`HELLCATRAZ' HOUSED NATION'S WORST CRIMINALS.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

It's eerie to be here, surrounded by concrete and cold steel bars, with the lights and laughter of the city less than two miles away, across the bay's cold, treacherous waters.

But this is the somber, bleak atmosphere of Alcatraz, the hilltop fortress known as ``The Rock,'' where for 30 years, the nation's most notorious criminals - including ``Scarface'' Al Capone and George ``Machine Gun'' Kelly - were incarcerated.

``It was terrible,'' former inmate Nathan Glenn Williams said, standing just a few steps from the 9-by-5-foot cell where he served seven years for bank robbery in the 1950s. ``It had the reputation as a place that would break a man. It lived up to its reputation.''

Now, more than 150 years after it was created as a Union Army fortress and stockade and more than 30 years since the last federal prisoner was removed, moviegoers can get a more dramatic look at the bleak former island prison in the action megahit ``The Rock.''

Visitors can also get an in-person look at the penitentiary known by the men who lived there as ``Hellcatraz.'' As part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Alcatraz annually hosts more than 750,000 visitors, who wander in and out of the cells and marvel at tales of murder and attempted escapes.

The island prison's popularity with tourists amazes Williams, who was caught robbing his 25th bank and became Prisoner No. 1103 in 1953. He was released in 1959, and become a successful Seattle businessman and writer.

When National Park Service officials took over Alcatraz in the early 1970s and asked Williams to come back occasionally and share his lockup experiences with visitors, he initially refused.

``I told them no one would come here to see a prison,'' Williams recalled.

Yet several times a day, boats filled with curious tourists make the 10-minute ride from San Francisco's Pier 41 to the dock where the country's worst criminals - many declared incorrigible or at high risk for escape from other federal lockups - got their first glimpse of their rock-hard future home.

Even with the prisoners long gone, ``the rock'' has a sobering influence on most visitors.

``It's grim,'' said a woman from Denmark, fingering the specially hardened bars, made to withstand even the strongest, sharpest of saws. ``It must have been a really bad place to be.''

Williams finally agreed to revisit the prison, partly out of curiosity. But he wasn't prepared for the emotions that came flooding back as he stepped off the boat onto the dock for the first time in nearly 20 years.

``The first time I came back, it was very traumatic,'' he said. ``It all came back to me, everything that happened here. It took me two or three days to get over it. Now, I come back every once in a while to talk to people about the way it was here. I'm surprised that they're really interested.''

Island visitors can view a 12-minute film about the island's history and poke through a small bookstore - where former guards and former inmates like Williams sometimes answer questions and pose for photos. Then they make the long climb - about three-quarters of a mile - to the cell house at the top of the island.

In the cell house, visitors can borrow a small tape player and earphones so they can hear inmates and a former warden describe the monotonous days at the prison, from which no inmate ever escaped - and lived.

The rules for prisoners were simple: Do as you're told, and you can have periodic visitors, library and work privileges.

``You don't behave yourself and we're going to come down on you like a ton of bricks,'' a guard recalls on the taped tour.

Prisoners who violated the rules could end up in solitary confinement in D Block; some spent years there.

Those who tried to escape or who assaulted a guard or another inmate wound up in ``the hole'' - cells 9 through 14 - which were simply steel boxes with a drain in the floor for a toilet. Two meals a day were passed through a slot in the door, bedding was issued only at night and prisoners spent their time - from only a few days to several weeks - in total darkness.

Outside those cells, the clank of a door resounds on the taped tour and rangers will lock visitors who request it into the dark cells for a second or two so they can see how prisoners might have felt. (Very few people take advantage of the opportunity, rangers say.)

Jim Quillan, one of the inmates whose voice is heard on the tour tape, said he knew he had to keep busy to survive confinement in ``the hole.''

``I'd tear a button off my coveralls,'' he says on the tape. ``I'd flip it up in the air. I'd turn around and around. Then I'd get down on my hands and knees and I'd hunt for that button. When I found it, I'd do it again.''

The real punishment on Alcatraz was not brutal treatment, but boredom, Quillan says. On the march from the cellblock to the nearby workhouse to do laundry, make furniture or, during World War II, make cargo nets for the Navy, prisoners could see San Francisco across the bay. On New Year's Eve, the sound of dance music and merrymaking would waft across the water.

``There was never a day you didn't see what the hell you were missing,'' Quillan says. ``There's everything in my life I want, and it's a mile, mile and a half away - and yet I can't get to it.''

Aside from its stint as a prison, Alcatraz is a historic spot in its own right. Discovered by the Spanish in 1775, it was decided on by military engineers in 1848 to be the perfect place for a fort to defend San Francisco's harbor. In 1854, the first lighthouse on the Pacific Coast was built on the island. Alcatraz housed Confederate prisoners during the Civil War, and was designated a permanent military prison in 1892.

In 1933, at the height of an unprecedented national crime wave that began during Prohibition and extended through the Depression, the prison was turned over to the U.S. Department of Justice. ``Desperate and irredeemable'' inmates from other prisons, as well as gangsters who tried to run their organization from inside prison walls, were the inmates.

``They (federal prison officials) would select their worst. I would take them and do my best,'' James A. Johnson, the prison's first warden, once said.

In 1934, Capone arrived for a five-year stay on tax-evasion charges.

Murderer Robert Stroud, portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the 1962 movie ``Birdman of Alcatraz,'' arrived in 1942, spending 17 years in solitary confinement. But, despite what the movie shows, he never had birds to keep him company, rangers say. It was while he was imprisoned at Leavenworth, Kan. - where he stabbed a guard to death in 1916 - that he captured and studied birds that flew into his cell.

Displays throughout the cell house tell of some of the 14 escape attempts that occurred between 1936 and 1962. Five of the 34 men who risked their lives trying to get off ``the rock'' simply disappeared into the frigid bay. Two temporarily gained their freedom but were captured within an hour.

In 1943, guards nabbed one convict as he tried to steel himself to plunge into the icy water. Another prisoner, who worked in the laundry, managed to assemble a guard's uniform and slip aboard a supply boat, but was caught before the boat left the dock.

The bloodiest incident on the island, in May 1946, came to be known as the Battle of Alcatraz, an escape attempt planned by six inmates who overpowered several guards and seized their weapons. The prisoners herded the guards into two cells and opened fire, killing two and wounding 14 others. Three inmates were killed by guards who attacked the cell house from the outside with shotguns and tear gas. Two inmates were later executed for the guards' murders.

An increasing number of escape attempts - plus the cost of ferrying food, water, clothing and staff members to the island stronghold - prompted the federal government to close the prison in March 1963.

In November 1969, while San Francisco and federal officials were trying to decide what to do with the fortress, nearly 90 American Indians landed on Alcatraz, claiming it as Indian land. An attempt at creating a culture true to their traditions failed and, after two years, federal marshals removed the last few Indian homesteaders. A year later, Alcatraz was designated part of the new national recreation area that includes Golden Gate Park, and in 1973 opened to visitors.

Inmate Frank C. Weatherman, one of the last prisoners to leave before the shutdown, had a fitting epitaph for the windswept island: ``Alcatraz never was no good to anybody.''

Except, of course, those who come just to spend the day.

On location More than 1.1 million people came last year to see the prison that held Al Capone and other gangsters, and National Park Service Ranger Craig Glassner gives Hollywood the credit for nearly all of those visitors.

``People come to Alcatraz because of Hollywood,'' said Glassner, who leads a tour he calls ``Hollywood's Alcatraz.'' ``Hollywood has created the myth of Alcatraz.''

``Dark Passage'' (1947), ``Birdman of Alcatraz'' (1962), ``Escape From Alcatraz'' (1979) and ``Murder in the First'' (1995) and other films all contributed to the legend of the former prison - and ``The Rock,'' which debuted last weekend in theaters, will only add to that mystique, Glassner said.

``The Rock'' was filmed on Alcatraz last November and December, with park rangers monitoring filming to avoid filmmakers' intrusion into the sightseeing of daytime visitors and to guard against disturbance of the island's wildlife, Glassner said.

If you plan a trip to Alcatraz, you'll need to reserve a spot on a Red & White Fleet boat; the firm is the only tour company permitted by the National Park Service to land passengers on Alcatraz.

The 10-minute cruise to the island leaves from Pier 41, near Fisherman's Wharf, beginning at 9:30 a.m. daily (except holidays). Boats leave every 45 minutes, with the last tour departing at 2:45 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2:15 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Cruises that include the use of a tape-recorder and headphones for a 35-minute, self-guided tour cost $10 for adults, $8.25 for seniors 62 and older and $4.75 for children age 5-11. Reservations are recommended. Tickets: [phone].

Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala named the island Isla de los Alcatraces (Island of the Pelicans) in 1775 because of the birds that were the only inhabitants.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, box

Box: On location (see text)

PHOTO (1) In the film ` `The Rock,'' a helicopter rescue team approaches Alcatraz. The movie was filmed on the island, a former prison in San Francisco Bay.

(2 -- color) Visitors wander the cellblock at the former Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay.

Carol Bidwell/Daily News