They Escaped a 17-Story Prison Using Dental Floss 

200 ft above the streets of downtown Chicago, two men are dangling from a skyscraper. It’s 3:00 a.m. December and freezing cold. They aren’t window washers and they aren’t stuntmen. They are convicted bank robbers and they’re hanging by a thread. Literally. Their lifeline is a 200-ft rope made entirely of bed sheets reinforced with thousands of strands of dental floss.

 One slip, one weak knot, one gust of wind whipping between the high-rises, and they plummet 17 stories onto solid concrete. The building they are escaping from is the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal prison designed to be inescapable. But, Joe Spanks and Kenneth Conley didn’t spend 6 months smashing a concrete wall just to fall.

 They have just executed the most audacious jailbreak in modern American history. And the craziest part? Right now, the guards inside think Banks and Conley are sleeping soundly. They left decoys in their beds and replaced the steel bars they ripped out of the window frame with fakes so convincing nobody noticed.

 This isn’t just an escape, it’s a magic trick performed 17 stories in the air. They’re about to vanish, triggering a massive FBI manhunt, and the authorities don’t realize they aren’t just chasing two desperate men. They are chasing the ghosts who managed to walk through a solid wall. Perhaps motivated by the half million dollars in stolen cash that the FBI still hasn’t found.

 The story starts 5 days earlier inside a federal courtroom. Joseph Joe Spanks, 37 years old, is standing trial. Banks is notorious. The FBI called him the Secondhand Bandit because he committed his robberies wearing used thrift store clothing, making him incredibly hard to identify. He wasn’t a petty thief. Banks was prolific.

 In just a few heists, he has stolen over $589,000. And the crucial detail? Over 540,000 of that was still missing. Banks didn’t trust the system. He fired his lawyers and represented himself, claiming he was a Moorish national, a sovereign citizen exempt from US law. His trial was chaos. He was so disruptive that marshals had to physically strap him into a restraint chair just to keep him present.

 The jury didn’t buy it. On December 13th, 2012, they found him guilty. He was facing up to 80 years in prison, a life sentence. As the judge, Rebecca Pallmeyer, prepared for the next steps, Banks looked her dead in the eye and delivered a chilling promise. He told her he would be seeking retribution. Then he added, “No motion will be filed, but you’ll hear from me.

” When Banks was returned to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, he knew he was never getting out legally. The MCC Chicago is unique. It’s not spread out over acres of land surrounded by fences, it’s a triangle-shaped skyscraper, 27 stories high, right in the heart of the city. It was designed to be escape-proof. There are no traditional bars on the windows.

Instead, the windows are just 5-in wide slits. That’s smaller than the width of an average human head. The theory was simple. If you can’t fit through the window, you can’t escape. For decades, that theory held true. Banks was housed on the 17th floor. His cellmate was 38-year-old Kenneth Conley.

 Conley was a former strip club manager who had recently pleaded guilty to robbing about $4,000 from a bank. He was also facing serious time, up to 20 years. So, two desperate men, one tiny cell. The motivation was clear. Banks had a potential fortune waiting for him on the outside, and Conley had nothing to look forward to but concrete and steel.

 If they were going to escape, there was only one way out. The window. But, how did two men fit through a 5-in gap? Well, they don’t. They needed to make the gap bigger. The plan they devised was audacious, requiring patience, ingenuity, and incredible luck. It didn’t happen overnight. This took weeks, maybe months.

 First, they needed tools. Where do you get a sledgehammer in federal lockup? Well, you don’t. You improvise. Investigators believe they smuggled heavy metal parts, possibly from a floor buffer machine, or maybe even a bell bar from the weight room, back to their cell. This became their chisel and hammer. Slowly, agonizingly, they began to smash the cinder block wall surrounding the window frame. This was the most dangerous part.

The noise of the metal on concrete echoes. They had to work in short bursts, timing their strikes with the rattling of food carts, or the slamming of doors. Every swing risked discovery. Every speck of dust and debris had to disappear. So, they flushed it down the toilet, bit by bit, day after day. They couldn’t just leave a gaping hole in the wall while they worked.

 They needed camouflage. They pulverized the dust and mixed it with soap or toothpaste, creating a paste that matched the color of the wall. They used that paste to cover their progress. Eventually, they managed to remove an entire cinder block and dislodge the steel security bars. But, they couldn’t escape yet. They needed a way down.

 You can’t just jump 17 stories. So, they needed a rope, a 200-ft rope. Banks and Conley started hoarding bed sheets. They had to manipulate the laundry system, bribe other inmates, or slowly steal them over time. But, prison bed sheets are thin. They knew the sheets alone wouldn’t hold the weight of two grown men.

And this is where the genius detail comes in. Dental floss. They collected thousands of yards of dental floss. They braided the floss into the bed sheets, reinforcing the entire length of the rope. Dental floss, when braided, is incredibly strong. It turned a flimsy collection of sheets into a viable escape tool.

 They even fashioned harnesses so they could descend safely. The scale of this operation inside a tiny cell is mind-boggling. They were hiding tools, a cinder block, steel bars, and a 200-ft rope. But, they had one more problem. If a guard looked closely at the window, they would see the missing steel bars. So, Banks and Conley created fakes.

 They reportedly used cardboard from toilet paper rolls, colored to look like metal, and placed them in the window slots. From a distance, the cell looked secure. The real steel bars? They shoved those deep inside their mattresses. They even prepared their bodies. Knowing the hole would be incredibly tight, both men reportedly started dieting, trying to lose weight to ensure that they could fit through the gap.

 Everything was meticulously planned. For Banks, the clock was ticking faster after his conviction. And the time was now. Monday, December 17th, 2012. At 10:00 p.m., the guards conducted a routine head count. Banks and Conley were both present. The guards marked them down and move on. They didn’t notice the fake bars. As soon as their tier was quiet and the lights dimmed, Banks and Conley got to work.

 They needed to buy themselves hours. They prepared their decoys. They took their clothes and extra sheets and molded them under their blankets into the shapes of bodies. If a guard shone a flashlight into the cell during the night, it would look like they were sound asleep. The moment of truth arrived. They removed the fake bars and loosened cinder block.

 They now had a hole just big enough to squeeze through. It was incredibly tight. They secured the bed sheet rope to the remaining structure of the window frame. They double-checked the knots. This was it. It was the early hours of Tuesday, December 18th. The temperature in Chicago was freezing. And the wind at that altitude was brutal.

 The men changed out of their orange jumpsuits and into street clothes they had hidden underneath. Then, one of them squeezed through the narrow opening. Just imagine the vertigo. They were 17 stories above the street and in the dark, about to put their full trust in a homemade rope. They threw the rope over the side.

 It cascaded down the concrete wall and they slipped into the harnesses. And then they began their descent. This wasn’t a smooth, tactical rappel. This was a desperate slide down a rough surface. The friction was intense. When the FBI later recovered the rope, they found it stained with blood. Their hands were raw.

 They had to move quickly, but carefully. If the rope swung too much, they could smash against the building. If their grip slipped, they were dead. It must have taken several minutes to reach the bottom. Minutes where they were completely exposed. If anyone walking by had happened to look up, they would have seen the unbelievable sight of two men scaling down the side of the federal prison.

But, nobody looked up. At approximately 2:40 a.m., Joe Spanks and Kenneth Conley touched down on the street. They were free. They had defeated the skyscraper jail. They didn’t waste a second. They ran a few blocks and, in a stroke of cinematic luck, they didn’t have a getaway car waiting. Instead, they did what anyone in downtown Chicago does when they need a ride.

They hailed a taxi. A cab driver picked up the two men in the middle of the night, completely unaware that he was now the getaway driver for the most high-profile escapees in the country. They told the driver to head south toward the suburbs. They paid with cash and vanished into the night. Back at the MCC, everything was quiet.

The guards continued their rounds. At 3:30 a.m., a guard conducted a head count. He walked past the cell, flashed his lights inside, saw the two bodies in the bunks, and moved on. The security failures that night were catastrophic. The area where Banks and Conley descended was supposed to be monitored by video cameras, but the camera covering that wall was reportedly malfunctioning.

 Furthermore, the staffing levels that night were low. The guards were complacent. Hours passed. 4:00 a.m., 5:00 a.m., 6:00 a.m. Around 7:00 a.m., the morning shift started arriving for work. As employees walked toward the entrance, one of them noticed something strange. Dangling down the side of the building, blowing in the morning wind, was a long knotted rope.

The sight paralyzed the staff. It was so blatant, so absurd, that it took a moment to process. Panic immediately set in. The prison went into lockdown. Guards rushed to the 17th floor. When they opened the door, they found the decoys. They ripped the blankets off and no inmates. They looked at the window, a gaping hole in the concrete.

 Joseph Banks and Kenneth Conley were gone. They had at least a 4-hour head start. The news broke instantly, and it was a sensation. This wasn’t just a prison break, it was a humiliation for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The FBI immediately took over the investigation. A $50,000 reward was offered. The perceived threat Banks made to the judge suddenly seemed very real.

 Federal agents were assigned to protect Judge Palmieri and the prosecutors from the trial. The fear was that Banks hadn’t escaped just to run, but to seek retribution as he promised. The manhunt was massive and chaotic. Heavily armed federal agents and local police swarmed the city. There was a report of a sighting at the Greyhound bus station.

 A SWAT team swarmed the station, but they found nothing. The investigators caught a break by tracing the taxi ride. The trail led them south to the area near Tinley Park. Sources revealed that Kenneth Conley went straight toward his mother’s house. He showed up on the doorstep hours after escaping a federal prison, apparently expecting breakfast and a place to hide.

His mother was stunned. She made the agonizing decision to turn her own son away, refusing to help him hide. The FBI and SWAT teams quickly surrounded the neighborhood, and they brought in police dogs. The dogs picked up the suspect scent and followed it to a nearby metro station in New Lenox.

 The dogs lost the scent right there on the platform. Authorities believed Banks and Conley had boarded a commuter train. The trail went cold. The city was on edge. The speculation was that they were headed for a far-flung island, ready to live off the half a million dollars Banks had stashed away. But the reality of being a fugitive is rarely glamorous.

 It’s stressful, paranoid, and often very short-lived. Banks and Conley knew they couldn’t stay together. The heat was too intense. They split up. Joseph Banks wasn’t as careful as he thought he was. He didn’t flee the state. He stayed right in Chicago, heading back to familiar territory on the north side. On the night of Thursday, December 20th, just over two days after the escape, the FBI received a tip.

 They tracked Banks to the Lincoln Park neighborhood, an upscale area not far from where he lived before his arrest. Around 11:30 p.m., officers and federal agents surrounded an apartment building. They moved in quickly. Banks was caught completely by surprise. He was arrested without incident. When they searched him, there was no sign of the missing $540,000.

The second-hand bandit’s run was over, though. His impossible escape had bought him less than three days of freedom. But Kenneth Conley was still out there, and he was proving much harder to find. Days turned into weeks. Christmas came and went. New Year’s passed. There was speculation that Conley had fled the state.

 The nationwide manhunt continued, but the leads were drying up. Conley had also decided to stay close to home. He was hiding out in Palos Hills, another suburb southwest of Chicago. He knew the police were looking for him, so he decided to hide in plain sight. But his disguise wasn’t exactly subtle. It was now January 4th, 2013, 17 days since the escape.

 Police responded to a report of suspicious activities in an apartment building in Palos Hills. The caller reported hearing noises, like someone trying to find an unlocked door. When they arrived, they saw a man who looked completely out of place. It was an old man bundled up in a heavy overcoat, wearing a beret, and leaning heavily on a cane.

 He looked frail and harmless, but something about the old man seemed off. The police approached him. As they got closer, they realized that it was a disguise. It was Kenneth Conley. When Conley realized he was made, the disguise didn’t stop him from resisting. He fought back and he ran. The officers chased him down.

 He allegedly assaulted a federal agent during the arrest, trying desperately to get away one last time. The officers were forced to use a taser to subdue him. Finally, they got him into handcuffs. When the FBI agents confirmed his identity, Conley was defiant. He reportedly looked at the agents and said, “It happened once. What makes you think it won’t happen again?” The spectacular skyscraper jailbreak was officially over.

The aftermath of the escape sent shockwaves through the federal prison system. The MCC Chicago was scrutinized intensely. The investigation pointed to complacency by the staff, and they never believed an escape from the 17th floor was possible, so they just stopped looking for the signs. In response, the Bureau of Prisons implemented changes.

The windows at the MCC were reinforced with heavy steel plating. Furthermore, a new national policy was implemented. It became known as the bar tap. Now, guards in federal high-rise prisons must regularly go into cells and physically strike the window bars and metal housing with a mallet to ensure they are real and intact.

 They are literally checking to make sure nobody is replacing the bars with fakes. As for the escapees, the courts showed no mercy. In 2014, Joseph Banks stood before Judge Palmiere again. He apologized, calling the escape an act of desperation. He admitted his sovereign citizen defense had all been an act. The judge wasn’t convinced.

 She called Banks narcissistic and a threat and a menace to society. Joseph Banks was sentenced to 36 years in federal prison. He was also ordered to pay $589,000 in restitution. The vast majority of that money has never been recovered. He’s currently housed at USP Hazelton, a high-security penitentiary in West Virginia.

 Kenneth Conley’s fate was similar. He was first sentenced for the bank robbery he was awaiting sentence for when he escaped. The judge in that case gave him the maximum penalty of 20 years, citing the escape as a key the harshness. Then Conley faced sentencing specifically for the escape in front of Judge Gary Feiderman. Conley smirked his way through the hearing.

 He even winked at the federal agents who had arrested him, and Judge Feiderman noted Conley’s long record and called him incorrigibly violent. He sentenced Conley to an Conley was furious. He exploded in the courtroom, yelling profanities at the judge, telling him exactly where he could stick his sentence, and suggested the judge increase it to five years.

Judge Feiderman simply replied, “Thank you.” Kenneth Conley is currently incarcerated at USP Thomson in Illinois. If you enjoyed this prison break case, check out the channel. There you’ll find many great stories just like this one. If you like what you see, please subscribe. I’d be very grateful, and I’ll catch you next time.