published a letter from him. Recapture and Alcatraz Gardner was now the "Most Wanted" criminal, and committed several crimes in Arizona before he was captured by a mail clerk during a train robbery in Phoenix in fall 1921. He was sentenced to an additional 25 years, this time at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Headlines read: "Gangster Gardner brags, 'Leavenworth will never hold me'". Now known as the "King of the Escape Artists", Gardner was transferred in 1925 to Atlanta Federal Prison, then the toughest prison in the country. The following year, he tried to tunnel under the wall and saw through the bars in the shoe shop. Then in 1927, he led a prison break during which he held the captain and two guards hostage with two revolvers, but the escape failed and he was placed in solitary confinement for twenty months. When he was released from solitary confinement, he was placed in a mental hospital in Washington, D. C. In 1929, the warden described Gardner as the "most dangerous inmate in the history of Atlanta Prison", and that year he began a hunger strike protesting prison food and threatened suicide. He was then transferred to Leavenworth Annex Prison in 1930, and in 1934 he was transferred to Alcatraz, where he was one of the first hardened criminals incarcerated there. Gardner's time in Alcatraz coincided with Al Capone's. Capone was an unpopular prisoner. Supposedly, an unidentified inmate once threw a lead sash weight at Capone, but Capone was only wounded in the arm because Gardner pushed him out of the way. During Gardner's time in Alcatraz, his wife divorced him. He worked and supervised at the mat shop with Ralph Roe and they planned an escape, but Gardner was paroled and released in 1938 after his appeal for clemency was approved. Final years In 1939 Gardner published his autobiography, titled Hellcatraz. He attended crime lectures, and he and Louis Sonney made one of the first re-enactments, a short film called You Can't Beat the Rap. Gardner worked as a film salesman and an exposition barker. A 1939 movie called I Stole a Million was based on his life; it was a failure. After being paroled he became a guide on a tour boat that circled Alcatraz Island. On the evening of January 10, 1940, in a hotel room in San Francisco, Gardner wrote four notes; one of them he attached to