Trump says “nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz”: Here’s the story of the 3 men that did it using a spoon
Here’s the story of how 3 men used incredible ingenuity to escape from ‘The Rock’.
It turns out, what Donald Trump said wasn’t actually true. Hard to believe, I know.
The 47th President of the United States, on social media, recently announced that “I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
After that, while smiling proudly in the Oval Office, Trump falsely claimed that “nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz”. Of course, this is not true.
The famous story of the Alcatraz escape involving three inmates and a spoon is one of the most legendary prison breaks in American history.
On the night of June 11, 1962, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin, locked up for theft and sent to ‘The Rock’ after trying to escape a federal penitentiary, managed to break loose from the maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island in a daring plan involving incredible ingenuity and a spoon.
Using makeshift tools, including sharpened spoons stolen from the prison cafeteria, the men chipped away at the ventilation ducts behind their cells over the course of several months. They carefully covered the holes with cardboard and paint to avoid detection. Behind the walls, they constructed a secret workshop in an unused corridor, where they built a raft and life vests from over 50 stolen raincoats, stitched together and sealed with heat. They also used a vacuum cleaner motor used to make an electric drill.
To fool guards during bed checks, the escapees created dummy heads out of plaster, soap, and toilet paper, with real human hair glued on top. According to an FBI case memo filed three days after the escape, the “work which the subjects performed in preparation for the escape is fantastic,” Special Agent in Charge Frank L. Price said.
On the night of their escape, they slipped out through the holes in their cell walls, climbed up a utility corridor, and made their way to the roof and then down to the water’s edge. There, they launched their handmade raft into the cold, shark-infested waters of San Francisco Bay.
The FBI launched a massive manhunt, but the three men were never found. Officially, the case remains unsolved, with the men presumed drowned—though no bodies were ever recovered. Over the years, sightings and theories have emerged, and in 2013, a letter surfaced allegedly from one of the escapees claiming they survived.
“That case,” Art Roderick, a retired US marshal involved in the investigation for nearly 40 years, told CNN, “just never goes away.”
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