Jackson — In April 1952, the biggest prison riot in Michigan history took place in Jackson, as 170 inmates held guards hostage for five days and caused more than $2.5 million in damage. The riot also resulted in the state police shooting one inmate dead.
The riot ended when the liberal governor, G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams, decided to not only give in on every single one of the rioting prisoners’ demands but to also reward the rioters with a dinner of steak and ice cream. Tough negotiator, that Soapy.
At the center of it all was a small-time crook from Canada who had come to America to break into safes. His name was Jack Hyatt, but he became better known as “Crazy Jack Hyatt” once he started making waves in the Michigan penal system. Although he died in relative anonymity in 2015 at the age of 92 in Canada, he was once one of the most famous bad guys in the country.
“I’ve known Jack since I was 10 years old,” said Mark Loop, a longtime constable for the Leamington Police Department in Ontario, where Crazy Jack lived. Loop knows his entire life story and was more than happy to share some of the best tales.
Jack Hyatt grew up poor in Leamington and committed his first crime as a teen, stealing a bicycle and going to the Kingston Penitentiary. He got out and stole a car with a safe in it. “He never wanted to be a common thief; he wanted to be a safe cracker,” Loop said.
That landed him another term in prison, and when he got out this time, he took a job on a tobacco farm. When his work wrapped up, he started hitchhiking home and was picked up by two truckers from America.
“This huge snowstorm comes along, and Jack and these truckers end up getting snowed in for the night,” Loop said. “Jack decides he wants to make some money, so he gets these two guys to help him break into a machine shop so he could crack open the safe.” When Crazy Jack and the two truckers popped open the safe, they found about $5,000 worth of war bonds inside.
Knowing the cops would nab them if they tried to spend the stolen war bonds right away, they decided to sit on them for a year. Jack told the truckers he’d meet up with them in the states and give them their money.
In the summer of 1945, 23-year-old Crazy Jack came to Detroit and met up with the two truckers. He gave the guys their money and then talked them into pulling a few more safe-cracking jobs with him.
After one of the heists, Jack was celebrating in a bar in Detroit, when two cops walked in and thought he matched the description of some guy who had just robbed a doctor. He actually had nothing to do with it.
“They start beating the crap out of him and saying, ‘Tell us who you were with!’ Jack kept saying he didn’t know anything about that doctor,” Loop said.
Nonetheless, it took the jury all of about 10 seconds to convict him.
“The judge is looking at him, and he’s mad that Jack didn’t want to cooperate,” Loop said. “Then the judge says—and Jack told me this story a hundred times—the judge says, ‘I’ve got a thousand years in my back pocket, and I’m giving you 30 of ‘em.’ ”
The sentence was 25-30 years for what was a relatively small crime, but off to the Upper Peninsula he went, to the Marquette Branch Prison, one of Michigan’s toughest lock-ups. That’s when he picked up the nickname Crazy Jack.
In 1948, Michigan elected a 37-year-old attorney named G. Mennen Williams as its new governor. Williams always wore a polka-dotted bowtie and had picked up the nickname “Soapy,” because he was an heir to the Mennen men’s care products company.
Soapy Williams was also a diehard liberal, who had made prison reform one of his top priorities. He’d heard that the conditions in Michigan’s prisons were awful—particularly in Marquette—and he wanted to get a look for himself.
This would have been fine, except his people didn’t just schedule a visit to the Marquette prison, they told all the inmates exactly when he was coming. That gave Jack and two other inmates—Ralph Stearns and John Halstad—the brilliant idea that they needed to kidnap Soapy and use him to escape.
Gov. Williams’ plan was to visit the prison dining hall so that he could eat the supposedly disgusting food the inmates were eating. The tour would begin in the prison kitchen.
That’s when Jack and his buddies sprung into action. When Soapy entered the kitchen, Stearns grabbed him and pulled a knife. Crazy Jack pulled out an onion masher and started waving it around violently, hitting one of the prison guards and breaking both of his arms. Halstad grabbed one of the other guards.
At that point, the governor’s bodyguard stepped in and shot Halstad dead.
That ended the kidnap attempt. Soapy left the kitchen, and the guards put Crazy Jack and the other inmates back in their cells.
The kidnap attempt didn’t faze Soapy, and he blamed the Republicans more than he blamed the prisoners.
“I came here to see how the Republican legislature’s budget cuts were affecting state institutions,” he told the press. “I found out the hard way.”
As for what Crazy Jack’s plans were had the kidnap attempt actually worked, he said he was going to hijack a plane and make the pilot take him to Florida, where the judge from Detroit was now living. “He was going to kill the judge,” Loop said.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen. What did happen is that Crazy Jack got sent down to the huge prison in Jackson, because the folks in Marquette didn’t want him there anymore.
It didn’t take Crazy Jack long to make friends with a psychopath named Earl Ward. Together, they decided to start a riot.
Ward was an armed robber from Detroit, who was described as a natural-born leader with movie-star good looks. He and Crazy Jack were in Cellblock 15, the worst one in Jackson, and conditions there weren’t good. When the riot started, Ward was the brains of the operation; Crazy Jack was the enforcer.
The riot started on April 20, 1952, when Crazy Jack grabbed one of the guards and held a makeshift shiv to his throat—a flattened bedspring fashioned into a knife. He forced the guard to pull the big lever that opened all the cells.
There were about 170 inmates in Cellblock 15, and with Earl and Crazy Jack calling the shots, it didn’t take them long to take control of it. They seized the 13 guards and locked them in cells.
The convicts made sure their prisoners were treated well.
“They call him Crazy Jack, but you’ll never get me to believe he’s crazy,” guard Joseph Dzal said later. “He treated us fine, and he handled those other guys with him like someone who has commanded men all his life. We got plenty to eat, and Hyatt always insisted that we got fed before the inmates.”
When word got out that a riot had broken out at the Jackson prison, newsmen from across the country headed that way.
The rioters weren’t looking to be let out of prison. Instead, they issued a list of 11 demands that included better lighting and living conditions, regular counseling and psychiatric services, the creation of an inmate advisory board, and a separate wing for gay prisoners and those with mental issues.
As as the riot dragged on, the governor decided to become personally involved in ending it.
His move? Total surrender. Soapy agreed to every single one of the prisoners’ demands. And not only that: He was going to reward all the rioters with dinner and dessert.
Despite being grabbed at knifepoint by Hyatt’s buddies less than two years earlier, he was now giving them all steak and ice cream.
Republicans, and most everybody else, were furious.
The hometown Jackson Citizen-Patriot editorialized on the surrender, writing, “The business of the state making a deal with convicted felons, in which they (the felons) dictated terms, was nauseating to all decent citizens. Excuse us while we vomit.”
Two years after the riot, Hollywood got hold of the story and made a film called “Riot in Cell Block 11,” closely based on the Jackson story. They changed the names, but the plot was almost identical to the actual story, complete with the governor’s surrender at the end.
Crazy Jack went free on July 13, 1962, just 10 years after leading the biggest prison riot in Michigan history. They gave him five dollars and a suit, and two state cops drove him to the bridge in Sault Ste. Marie. They told him to stay in Canada and never come back.
Two years after that, Earl Ward went free too. He moved to Florida and lived a relatively quiet life.
“Jack said that Earl died on a boat somewhere down in Florida,” Loop said. “He was living on the boat, and it got cold one night, and he had the heater going. He ended up dying of carbon monoxide.”
Crazy Jack was still a relatively young man when he got his freedom, just one month shy of his 40th birthday. And it didn’t take him long to become a Leamington legend once again.
“Everybody knew him. I mean, he was infamous here,” Loop said. He took a couple jobs along the way—helping a guy who gave helicopter rides and working in an auto factory—and, aside from a few minor scrapes, kept his nose clean.
Well, sort of. At some point in the 1970s, Crazy Jack became a bootlegger.
“Back then in Canada, our liquor stores were closed on Sundays, and they closed at 5 o’clock each day,” Loop said. “If you were having a party or something, and you ran out of beer or liquor, you had to go to a bootlegger to get it. That was Jack.”
His other side job was running an illegal casino.
“He used to have a poker game in his house on Sundays,” Loop said. “The locals would go there and have a few beers, because the bars were all closed. They’d shoot craps and play poker.”
Crazy Jack also kept in touch with his buddies from his prison days, even sneaking across the border for a reunion with his fellow rioters. He also made an illegal trip to Florida once to meet up with Earl Ward.
When Jack turned 80, Loop and his wife had him over the house. Loop’s 12-year-old daughter baked him a birthday cake, and when Jack saw it, he started crying.
“I said, ‘What are you crying for, you big baby?’ He said, ‘I never had a birthday cake before in my life.’”
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
