What No One Realized About The Alcatraz Escape

Every prison has one job, keep the inmates inside.  Welcome to Alcatraz.  For almost 30 years, America believed Alcatraz did that better than any prison on Earth. Surrounded by freezing water, armed guards, and impossible odds, it earned one reputation that mattered more than anything else. Nobody escapes.

 The truth, that reputation was built on a myth because in 1962, three convicted bank robbers didn’t just escape Alcatraz. They uncovered a series of mistakes that had been hiding for years. June 12th, 1962, 7:00 a.m. roll call. A guard makes his morning rounds waking up the prisoners, but Frank Morris, John Anglin, and his brother Clarence do not respond. The guard is annoyed.

 The prisoners know the drill, yet they lie in their beds unresponsive. He doesn’t have time for  their tomfoolery, so he prods Frank Morris’s head. To his greatest surprise, the head rolls off the bed completely  decapitated. Except, it wasn’t a head, it was a dumm

By 7:15 a.m., the shocking truth dawns on Alcatraz.  The prisoners have escaped. The prison immediately goes into full lockdown. The clock is running, and there’s almost no time to find the escapees. Acting Warden Arthur Dollison doesn’t have a plan because a breakout here was never supposed to be possible.

 Here is a full sweep of the prison grounds. They sweep through every perimeter, every shadow for these men who shouldn’t be able to disappear, but no sign of them. The search widens to the bay itself. Hundreds of soldiers, 35 military officers, and teams of bloodhounds fan out across the surrounding Bay Area. Yet, by 7:28 p.m. all their efforts remain futile.

 Three men have vanished from the most escape-proof prison on Earth. And the more officials investigate, the less this looked like an impossible  breakout because Alcatraz hadn’t been beaten in a single night.  Its weaknesses had been there for years, hidden behind a reputation nobody thought to question.

 That reputation started with the water.  Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, The Rock, was built for America’s unreformable elites. It wasn’t designed for rehabilitation. It was designed to hold the worst of the worst behind escape-resistant steel and a dozen mandatory daily head counts. Located on a lonely island in the San Francisco Bay, it was already a forbidding place    surrounded by cold, angry, and unforgiving waters.

 The water temperature was approximately 54° F. Prison officials calculated that exposure to those conditions would begin affecting body function after roughly 20 minutes. Currents ran up to six knots, fast enough to sweep even a strong swimmer past his target and out towards the  open ocean. Warden Olin Blackwell would later put it plainly,  “Convicts without training for a swim like that simply weren’t going  to make it.

” So, Alcatraz built its defense around a bet on the water. Officials became convinced that no one could survive the freezing temperatures and powerful currents because the bay itself was an impassable natural wall. So, why spend manpower guarding what nature had already seemed to protect, that overconfidence made the breakout much easier than anyone realized.

 The faith was so strong that Alcatraz disregarded a crucial warning from Leavenworth, and in doing so, signed its own death warrant. The warning had a name attached to it, the Anglins. None of Alcatraz’s inmates were more infamous than the Anglin brothers, not because they were especially dangerous, but because they were inseparable and disturbingly good at escaping.

 No prison had managed to keep them apart or keep  them in.  Yeah, man, we just really tight, you know? I think we’d be twins if pops had better timing. Look, we love our freedom, okay? I mean, who doesn’t? That bread box thing at Leavenworth, we were just trying to go sightseeing for a couple of days.

 They didn’t have to be so nosey.  The escape failed, but it made something clear. These two were not ordinary inmates. Every facility they’d passed through had struggled to hold them. So, authorities made a drastic call. John and Clarence were shipped off to Alcatraz in 1960 and 1961 with a direct warning from Leavenworth attached.

 Don’t house these brothers near each other. Warden Olin Blackwell brushed the warning aside. Nothing The Rock couldn’t handle, he figured. The brothers ended up in adjoining cells anyway.  Alcatraz wasn’t  even that bad. I got to be with my homie every day. Big ol’ Olin did us a solid. It would have been way harder getting out without Clarence right next door.

 One ignored memo removed one of the biggest obstacles to any escape plan, assembling a team you could rely on. And as fate would have it, they ran into the evil genius Frank Morris and the troublesome Alan West, familiar faces from prior penitentiaries.  Together, they began building something Alcatraz had never seen coming.

Meanwhile, none of them knew it yet, but their most valuable accomplice wasn’t a fellow inmate.    Pride, they say, comes before a fall. No statement could be more true about Alcatraz than this. Less than three decades after it became a penitentiary, the place was already falling apart from within, ravaged by the very elements that gave it its reputation.

  The salt water surrounding the island turned out to be its greatest strength and its Achilles’ heel. And around the time the inmates were building their plan, that weakness handed them an opening. They noticed what the prison officials had carelessly overlooked, the concrete walls in the prison were crumbling from salt water corrosion and the steel bars reinforcing them had rusted and expanded, cracking the concrete from the inside out.

 The wall had decayed and become soft, providing the prisoners with just the perfect escape route. Budget constraints only made things worse. Block A, unlike blocks B and C, wasn’t fitted with tool-proof hardened steel. Also, attention wasn’t paid to  the precision of structures as there was an engineering anomaly in the gun gallery where the bars at the very top curved towards the wall, creating a gap.

 So, it’s no surprise that before June 1962,  other inmates had already exploited these structural flaws in their escape attempts. The belief that the facility would always be an ultimate deterrent, coupled with several unsuccessful escape attempts, made the prison officials and the government ignore these critical flaws in the facility for a long time.

So much so that by the time they came to the realization that the prison was falling apart, the maintenance cost had soared to over $5 million. Well, crumbling walls are one thing, but Alcatraz’s ultimate act of self-sabotage was a stroke of absolute genius. They handed the prisoners maintenance access,  effectively giving them the exact weaknesses of the fortress holding them.

Whether it was the cost of upkeep or the belief that the waters alone would stop any escape, Alcatraz officials made a grave mistake. They gave inmates unsupervised maintenance access to the facility. Some inmates worked as plumbers,  mechanics, painters, and electricians. Access that became the catalyst for the prison’s most famous breakouts.

The 1962 escape itself began with a piece of maintenance intel. Claims differ on who masterminded the plan, but records point to a conversation Frank Morris had with another inmate who mentioned that electrician Willard Winhoven had removed a ventilation shaft on Block B’s roof and never replaced it. That tip was enough for Morris to realize something.

 There might be a direct unblocked path from the utility corridor straight up to the roof. This administrative oversight turned out to be Alcatraz’s undoing. It became the opening move in an escape plan that would puzzle America for decades. The hardest part of escaping a maximum security prison is usually finding a way out.

 Alcatraz had already left one waiting for them. It’s often argued that prison work prepares inmates for future  freedom. In Alcatraz’s case, that freedom wasn’t the kind officials had in mind. Warning signs had surfaced previously tied to inmates working on the prison’s maintenance team, and they’d been  ignored.

 In the 1946 Battle of Alcatraz, inmate plumber Bernard Paul Coy used his access to maintenance tools to build a makeshift bar spreader,  bending the gun gallery bars during a failed breakout attempt. You’d think this would push  guards to tighten surveillance. It didn’t. Eventually, Frank Morris, John and Clarence Anglin, and Allen West would  exploit that same loophole to pull off an escape that remains one of America’s greatest  unsolved mysteries.

 Allen West’s unsupervised maintenance access compromised prison security in several ways. Maintenance workers were among the few inmates with unrestricted run of the facility, free to scout the perimeter unnoticed. West’s job as a painter led him to discover the previously mentioned vent shaft leading to the roof.

 That same job let him camouflage the operation, mixing and matching paint for the drilled vents, the paper mache heads, and the rooftop workshop. His mobility also let him smuggle in the tools and materials the plan needed. Also,  the inmates had ample time to fabricate custom-made tools like the makeshift drill they made from a broken vacuum cleaner, different  paper mache heads, and other tools needed for their adventure.

Bad concrete, soft walls, and maintenance access were just the beginning because while the prison was busy falling apart on the outside, it was also handing the inmates everything they needed on the inside. The greatest help the 1962 escapees ever got came from the guards themselves who willingly handed over the blueprints, tools, and camouflage that fine-tuned the entire plan.

 The first security lapse involved something as harmless as reading materials. Alcatraz let inmates request magazines and other reading material. A good initiative undercut by one problem. The guards never scrutinized  what was actually in them. Frank Morris, the mastermind behind the plan, exploited this loophole to gather the resources he needed.

 Over time, he ordered issues of Popular Mechanics and Science Digest. From the March 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics,  he learned how to build life vests from an article titled Your Life Preserver, How Will It Behave If You Need It. Another magazine introduced him to rubber vulcanization, the process he used to construct the raft.

 The inmates also tore pages from discarded magazines, mixed them with toilet paper, soap,  and concrete dust to mold dummy heads and fake ventilation grills. Even what should have been the hardest part of the escape became surprisingly effortless because of Alcatraz’s own routines. To widen the salt-damaged openings behind  their cells, the inmates scraped through the weakened concrete with crude tools like spoons after their makeshift drill proved too loud.

 Normally, the noise would have exposed the entire  plan. Instead, Alcatraz unintentionally provided the perfect camouflage. During the daily music hour, inmates were allowed to play instruments or listen to music piped into the cell block, masking the sound of the digging. Frank Morris took full advantage, spending hours playing loud, deliberately discordant accordion, while the scraping blended into the prison’s daily routine.

 Once again, the prison made the escape easier than it had any right to be. But the biggest security failure of all was simpler than one could imagine. The prison never kept an inventory of its clothing or industrial materials. Raincoats were common gear on the island, given how foggy and cold it stayed even on  clear days.

 So, no one thought twice about inmates wearing them. What no one tracked was how many there were. And over 6 months, more than 55 raincoats disappeared,  quietly repurposed into a makeshift raft without a single guard noticing. Whether that came down to laziness or just plain indifference, since the government kept the funds flowing regardless, remains a mystery.

Dang, a federal prison loses 55 raincoats and no one even notices. I’ve had hotels chase me down for one missing bathrobe. And all these factors paved the way for the perfect escape. On the night of June 11th, 1962, the inmates decided it was time to sail to freedom. Right after the nightly lockdown head count, they laid their dummy heads on their beds just as they had for months, and tucked bundles of clothes under their blankets to mask their absence. At around 10:00 p.m.

, Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers pulled away the fake cardboard grates beneath their sinks and squeezed into the utility corridor behind the cell block, then climbed the plumbing pipes up to the roof. There they grabbed their gear and used a makeshift tool to bend the  rivets on a massive ceiling ventilator fan, prying open a gap just wide enough to crawl through onto [clears throat] the prison roof.

 To dodge the sweeping searchlights, they crawled on their bellies before working their way down a 50-ft service pipe on the outside of the building,  then scaled two separate 12-ft barbwire fences to reach the island’s northeastern shore. On the dark, rocky shoreline, they used a modified accordion  to inflate their 14-ft raincoat raft, pushed it into the freezing 54° waters of the bay, climbed aboard with wooden paddles, and disappeared into the fog.

 The plan was generally successful, but not for one inmate, Allen West. He had been a central part of the plan, supplying much of the equipment through his maintenance access. But, on the day of the escape, he was left behind. He had accidentally locked himself into his cell as the cement he used to mask the ventilation opening had hardened around the edges.

By the time he finally escaped, the others were gone. He had no choice but to return to the prison. He eventually became a crucial part of the investigation, providing authorities with details of the escape.    To this day, the mystery of the Alcatraz escape has not been solved. The men were never found, nor were their bodies.

 The authorities concluded that the men drowned at sea and closed the files. However, there are many who believed and hoped that this was not the case. Computer simulations by Dutch scientists fueled these hopes. What’s even more striking is that less than a year after the [clears throat] escape on March 21st, 1963, Alcatraz officially closed down due to high operating costs.

 Many found this suspicious, claiming it was merely a cover for their shame. Their impenetrable fortress had been breached. As a matter of fact, the Anglin brothers’ nephew, David Widner, accused the FBI of closing the case prematurely because admitting Alcatraz had been beaten was something the bureau simply could not afford to do publicly.

 Another piece of evidence bolstering this fact is a letter received by the FBI claiming to be from one of the escape men, but the case wasn’t pursued because the FBI labeled the evidence inconclusive. Looking back, escaping Alcatraz has never really been an issue. In its 29 active years, there were a total of 14 escape attempts.

 Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers didn’t need to crack a flawless code, they just had to wait for a legendary fortress to defeat itself. Escaping the prison turned out to be the easy  part. The real mystery is whether they survived the swim.