Lindsey Graham (3:46)
From. Wondery. I'm Lindsey Graham and this is American Historytellers. Our history your story In 1847, during the Mexican American War, US soldiers seized Alcatraz, an island in San Francisco Bay. The US 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. By 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 two in our four part series on daring. Prison Fleeing the Rock On 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 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. By the time he was six, he was stealing matches and lighting them just to watch them burn. He stole change from his teachers 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. detention 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. No 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 US as 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. Heavy 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. But 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. 23 had been caught. 2. 6 had been shot and killed and 2 had drowned. When Frank Lee Morris arrived at Alcatraz in January 1960, he immediately began looking for ways to escape. The 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 he was small, only about 6 by 10 inches. And the metal grate covering the vent was tightly affixed to the concrete wall. In 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. Imagine 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. But 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. Nah, man, it's just glass and cork. There's nothing to set the snitch box off. What if the guards frisk you? I figured I 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. He 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, but 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. Escape? You are just messing with him. He'll never figure out how to access the ventilator shaft, much less get out of this prison. After 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. Slowly, he stood up and peered out of his cell. There was no guard in sight, 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's 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. At 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 Allen 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. But 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 to 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 unobstructed air shaft the other inmate had told him 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. To 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 busted 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.
