a former judge who was caught running a protection racket by another judge, Eugene Chillingworth. Rather than face justice, Peel hired hitman Floyd Holzapfel to kidnap Judge Chillingworth and his wife Marjorie, take them out on a boat, tie them up, weight them down, and push them overboard. Five years after the murder, Holzapfel confessed, and Peel was convicted. In spite of Gideon’s somewhat dubious source of help, the Supreme Court ruling in Gideon vs. Wainwright was a landmark civil liberties case with far-reaching consequences.
Attorney Abe Fortas represented Gideon before the Federal Supreme Court, and the Court ruled that Gideon had been denied a fair trial when Florida failed to provide him with an attorney. From then on, states were required to provide public defenders for defendants who couldn’t afford an attorney. Gideon was granted a re-trial, and with Fortas representing him, he was found not guilty.
At the time, Florida had over 4,000 convicts who had been convicted without an attorney, and, technically, Al House was one them. Immediately, the state’s courts were swamped with Gideon appeals, and House, alongside Judge Peel and other jailhouse lawyers, found his services in popular demand. In 1965, Warden Sinclair said that he estimated that Gideon appeals had diminished the population of Raiford by “about 700,” although many of those freed “drifted back.”
In September, House made his own Gideon appeal. He was released from Raiford and sent to the federal penitentiary at Atlanta to serve out the five months that remained of his 1951 mail theft sentence.
Tallahassee Democrat columnist Malcolm B. Johnson observed, “Arrogant self-representation has been a trademark of the scant legitimate part of his career. There may be few lawyers in Florida, actually, who know more about court precedents on the constitutional rights of men charged with a crime. It is ironic that he can cap his career as a lawyer “in proper person” (as the courts recognize self-representation) by pleasing how that he needed a lawyer when they sent him up the last time.” None of that mattered for House, though, because he had left Raiford for good.
In 1968, House was arrested in his Titusville apartment in connection to a safe-breaking at a Canal Point Sears. When the police showed him a photo of the safe, he snapped, “Do you think I would do a sloppy job like that?” He was turned over to the West Palm Beach police, but the case was dropped.
A year later, he was arrested in Terre Haute after trying to cash in a forged money order. He was returned to Jacksonville, where he made bond on all of the eight warrants out for his arrest. In 1970, he was arrested in Opp, Alabama, once again trying to cash stolen money orders. He was given his final jail sentence, five years in federal prison. At Sandstone, Minnesota, he suffered a minor stroke which left him blind in one eye and weakened on his left side. Years of dental neglect had caused him to lose all his teeth, and he suffered from chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Eventually, he was transferred to the prison at Terre Haute, where the warmer climate could help with his health, and where he could receive regular visits from his niece, Nona James.
In spite of his health problems, he continued doing as he always did: he wrote letters asking for parole at every opportunity he had. His prison records from the time take note of his reputation as a jailhouse lawyer, and add, “He seems to enjoy this tag.”
In a letter written to Congressman John T. Meyer, he asks, “As our best Congressman, as people say you are, that Indiana has ever had in Congress,” for a 30-day furlough to have his eye examined. He goes on, “I believe President Nixon, the best president I have ever known in my 78 years of life, if he knew of my condition, he would issue an order to the Bureau [of Prisons], or the Parole Board, to grant me either the parole… or the furlough for therapy. The president ordered the parole of Mr. Hoffa, and I think he will accordingly do so for a sick old man.” And so, in 1973, Al House was released from prison one last time.
He moved in with his niece and got a white wolf-hybrid dog named Baby. He finally self-published Freedom from Florida Chains. With the success of the based-on-a-true-story Florida chain gang exploitation classic Cool Hand Luke, House had high hopes that his story would be made into a movie, ideally one produced by Frank Sinatra. He even went as far as putting explicit instructions on the back of the book saying that any film production should include a violin duet of “Listen to the Mockingbird,” a favorite of his mother’s. Unfortunately, such dreams never came through. House went back to crime.
According to his great-niece, Debra Wiley, his favorite new trick was to use a double-sided photocopier to make copies of cashier’s checks, “Those copiers were a revelation to him.” He would use the forged checks to buy expensive items like TVs, often while playing the poor old man, saying that it was all the money he had. The cashiers at the store would cash the check, give House any extra money that was left over, and then carry the TV out to his car for him. Along with this, he was receiving numerous Social Security checks under false names.
In 1979, at the age of 85, House led Illinois state police on a high-speed chase that ended when he slammed into the back of a semi-truck. Doctors didn’t expect him to live, but if Raiford couldn’t kill Al House, then a semi-truck wasn’t going to kill him, either. He spent a month in the hospital but was released. Unfortunately, the accident had unraveled his schemes, and he was indicted on Social Security fraud.
When brought before the judge, he played up the old man schtick. When the judge asked him who the president was he replied, “Herbert Hoover.” When he was asked what year it was, he said, “I don’t rightly know, but if you told me, I could answer you.” He was ordered to be sent to a nursing home, but Al House wasn’t going to live out the rest of his life in an institution. He climbed out of a window and made it back to his niece’s farm, where Baby was waiting for him.
After that, House brought back his case with the Navy, claiming that since he was never actually A.W.O.L. and never officially been discharged until 1957, he was owed 45 years of back pay, along with regular veteran’s benefits. He petitioned numerous courts, military review boards, the Veteran’s Administration, and even the federal Supreme Court, but with no luck. His efforts did, however, earn him a long profile in The Indianapolis Star.
In it, his lawyer, Barbara Williams, describes House, “Albert’s a survivor. He’s gotten quite a lot accomplished. He hasn’t gotten the results he wanted, but he kept it alive. He has generated a lot of interest wherever he’s gone.”
Material regarding the history of the Florida prison system is remarkably hard to come by. Freedom From Florida Chains, self-published, full of typos and dubious truths, and in sore need of an editor, remains not only an invaluable history of a subject that is broadly ignored, but a testament to those whose brutal deaths in Florida prisons went unnoticed.
Since Al’s time at Raiford, much, and little, has changed in the Florida prison system. The prison now commonly referred to as “Raiford” is now simply officially called Florida State Prison. Originally built across the Bradford county line as an eastern extension in 1955, in 1972 it became its own unit. It currently holds the state’s execution chamber, which has seen the ends of such infamous names as Aileen Wuornos, “The Gainesville Ripper” Danny Rolling, Bobby Joe Long, and, of course, Ted Bundy. The “Raiford” that Al House would have known is another prison unit in Union County- now the Union Correctional Institution. It is where Florida’s male death row inmates are housed. The building called “The Rock” was used for housing inmates until a court order shut it down in 1985. In 1999, it was demolished. Prisoners are now housed in a number of different, specialized units. The building known as “Flat Top,” where Al House spent so many years, is, as if in an unwitting tribute to House, used as a musical practice facility for the prison band.
In 1964, the death sentence was discontinued, but was then brought back in 1976. In recent years, the use of the death penalty has declined in Florida, but Florida still remains one of America’s leading execution states. Since the re-introduction of the death penalty, it has executed 96 inmates. In 2013, governor Rick Scott passed the Timely Justice Act of 2013, limiting the amount of time that those sentenced to death have to make appeals. In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Hurst vs. Florida that a judge cannot impose a death sentence if the jury has not reached a unanimous verdict. In 2017, Orlando-area State Attorney Aramis Ayala declared that she would not pursue the death penalty in any case, citing “Demonstrable flaws in capital justice.” Rick Scott promptly turned 23 of her capital cases over to another State’s Attorney and slashed her office’s funding by $1.3 million. Scott’s first years in office saw a rush of executions, seven in 2013, and eight in 2014. Florida then followed the national trend of slowing its executions, with two in 2015, one in 2016, and three in 2017. As of March 2018, Florida has 347 inmates on death row.
In 2010, Randall Jordan-Aparo, 27 years old, serving 18 months for check fraud, and suffering from a rare genetic blood disorder, complained of feeling ill, and was denied being taken to a hospital. After lashing out at guards, he was placed in an isolation cell. Afterwards, he was repeatedly “gassed” with debilitating chemical agents and was heard screaming that he couldn’t breathe. He was briefly taken to the infirmary, but then put back in his isolation cell, and five hours later, he was found there, dead.
In 2012, Darren Rainey, a schizophrenic inmate serving two years on a minor drug charge, was found dead in a prison shower, chained in place, with the water running so hot that second and third-degree burns covered 30% of his body. His autopsy report took three years to complete, and ruled his death an accident, caused by “Complications from schizophrenia, heart disease, and confinement to a shower.” Inmates reported that officer Roland Clarke has left Rainey in the shower for over 90 minutes and stood by while Rainey “Screamed and begged for help.” In January 2018, Rainey’s family was awarded a $4.5 million dollar settlement, but no charges were ever filed against the guards who oversaw the deadly shower.
In 2014, Latandra Ellington, serving a 22-month sentence for grand theft, allegedly found guard Patrick Quercioli having sex with an inmate. She wrote a letter to an aunt complaining that “Sgt. Q” was threatening her, “He was gone beat me to death and mess me like a dog.” Ten days later, she turned up dead. A private autopsy paid for by the family showed that she’d suffered blunt-force trauma to the abdomen, consistent with a beating. Quercioli was placed on paid administrative leave, and in 2015 the case was declared closed with no findings of foul play.
In 2014, Matthew Walker got into an altercation with guards over a cup and magazine that had been left out in his cell. It ended with his larynx crushed and Walker dying of asphyxiation. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, but concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge the five guards who had beaten and stomped on Walker with any sort of crime. Later, Louise Salcedo, a member of the grand jury investigating the death, came forward, “We all knew they were guilty and should have been prosecuted, but we were talked out of indicting them. This man was beaten to death.”
In 2015, 17-year-old Elord Revolte died after being beaten by more than a dozen inmates. Two of the boys who took part in the beating later claimed it had been encouraged by a detention officer. A long investigation by The Miami Herald revealed a “fight club” system where juvenile inmates were given rewards such as honey buns for beating up other inmates.
In January 2018, prisoners across Florida went on strike protesting “prison slavery” and “deplorable conditions.” They demanded payment for their labor, the lowering of outrageous canteen food prices, and the reintroduction of parole for long sentences. The Florida Department of Corrections denied that the strike ever happened. One of the strike leaders, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, was charged with inciting a riot.
The abuse described by Al House in Freedom From Florida Chains may often feel archaic, a relic of a crueler era, but much of it remains deeply embedded in the Florida prison system.
On June 2nd, 2000, Al House died at the age of 106. He lived long enough that, in spite of spending 43 years in prison, he could proudly declare that most of his life had been spent as a free man.
