Daring Prison Escapes | Fleeing the Rock | 2

0:28Hello, American History Tellers listeners. That's AmericanHistoryLive.com. Come see my Days That Made America tour live on stage. Go to AmericanHistoryLive.com.

0:52Imagine it's spring 1962. It's the middle of the night and you're creeping along a catwalk deep inside the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Just ahead of you is your friend and fellow inmate Clarence Anglin. The dank, clammy air reeks of mildew and clings to your skin, but you're used to it. You've been a prisoner here for nearly two and a half years. Though if all goes according to plan tonight, you'll be a free man soon. You spy an air shaft just ahead of you, and your heart begins to beat faster. Your entire escape plan hinges on being able to make it through this shaft and up onto the roof. Clarence squats down at the shaft, and carefully you climb onto his shoulders.

1:32Its large hands reach back and grab your ankles tightly. You ready? I'm ready. Slowly, Clarence stands up, raising you into the shaft. You peer to the end and inspect it as carefully as you can. Well, what do you see? Goddammit. You shake your head, dejected. Lower me down. Slowly, Clarence lowers himself and you step off his shoulders. It's no good. We're trapped. What do you mean? What'd you see? Well, this shaft isn't blocked by a fan like the others, but it is blocked by iron bars. There's some kind of cap at the end, too, like a rain hood or something. Well, we can beat that. We can bend the bars and knock the cap off.

2:10Not likely. It's riveted into place. We'll use a drill. Even if we managed to get our hands on a drill and figured out a way to power it up here, it'd make too much noise. Oh, come on. We've gotten this far. We can't give up now. I don't know. There may not be a way out. Well, we have to think of something. You stare at Clarence, trying to think of some way to get the cap off, but your mind just races in circles. I don't know, we're not going to solve it tonight. Come on, let's get back to our cells. You and Clarence glumly tiptoe back down the catwalk and shimmy down a pipe to the first floor where your cells are located.

2:44But as you step back behind bars and slump onto your bunk, you feel dejected and morose. You can't stand the idea of spending eight more years in this godforsaken place. You have to find a way out because you refuse to let Alcatraz, the inescapable prison known as The Rock, beat you.

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4:19From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers, our history, your story.

4:42In 1847, during the Mexican-American War, U.S. soldiers seized Alcatraz, an island in San Francisco Bay. The U.S. military first established a fort there, but soon figured out that the difficult-to-access island, a mile and a half off the shores of San Francisco, was better used as a prison. So officials converted it to hold military inmates. It served that purpose until the 1930s, when the Department of Justice purchased Alcatraz from the military, intending to use it as a new maximum-security prison. The buildings on the island were modernized and redesigned to be inescapable, with thick concrete walls, steel doors, and armed guards keeping close watch.

5:20By 1962, Alcatraz housed approximately 270 inmates, many considered the most dangerous in the nation. Among them were two brothers, Clarence and John Anglin, incarcerated for armed bank robbery, and another man, Frank Morris, serving a 14-year sentence also for robbing a bank. These three inmates, along with a fourth conspirator, would soon devise a plan to escape. But their success hinged on an elaborate series of steps, any one of which could go wrong. Nevertheless, they were determined to be the first prisoners to defy the odds and break out of Alcatraz. This is Episode 2 in our four-part series on daring prison escapes, Fleeing the Rock.

6:04On September 1, 1926, Frank Lee Morris was born in Washington, D.C. His mother, Clara, was just 17 years old at the time. She claimed that Frank's father was a man she had married two months earlier, but by the time Frank was born, the man had disappeared from her life. Nevertheless, she gave her baby the man's surname, Morris. It soon became clear that Clara was erratic and had a violent temper. Authorities worried she would harm her baby in a fit of rage, so when Morris was just six months old, he was placed in a foster home. As a young child, Morris was smart and charming, but also highly energetic and had a penchant for mischief.

6:41By the time he was six, he was stealing matches and lighting them just to watch them burn. He stole change from his teacher's desks and food from his classmates' lunchboxes, even though he had his own lunchbox full of food. As a result of his acting up, he was bounced from foster home to foster home. Then, at the age of 13, he was convicted of theft and sentenced to a juvenile detention center in Washington, D.C. Although his initial sentence was for six years, he was released on parole after serving just one. But his good behavior didn't last. A year later, he was back in detention. At 16, he escaped from the D.C.

7:17detention center and made it all the way to Miami, Florida before he was caught. This was the start of a pattern that lasted into his adult life. He cycled in and out of detention centers, escaping and getting caught over and over. He racked up a lengthy rap sheet and was convicted of everything from armed robbery to possession of narcotics. By 1955, Morris was in prison once again, serving a 10-year sentence in the Louisiana State Penitentiary for bank robbery. At the time, the Louisiana State Penitentiary was considered the most secure prison in the southern United States. But that spring, while Morris was assigned to a work crew cutting sugar cane, he managed to sneak away.

7:55No one was exactly sure how he did it. Still, he wasn't out for long. Several months later, in early 1956, the FBI caught him in a hotel room in Baton Rouge. While free, he had stolen over$6 ,000 in coins from a bank in a small town north of New Orleans. He was sentenced to 14 years for the crime, and this time, there was only one prison considered secure enough to hold him, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in the San Francisco Bay. The Department of Justice purchased Alcatraz Island from the Army in 1933 with the express purpose of confining the country's most hardened criminals. A decade earlier, prohibition had sparked a wave of violent crime in the U.S.

8:35as bootleggers battled with each other to dominate the black market on alcohol. And as these savvy criminals were caught, they overwhelmed local prisons. The Department of Justice decided a new kind of prison was needed, one that was inescapable, and Alcatraz was deemed the perfect site. Located on a 22-acre island, the prison was surrounded by the frigid waters of the San Francisco Bay, which was known for its strong current. And the prison itself was upgraded with all the most modern technologies. The bars at the cells were made using steel that couldn't be cut through with a hacksaw. The ends of the cell blocks were secured with heavy steel doors, armed with automatic locks, tear gas dispensers, and watched over by armed guards.

9:15Heavy barbed wire lined the perimeter, and bars were placed over the sewer entrances. The prisoners at Alcatraz were kept under close surveillance. Armed watchmen monitored the ground from gun towers, and inside, guards counted the prisoners every 30 minutes. Strict rules were also enforced. Inmates could be sent to solitary confinement for the smallest of infractions, including not finishing the food on their plate or engaging in small talk. It was the country's most secure prison, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Alcatraz housed some of America's most notorious outlaws, including gangsters like Al Capone and George machine gun Kelly.

9:51But over the years, some of the prison's harshest methods came under criticism. An investigation in the 1950s revealed multiple prisoner abuses, including the overuse of solitary confinement. As a result, officials were forced to loosen some of the strictest rules, allowing prisoners to talk during meals and play music in their cells. But the island fortress was still considered inescapable. Since opening, 33 prisoners had tried to escape from Alcatraz, but none were successful. Twenty-three had been caught, six had been shot and killed, and two had drowned. When, frankly, Morris arrived at Alcatraz in January 1960, he immediately began looking for ways to escape.

10:31The bleak track record of failed escape attempts didn't bother him. He was determined to regain his freedom. So he watched the guards closely. He timed how long it took them to patrol the entire cell block. He learned their shift changes. He clocked which ones were unarmed. He also studied the architecture of the prison building, looking for any weaknesses he could exploit. But the place was a fortress. At one point, he considered an air vent built into the base of a rear wall of each cell, including his own, but it was small, only about 6 by 10 inches. And the metal grate covering the vent was tightly affixed to the concrete wall.

11:05In the end, he dismissed this vent as too secure and too small for a grown man to fit through. For over a year, he continued to case the prison for weaknesses, but could find none. He was almost ready to give up hope, but then he learned a secret.

11:22Imagine it's a cool morning in 1961. You are a prisoner at Alcatraz assigned to the so-called brush shop for work duty. All day, you make brushes and brooms for a few cents an hour that gets deposited into your commissary account. You wait patiently as the guard finishes his count of the prisoners in the shop. Then you spring into action, reaching for a half-gallon jug of glue that you use in the workshop to make brooms. You're hoping to steal some for a project you're working on back in your cell. You tip the jug of glue, carefully pouring it into a small glass bottle you brought with you. When it's full, you cork the bottle and slide it into your pocket.

12:00But when you look up, you notice the man next to you giving you a leery stare. Hey man, what was that? That's when you realize he saw what you did. You've never spoken to him before, but you think his name is Morris. He looks at you quizzically. Oh, it's nothing. Mind your own business. Morris is quiet for a moment and then cocks his head. What about the snitch box? The snitch box is what you and your fellow inmates call the metal detector the guards use to make sure inmates don't sneak anything from the work areas back into their cells. You just shrug. No, man, it's just glass and cork. There's nothing to set the snitch box off.

12:33But what if the guards frisk you? I figured I'd get pulled out to be frisked once every 30 times I go through. The odds are in my favor. Plus, I was frisked last week. I doubt they'll pull me out again so soon. All right, so you've been doing some thinking. Yeah, man, this place isn't nearly as tight a ship as they like to think. You don't think so? Nah, there are plenty of security lapses. I even know a way someone could bust out of here if they had the nerve. Morris raises an eyebrow. All right, then, let's hear it. Okay, so a few years ago, this old inmate was working as an electrician when a fan in one of the ventilator shafts above cell block B broke.

13:08He removed the broken fan, but no one ever put in a replacement. I bet you could climb that shaft all the way out to the roof. Morris stares at you, his eyes flashing with intensity. You say, cell block B? Yeah, that's what I heard. But how do you access the ventilator shaft? There's a utility corridor behind the cells. You get to the shaft from there. But isn't that corridor blocked off by like a locked steel door? Yeah, but I guess you could always ask the guard for a key. You smile as Morris' face falls. A moment later, the guard re-enters the room, and it's time for the next count, so you turn back to your broom.

13:44But out of the corner of your eye, you can see that Morris is deep in thought. You can't believe he seriously thinks he can reach that shaft and make an escape. You were just messing with him. He'll never figure out how to access the ventilator shaft, much less get out of this prison.

14:02After learning about an empty air shaft from a fellow inmate in the brush shop where he worked, Frank Lee Morris spent the next few months mulling over how to reach it. It was somewhere behind the thick cement walls of his cell, and he needed to find a way to get to it. One night, in the fall of 1961, he sat on his bed cleaning his nails. As he used a small nail file with a tapered end to scrape out the dirt from his fingernails, His eyes landed on the air vent on the rear wall near the base of the sink, the one he had previously dismissed as too small to fit through. His thumb grazed over the pointed end of the clippers in his hand, and he got an idea.

14:38Slowly, he stood up and peered out of his cell. There was no guard inside, so he hurried to the back wall and got down on his knees. Using the pointy file from the clippers, he scraped hard against the wall right near the vent. Tiny flakes of concrete fell to the floor. Morris' hands began to shake with excitement, and his mind raced. He knew it would be a strenuous process to scrape away the concrete to make the opening large enough for him to fit through, but he was convinced this could be the way to the air shaft and then on to freedom. But he still had a problem. He had to figure out how to hide what he was doing from the guards.

15:13At the very least, he needed a lookout. He would never succeed on his own. So he decided to approach his cell neighbor, a 32-year-old inmate named Alan West, who was serving time for car theft. He also considered two bank-robbing brothers who lived in adjacent cells four doors down from him, Clarence and John Anglin. Morris already knew these brothers because their sentences had overlapped at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. And Morris knew that, like him, they had a history of escaping from prisons. Still, Morris worried that enlisting these three men as accomplices might be a mistake. West liked to talk, and Morris worried that he might let the plan slip, and the Anglin brothers had a reckless streak.

15:53But after deliberating, he decided they were his best options. So in early 1962, Morris approached the other three men over breakfast. He pitched them on the plan, and they quickly agreed. Morris explained that the first step would be for each man to dig around the vent in their respective cells, eventually widening the opening enough so that they could crawl through to the utility corridor that housed pipes and other infrastructure behind the wall. Once through, they could look for the uninstructed air shaft the other inmate had told them about, then figure out next steps. Clarence Anglin was eager to get started digging on his vent immediately, but Morris warned him to take it slow.

16:30To pull this off, they would need to execute their plan perfectly. No detail could be overlooked, and it would take time, at least several more months of careful and patient work before they actually bust it out. Everyone agreed to commit for the long haul. but Morris could feel the impatience emanating off clearance. Still, there was no cutting him out of the plan now. All Morris could do was hope he'd chosen the right men as his accomplices. One slip of the tongue or careless move would doom the mission and condemn them all to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

17:07I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford, and we're the hosts of British Scandal. Yes, indeed. In this series, a Derbyshire couple are bored of their curtain-twitching, lawn-mowing suburban life. So they sell their house, build a yacht and sail off around the world. Which sort of sounds idyllic until a sperm whale sinks their boat and they begin to starve. Oh yes, and they didn't bring a radio because real sailors don't use radios. Right? This is the story of Marilyn and Maurice Bailey. And the 117 days they spent lost at sea. Follow British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Audible.

17:47I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford and we're the hosts of British Scandal. Yes indeed. In this series, a Derbyshire couple are bored of their curtain-twitching, lawn-mowing suburban life. So they sell their house, build a yacht and sail off around the world. Which sort of sounds idyllic until a sperm whale sinks their boat and they begin to starve. Oh yes, and they didn't bring a radio, because real sailors don't use radios. Right? This is the story of Marilyn and Maurice Bailey. And the 117 days they spent lost at sea. Follow British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts, or listen early and at free on Audible.

18:35In early 1962, Frank Lee Morris and his three accomplices had a plan to break out of Alcatraz. But it wasn't going to be easy. Their ultimate goal was to escape via an air shaft Morris had learned about from another inmate. But to do that, they would each need to gain access to a utility corridor behind the cell block where they were housed. That would require digging into the concrete wall surrounding the small air vents at the back of their cells in order to expand the holes so they could fit through. Each vent was just 6 inches by 10 inches, and Morris estimated that the smallest area a man could fit through was 10 by 14 inches, meaning they would have to more than double the size of the holes.

19:13This meant scraping through a concrete wall that was approximately a foot thick, with limited tools and without getting caught by the guards. The men agreed that Morris and Clarence Anglin would start digging their holes first while Allen West and John Anglin kept watch for them. It was slow going. The file of a nail clipper was an inefficient tool, even after Morris figured out how to weld it to the handle of a spoon he snuck out of the mess hall. And they had to hide the dust they were generating so the guards wouldn't get suspicious. Every night, Morris and Clarence would dig until the scrapings filled the pockets of their coats without any visible bulge.

19:49Then the next day, on their way to work detail, they would scatter the debris. Meanwhile, Morris came up with a clever way to conceal the growing hole in the back of his cell from the guards. Playing music was one of the few leisure activities the men of Alcatraz were allowed to pursue, so Morris took up the accordion. He positioned the large instrument case in front of the air vent to hide the damage he was doing to the wall from passing guards. Their scheme was underway, but Morris and the other men knew that getting into the air shaft and out onto the unsecured roof of the prison was only part of the plan.

20:21They would also need to find a way to prevent the guards from knowing they were gone to give them as much of a head start as possible once they broke out. So Morris came up with another idea. Aware that at night the guards checked the sleeping inmates' cells every 45 minutes, he devised a way to trick the guards into thinking they were still in their beds. He and the other men borrowed magazines from the prison library and carefully removed pages until they had enough to make papier-mâché, which they planned to use to make dummies of their heads that looked as much like themselves as possible.

20:52To do this, John Anglin took up painting as a hobby in order to justify buying paint from the commissary, then snuck the paint to the other men. Meanwhile, his brother Clarence worked in the barbershop, so he smuggled out hair clippings which they glued to the papier-mâché heads to give them an even more realistic look. They also used papier-mâché to create homemade cardboard, which they put over the holes in the cell walls once they were too big for the metal grate to stay in place. They painted it the same color as the wall and then painted on a fake grate. Repeatedly, Morris had to urge his accomplices to slow down.

21:25The Anglin brothers were impatient. John wanted to rip more pages out of the magazines so they could build their dummy heads faster, but Morris snapped at him, warning that missing pages could get noticed and they didn't want to tip off anyone about their plan. Morris hoped that between fake heads and clothes stuffed under their blankets, they could fool the guards into thinking they were still in their beds well after they had left. And if all went according to plan, their escape wouldn't be discovered until roll call the next morning, giving them several hours of a head start. But Morris also had to remind the other men that once they got off Alcatraz Island, they would face the strong currents and icy waters of the San Francisco Bay, known to easily overwhelm even the strongest swimmers.

22:06To overcome this challenge, Morris devised a plan to build makeshift rafts. The prison commissary sold raincoats for the inmates to purchase to keep them dry while they spent time in the prison yard amid the frequent San Francisco drizzle. And John Anglin happened to work near where the stock of raincoats was stored. So during his work shifts, he would sneak one of the coats on and then wear it back to his cell. And a guard shift change meant that the guard on duty when he left had no idea that he had not worn the raincoat when he arrived at work that morning. Through this method, John was able to steal over 50 raincoats that the men fashioned into two rafts by stitching the coats together.

22:43They even waterproofed the seams by holding them up to steam pipes to apply heat. They used similar techniques to make life vests for each of them, as well as waterproof bags for their possessions. Finally, by the spring of 1962, after roughly three months of preparations, both Frank Morris and Clarence Anglin had managed to make the vents in their cells large enough to be able to squeeze through. They had access to the unguarded utility corridor behind their cells and to the air shaft that would take them to the roof. Then, one night, after lights out, while West and John Anglin kept watch, Morris and Clarence Anglin snuck into the corridor.

23:19Morris pulled his accordion case in front of the hole as he climbed through. Then, when they reached the ventilator shaft, Morris climbed on Clarence's shoulders and peered to the end. All the work they'd done so far had relied on the intelligence Morris had learned that this shaft did not have a fan and would give them access to the roof. But when Morris saw the end of the shaft, his stomach sank. It was true that there wasn't a fan, but instead there were two iron bars across the end and a cap secured with six iron rivets. He knew there was no way to remove the rivets with the limited tools they had access to.