Locked doors, high prison walls and barbed wire are formidable enough obstacles, but many escaping prisoners also face savage dogs and armed guards who shoot to kill. From Alcatraz to Devil’s Island, this book tells the extraordinary tales of men who risked their lives for their freedom.
CONTENTS
BREAKOUT AT ALCATRAZ
People thought San Francisco’s Alcatraz prison was escape-proof – Frank Morris set out to prove them wrong…
ALIAS IVAN BAGEROV
In 1943, a British naval officer prepares to escape from a German prison camp. He speaks no German, but his disguise as a Bulgarian naval officer should see him through…
A SPY IN THE SCRUBS
Soviet masterspy George Blake faces a 42 year sentence in London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison. His guards thought he was a model prisoner – until he escaped.
THE DIRTY DOCKER
Dapper German pilot Gunter Pluschow wends his way through World War One England, dressed as a docker in desperate need of a bath.
ESCAPE OR DIE
French resistance fighter André Devigny faces imminent execution. Beneath his mattress lies a bed-sheet rope, attached to a grappling hook made from a lamp stand. Will it be enough to get him out of Montluc prison?
TEN LOCKED DOORS
Ten locked doors lie between Tim Jenkin and the outside world. But the anti-apartheid activist is determined to break out of Pretoria prison.
MUSSOLINI’S MOUNTAINTOP GETAWAY
German commandos snatch Mussolini, the deposed Italian dictator, from his Apennine jail. Is the escape plane too small to carry him?
NO ESCAPE FROM DEVIL’S ISLAND
A chilling tale from the French prison colony of Devil’s Island. Escape from the camps was easy, what came after was truly terrifying…
USBORNE TRUE STORIES
Breakout at Alcatraz
In the 1930s Alcatraz, a tiny rocky island in San Francisco Bay, was one of the world’s most notorious prisons. Known as “The Rock”, it was said to be escape proof, and was a bleak home for such notorious gangsters as “Creepy” Karpis and “Machine Gun” Kelly. Al Capone, the most famous gangster of all, traded a life of crime and luxury for the prison’s dull routine, and slowly lost his mind working in the laundry room.
By the 1950s, Alcatraz had become a crumbling shadow of its former self. Its villains were no longer notorious, although they were often just as brutal. Now the island was a dumping ground for persistently troublesome prisoners who were transferred there from other jails in the American West.
Frank Morris, bankrobber and burglar, was such a man. A series of prison sentences, escapes and recapture, had led him here. He arrived in January 1960, refusing to accept that “The Rock” was escape proof. From his first moments on the island he was planning his getaway.
Morris was a gaunt, handsome man, not unlike Clint Eastwood, who would later play him in a Hollywood film. His pleasant face and quiet, amiable manner disguised a ruthless determination and razor-sharp mind.
As his first days at Alcatraz went by, Morris got used to the prison routine. There was the daily visit to the workshop to earn money making brushes or gloves. There were the routine body searches, half-hourly head counts, the two hours of “recreation” wandering around the exercise yard. Then there were the three meals a day in the prison canteen. The canteen was considered to be one of the most dangerous places in the prison. As a precaution against an outbreak of rioting, ominous rifle slits had been built into the walls, and silver tear-gas bombs nestled in the ceiling.
After the evening meal, the prisoners were locked in their cells for the night. They had four hours to themselves before lights-out at 9:00pm. Here they could paint, read, play musical instruments or whatever, all in the relative privacy of their cells. Some called out chess moves to opponents nearby, others swapped jibes and threats with prisoners they planned to attack during an afternoon exercise period.
Morris’s easy manner soon made him friends. In the cell next to him was Allen West, an accordion-playing New York car thief. The two men got along well. In the canteen, where the prisoners could sit where they liked at meal times on long tables and benches, Morris also met the Anglin brothers, John and Clarence. They were burly country boys, who left behind a life as Florida farm hands for a career in bank robbery, and now they were hardened prison veterans. They had cells on the same level as Morris and West, but further down the row.
After Morris had been in Alcatraz for a year, another prisoner told him that a large fan motor had been removed from a rooftop ventilator shaft three years before. It was never replaced. Morris’s sharp mind instantly pictured a daring night-time getaway through the shaft. There was a way out of “The Rock” 9m (30ft) above his head.
An escape would be difficult but not impossible. One thing was certain – it would take a great deal of time and planning. But time is the only luxury a man has during his term of imprisonment, and Morris was going to make the best of it.
The first thing Morris had to do was figure out a way of getting from a locked cell up to the roof. The men were watched closely during the time they were out of their cells, so going up there then would be impossible. But one day, inspiration struck. At the bottom of every cell, just below the sink, sat a small air vent. Behind it lay a narrow corridor carrying water, electricity and sewer pipes. If Morris could remove the vent and then make a hole big enough for him to crawl through, he would be able to climb up to the ventilator shaft and out on to the roof. At night he was left alone in his cell for a whole nine hours. This would be a perfect time to explore.
How easy would it be to make that hole? Morris stooped down and picked at the concrete around the vent with a pair of steel nail clippers. Tiny flakes fell away. The concrete could be dug out but it would take ages to do it. And making the hole wasn’t the only problem. Hiding it as it got bigger was also a major consideration.
Morris decided he could order an accordion, like West’s, to hide his early excavations, paying for it with money he had earned from the prison workshop. As the hole grew slowly bigger and became too big to conceal with the accordion, Morris also hit on the idea of making a false wall with a painted board, complete with a painted-on air vent.
The more Morris plotted, the more he realized an escape like this would be better made with others to help him. West and the Anglin brothers were quickly recruited. Their closeness to him in the cell block would help. The four became an escape committee, and their first move was for all of them to take up painting as a hobby. This gave them a seemingly innocent excuse to order brushes, paints and drawing boards which they could each use to make a false wall when they were needed.
While West watched out for patrolling guards from his cell next door, Morris began to chip away at the concrete with his clippers. After a slow hour he had collected a small pile of fragments, and his fingers ached terribly.
He grumbled quietly to West: “I reckon at this rate we’ll still be digging by the time we come up for parole.”
“We’ll have to have ourselves a little talk with the Anglins at breakfast,” said West, and the two retired to their bunks to sleep.
“Weeeellll…”
Clarence Anglin always left a word hanging in the air, but what he said afterwards was almost always worth waiting for. West and Morris hung on to his every word.
“See this spoon? I reckon we can make ourselves a proper digging tool with this. You stick your clippers to that handle, and you get a lot more digging done.”
Morris slipped his spoon into his pocket.
“Great idea, Clarence,” he said. “And I know just how to put spoon and blade together! Catch you later…”
That night, as other men painted, or played their instruments, Morris prepared his cell for some ingeni
ous improvised metal work. First he broke the handle off his stolen spoon, and then removed one of the blades from his nail clippers.
“Hey Westy,” he whispered, “You got a dime?”
“Yeah, who’s asking?”
“Gimme it, I’ll pay you back when we break out of here! Now keep a look out for me.”
Morris began to chip off tiny slivers of silver from the dime until he had made a little pile on his table. Then he tied fifty or so matches into a tight bundle. Next he piled some books into two close towers and positioned the spoon handle and clipper blade in the gap between the books so that they were touching. Finally he carefully sprinkled the silver slivers on top of the spoon and blade.
“Anyone coming? Good. Here goes!”
WHOOOOOOSH. Morris ignited the bundle of matches beneath the handle and blade and, for a brief second or two, they were bathed in a fierce white heat, which quickly settled into a fast burning orange flame.
“Bingo!” he cried quietly to himself. Sure enough the heat had melted the silver, and fused the handle and blade together.
“What’s that smell Frank? You raising the devil in there?” said West, who caught a strong whiff of burning matches.
Morris checked to see that no guard was approaching then quickly passed his new tool through the bars and into West’s cell.
“No kidding,” said West. “I’m gonna get me one of these!”
Soon, all four men had made themselves similar digging tools, but they still found hacking away at the concrete was hard, tedious work. After all it was 20cm (8in) thick.
“There’s got to be a better way than this,” thought Morris, and sure enough, there was.
Allen West enjoyed his job as a prison cleaner. He could wander around chatting with people, and still appear to be working at the same time. The job also brought him several unexpected perks, such as access to electrical equipment. Talking to Morris about the problem of digging through the concrete, he said:
“What we need is the inside of a vacuum cleaner, and I know just where to find one. Take the motor out for the fan, stick in a drill bit on that pivot that goes round, and what have you got – a power drill!!”
“You get me a vacuum motor, and I’ll get you a drill bit,” said Morris.
West smuggled a motor into his cell, and Morris fitted it up with a drill bit he had stolen from the prison workshop. They both knew it would be terribly noisy so they had to wait until the prison music hour, when the men were allowed to play their instruments in the cells, before they could try it out.
Morris placed the motor’s plug into the light socket in his cell.
“Well, here goes…”
He flicked the switch and the motor whirred into life. That was loud enough, but the noise it made when the bit hit the concrete was excruciating. Morris drilled for as long as he dared and then stopped. The results were promising. Two holes had gone right through to the other side. Working around these with the blade would be a lot quicker.
Next morning at breakfast Morris filled in the Anglins.
“We’ll pass this drill around between the four of us, but we need to use it real careful,” he said. “Just make a series of holes when you can, when everyone’s blowing, scraping, strumming and honking. This is gonna save us months of digging. Once we got the holes in the wall, digging the rest out with the blades at night will be a walk in the park.”
Clarence’s eyes lit up. His fingers were completely covered with blisters.
With the escape now looking increasingly likely, the men turned their thoughts to getting off the island. Sitting together at the evening meal, they pondered the problems that faced them.
“Water’s freezing cold. You got fog almost all year round. Wouldn’t like to go to all the trouble of escaping just to freeze to death in that water,” said Clarence between mouthfuls.
“The swim’s been done,” said West. “I heard three girls did it back in ’33.”
Morris was more realistic: “But they were athletes. They trained for months, they probably covered themselves with goose grease to keep warm, and they definitely weren’t living on no prison diet to strengthen them up for the swim… and I’ll bet they had a support boat follow them over. What we need is a little assistance, a raft, life jacket, something to keep us afloat, or even better, out of that water.”
John Anglin spoke next. “I seen a whole pile of plastic raincoats just lying by the workshop. We could steal some of them, take the sleeves off and blow them up like water wings. We could even stick them on any stray planks by the water’s edge and make ourselves a raft.”
Morris smiled broadly. “As soon as we’ve got behind that wall, we can start collecting things.”
The holes in the wall were getting bigger every day, so the four hurried to complete the false walls that would cover up their handiwork. They painted drawing boards the same shade as the cell wall, and then painted on an air vent. Then they carefully chipped away the wall just around the vent, so that their false wall would fit over it without jutting out.
In bright light the fake walls would not survive a second look, but in the dim recess of a cell they blended in well enough. Now they could dig with less fear of discovery, and soon they had made holes which were big enough to squeeze through.
Getting out at night presented a major problem. All the doors on the cells at Alcatraz were made of steel bars – this meant a patrolling guard could look in to any cells at any time of day to check on the convict within. But Morris had come up with a brilliant solution. Torn pages from magazines were soaked in his cell sink. Then the soggy paper was mashed into a pulp to make papier-mâché, and fashioned into the shape of a head.
After a week or so the head was dry enough to paint. Clarence Anglin, who worked as a prison barber, smuggled Morris some hair the same shade as his, which added a final authentic touch. Morris used the hair to add eyebrows too. Poking out of a blanket at the top of a bunk, in a darkened cell the head would look just like a real one. Rolled up bedding and clothes would make a body shape under the blankets. The prototype head completed, Allen and the Anglins set about making their own dummy heads.
Finally, the night had come to take a trip to the roof. Morris spent the day beforehand trying to curb his restlessness. What if the way up to the roof was blocked? What if the ventilator motor had been replaced after all? All their painstaking work would be wasted. The 12 year sentence stretched out before him. Then another awful thought occurred. The holes in the wall would be discovered eventually, and that would mean even more years added on to his sentence.
At last night fell, and activity in the prison slowly ground to a halt. As West kept an eye out for the guard, Morris placed the dummy head on his pillow and wriggled through the hole at the back of his cell, carefully replacing the false wall behind him.
The corridor behind the wall was a grim, damp place, which stank of the sea water that flowed through its sewage pipes. All around him were ducts and cables, and dust and dirt had settled on everything he touched. But standing up in the tiny corridor Morris felt a huge gleeful rush, like a naughty boy doing something a hated teacher had expressly forbidden.
He had to wait a while for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, then he began to make his way up, climbing through a tangle of conduits, mesh, wiring and catwalks to reach the roof ventilator shaft. It stood before him, hanging down 1.5m (5ft) from the roof, and took a sharp right angle 30cm (1ft) inside.
The first thing he realized was that he would need someone else to help lift him inside, and he congratulated himself on having the forethought to realize that escaping as a team would be better than going it alone. Morris also noted that there was plenty of space up here. In this rarely visited and unguarded area of the prison, it would be a perfect place to store material for their long swim to the mainland, a mile or so away.
The next night, Morris and Clarence Anglin made a trip to the roof together. Clarence lifted him inside, but what Morris saw there came lik
e a punch to the stomach. The fan blade and motor had been removed all right, but they had been replaced by two iron bars, a grille and a rain hood. All of these unexpected barriers were firmly anchored in place by solid steel rivets.
They shared the news next morning with West.
“What did you expect to find up there?” he chided, “A couple of airline tickets to Brazil? We got through eight inches of that concrete, so a few bolts ain’t gonna stop us now.”
West was right. Morris chewed over the problem for a couple of days and came up with a solution. The two bars could be bent back with a length of pipe a repairman had carelessly left in the back corridor. The rivets that held the grille and rain hood in place were far more of a problem. The vacuum cleaner drill would have been handy, but it would make far too much noise. What they needed was something to cut through the rivets. The workshop had a supply of carborundum string – a thin cord coated with abrasive powder, used to saw through metal. It would take many more hours of painstaking work, but it could be done.
So, most nights, a couple of the escapers would climb up to the roof and saw and saw. It was tedious, painful work, but eventually the rivets came away. Morris thought up the clever idea of replacing them with rivet-shaped balls of soap, which they painted black. He did not want a patrolling guard to peer into the shaft and notice the rivets were missing.
Now it was midsummer, 1962. Everything was in place, and there would be no better time of year for an escape. The coldness of the water around the prison made it lethal at most other times of the year. Hunched together in the canteen they haggled about when they should go.
“I say now, and John’s with me,” said Clarence Anglin. “We’ve got a huge pile of raincoats waiting to be discovered up in the roof, and those holes in the cells ain’t gonna stay secret forever.”
“That’s true enough,” said West. “My fake wall keeps slipping too when I’m outta there at night. I’m gonna have to fix it in there with cement, so let’s set a date that will give me time to chip it all out again.”
Escape Page 1
