Alcatraz was supposed to be impossible to escape. From the time that it had opened, there have been fourteen attempts, but only one has succeeded: Frank Morris and the Anglin Brothers, a group of three bank robbers. For over fifty years, it has been speculated whether this trio made it or not. Some say that they escaped and others say that they died in the attempt. It is only years later that light is shed on that mysterious night, proving that Frank Morris and the Anglin Brothers survived their escape from Alcatraz in 1962.
The Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary began as a U.S. military prison, but was converted to a maximum high security federal prison in 1934 (History Channel). Alcatraz was built for dangerous and difficult criminals whose actual crimes did not matter, only their conduct in other prisons. If they grew to be too much, they would eventually be turned over to Alcatraz. A common problem other prisons faced were multiple escape attempts, so convicts were sent to Alcatraz, a place no man could escape. It was nicknamed the Rock, and was considered inescapable because of the surrounding mile and a half of frigid waters and swift currents as well as sharks (History Channel). Nonetheless, Alcatraz Prison took every precaution. Their security included strategically positioned watchtowers, tool-proof steel bars, dozens of head counts every 24 hours, and a carefully structured schedule. Prisoners would also be picked at random for a “quick search and frisk for contraband” that the detectors hadn’t caught (Katz).
The escape group originally consisted of four men: Frank Morris, Allen West, John, and Clarence Anglin. However, on the night of the escape, West was not able to get out of his cell in time and was a main source for the FBI investigation. All four of the inmates knew each other from before. They had met at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. While at Alcatraz, West was assigned a cell next to Morris, which was only four down from the Anglin brothers (Katz).
Frank Lee Morris, prisoner #1441, arrived at Alcatraz in January 1960 for an escape attempt in Atlanta (Katz). According to the Associate’s Warden’s Record, he was a blueprint man and draftsman. Under his official occupation, however, he was an escape artist. They credited Morris with superior intelligence, an IQ of 133, which places him in the top three percent of the population (History Channel). Prior to Alcatraz, he had been abandoned at birth and moved around from one foster home to another. He committed his first crime at the age of thirteen and since has been guilty of many crimes, from narcotics possession to armed robbery (The Great Escape).
John and Clarence Anglin were sent to Alcatraz after several escape attempts at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. Their original crime was a bank robbery in Columbia, Alabama with their older brother, Alfred. Their weapon of choice was a toy gun and they stole $19,000, but the FBI caught them four days later in Ohio. Before the heist, they were just poor farmers from Ruskin, Florida. John was sent to Alcatraz in the October of 1960 as prisoner Alcatraz number 1476 and Clarence joined him a year later as Alcatraz number 1485. They were assigned cells right next to each other, despite their previous warden’s advice against it. He said that they were both escape risks, but the prison officials at Alcatraz dismissed it, believing the Rock to be inescapable (History Channel).
Allen West, Alcatraz number 1335, arrived at Alcatraz in June 1958 for a second time. He was compulsiviley chatty, and a little arrogant He had grown up during the Great Depression and by the age of fourteen, West was guilty of car theft. He was imprisoned repeatedly in the Georgia State prison for car theft and burglary. He worked as electrician’s helper for a short time before enlisting in the army, but was soon arrested after basic training. He was dishonorably discharged and then sent to a federal prison in Pennsylvania where he was transferred to the one in Atlanta due to disruptive behavior. He was segregated four times at Atlanta because of his behavior. Over his lifetime, he was arrested over 20 times for charges including grand larceny and driving a stolen vehicle across the border, a federal offense. He was sent to Alcatraz two different times. (Katz).
Starting in December 1961, Morris began to devise an escape plan. He had heard rumors from other inmates that there was an unguarded utility corridor behind the cells in Block B, which lead outside. Each cell was made of concrete with a six-by-ten-inch metal ventilator grill placed at the bottom of the rear wall, about a foot thick, which connected the cells to the corridor. He need to widen the vent to ten inches high and fourteen inches wide, enough to let him squeeze through. To learn more on the subject, he borrowed a book from the prison library on structural engineering. He let West (in the adjacent cell) and the Anglin brothers (four cells down) in on his idea. The four of them meticulously planned out every detail of their escape (Katz). After dinner, many inmates would practice musical instruments in their cells, providing the perfect opportunity for Morris to work on his wall until lights out at 9:30 PM. As he chipped away, West would watch for guards using a homemade periscope. They used primitive tools, such as spoons and even a vacuum motor to drill into the wall. Each person was careful to hide their progress using an instrument, clothing, or even making a fake grill cover to go over the real one. When Morris and Clarence finished, they took turns watching for guards as West and John dug theirs. Using the corridor as a secret workshop, they started working on dummies to trick the night guards during patrols. Morris used magazine pages from the library along with plaster (soap, glue, and cement from the wall) to make a papier mâché head. He was careful to make sure that the pages had ads on both sides so no one would notice that they were missing. Clarence worked in the barbershop and gathered snippets of dark hair for the dummies. He also took up painting under the guise of a recreational activity, practicing with shades of pink, white, and black to perfect a human likeness. Once the dummies were finished and safely hidden inside the vents, they began to think of a way off the island. They started to construct a raft and life vests. John worked in the clothing room and wore a different raincoat every time he left. The afternoon shift wouldn’t notice that he wasn’t wearing one in the morning. He smuggled more than fifty raincoats. Morris carefully studied the contents of the March 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics, which contained instructions on making homemade life vests and rafts. They stitched the seams of the raincoats together and built wooden paddles. In April, Morris requested a concertina and turned it into a baffle to inflate the six-by-fourteen-foot raft. In early June, guards searchd the Anglins’ cells, but didn’t find anything discriminating. West was worried that he would be searched next, so he used cement particles to reduce the size of his hole because the grill was having trouble staying on. About a week later, the Anglins were finally ready to escape (Katz).
On June 12, 1962, Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers were found missing at 7:15 AM. During the previous night, guards would make four headcounts before 7:00 AM, mistaking the dummies for the missing convicts. The group left at approximately 9:30 PM when they made their way to the roof through the ventilator. They crawled to the other side of the roof with their supplies and climbed down a smokestack on the side of the building. They crossed down to the water where they inflated the raft and disappeared, leaving Allen West behind, who was having a hard time with his vent (Katz). By the time he was able to break through, he realized that it was too late. They were already gone, but where they went remains a popular topic of debate. Some think they would have paddled out to Angel Island, the closest land. Others think that they didn’t make it all, that they drowned in the currents or were swept out to sea. But neither of these theories are correct. Morris and the Anglins were prepared for the final part of the plan. They did not go through all that planning just to be swept out to sea; they were too smart for that. Instead of paddling straight out, they made their way around the perimeter of the island. The FBI followed their footprints down to the shore where bloodhounds continued to track the group’s scent until the cave on the west side, where they had lost it (History Channel). This route enabled the escapees to avoid the watchtower as they paddled to the prison’s boat dock. The FBI reported that 120 feet of electrical cord that was stored near the docks missing. The last ferry boat that transported guards to and from the island was schedueled to depart at 12:10 AM that night. Another magazine found in Morris’s cell was a Sport’s Illustrated article explaining how to tie a boat to the dock and how a boat leaves and enters a slip (a docking place for a ship between two piers). When pieced together, this evidence shows how they survived the water. The escapees could have known what time the boat arrived with new guards, used the information from the article, and tied the stolen electrical cord from their raft to the ferry, so that it would give them a tow. Somewhere along the course, the three untied the rope and paddled out to meet a getaway boat. Officer Robert Checchi, an off-duty policeman, was a witness that night. He was smoking a cigarette when he looked out to Alcatraz and saw something strange. Between him and the island, there was a “pristine” white boat without lights or fishing poles, sitting idle for about thirty minutes before moving towards the Golden State Bridge. Art Roderick, a U.S. Marshall, believes that Fred Brizzi, a childhood friend to the Anglins, helped them escape due to his own extensive criminal record. He was a pilot who smuggled drugs from South America, and more than likely, he helped them get across the Bay and eventually reach Brazil (History Channel). Fred Brizzi recounts the time when he “ran into the brothers.” He says, “The whole situation of it is, nobody absolutely, positiviely knows they’re alive, really, but me. And I sat and talked with them and I asked them, I said, ‘how did you boys make it across there?’ Neither one of them siad anything and I said, ‘I know how you did it now, I remember. Well, down there at the mouth of the Alafia, we’d go down there and take a rope and tie it around a rudder post and we’d wait for the boat to pull on out and we’d hold onto this rope and bodysurf.’ ‘You’re the first one,’ he says that ever thought of it.’ He siad, ‘that’s the way we came across.’”
The following morning, panic ensued when cell numbers 138, 150, and 152 were discovered missing at 7:15 AM. The prison went on lockdown, and an intense search began, the biggest manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping. The search team included six of the surrounding police departments, the FBI, the Coast Guard, the Highway Patrol, the U.S. Army, the State Harbor Police, and the Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C.. They searched land, air, and sea, but no physical evidence could be found (Katz). This is particularly interesting because two out of every three bodies are recovered from the San Francisco Bay, but nothing could be found. They simply vanished. The FBI officially closed the case in 1979, believing that the missing persons drowned at sea and turned it over to the U.S. Marshalls, who continue to look for them (History Channel). One of the only leads was the human bones that were recovered from the bay six months after the escape. This buoyed the belief that the three perished in the attempt, most assuming that the bones were one of the convicts. In 2010, a DNA sample was compared to Morris’s family and proved that the bones were not his. Due to the Anglin family’s distrust of the government, they weren’t able to test the bones’ DNA to see if it was either of the brothers’ until recently. The results came back negative: the bones did not to belong to the Anglins either (History Channel). Another piece of evidence is a stack of Christmas cards sent to the Anglins. Every year, she would receive a card from her sons while they were incarcerated. It had their prison number on it as well as Alcatraz’s stamp. However, for three years after the escape, the family continued to receive these Christmas cards without a number or stamp (Robinson). A final piece of evidence, and the strongest, is a photo of the brothers that was taken in Brazil during the 1970’s. Fred Brizzi, who most likely helped the brothers escape, saw the brothers at a bar in Rio De Janeiro. They invited him to their farm and showed him around. Brizzi took their picture and gave it to the family in 1992, along with his story. Michael Streed, a world renowned forensic facial imaging expert, analyzed the photo and stated that it was highly likely that those men were, in fact, John and Clarence Anglin. The hair lines, foreheads, and bone structures matched their mugshots, almost as if it were a mask (History Channel).
In 1962, Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers escaped Alcatraz and survived, making themselves legends in the eyes of the public. For years, the FBI has believed them to be dead, but thanks to new evidence, both Morris and the Anglins made it out that night. By using a stolen electrical cord, the guard boat unknowingly towed the three men to the middle of the bay, where they paddled towards a getaway boat. Alcatraz closed a year after the escape in 1963 because of financial costs, but the prison break accelerated its discontinuation. It is now a popular tourist attraction. West was transferred from Alcatraz to a state prison in Washington, and then Atlanta. He was arrested several times before he died of peritonitis in 1978 (Katz). This great escape has become iconic, inspiring a film, starring Clint Eastwood as Frank Morris in the Escape from Alcatraz (1979).