The Rock Holds

"I'm a changed man. You won't have any trouble from me," said affable Bank Robber Theodore (Teddy) Green, 41, to Federal Prisons Director James Bennett, after an unsuccessful 1955 breakout attempt from a Massachusetts penitentiary* had led to his transfer to Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Last week a report sent by Bennett to Attorney General Herbert Brownell showed that Green has not changed at all: he had been caught organizing a major escape from The Rock. In the prison's history there have been only eleven major escape attempts, none successful.

Alcatraz screws, tipped off, found that Green and at least two other convicts had hidden escape tools in compartments chipped in the bottom of toilet basins. Among the tools, all fashioned from materials in the prison workshops: a blowtorch made from a large grease cup, a brace and bit from pipe parts. Remarking on the careful preparation, Bennett recalled Green's earnest promise of two years before. "All the time he was talking to me," said Bennett, "he was probably planning his next blast-out attempt."

*Dramatized for TViewers last week in Playhouse go's hour-and-a-half presentation of Child of Trouble.

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