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12 MY LIFE AS A FREE MAN As I stated before, I never got a transfer from Alcatraz, because I served as a witness for Clarence Carnes. As a result, James Bennett, director of federal prisons, hated me and took my testimony as a personal affront. But I never went to talk to that bastard about seeking a transfer, as all the other men received, and I waited for my release from Alcatraz. Bennett had been the director of all federal prisons since 1937, and I soon learned he had a vendetta against me. The first time that I knew he had it in for me personally was when he visited the prison with Warden Swope. Swope was from New Mexico, and he spoke Spanish pretty well, a fact I learned because he sometimes spoke with me a little in Spanish. On this particular day, Swope brought Bennett down to the tailor shopwhere I worked; he wanted to show off the most productive industries to impress the bigwigs. I was working the double-needle sewing machine at the time, and Swope recognized me and brought Bennett over. Swope was always trying to make it seem that he was real chummy with the prisoners, I think to prove that he had the prison under control . He came over, patted my back, and in his thin, reedy voice offered his customary greeting: ‘‘How’re you doing, my boy?’’ Then to Swope he said, ‘‘This is Ernie López. He’s been working here in the shop quite a while. He’s a very good worker.’’ He was talking up my skills, talking about this and that, when Bennett took off like a jackrabbit. He didn’t want to be anywhere near me. The funny thing was that Swope didn’t even notice that Bennett was gone. He was still talking away, unaware that Bennett had hightailed it out of there. But because of Bennett, I never did get parole. I was finally released from Alcatraz in 1956, on conditional release. By law, if a prisoner managed to stay out of trouble while he was doing time, he earned credits of ten days for every month served. If he got in trouble for any reason, they could take some of that credit away. But I had earned enough credits to get out. Now thirty-four years old, I had spent eleven years in Alcatraz. Little did I know then about the trouble I would soon find myself in, but even less did I suspect how much those years in Alcatraz would keep coming back and making my life difficult. The first time that I was haunted by Alcatraz came very soon after my release. My wife had divorced me while I was in Alcatraz, so I took a room alone in a duplex that sat on a narrow block where two streets came together in North Hollywood. At the very point of the block was a gas station where I made phone calls, since I didn’t have a phone of my own. As luck would have it, a pretty spectacular bank robbery took place inWest Covina soon after I moved in.Two masked men had gone into a bank, waving a machine gun around. They robbed the tellers and took money from the vault before escaping. Nobody got hurt, but the robbery was a daring daylight job, so the newspapers splashed the story, including a rough sketch of the masked robbers, all over the front page. At the time, some joker was going around saying that one of the bandits in the drawing looked like my friend Joe Morgan and that the other one looked like me. It didn’t take too long at all before the authorities heard these rumors, which became innuendo and finally—in their minds—fact. I became a possible suspect. The local FBI and the LAPD knew that I had just been released from Alcatraz, and they were itching to catch me doing something that would send me back behind bars. They were hoping to clear the books on the bank robbery, but they had no leads. So the easiest thing for them to do was to pin the blame on me. When they finally did get around to arresting me, they made a huge production out of it in order to make themselves look good. On the day I was arrested, I was walking to the gas station to make a phone call...

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