Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, Ca. | There is Shutterstock
As one of the most daring and adventurous escape attempts in American history, The Breakout of Alcatraz comes in the upcoming Morgan Freeman series The Great Escape. Starting At 10 p.m. on Feb. 23, the Academy Award-winning actor will tell the true story behind some of the world's most notorious prison breaks in a compelling and insightful perspective.
On the night of June 11, 1962, three die-hard criminals stormed out of alcatraz's heavily guarded prison and escaped in a boat made from stolen raincoats. Formally, they were never seen or heard again. However, many, including the families of the three fugitives, believe that they did escape that night and have been alive for decades.
The boss is the seasoned criminal Frank Morris. Frank was abandoned by his parents at the age of 11; by the time he was 13, he had been convicted for the first time. In his teens, he was repeatedly arrested and charged with armed robbery and drug crimes. Frank was in and out of correctional facilities throughout his youth and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for robbing a bank while escaping.
Starts at 10 p.m. on February 23
Frank's associates were the Angelin brothers John and Clarence, and Alan West. The Angels come from a large family of seasonal agricultural workers who pick fruits and vegetables back and forth across the country. In the slum, the two brothers began committing crimes from an early age and were arrested at the age of 14 for breaking into a gas station. They start robbing banks and other businesses after breaking the law for the first time. They were sentenced to 35 years in prison for robbing the Savings Bank of Columbia in Alabama. After several escape attempts at atlanta prison, the two were transferred to Alcatraz Island in 1960.
Alan West was the last member of the escape team. A serial offender, Allen was arrested more than 20 times before he was finally jailed for car theft in 1955. Allen was transferred from Atlanta To florida prison, but his attempt to escape failed, ending in Alcatraz in 1957.
The four men were already familiar with each other when they were all held in Alcatraz, having all served their sentences in other prisons many times. After they were all placed in the cell next door, where they could talk at night, they made plans to escape.
From left to right: Frank Morris, John Anglin, Clarence Anglin
Led by Morris, the four plan to dig tunnels in the walls of their cells, build a raft, and then escape the island by sea. After collecting discarded saw blades from the prison workshop and metal spoons from the canteen, they made a drill bit out of a vacuum cleaner motor. They used their temporary tools to begin widening the holes around the ventilation ducts under the sinks of each cell, hiding their handicrafts from the guards with painted cardboard strips.
To hide the noise they make from the unguarded common corridor behind their cells, Morris would play his accordion during the prison's musical hours—setting aside an hour a day for music to enter the prison through the pipes to calm the inmates down.
Once they could walk through the holes, the men would set up a makeshift studio on the empty top floor of their cell. Here, they made rafts to escape, as well as a set of life jackets. Rafts and jackets are made from stolen and donated raincoats, carefully stitched together and sealed by melting the rubber on the heat pipes in their workshops.
When they were on the workshop to cover up their absence, the men cleverly made pulp versions of their heads out of soap, dust, toilet paper, and toothpaste. The head looked realistic with paint from the repair shop and real hair collected from the prison barbershop floor. They were placed on prisoners' pillows, and clothes and towels were tucked under blankets in the shape of their bodies. Any caretaker would have seen them asleep in bed, when in fact they built a 6x14-foot rubber raft and paddles made of wood chips and stolen screws on top floors.
Finally, on the evening of June 11, 1962, the raft was ready and it was time to start the plan. When West realized that the cement he had used to reinforce the concrete around the vent had hardened, preventing him from passing through the hole he had dug, his hopes of escaping were soon dashed. By the time he managed to enlarge the opening again, his accomplice was gone. He went back to bed.
Meanwhile, Frank and the two Anglin brothers escaped from the ventilation shaft to the roof of the prison. Their escape was almost thwarted when they made a loud noise from the shaft, but fortunately, the guards who heard it decided not to investigate. As the coast cleared, the three men used kitchen pipes to descend 50 feet to the ground and climb over two 12-foot barbed wire fences. They traveled to the shores of the northeast of the island, where searchlights could not recognize them. They inflated the raft with a modified hexagon accordion stolen from a prisoner, and at about ten o'clock they pushed it away and headed in the direction of nearby Angel Island.
Officially, at least, they never saw it again.
The alarm did not sound until the next morning when the guards failed to wake up the three prisoners and enter their cells to find the dummy heads. A large-scale search operation involving civilian law enforcement and the military began. Over the next ten days, an extensive search was conducted for land, air and sea in and around Alcatraz.
At night inside Alcatraz Prison
The Coast Guard reported that the oars of one of the prisoners were found on the south coast of Angel Island on June 14, and that staff found a wallet containing details of the Angel's family on the same day. Six days later, broken rubber believed to have come from prisoner rafts was washed up on the shore near the Golden Gate Bridge; the next day, a deflated life jacket was picked up by a prison ship floating fifty yards away from Alcatraz Island. These scattered remnants are all these people and the tools they used to escape. Although no bodies were found, the FBI quickly concluded that three inmates had drowned.
From the first year these people fled to the present, there are many people who say that the FBI was wrong to declare these people dead. Back in Christmas 1962, several members of the Anglin family claimed to have received cards and postcards from the brothers. Until her death in 1973, the mothers of the two men received an anonymous bouquet of flowers each year, and two of her funerals were said to have been unusually tall and humane
Man in heavy makeup. The family thought they were disguised as John and Clarence Angel.
In 1989, one of Angel's brothers, Robert, claimed that two people had appeared on the body of his dead father, stopped for a moment, wept over the corpse, and then left. That same year, two women contacted Unsolved Mystery, saying they had seen Clarence Angelin and Frank Morris at a farm near Marianne, Florida, but could not find their tracks.
Over the years, many people outside the Anglin family have come forward to claim to have met or approached the three fugitives. A day after the man disappeared, a local San Francisco police officer claimed to have seen a boat near Alcatraz Island and turned a few minutes later and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge. The FBI investigated the claim and dismissed it.
Also in 1962, a man named Bud White came forward as a cousin of Frank Morris. He said he had been hired by Frank to bribe some Alcatraz guards and that he met Frank in a park in San Diego a few days after escaping. Bud's daughter later said she had attended the meeting but could not find any evidence to support it.
New hypothetical evidence emerged in 1993. Thomas Kent, a former Alcatraz prisoner, told the U.S. wanted man that he helped plan the escape but refused to go with the prisoners because he couldn't swim. He also said That Angel's girlfriend picked up the men and drove them to Mexico. Kent's story has been questioned because the network charged him guilty.
That same year, another man named John Leroy Kelly claimed that he took the prisoners to a boat and then murdered them so he could keep the $40,000 their family had collected, which he should have transferred to them. Kelly confessed all this on his deathbed, even offering a place to bury the bodies of the three men. Subsequent searches did not uncover any remains.
In 2015, History interviewed members of the Angel green family about the escape. In addition to showing some cards that the brothers allegedly sent over the years, they also revealed Fred Brizzi's story. Brizzi, who has been friends with the brothers since childhood, claims that he had seen jailbreakers in Brazil in 1975. Presumably, the photo was of the Anglin brothers, but because both were wearing sunglasses and the photo was in poor condition.
Finally, in 2018, the FBI confirmed that they had received a letter allegedly written by John Anglin. In the letter, Anglin revealed that both Morris and his brother Clarence were dead. The remaining inmates said he would turn himself in in exchange for treatment. The FBI could not confirm the authenticity of the letter, and they never received another letter from the author. Was this the last word of the last man to stand in the fugitives in 1962?
The FBI formally closed the case in 1979. The U.S. Marshals, on the other hand, plans to open the case to 2030, when these people will all be over 100 years old. So, did the Frank Morris and Brothers Angelin manage to escape from one of the world's most notorious prisons and continue to live as wanted criminals for decades? The answer is that we may never be sure.