Donald Trump wants to reopen the legendary Alcatraz prison, closed in 1963 and became a museum.
Considered in its time as the safest (and hardest) in America, it would not count any successful escape.
However, for six decades, a tenacious legend has maintained the opposite opinion.
Rocks cut like blades, cold, restless waters, and moreover infested with sharks. Embarking from Alcatraz prison, an island in the middle of San Francisco bay, was deemed impossible. Fourteen attempts took place in the relatively short story of this high security prison, which welcomed the “worst of the worst” of the American condemned from 1934 to 1963. But none succeeded, according to the prison administration.
It is this imaginary of a waterproof fortress that Donald Trump wakes up, by ordering the restart of this prison “For the most dangerous criminals”. However, three detainees who attempted an escape in 1962 were then not found. If the most commonly retained hypothesis is that they have drowned, their files are still officially open today, more than six decades later. And it was this affair that had precipitated the closure of Alcatraz, in 1963, at the end of the investigations which she triggered. The prison became a museum ten years later, where their legend was told to millions of visitors.
Escape specialists
There were four of them at the start. On this night of June 11, 1962, they were about to take action, after six months of meticulous preparations. The four men know each other, for having already met in other penitentiaries. They are not angels, they have all committed many crimes, including armed robberies. But what earned them to be sent to this prison deemed hermetic, where the worst criminals of America are detained, is above all their propensity to try to escape, sometimes with success, of all those where they have passed before.
The first error in the prison administration will have been to enclose Frank Morris, Allen West, and the John and Clarence Anglin brothers in coast-to-side cells, and the second to neglect an adjacent service corridor, a few meters long. Since December 1961, these escape specialists have refined their plan. They dug galleries using DIY tools with the means at hand. A vacuum cleaner engine provided them with a drill. They made a raft with dozens of stolen raincoats … They used the music slots of the music course to cover the noise of their work, and even made false walls to hide the already pierced holes. Heads of themselves papier mache, with hair recovered from the prison hair salon, gave the guards the convincing impression that they were good in their respective beds, when they were digging.
The night of June 11, an unforeseen event arises as they start to leave. Allen West had to use cement to keep the false wall that hid the open hole in its cell. But the cement has taken too well, and the detainee cannot pass. His comrades await him for a few minutes, but end up abandoning him to his fate. When he manages to pass, they are already far away. According to legend, the man then went to bed.
His three companions have already managed to join the roof by a ventilation duct, which they had neutralized before. Descended to the ground by a gutter, they cross a last barbed barrier almost 4 meters high, and win the shore at the level of a blind spot which they have spotted in the surveillance system. They then inflate their survival raft … using the bellows of a kind of accordion.
It was only the next morning that the alert will be given. When a goalkeeper touches what he believes to be Frank Morris’s head in his cell, the papier mache posthe falls to the ground. The crazy scenario of this escape provided a gold material to literature and cinema, The escape of Alcatraz (1979) with Clint Eastwood by being the most famous example.
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As for the three men, the prison administration ended up considering that they had drowned in their attempt to join Angel Island, an island located three kilometers to the north. No car was stolen in the surroundings that night, which could have suggested a leak. The temperature of the water and the strength of the current currents made their success very improbable aboard a canoe made of waterproof, with plywood oars. But not completely impossible. And in the absence of a bodies, this tiny possibility has left the mystery over this affair.
At regular intervals, people came forward to declare that they had met one or the other of the escapees. Their possible presence in Brazil in the 1970s was mentioned several times without direct proof, if not photographs very after escape (new window)which prohibit any certainty. Press investigations and documentaries have succeeded, without ever ending the mystery.
A letter was even sent to the FBI in 2013, supposedly written by John Anglin, who would have been 83 years at that time. The missive claimed that her brother and accomplice had died a few years ago, and proposed a surrender against medical care. The authorities’ investigation concluded that a false. The research opinions of the three escaped from Alcatraz are still active, even if the youngest of them, Clarence Anglin, would today be 94 years old.
