- The most infamous prison on Earth.
- Alcatraz is the true pioneer of the supermax prison concept.
- Surrounded by the freezing waters
of the San Francisco Bay.
- An average prisoner would have succumbed
to hypothermia in under three hours.
- Four inmates think they can beat the odds
and make their way to freedom.
- They were paired in twos.
One would keep watch as the other did the digging.
- Can they escape The Rock? - You can't look back.
You can't contact family.
You've got to basically disappear.
♪ ♪
- Some of the greatest stories ever told
start behind bars.
Locked up in the most notorious prisons
in the world,
spied on by guards
and fellow prisoners.
It takes a devious mind
to find a way out.
It could lead you to freedom
or it could cost you your life.
But wouldn't you try
when you have nothing left to lose?
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
Alcatraz, The Rock.
This is the most notorious prison in American history.
It's a grim concrete fortress planted on solid rock,
surrounded by the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay.
This place is always cold.
And it has a way of breaking the spirit
of the most hardened criminal.
Even Al Capone said,
"Alcatraz has got me licked."
♪ ♪
- Alcatraz is the true pioneer
of the supermax prison concept.
- Alcatraz opened back in 1934.
They had a huge ratio of guards to prisoners.
- You had, like, this tool-proof steel
that was touted that nobody could use
a regular file to file through.
- There were remote-controlled canisters of tear gas
and that could be opened in the event of a riot
or escape attempt.
There also was a number of metal detectors around.
- They were really boasting the metal detection.
They called it, you know, "the invisible eye."
♪ ♪
- The prison's construction is unlike
anything that had ever been built before.
- The cell structure is like
a three-tiered building inside of a building.
It's three stories high
and the cells all faced outwards
so the guards could walk the corridors
and look inside each cell as needed.
Gun galleries up along the ends
so guards could shoot into the prison if needed.
Once you're outside the main cell building,
there are additional fences and 20-foot walls.
There are thick concrete walls
and guard towers on the corners.
- Six watchtowers.
Each one of them had an armed officer in that tower.
This was gonna be the facility
that there was no escaping, no way out.
♪ ♪
- Even if you managed to get out of your cell,
scale the walls,
and evade the watchtowers,
you still faced the biggest obstacle of all:
San Francisco Bay.
Its waters are cold enough to kill you in an hour
and the currents can drag you
clean out into the Pacific Ocean.
- An average prisoner
would have a functional time of about
an hour and a half to two hours.
And then after that, they'd just be
kind of, like, bobbing and floating
and wouldn't be able to really function
and they would succumb to hypothermia
in about under three hours.
♪ ♪
- Here's how criminals start to talk about Alcatraz.
"If you don't follow society's rules,
"you go to prison.
"If you don't follow the prison rules,
you end up in Alcatraz."
♪ ♪
- All the federal prisoners knew if you went to Alcatraz,
the other prisoners who were there
were the worst of the worst
in the federal prison system.
- Many of the most famous criminals of their day
spent time at Alcatraz.
These include the infamous Chicago crime boss,
Al Capone.
Other Depression era gangster figures,
like Machine Gun Kelly.
Bumpy Johnson, the Godfather of Harlem
spends time in Alcatraz,
as does Whitey Bulger,
the Irish American crime boss
turned FBI informant.
And of course, Robert Stroud
known as "The Birdman of Alcatraz,"
who was transferred from Leavenworth
after he killed a guard.
- But in 1962,
all of these big name mobsters and murderers
will be overshadowed by a gang of four small-time crooks.
It's not what they did to get in that makes them famous.
It's their attempt to get out.
- Our team of Alcatraz escapees.
We have Allen West.
♪ ♪
- West was a-- mostly a car thief
and he had a lot of larceny
and a lot of different escape attempts.
- He finally gets out of prison,
goes into the military for a short time,
gets a dishonorable discharge,
back in prison, and believe it or not
ends up in Alcatraz in 1954.
- West is the guy who comes up with the escape plan.
He gets the idea while working at his prison job.
- West was one of the prisoners
who was trusted with the maintenance.
So he would be cleaning, he would paint,
he would do different things.
There's like a seven foot gap
between the ceiling or roof of the cell structure
before you get to the bottom
of the actual cell building itself.
And there's ventilation through there,
there's plumbing pipes, there's wires.
♪ ♪
While he was up on top
cleaning the top tier of the cell structure,
he noticed one of the vents was not turning
and there's little motors in there to pull air through
and he's noticed one of them was broken.
He thought that was a way out of the cell building.
- That's when the wheels start turning.
This could be access to the roof.
This could be the way out.
- West comes up with the idea that,
"Yeah, we can do this."
So he knows the other people
who have a history of escape,
and he starts talking to 'em.
- West starts looking for collaborators,
guys he can trust.
And one man he did time with
at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta
stands out above the rest.
- Next on the island we would have Frank Morris.
♪ ♪
He's our lone wolf.
He's very smart.
- People claim Morris had an IQ of 137.
- He's got the most escapes
out of our four guys.
- He's been incarcerated at 11 different facilities
from a very young age, and Frank Morris was able to
successfully escape from all 11 of those facilities.
- Morris recruits two more members of the team,
a pair of escape artists who also served in Atlanta,
John Anglin...
♪ ♪
And his younger brother, Clarence.
♪ ♪
- John and Clarence, my uncles,
they robbed a bank in 1958,
which was the biggest crime they had ever committed.
They used a toy gun to do it
because they didn't want anybody to get hurt.
When they went in, the president of the bank
got real hysterical and he wound up passing out.
Well, they stopped what they were doing
to get him a glass of water to make sure that he was okay.
They did, you know, tie their hands up
so they couldn't, you know, call the police or whatever,
but they never hurt anybody.
- What the Anglin brothers
lack in cold-hearted criminality,
they make up for in ingenuity
and persistence in escape attempts.
- They had the reputation inside of the family
as being their era of MacGyvers.
They could take nothing and make something out of it.
- They had tried several different,
and sometimes ingenious, little escape attempts.
Leavenworth was the main one.
They both worked there together.
They had a prison camp where they'd make bread
and then they would ship it to and from the prison,
you know, and then they'd send the empty boxes back.
They're large boxes, so Clarence helped John
hide in these big bread boxes.
♪ ♪
He concealed his brother in there,
and then one of the guards caught 'em
as they were going out.
- After their foiled escape from Leavenworth,
the brothers get shipped off to Alcatraz.
They're more than happy to team up
with West and Morris
on another breakout scheme.
- I can tell you that John and Clarence both,
they were always planning escapes.
I can assure you that
they were thinking of ways to get out of there.
- The four prisoners have teamed up,
and their first task is to get themselves
assigned to adjacent cells.
Given their escape record, the Anglin brothers
are separated when they get to Alcatraz.
- So there's a really interesting note
in the case file.
And the sending warden from Leavenworth
makes the statement that the two brothers
should not be celled next to each other.
And they had been known to plot escapes
from every other facility they'd been at
when they were together.
- After months of good behavior,
the warden allows the Anglin brothers
to move to adjacent cells.
West and Morris also get locked up side by side.
- It took some time to get these guys
nearly all lined up on B block.
- Now that they are all together,
they begin formulating a plan
to get through the roof vent,
down the side of the building,
past the fence,
and across the icy cold bay.
♪ ♪
Step one, escape your cell.
Easier said than done.
The inmates know the bars can't be cut with a saw
and stepping out the door
puts you directly in firing line
of machine-gun-toting guards
on either end.
The only possible way out
is somewhere else.
♪ ♪
- Below the sink at the back of each cell
is a small 6x9 inch grated vent.
♪ ♪
And if you could actually remove that grate,
what it provided access to
was a maintenance corridor
that ran the length of the cellblock.
- The concrete around those vents was deteriorating
so they figured if they could make a big enough hole,
they could get out of the back of the cell.
- The digging begins
in September of 1961.
♪ ♪
- They stole spoons out of the cafeteria
and broke the tips off of 'em
and used 'em like picks
to pick away the concrete around the vents.
- And slowly, methodically,
over the course of six months,
the four men began to enlarge
the opening at the back of their cell.
- Morris exploits his job in the repair shop
to steal a vacuum motor and build a makeshift drill.
They hope it will help them break through the vent faster.
- West and Morris both supposedly
read a book about engineering.
They said if you use a hot plate,
heat the concrete up, like, in the back
of the cells as they're chipping away with it,
they said it would help make the concrete
fall apart more easily.
And I think they did experiment
for a time with that.
- They couldn't all four work at the same time.
They were paired in twos.
The Anglins were next to each other
and one would keep watch
as the other did the digging, and then they'd trade off.
Same with Frank and Allen.
- And then finally they could actually pass through it.
♪ ♪
- Clarence Anglin is the first
to break through the back wall.
Freedom is so close he can taste it.
He reaches the roof vent
but discovers that it's bolted shut.
After months of patiently chipping away
at their cell walls,
their dreams of escape
could be over.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- Clarence Anglin has snuck through
a hole in the back of his desolate cell
to a grungy maintenance corridor
with an air vent that leads to the prison's roof.
But instead of an easy path to freedom,
he discovers that the vent is bolted shut.
He and his co-conspirators
are going to have to cut through the bolts
in order to escape.
But they've got one hell of a problem.
How can they keep sneaking into the maintenance corridor
without the guards noticing they're not in their cells?
♪ ♪
- To work on the vent on the top,
they would need to have something look like
they're in their cells.
- The escapees were true artists.
They fashioned fake heads
out of anything you can find in a prison.
We're talking wadded-up sheets,
we're talking soap, chicken wire.
- They were able to collect plaster, concrete mix,
and they were able to form dummy heads
that they put inside their beads
to make it look like they were still sleeping.
- The dummy papier-mache heads
were incredibly convincing.
- John and Clarence took up painting
and they wound up painting
some portraits of their girlfriends.
Well, they needed the flesh-colored paint
for the dummy heads, so they talked the guards
into letting them have the flesh-colored paints
for the portraits, which was actually a ruse
for the dummy heads.
- And the way to really make it human
was to add human hair.
- Clarence Anglin worked in the barbershop,
so he was able to collect hair from other prisoners.
- While he was cutting hair,
he would let some of the hair
fall in the cuffs of his pants
and he would walk it back to his cell every day.
So the dummy heads actually had real human hair.
- They would shove blankets and pillows in for the body
and then the head sleeps near the rails
or near the bars that the guard walks by.
So the guard could just look inside.
If they see a head there, they don't worry about it.
Or unless you go touch it
or actually get really close to it,
you wouldn't worry too much about it.
- Then there's the issue of disguising
the chipped away holes at the back of the cells.
- During the day, they concealed
the enlarged grates by creating false fronts
with a grate and cardboard
painted to look like the prison walls.
- They were able to actually secure
some of the actual paint from Allen West
that they're using to paint
in certain parts of the cell blocks
so it perfectly matches.
This was not something that was
just in place for two weeks.
These were things that were, you know,
being utilized for months and months.
So they were actually pretty compelling
in terms of how they crafted these.
- Covering their tracks turns out to be the easy part.
The hardened steel bolts on the vent
are almost impossible to cut.
And the vent is above the cellblock,
exposed to any guard who happens to glance upward.
The escapees need a way to work without being seen.
♪ ♪
- Allen West came up with a really good plan
to hide in plain view.
His job was to not just paint the ceiling
of the cell house, but also to remove the debris
that he encountered along the way.
And those areas on top of the cell blocks
were not often traveled
and they were dusty as all get out,
and lots of paint chips up there.
So he made a mess one day
and swept all of that debris down the tiers.
Alcatraz had this reputation
for having the shiniest concrete floor
in all of the land.
It just wasn't fit that it would become dirty.
So he basically planted the idea,
"Hey, we wouldn't have this problem
"if I could just put some drop cloths up there.
"You wouldn't get mad at the work
"that you need me to do.
"So let me just put a couple drop cloths up there.
You know, problem solved."
- And believe it or not, he actually convinces
one of the officers and also the captain
that he would like to put up
blankets to completely enclose
above the cell block.
- His job wasn't that long.
These drop cloths were up there for months.
- The guards are fooled,
but the rest of the prison population
knows something's up.
- It really goes to say a lot that these convicts
never ratted them out.
They stood to benefit a lot
if they would've alerted an officer
that there was an escape going on.
And it really gives credit to, you know,
the entire inmate population
who worked with them collectively
to ensure that they were successful.
- They try to protect each other.
Even if you hate the guy in the cell next to you,
they'd rather, you know,
basically, screw the guards over
or screw the whole government and prison system over
and not give up any information.
It's a code in the prison system.
- With the drop cloths in place
and the rest of the inmates keeping their mouths shut,
the escapees have time to work
on removing the bolts from the ceiling vent.
- The ceiling ventilator itself, this passive vent,
was actually bolted into the cement up there
so they had to go up, and utilizing a file,
literally file away at those bolts.
- And then carefully,
they replace it with a bolt made from soap.
- I think it just goes to show
they left no stone uncovered
and tried to cover every single track
so that if they did go up and investigate,
there would be nothing to tip them off.
- That's gonna be their escape,
but just because you've got out of the prison
doesn't mean that you're home free.
♪ ♪
- The second layer of the Alcatraz defenses
is breached,
but there's much more work to do.
They need to find a way down from the roof
and then a way to cut through the exterior fences.
But most of all,
they need to figure out how to cross
the freezing San Francisco Bay.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers
have broken through two of the main defensive barriers
of this grim hell hole.
They've escaped their cells via secret backdoor exits,
and they've successfully filed through the bolts
of a ventilation grate,
giving them access to the prison roof.
But the manmade structures on Alcatraz
are only half the battle.
The final and most formidable barrier
is the frigid water of the San Francisco Bay.
♪ ♪
Only a few prisoners have ever tried to escape Alcatraz.
Six were shot and killed.
Two of them drowned trying to swim across the bay.
One prisoner actually made it to the mainland
but was soon found incapacitated by hypothermia.
♪ ♪
One thing is obvious:
if you want to make it to freedom,
swimming the bay is not a workable plan.
- In some ways, it looks like
all that stands between you and freedom
is a one-mile swim.
But the people who have achieved that feat
are triathlon-level swimmers.
So the notion that any ordinary prisoner
would be able to make that journey
and survive is incredibly unlikely.
♪ ♪
- The escapees needed flotation devices.
They needed, also, a raft.
Frank Morris, he was an avid reader.
He also had magazine subscriptions
that would aid him
in making these inflatable devices.
- One of the famous stories told is that
they read an article in "Popular Mechanics" magazine
that basically gave them the plans to construct these.
- There was a specific article
about how to take rubberized material
like a raincoat material
and make a life vest out of it.
- Because of the cold weather,
Alcatraz has hundreds of heavy raincoats
available for the inmates.
- At that time, the raincoats were
actually really good material.
They were rubber with a cotton mesh inside of it,
so they were really sturdy.
- These were being provided by other convicts.
They were being worn out to the recreation yard
and then they would walk away from them.
And then one of our escapee team guys
would walk back to their cell with it.
- They also knew that there was no tracking
of the issue of raincoats.
You know, the guards never said,
"Well, how many raincoats are out?"
So they ended up with, you know, dozens of raincoats.
They cut the backs out of the raincoats
and then they started shaping them
to make a raft and life vest.
- The way to make them
into something seaworthy, hopefully,
is a clever use
of three different ways of binding them.
There's stitching.
There is gluing,
with most likely bookbinding rubber cement.
- They used some steam lines behind the cells
to vulcanize and put heat to the seam
and help seal it even better.
- This is a triple sealed,
homemade life jacket and raft.
- And West claimed that it would hold a Jeep.
He was an exaggerator, I'm sure.
But he said they would hold air.
- Making high-quality gear takes time.
It also requires privacy.
With the drop cloths still in place
above the cell block,
they turned that area into a secret life raft workshop.
- So for at least two months,
our escapees are going up and down
to their secret workshop to get everything together.
And they're not being seen at all
because of the drop cloths
that Allen West convinced the staff
that he should put up.
So they're able to work from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.
during music hour.
♪ ♪
Any of the convicts that had permission
and had purchased or borrowed an instrument could practice.
[inmates cheering]
Maybe they weren't great at what they were playing
but the sounds that were being created
really covered a lot of that scraping, drilling, climbing.
- During music hour, other prisoners would
either play their radios louder than normal,
or they would have instruments to play music
'cause they knew that they were going to be working.
Even though the prisoners said "We didn't know
they was gonna escape," they were noisier than normal.
[inmates cheering]
- There's even this one rumor
that there was a secret melody
that someone would play if they saw a guard
about to turn and do his rounds.
Something that could be played
to alert the guys, "Look sharp."
But they're not ratting Allen and his team out.
And that's probably indicative of the hope
that every convict had
that someone would break Alcatraz.
- After they had their little workshop
built on top of the cell structure,
they had their rafts built.
They were able to make paddles.
- Paddles are made from pieces of small wood
that they're able to steal
from different places around the shop.
- The next big obstacle they had
was the really cold water.
♪ ♪
- Even with a raft and life vests,
San Francisco Bay can easily kill the untrained boatmen.
But the team finds a surprise instructor:
the notorious Irish American crime boss,
Whitey Bulger.
- He said that the first time he saw John
walking across the rec yard
that it reminded him of Steve McQueen.
He thought they were good people.
He thought they were trustworthy.
He told 'em how to take the raincoats
and actually make wetsuits out of them.
He was a scuba diver back in the early 50s. And
he knew that in order
to help them survive the cold temperatures,
that they would need something to protect their skin.
So he told them how to take some of the raincoats
and actually wear 'em and use 'em
as protection against the cold.
- He also teaches them
how to build up endurance to the cold water.
- One of the security features of Alcatraz
was that the water that they utilized
in the shower area was always very warm.
And what they wanted to do was make sure that
the convicts could never get acclimated
to the cold waters outside.
So that way, that if they were somehow able
to make it to the shore, as soon as they hit the water,
they would realize that they would not be able to sustain.
But Whitey Bulger later stated
that some of the advice that he gave to Clarence Anglin
was that he was to utilize wet towels.
So they would actually take these towels
and then soak 'em in water that was cold
and drape the towels over them,
and that would help them get acclimated.
- He also told 'em, "Once you make it out of here,
"you can't look back.
"You can't contact family.
You've got to basically disappear."
♪ ♪
- The plan is set.
The consequences are clear.
On the night of June 11th, 1962,
it's time to go.
- On the night of June
everything literally came to a head,
and not just the dummy head.
They are placing those in the bed
for the very last time to fool these guards.
- The four men decide that it is time to go.
That they're going to exit their cells in the evening,
make their way up onto the roof of the prison,
down into the yard,
over the fence, and to safety.
♪ ♪
- The lights out. They get out of their cell.
They had a ten-hour head start
before 7:00 the next morning.
♪ ♪
- The officers at that point in time
probably had so much faith
in the security components of the prison
that they were becoming a little bit more laxed
and overconfident that once they did their final count,
there is no way that these guys were ever gonna
make it out of their cells.
- They are removing the fake grill
and fake wall piece from the back of their cell,
squeezing through that hole.
- But almost immediately,
the plan and reality start to diverge.
- The first hiccup is Allen West,
who isn't able to get through his vent.
The covering that he had used to conceal his opening
had actually hardened.
- He had re-cemented part of his cell up too much,
and he couldn't get back out of it
'cause he thought he was gonna get caught
so he kinda re-cemented it.
- He couldn't break through.
- About 9:37 that night,
Frank Morris came back down and asked for a sip of water.
Then West claimed, "Hey, I need help
getting out of my cell. Can you guys help me?"
So Morris said,
"I'll grab one of the other guys and we'll come help you."
And then Morris never came back,
so that's the last time West saw them.
- And that's a really interesting prospect.
If you're putting all this time and effort into escaping,
wouldn't you be ready at any time?
And it tells us maybe he didn't want to go.
Maybe he was scared.
Maybe he wanted the bragging rights.
That was certainly on brand for him.
But also too, there's another possibility,
maybe he was sabotaged.
He was a wildcard, he was a loose cannon
and maybe they didn't tell him,
"Hey, buddy, tonight's the night."
♪ ♪
- Leaving behind the instigator
of their escape plan,
Morris and the Anglin brothers
race up to the workshop.
The clock is ticking.
- They're climbing up the pipes
to their secret workshop at the top of the cellblock.
From there, they're gathering their supplies.
Next, it's time to get to the roof.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- The top vent cover being knocked off
made a loud noise
when they dislodged it on the night of the escape.
The guards actually had a report
at a few minutes after 10:00 that night.
They heard a loud bang,
which sounded like somebody taking their hand
and hitting the side of a 55-gallon drum.
[whistles and cheers]
- But their fellow inmates come to the rescue
with a going-away present:
one final distraction.
- Every prisoner in there made so much noise
because they wanted to hide where that noise came from.
- The escapees are finally through the ventilation grate
and up on the roof.
- And they had no idea what the actual roof
of the building looked like
'cause nobody got to go up there.
- I always think that that must have been
such an amazing feeling
to finally make it onto the roof,
having never seen
the cityscape of San Francisco at night
without any bars or barriers.
♪ ♪
- They're able to go up to the roof.
First, an inmate goes up
and next, the supplies need to come up.
The supplies that are coming up
through that air shaft are paddles,
the inflatables,
a concertina.
A concertina is not the same as an accordion,
but it is in the same family.
A concertina added a benefit because of its valve system.
The way it forces air out
would make for a great way to inflate a raft.
- Carrying all their gear,
the three men dash 100 feet to the edge of the roof,
careful to avoid being spotted by the guard towers.
They are now face to face with their next obstacle:
getting down.
- They're going to have to go down 35, 40 feet probably.
They work their way to the north-northwest side
of the cell building
and there's a stovepipe back there for the kitchen.
- Months of planning and hard work
and subterfuge will have all been for nothing
if they can't make it down this rickety pipe.
No turning back now.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- Inmates Frank Morris, Clarence Anglin,
and his brother John,
are on the precipice of freedom,
staring down from the roof of Alcatraz
to the ground 40 feet below.
One slip here would be fatal.
♪ ♪
- They end up shimmying down a chimney
that goes down to the prison bakery.
- They kind of used it like a fireman does on a pole.
They wrapped around it and slid down it.
- It was really rusty and sooty.
And we know they used that because at the bottom,
after the escape, the next day they have photos
and there's a whole bunch of sooty footprints
all along the ground on the bottom
where they shimmied their way down the pipe.
- They had acquired an extension cord
that was 125 foot long.
♪ ♪
- They used that extension cord
to lower their gear from the roof.
- Once they were down there
and had all their stuff down there,
they still had a probably 15-foot fence to get over.
- They took a blanket and laid it over the barbed wire
so it wouldn't cut 'em as they were going across it.
- They were able to climb over the fence
and they could see a spot where the barbed wire
was pushed down and they actually could see
where they worked their way through down the hill,
underneath the water tower.
And they know they went down that way 'cause they found
a coiled up extension cord
right at the bottom of that slope.
And then from there, they know they worked their way
basically to the northwest side of the island
which was the closest launching point
for their destination,
which West claimed was Angel Island.
They didn't want to go towards San Francisco
because too many people there,
too many people would see 'em,
and it'd be too hard for them to blend in
or to easily be seen by local police.
They knew Angel Island was largely unoccupied.
♪ ♪
And they knew it was a missile base
back in the '50s and '60s
and it was starting to be deactivated
so there were probably a few Army personnel there,
but they assumed that there are gonna be boats there.
They were actually gonna be able to get a real boat
and get to the mainland.
- Multiple stages of the escape seem improbable.
♪ ♪
The idea that these men
could leave their cells in the night
for weeks on end
and not be detected, for one,
given the security measures
that we know were in place in Alcatraz.
And then simply making it from outside of the prison
and to the shore, that itself is not a given
and that's part of the escape that they're not able to scout
and plan with the same precision
as they are the construction of, say, their raft.
- Against all odds,
they make it to the shore.
They inflate the raft with the concertina
and push off into the dark
and treacherous waters of the bay.
[uneasy music]
♪ ♪
- No guard notices any of them are gone
until the next morning.
- 7:00 headcount, those three cells,
Morris and my uncles, the Anglin brothers,
they did not come out of their cells for headcount.
So one of the guards goes by
and takes his little walking stick
and taps them on the head.
- And he wouldn't wake up, and when they
tapped on the head they said, "He's dead."
Initially said, "I think he's dead."
They started hitting harder.
- Then that's when one of the heads
fell out on the floor and it kind of freaked him out.
He thought somebody had cut his head off, you know?
He went screaming, and that's when they realized
that they were gone.
[alarm blares, whistle blows]
- And they called it out, "Sound the alarm."
- Whitey Bulger told us when they discovered
that they were missing and the sirens went off,
he said everybody in the cell block just went to cheering
'cause they knew that they had made it.
He said it was a great moment in his life.
♪ ♪
- Morris and the Anglin brothers
have successfully launched two things:
their escape raft
and one of the biggest manhunts ever.
♪ ♪
[siren blares, whistle blows]
- On the morning of June 12th, 1962,
all hell breaks loose when guards discover
that Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers
have vanished.
- They just started searching everywhere for them.
- They say it was one of the largest manhunts
in history at the time.
- And FBI came out and they called the Coast Guard.
They called the local police.
They sent out BOLOs,
which is a "be on the lookout for"
to every local agency in the whole Bay Area
and then statewide after that.
Every police department was on the alert.
Two days after the escape, they found a packet of
personal effects that belonged to the Anglin brothers.
There were photographs, some written piece of paper.
They said they found it about 3/4 of a mile
northwest of Alcatraz.
Also, on the night of the escape,
they found a paddle right in the Badger Straits,
which is in between Angel Island
and Sausalito area.
It was similar to the other paddle
that was left on top of the cellblock for West
so they know it was made on Alcatraz as well.
- There's a lot of speculation about
whether Morris and the men
might have actually planned a different escape route.
That maybe paddling towards Angel Island
was a diversionary tactic.
Maybe they discarded one of their paddles
into the water in order to
throw authorities off the chase.
- The next day after that, they found
a used life vest out of Cronkite Beach.
They could tell it was a used life vest.
It was made the same way
as the one left behind for Allen West
and that was found outside the Golden Gate North.
And one of the life vests that was left behind
when the FBI took it as evidence,
they took it to the lab and they filled it with air.
They put a weight on it and it held air indefinitely
so it didn't leak air at all.
They were following up on leads everywhere.
Relatives, cousins,
anybody who had anything to do with him.
- I was about 11 years old.
My mom and I was out raking the yard.
The FBI pulls up
and started asking my mom questions.
"Have you heard from your brothers?
Do you know where they're at?"
And she always had the same answer for them:
"I don't know where they are.
And if I did, I wouldn't tell you."
Our phones was bugged.
They was listening to everything
that the family was doing,
hoping that they would get some kind of clue.
But behind the scenes,
they were constantly harassing the family.
When my grandmother passed away,
of course the FBI was there at the funeral.
The FBI harassed the family
all the way up into the late '70s
when they decided to turn the case over
to the U.S. Marshall service.
- Neither the Anglin family nor law enforcement
has heard anything from the escapees
since the night they pushed their raft
off the shores of Alcatraz.
But that hasn't stopped the search.
- The investigation is still ongoing today.
The authorities say they will not close the case
until they reach the age of 99.
- I worked on this case for 17 years until I retired.
And every lead that I ever followed
turned out to be nothing.
It turned out to be dead-end on everything.
There's a couple things that I didn't really put out before
but I'll put out right now is
they left at, like, the worst time
they could have left.
The currents at 10:00 that night
just started going out to the ocean
at an ever-increasing pace
up until midnight.
And that's easily,
easily enough time for a three knot current
to push them all the way out into the ocean.
So if they had tried to paddle towards Angel Island.
More than likely, they said, "This isn't working.
We're dumping the boat." Boat went out to the ocean.
And when that happened, that's when the Anglin brothers
lost their little packet of information.
Probably fell out at the same time
and they probably tried to swim from that point
'cause they were probably in panic mode at this time
'cause they knew they weren't going towards Angel Island,
they were going towards the Golden Gate.
And by now, they're probably in the water
for an hour so they're probably
getting pretty cold and they're starting to lose
their functional time from hypothermia,
And then they would've finally succumbed to it
and would've probably sunk to the bottom.
So I can't ever say it 100%
because we don't have bodies to prove they died.
But I can say, in all likelihood,
they probably did not make it.
- I'm gonna say this.
The answers to this mystery are in the FBI files.
It's clear that they were onto 'em
and close to 'em several times
because they were getting thousands of leads every day.
People that claimed that they had saw 'em.
You really don't have that many leads, in my opinion,
unless some of 'em were actually true.
- The scope of the investigation
for the FBI was massive.
I mean, it was nationwide.
Thousands of leads all around the country
'cause everybody saw them.
Even though nobody saw them, everybody saw them.
- They told the public
that there was no way they made it
the day after they couldn't find them, you know?
"Hey, they drowned.
They washed out to sea, end of story."
It was a big embarrassment.
If y'all really believed
that they died and they didn't make it,
why are y'all still looking for 'em?
Why didn't you close the case?
So I really don't believe that they believe
that they died.
♪ ♪
- I think that the 1962 escape of Alcatraz
is a story that affirms confirmation bias.
I can tell a group of 50 people
the same story, even open it up for questions.
Every piece of evidence
that could lead for success,
there's something else that could lead to failure.
And the people that hear this story
are gonna interpret it the way they want.
That's what everyone loves about this story
because they know what happened.
What do I think?
It depends on the day.
♪ ♪
- So what happened to Frank Morris
and his co-conspirators, John and Clarence Anglin
after they sailed off into the darkness?
We may never know.
But Alcatraz,
well, it closed the very next year.
Many inmates later said that they helped the escapees
because they had a bigger objective:
shut Alcatraz down.
One thing is certain.
Those three men did make it off this cold rock.
Dead or alive,
they pulled off one of the most
daring escapes in American history.
♪ ♪