Stuff You Should Know - How the Escape from Alcatraz Worked

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

In 1962, three ordinary criminals transcended into folk heroes when they crawled out of their cells in Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary took to the water in a homemade raft and were never heard from again. Could they have possibly survived? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's us, and we're here to talk to you about Get This, our book. We have a Stuff You Should Know book coming out this November, and you're going to love it, and you can pre-order it now.

That's right, it's called Stuff You Should Know, Colin, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things, and it's been a lot of fun to work on, and we're really, I mean, genuinely excited about how this thing has come together. Yep, it's 26 chunky, hairy chapters that are just gonna knock your socks clean off, and yes Chuck, we are indeed proud of this book.

It is truly, indubitably the first Stuff You Should Know book, and it's coming out this November, and you can order it now, pre-order everywhere you get books, so do that, and we thank you in advance. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Jerry's out there in the ether somewhere, like that one kid being transmitted from the camera to the TV in Willy Wonka. Wow. I got that one eight kinds of wrong. Yeah. But anyway, this is Stuff You Should Know,

which is appropriate, that I would get something eight kinds of wrong right at the beginning. Did you ever hear the story from Gene Wilder about the move at the beginning of that movie where he walks out with a cane? Where he did the spill, the somersault? Yeah, he sticks the cane in the ground and does the somersault.

No. He said that that was his idea, and this just shows the brilliance of Gene Wilder, and he said he did that because he knew from that moment on and no one would believe anything that that character said. Oh yes, I have heard that before. Great story. That is brilliant.

That man was a brilliant man and a wonderful human being. I loved him. He's got one of his last interviews on Conan O'Brien was so great, because Conan was just gushing. Oh, I'm sure. Gene Wilder was very, I think kind of taken back by how much he means to people. Have you ever seen,

I don't know, that wasn't the question I had. Did you know? Did you know that? The question was, did you fart? Did you know that Conan O'Brien and Dennis Leary are cousins? I don't think I knew that. According to Conan O'Brien asking a question on Jeopardy, that is his cousin.

Hmm, did not know that. Speaking of Jeopardy, we have a colleague named Ken Jennings, who is on Jeopardy. Yeah. And we have another colleague, two colleagues, called Daniel and Jorge, and they have a podcast called Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe. It's pretty cool.

But they also, Chuck, I just saw, have a PBS Kids animated program coming out September 7th, called Eleanor Wonders Why. Oh, cool. And it looks adorable. Wow, that sounds like right at my daughter's alley. Yeah, so check it out, everybody. PBS Kids September 7th, Eleanor Wonders Why,

and congrats, Daniel and Jorge. Do you have any famous cousins? Famous or infamous? I think we are the famous cousins. That's how sad our families are. Yeah, it feels pretty great though. I keep being like, hey, let's have another family reunion this month.

Speaking of infamous cousins, Chuck, how about those Anglin brothers, huh? Yeah, man, this is, I kind of thought we did this. I know we, do we do one on Alcatraz and maybe just briefly touched on it? Absolutely. Because this is, this movie, the 19, what was it, 79? Escape from Alcatraz movie with Clint Eastwood

was one of my favorite movies as a kid. It's a good movie. I watched it just the other night as part of this. Yeah, it was an HBO special, so I must have been, I didn't see it when I was eight. I probably was like 10 or 11. And it was one of those movies I probably watched over a dozen times when I was 12, 12 years old.

Followed by Kroll and Outland. Oh man, those are great. Yeah. They always went together though, didn't they? Yeah, in war games. I mean, those were all HBO specials, but this was a really good movie. And I'm a big, big fan of prison escape movies.

Sure. And I was thinking today when I was looking over this stuff again, that it's so weird that like, these guys were hardened criminals. And yet when you're researching this, all you can think about is, oh man, I hope they got out of there. Right.

And I hope they lived the fat life in Brazil. Well, that really speaks to like who they are, what they became because of this escape, which is put most simply, they're folk heroes. I guess so, yeah. That's definitely a part of being a folk hero is that you can transcend the kind of like, judgments that society typically levies

against people like criminals. Like if you are so good at your craft or so good at something to do with criminality that you transcend being judged for your crimes, that's, you've become a folk hero for sure. It's like D.B. Cooper. Yeah. And I think it helps that, you know, these guys were armed robbers and thieves.

And I think Frank Morris, and we'll get into all these dudes are, but he was a drug trafficker, but they weren't rapists and murderers. I don't think it could transcend that. No, they were definitely nonviolent criminals from everything that I've seen. Yeah. They used a toy gun in one of these robberies.

Yeah. That's adorable. Well, let's talk about these guys like you were saying. We're talking about a group of people who escaped from Alcatraz. And as far as anyone knows, they are the only ones who really may have escaped from Alcatraz. They vanished in 1962, last seen leaving their cells

and were never heard from again. And like you said, they were all hardened criminals, like lifelong career criminals. Frank Morris was 35 when he left Alcatraz. And he'd been a criminal since he was 13. He was in and out of institutions. And like you said, he wasn't a violent criminal. He wasn't a rapist or a murderer or anything like that.

He was, he liked to sell the drugs. He had like a forehead tattooed or a star tattooed on his forehead for a while, which he very sensibly had removed later on. Is that what that means? But that he was a drug trafficker? Yeah. No, I think that means that he did

a few too many drugs one night. Oh, he really did have a star. Yeah. I thought that was some like prison thing for like the teardrop tattoo means you, didn't that mean you killed somebody or something? That's what I've always heard, but I don't know. It could just be urban legend,

but yeah, that's what I've always heard. No, I think this is- He really did have a star, okay. Yeah, I think he got super wasted one night. He got a star tattooed on his forehead. There was a tattoo artist far too handy that night. Yeah, yeah, which I think the old saying, don't ever make friends with tattoo artists.

Yeah. Or at least drinking buddies. Sure, that's true. But he was also super smart too. Yeah, and they point this out in the movie. And a lot of the movie, I mean, it's pretty close to the real story. They did a really good job,

but they do make a big deal in the movie about how smart he was. I know IQ is sort of taking her to leave it as far as that being a real measurement of one's intelligence, but he supposedly had an IQ of 130 and the BOP, which stands for the, was it Bureau of Prisons.

I didn't know they had rankings, but they had rankings of intellectuality. Is that a word? Yeah, I think so. It gets the point across, Ergo, it is. Yeah, and I'm curious what other rankings they have, but best looking. Best abs, but he was in the top 2% supposedly

in the American prison system as far as his intellectual capabilities. Yeah, so you hit on a point there that I think we need to at least bring up. Like the movie did follow the actual, the truth of the matter fairly closely in some cases. In other cases, it veered wildly away. Like there was a character based on one guy

who was very much involved, but they didn't even use his name and they made him seem less involved than he actually was. There's a lot that the movie gets wrong, but the problem with covering this is that there's so many gaps and holes that are so easily and casually filled in

that you can't help but wonder like, wait, was this detail provided by somebody who saw the movie and took the movie as fact? Like where are we exactly and just how pure the knowledge and understanding is of this escape? So you have to just kind of bear that in mind that it's kind of a blur in the annals of crime

as far as factuality goes. Yeah, but it's a good story. Great story. And most of this is pretty true, I think. So Frank Morris was four years into a 14-year stint and this was for a bank robbery and he was transferred to the Rock in 1960. I didn't know we were using lingo in this episode.

It's Alcatraz. It's a prison island or an island prison. Yeah. And some might say the island itself is a prison, which we'll get to. And then his buddies, you mentioned the Anglin brothers, J.W., John William and his younger brother Clarence were 30 and 29 years old

and they were from a very big family of migrant farm workers in South Georgia. They traveled all over the country wherever the work was basically as a big family and they got into stealing things from people. Yeah. And they were the ones who used the toy gun later on. They were, I think, visiting family

in a small town called Columbia, Alabama, which is in the southeast of the state. And they found out that this bank had been around for 100 years in this town and it had never been robbed. So they assumed... We're gonna change that. It'll be easy to knock over

and apparently it was pretty easy to knock over and they had a toy gun that they used and they still managed to get away with at least, I think like 10 grand or 20 grand, something, a pretty substantial amount of money. And they were on the run for a little while but got caught and the Alabamans were not very happy with it. And they threw the book at these brothers.

They got 25 year sentences for robbing a bank with a toy gun and that actually was way better than the sentence they initially faced, which was potentially the death penalty. That's crazy. Yeah. So they were caught and busted and they had a third brother named Alfred, too,

who was also involved, but he was never sent to the rock as you put it. I bet it was not a bet. It was factually a lot easier to rob banks back then. Yeah, it was way easier to be a criminal even just a few decades ago. Yeah, just in general, I think. Now it's like, don't even try.

No, I mean, if it's not the cops and their cameras, he got some dumb neighbor with their cameras, like me. Right. Oh man, I hate to get off topic so quickly, but, and we should post this on the Facebook page or something, or maybe I'll put it on Instagram. What? I got attacked by a squirrel

and it was captured by my front of the house camera. Oh yeah, everyone wants to see that. This is great. I was taking out some recycling and I heard some rustling and I went around the corner and I was like, this squirrel was freaking out. And then he literally leapt, if you freeze frame it, he leapt three feet in the air.

Wow. And hit my leg and ran at my leg a little bit. Wow. And I react thusly. That's awesome. You know, it would be wonderful is to intercut closeups of your face when you got that Charlie horse on internet roundup.

Oh my God. In with the squirrel attack. It'd be amazing. It's a good thing I don't care about myself and looking dumb. Why did you, why did that squirrel attack you? What'd you do to it? I didn't do anything.

It was freaking out. And then I turned and looked after I dropped the recycling off and he and another squirrel were going at it in our oak tree. So I think he was just, he was all riled up. He might've been on that. He was taking it out on you? Yeah.

Did he have a star tattooed on his forehead? He did, right on his little tiny furry forehead. Wow. Yes, please do post that, okay? So, all right, these guys are all in Alcatraz. And Alcatraz at the time was, like I said, it was sort of the rock itself was the prison. And that was the idea was that even if you're,

even if you manage to get out of the prison that they eventually built, which we'll talk about, then you still can't get out of there. Cause you got to swim it over a mile to the nearest body of land, about 1.3 miles. That water's really cold. The currents are brutal. The winds are really strong.

San Francisco Bay is not, you know, for people that haven't been there, it's not just like some lovely little chill body of water that you hang out in. No, it's not a very hospitable body of water. It's not. So the idea was that, yeah, like when you got sent to Alcatraz, you weren't getting off of that island

and you either paroled or died. And that was actually the reason that the Anglons and Frank Morris were sent there was because they had all met at the federal pen in Atlanta. I guess they went down in Grant Park, right? Yeah, which that building is amazing. It's one of the most forbidding buildings in the world. I would say it looks like a old-timey federal penitentiary.

Al Capone was there too for a little while. Yeah, I actually drove by there not too long ago with my daughter for the first time and I was like, check out that building, look at that. It's like, that's a prison. What's a prison? And I went, oh, well, I guess I gotta explain that. I'll tell you when you're 18.

If you make it and don't go to prison first. Right. So they all met at the federal pen in Atlanta. I can't remember if they actually made it out or if they were caught escaping, but they were known escape artists. Like Frank Morris had escaped from places in Florida. They didn't stay put when you put them in prison.

And so that's why they were all sent to Alcatraz. And just crazily, as they arrived between 1960 and 1961, they were all put pretty close together. And in fact, the Anglin brothers had adjoining cells, which is a very stupid thing to do, but that's what they did. In part, I believe because there is a certain thread of arrogance that ran through the administration of Alcatraz that it was just basically inescapable.

Yeah. And I think you also sort of want happy prisoners. And I've heard of requests like that being made possible before. Like, hey, if you put me near my brother, we're gonna be a lot better behaved. Yeah. We're definitely not going to break out. I don't think we mentioned either. Like Alcatraz was so formidable as just an island

that the very first time they used it was when the army put soldiers there who cheered on President Lincoln's death. And so they didn't even bother building a prison though. They just built some barracks through them on the islands. Like, well, you're in prison now because good luck getting out of here. Yeah. That's what I saw too.

And when the Bureau of Prisons took over, they really fortified it even more. Like you said, there was a larger building that housed everything from like the mess hall to the cell blocks. So when you were in a cell, in a cell block, you were in a little tiny prison inside a larger prison,

on side this island prison. And the cell blocks themselves had like three inch thick concrete walls, reinforced iron bars. The building itself has made a very thick concrete. It was just meant to basically tell you there's no getting out here. But what's crazy is Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers,

they weren't the first people to ever try to bust out. I believe they were part of a total of 36 people who tried to escape in the history of the prison. Everybody else, almost everybody else was either killed, captured, or their bodies were found. Except, and I did not realize this, Morris and the Anglin brothers were not the first people to vanish

without a trace from Alcatraz. Did you heard about Ted Cole and Ralph Rowe? I hadn't heard about them until this, but in the 30s, late 30s, they did escape and they did vanish. And sort of like where this story's going, I don't think anyone wants to admit that from the prison system that they could have really made it.

So they're like, nah, they died, they drowned. But the thing is, the thing that really differentiates the Anglin brothers and Frank Morris from guys like Ted Cole and Ralph Rowe, they all shared in common that they escaped from Alcatraz and vanished without a trace. The thing that differentiates Morris and the Anglins is that they're folk heroes because, almost exclusively,

because of this plan they devised and executed and that the plan was so good and so complex and well done that it actually lends credence to the idea that they may have survived and escaped from Alcatraz genuinely. Yeah, and what they had in common is that they were all top 10 in best abs in the prison system.

Yup. And what everybody listening right now has in common is that you're about to hear an ad. What about Trump? What about Trump? What about Harry? What about Trump? Trump.

Just stay on the surface. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best

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And I think it's high time we talk about the plan, the escape plan, don't you? Yeah. If you're going to escape from Alcatraz, it's not the kind of thing where you distract a guard and just run and jump over a fence. You got to start this thing, this plan, many months in advance. And by all accounts, they – and by all accounts meaning from the one account that we really have of this, they started planning easily six months before the escape. They start developing this plan.

They start collecting kind of anything they can get their hands on that they think they can use. Going from just loose nuts and bolts and screws to things that – I mean, they actually ended up using a lot of this stuff. But I got the impression that they were just kind of like anytime they saw something that they could squirrel away and hide, they would do it because you never know what you could use it for. Yeah.

And so like over the six-month period, they amassed something like 80 tools that they either stole, had stolen for them, rebuilt or repurposed out of other stuff, or just made completely out of like their own labor. They had a pretty extensive tool kit that they created. One of the ways that they got a lot of the tools was from Allen West, who we haven't mentioned yet. But a lot of people don't realize there was a fourth conspirator in the Alcatraz escape who was a major integral part of it, but who actually didn't go along with the escape

as we'll see. Oh, man. That part in the movie is so tough. It is. Especially with that poor guy, he just looks – Yeah, that character. He came out of the womb like, I'm down on my luck. Can you spare a dime, brother?

What's his name? He's so good. He's been in so many things. I don't remember. But he was – I think he was the guy who played Kramer on Seinfeld. Yeah. In the pilot, in the NBC pilot? Yeah.

In the show, the guy playing Kramer on the show, in the show. I think that was him. Yeah. He stole the M&M's, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So he was in escape from Alcatraz, too. Yeah.

He's perfect for that part. But this guy named Allen West, he was on the painting crew and he put that to use big time. One of the first ways he did it was he was in the prison barber shop and managed to steal a pair of electric clippers while he was in their painting. And they were like, hey, this motor will come in handy. Let's repurpose it into a power drill. And they did.

Yeah. That's pretty cool. He also – I mean, just having a little motor is so handy. So he came across a vacuum cleaner that wasn't working and he said, hey, you mind if I repair this? I got to shake the tree first, but after that, you mind if I repair this? Isn't that what they call it? The vacuuming?

No. And you got a pee on the chain gang, don't you call it shaking the tree? Oh, I guess. I think that's what it's called. Humor? But I mean, what does it have to do with fixing a vacuum? Nothing. It's just prison humor.

Oh, I got you. It's going to be a lot of prison jokes, so. All the inmates listening right now just busted out laughing like he said, shake the tree. Well, it's a drinking game. Well, explain. If you're listening from prison, if someone says, shake the tree, you take a drink. Of pruno. Well, that's another drink.

Yeah. But that's what you would drink when somebody said, shake the tree. So say, shake the tree one more time. Oh, shake the tree, guys. I think everybody's got a pretty good buzz in prison right now. So he says, let me fix this vacuum cleaner. They say that's fine. He saw that the vacuum cleaner had a couple of different motors and one of which he used

to repair and actually make, you know, pass it off as a working vacuum cleaner. And then he just took that other one and that meant that they could make a drill that was even more powerful than the other one. Yeah. So they had not one, but two electric drills at their disposal, which kind of gives you a pretty good idea of just how dedicated and smart and crafty these guys were. Right? Yes.

They also very famously ended up with 50, five, zero different raincoats that were made from rubber, prison issue raincoats that they got from other inmates. And this really reveals something that I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize. It seems like basically all the inmates in prison with the Anglans and Morris were well aware of their plans, not necessarily every detail or even any of the details, just that they were planning on breaking out. And so they managed to get their hands on like 50 different raincoats from other prisoners that they used to build a life raft and life vests with.

Pretty great. I think the idea was, is that these guys didn't like being on Alcatraz. So they kind of figured, hey, if these guys actually get out, they're going to close this place down. We're going to get out of here. Right. You know, I don't know if I would have gone along with that rationale. I would have thought it's going to be even worse for us here, but we'll hang on to what

happened till the end of the show. How about that? I think everybody would have kept their pruno from you had you raised that point. So they've got all this stuff. They got paint. They got paper. They collect hair. And from the, from the barber shop, they like sweep up his hair and keep that.

You might be thinking, why in the world would they need that? You'll just wait. You'll see. And then they had about three and a half hours each evening after dinner slop and before lights out where they had to work and create, you know, a way out of their prison cell. And then once they get out of their prison cell, like you said, they're still in this larger building than a way out of there. But the first trick is getting out of their individual cells.

Yeah. So from what I understand, that took up like the lion's share of the time between when they first hatched this plan and the time when they finally escaped. They were like these little six by eight or nine or something, very small ventilation shafts cemented into the wall. The grates were cemented into the wall, but really it was just a little metal grate over a hole. So they figured that they could start chipping away at that hole and enlarge the hole into

something they could crawl through and that's exactly what they did. Eventually over time, Frank Morris and then both of the Anglin brothers managed to create these holes and they did so by serving as lookout for one another while the other one chipped one night and then they would trade off that kind of thing. And then here's a question that I have. I could not confirm one way or the other if it was a movie thing or if it was a real life thing, but in the movie, they create these kind of cardboard false walls that they're able to fill the hole with that it looks like the grate is still there and the wall

is still intact. So when they were out of their cells, they could put this false wall in behind them and nobody would be any the wiser when they just walk past and casually glanced in there. I don't know if they did that or not. I mean, it's a pretty great detail of the movie. So I'm inclined to believe it. Let's go with it. What I didn't see, or I haven't seen it in a long time, did they have those drills in

the movie? Because I just remember a lot of digging with the kind of just like used a sharpened spoon as a little mini pick. A sharpened spoon with the warden's fingernail clippers that he steals in like one of the first scenes. But there was no drill in the movie, was there? Not that I remember. No.

But there definitely were two drills. One of the drills, that one with the vacuum motor, they actually figured out it's just too loud. It's too powerful and too loud. So they abandoned that one. But I don't know what became of the hair clipper drill. I didn't hear anything about that one other than that they created it and used it. Well, they managed to dig through though where they could get their bodies out of the cell.

And that just must have felt like we're halfway there at this point, guys. Oh yeah, I'll bet. So from there, it led to a utility corridor, it was about a meter wide and there were no guards in here because this is sort of like the guts of the prison. Like why would you need to guard where there are no people, wink, wink. And in that corridor, they could kind of move around freely. They would climb up to the ceiling. This is like a three-story cell block, still within a larger building though, of course,

like we mentioned. And then they had a full-on workshop up there for a few weeks, they could store their tools, they could hide their stuff, they could build. We haven't really talked about the rafts, but where they would much, they would build their rafts there and it just sort of serves as their staging area where they would eventually leave from to go buy this big, heavy iron grate to a ventilation shaft, which actually finally led to the rooftop. Right.

But that big iron grate was a big iron problem because the bars were reinforced, they were, I think, welded or maybe screwed, I'm not sure, into this iron ring that covered this ventilation shaft. So it was a big problem. And then they figured out that the bolts holding this whole thing together were actually not nearly as strong as the bars that made up the grate and the ring that held the bars. So they started working away at cutting these bolts one way or another. I think they created a wrench, they built themselves a wrench and they managed to use

that to some pretty good effect, but it went from digging out of their cells to figuring out a way to get through this grate. That was kind of like stage two. And then let's talk about the raft because the raft is an extremely important part of this whole thing. So I think really one of the things, if not the thing, that lends credence to the idea that they might have actually made it. Yeah.

So they got these raincoats and back then raincoats were just basically sheets of rubber. Yeah. They didn't breathe very well. No, they were very hot. Think like... You'd get sweaty. Gorton's fisherman type of stuff. A sweaty Gorton's fisherman.

Oh yeah, that guy was always sweaty. So they ended up creating a six foot by 14 foot life raft from these raincoats from an article in Popular Mechanics, which shows up a couple of times. Very useful magazine if you're trying to escape prison. And it was an article about a hunter who had gotten lost and survived hunting geese that he attracted using rubber decoys that he'd made. So they get this idea. They build these inflatable pontoons made from these raincoat sleeves.

So they were stuffed inside and made airtight by gluing rubber cement, contact cement over the seams, and then pressing them against steel pipes, which vulcanized it. It just basically melted everything shut. And then you have these floatable pontoons that you could use and craft this larger raft. Yeah. So they had something that was inflatable that because those seams were vulcanized, it would hold the air. The air couldn't escape.

And they used a concertina. Oh, I can't remember. Handsome Pete. It's like a little guy who plays the accordion down on the docks that looks just like Crusty the Clown in one of the Simpsons episodes. And he's playing a concertina. It's like a squeeze box. It's like an accordion without the keys and the buttons.

Yeah, but it acts as a bellows because it moves air, essentially. That's what they used it for. They modified it so that they could use it to inflate their raft very quickly with this concertina that I guess they stole from the prison music room, which is pretty great. So they're working on all this stuff. And the raft in particular, this is like the linchpin of this whole plan is this raft in these life preservers. That work fell to Allen West.

So while these dudes were chipping away at the ventilation holes, Allen West was standing look out for most of them. And he was creating this raft in these life vests. And so he wasn't able to chip away at his own ventilation hole nearly as fast. So while they were out working on the vent cover grate, he still had no way out of his cell at that point. He hadn't made it all the way through. Yeah.

And we should point out something that earlier we mentioned, if they happen to walk by and they don't notice a hole in the wall because they may or may not have made these false grates and walls. If you're a listener and you don't know the story, you might have said, yeah, but wouldn't they have noticed there was no one in the cell? No question. What they did was they made paper mache recreations of themselves. They made these busts.

They use that prison hair, which is so gross and use that rubber cement again to glue this hair on. And if you see the real things, it's not mad them to so or anything. It's not like, boy, look at that likeness photo realistic, but it's in the dark. And you're sort of, I think, as a human trained to see what you're looking for. So if you're a guard that's just walking by, you see a head turn the other way with prison hair on it and some pillows under a blanket and you don't think it looks fake. It just looks like it wasn't like Ferris Bueller style with like a fake snore on the hi-fi

system or anything. But you just kind of walk past it. It worked well enough. They did this for weeks and weeks and weeks with these paper mache busts and it worked. They never got noticed. No, they didn't because I mean, remember that they were working between the end of dinner and lights out. So they just seem to have made it like they went to bed early and put the paper mache

busts in there. It's like those guys sure are sleepy. Too much Bruno for you, Frank. I got a lot of questions about this, but I'm not going to investigate any further. So do you want to talk about the escape and then go to ad break? Yeah, I think that's the way to do it. So finally, they get to this point where the great is the bars are removed from this great enough that they can slip through and they realize that they have successfully penetrated

to the exterior of the building. That's right. Okay. They're on the roof. Well, they know they can get on the roof now. They know that it is go night. I bet you they got up there at least once to be like, all right. I don't know.

I haven't heard anything like that. There's a lot of questions about why this particular night, was this the very first night that they were able to get out and they're like, let's go, which seems likely to me, or were they waiting for a particular night? Or like you said, have they tested it before they do any dry runs? We don't really know that, but what we do know is that on Monday, June 11th, 1962, J.W. Anglin, Clarence Anglin and Frank Morris all left their cells. And the first thing Frank Morris did was go to help Allen West, puncturing the hole through

his cell wall. Poor Allen. He still had not done this yet. He's like, come on, we got to go, but apparently part of the plan was to help him punch the hole out the rest of the way and then he would escape with them. Frank Morris apparently tried in vain and went off to get Clarence Anglin to come try. They traded off and then Clarence tried. He couldn't do it either.

So I guess he had the very uncomfortable, I'll be right back, I got to go shake the tree or something like that. I'll be right back. You stay here. And that was the last anybody ever saw of Frank Morris, Clarence Anglin or J.W. Anglin from that moment until today. Yeah. So they get to that corridor, they climb up to the roof of the cell block and then through

that ventilation shaft, that grate is no longer a problem and they push away. Allen West, they can just barely hear him saying like, you guys are coming back, right? Any minute now you said, so there's this rain cover on top, they pushed that thing off. And this all makes some noise and in the movie, they kind of accurately display that too as some clanking and clanging around. And I don't think in the movie they did this, but in real life supposedly, there was so much noise that they did like a little 45 minute, kind of a search of the area, didn't see anything going on.

Not a good search. No, they didn't go up on the roof, that's for sure. And they basically didn't find anything. So the guys are out, they shimmy about 50 feet to the ground via drain pipe, which is how you always do it, go to that perimeter fence. And I'm sure the perimeter fence was fine, but I think the idea was that they're never getting out anyway. So I don't think it had like 15 feet of razor wire or anything like that.

I think it did have double barbed wire at least for sure. But that's nothing for us. It's not like concertina wire or anything. No, nothing like that. Around one in the morning, Alan West, poor Alan West, he finally gets that cell great broken open. I'm sure he just thinks, all right, I'm going to catch up to these guys and it's going to be all good and I'm getting out of here.

Follow that same route. It's been a couple of hours at this point though. He saw that these were genuinely good dudes, it seemed like, because they did leave him a paddle. I don't think we mentioned they made paddles out of chair legs and the screws and nuts and bolts. And a pontoon that was all inflated for him and he got a little snack, a little Rice Crispy treat.

Rice Crispy treat. It's a little pruno, a little shot of pruno for his courage. And then he looks over, terrible timing, and there's a guard in a new position that basically could see anything that he tries to do from that point forward. He's visually pinned down on the roof. He can't do anything. So this is around 1 a.m. or something and he figures, okay, the guard will eventually move while Alan West says the guard never moved until dawn.

Doesn't this guy pee? Right. Doesn't he ever shake the tree? And he didn't. He did not shake the tree, he stayed put and so eventually Alan West was forced to climb back down the ventilation shaft, back down from the roof of the cell block, three stories back to his cell that he had just a few hours earlier, finally after months, punched a hole through and he went and laid down and just waited for the heat to come down on him.

And indeed it did because at the 7 a.m. bed check, three dummy heads were discovered or three inmates, real heads should have been, and the prison just went berserk. You know that feeling you get when you take a wrong turn and go like three or four miles in the wrong direction and have to go all the way back the other way? Yeah. Imagine being Alan West and having to do that. That times infinity? That times infinity.

Yeah. You want to take another break? I think so, man. All right, we'll get to the bottom, well, we won't get to the bottom of this, but we'll speculate all over the place right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

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So there are some things that we know about this from watching the movie, but the movie writers based the movie on a book and the book author, I believe, based this stuff on an interview or interviews with Alan West that Alan West had with the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI, because basically everything we know about the escape from Alcatraz came from the mouth of Alan West. Yeah. So he made a deal. He said, listen, I'll tell you all about it, but you can't throw me in here for longer

because I tried to escape prison. You got to give me immunity for that attempted escape and let's be honest guys, it really wasn't much of an attempt. Can you give me a break here? Right. I had to make this ad walk of shame back to the cell. I have a feeling that that definitely factored into their decision to give him immunity. Like man, you really got a hard luck case.

So he makes a deal and says, I'll tell you everything. But again, this is just his account of it. One thing that kind of jumped out is maybe it's not the most accurate account was that he was like, yeah, I was the mastermind. I thought up the whole thing from the start. And I don't know if that's quite true because it seems like Clint Eastwood did. Yeah. Certainly in the movie, the movies basically should be called Cole in the Frank Morris story.

He's the main character. Everybody else is a side character. Who's Clint Eastwood? It really kind of downplayed a lot of the contributions by the Anglin brothers, certainly by Alan West, doesn't even use Alan West's name. So I don't know how much of an influence is from that movie or if that movie was just based on the general idea that Frank Morris was the mastermind and the leader, that he was a very intelligent person and kind of a born leader from what I know.

So it's just not clear whether Alan West actually came up with this plan or not. Was he the one who sowed the raft all this time and he got left behind? Or maybe he had really weak arms. And this was just what he told the Bureau of Prisons investigators. It was the reason why he never was able to chip out of his cell. Who knows? So just bear in mind, from this point forward, we're just going to go on with this as gospel. But all of this is coming from Alan West's mouth.

He was the one that was left behind. I feel like in the movie, he got to the point where he could not jump up by himself and reach the great. Is that right? Yeah. So in the movie, they help each other up and then he would have had to have done it himself. And he couldn't jump.

He just kept jumping and jumping and couldn't make it. Yes. But from what I know, he made it up to the roof and was pinned down on the roof by that guard in the watch tower. Yeah, but that wasn't in the movie, right? I don't think it was a guard inside. No, no, no. You're right.

In the movie, it was like that. So the plan was, and this is again from West's account said, was to sail this raft or I guess paddle this raft across the bay to Angel Island, about a mile away, a little over. And he said, from there, they were going to rest for a little bit, get their bearings, stash everything, and then swim to the mainland across what's called the raccoon straights to Marin County. And then once they got there, they would start doing crime again immediately. They could rob a store for closing money and steal a car and get the heck out of there

as quickly as possible before the word gets out, ostensibly. Yeah. Which is a pretty great plan, actually. Except for the crime part. Like I would have, I don't know, I guess the idea is to just get as far away as possible. But I don't know if I would have. Yeah. If you could take the car, it's not like somebody's going to just give you one.

No, you can take the part. Sure. You could take the part, I guess. I don't think the part was around back then. I think it was a pretty good, maybe they were just like one last heist to get away from here. Maybe that's what it was. Maybe, because they just want, I mean, I get that want the urge to get as far away from

there as possible. But also what if all of a sudden cops are on you from stealing a car immediately? I guess it's a risk. It's all a risk. It's a big risk and a lot of people say that they were actually helped on the other side. There was a guy named, oh man, I can't remember his last name, but his first name or his nickname was Bumpy. McGillicuddy.

He was a Harlem crime lord, drug lord, who was just a total B.A. and they think that he may have had something to do with helping them escape with somebody who would have shown up and picked them up and driven them off. Other people say that one of the Anglans girlfriends was there, but the FBI supposedly investigated and said Frank Morris didn't have anybody. He was an orphan. He didn't have anybody on the outside who could have helped. The Anglans had family that definitely would have helped if they could, but they didn't

have the means to actually, to help them out in San Francisco. They were bumpkins. Yeah, but they were a tight family and they were the kind of family where I think if one of them had called and been like, I'm breaking out, I need you to pick me up, they would have done it. It would be like that kind of tight family bond. Not like my family would be like, oh, I'll call you right back and then, hello, FBI. How much of a reward do you have for giving up a prison escapee?

Yes, a federal prison. Oh, that much, huh? Great. Do you have a pen? Can you do any better? That's exactly what my family would follow up with. They did find some evidence though. They did a search for about a week and a half along with the FBI, like you were saying,

the Bureau of Prisons and the Alcatraz people. They were all super mad, of course, especially in the movie version. They searched Angel Island. They searched all the other islands in the Bay and they did find one of those life preservers that had teeth marks on the inflation valve. They found a wallet wrapped in plastic that they figured was JW Anglens. They found one of those ores and they found, it looked like most of one of the rafts, or most of the raft.

But no bodies, no stolen cars, no burglaries. No one had reported anything in the area unusual according to their plan, which was to steal clothes and money in a car. Yeah. The Bureau of Prisons right out of the gate was like, they drowned, they were washed out to sea. That's it. We'll never hear from them again, but they're dead.

They didn't actually escape. This was in 1962. It wasn't until 1979 that the FBI closed the book and said, yeah, that's probably what happened. We presume that they were dead and their bodies lost at sea. But when they were building this case, they cited the story of a guy named Seymour Webb who had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge at virtually the same time that Anglens and Morris would have been in San Francisco Bay and his body was never found, despite there

being witnesses who watched him jump. It's very flimsy. Yeah. Yes, but at the same time, it does kind of demonstrate like, look, man, this guy. This guy was never, yeah, he was never found. He jumped at the same time that Anglens and Morris were in the water, so maybe their bodies were never found. There was a sighting of a body about five weeks later in July of 1962 by a group of Norwegian

sailors who saw something kind of floating off and they were like, is that a body? Yeah. They went up in oculars and they said, that's a body. It was a body. It was floating upside down, so all they could see was the butt basically, kind of bobbing in the water and the butt looked through their binoculars at least to have on jeans, have on denim and that was part of the prison outfit was they were wearing denim and this is the part that kind of gets a little flimsy to me is the FBI said that there were no missing

persons in the area in that timeframe that were wearing jeans. Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? Who knows? Even it was reported many weeks later, so it was kind of hearsay I guess at that point. It was and then by the time they actually reported the sighting, it was October, so they're like, well, that's kind of useless, but they do point to that and say, okay, this combined with Seymour Web, we think that their bodies were swept out to sea.

Not everybody agrees with that, including the Anglens family who very much maintained that their brothers survived this escape from Alcatraz and actually had a photograph that I don't know where they got it, but they have a photograph that was supposedly taken of their brothers in Brazil in 1975 that they shared with the history journal. It does. It certainly does and there's actually a company, I can't remember the name of the company, but they do artificial intelligence facial recognition, so they're just really leading the way to a dystopia, but they were like, hey, everybody, we want to introduce you to

our software, so we're going to analyze this picture and their AEI said, yep, definitely the Anglens. How cool is that? Yeah, I mean, I certainly looked at it and it could be. It didn't look so unlike them that it was like no way. Right. And again, I found myself being like, yeah, man, I hope these guys made it to Brazil. And they're robbing banks there to this day.

Yeah, exactly. Right. It's like a cattle in Brazil, that's my idea. In 2013, there was a letter sent to the San Francisco Police Department supposedly from J.W. Anglin saying, hey, we made it guys, but just barely. Morris died in 2008, we kept in touch, great guy. Clarence died in 2011 and I'm still alive, but I got cancer, I need help and I'm going

to come forward if you promise and pinky swear and tell the public that you're not going to send me to jail for more than one year and you're going to heal my cancer. Yeah. And apparently they analyzed the letter and were like, this is inconclusive. But the FBI was like, we closed this case in 1979, we're not about to open it up. But here's the thing, the idea that they survived is at least possible enough that for this whole time, the U.S. Marshals Office who took over the case from the FBI in 1979 have kept it open.

The guys are wanted outlaws still to this day, even though they would be 89, 90 and 95 I think by now, they are considered wanted fugitives and the case is open. Even though I believe the Marshals Service typically believes that they're dead, they haven't closed the case. Yeah, here's my deal. If you do something like this and you don't leave some rock solid deathbed evidence, then you're just selfish. You really are.

You owe it to the world to have this be a lead story and be like, Frank Morris died and here's the evidence, here's that little flower from the movie. Yeah, exactly. Teach your smartest head of cattle to stamp out a message in Morris Code. That's what I want you spending your dying days doing, teaching that cow. The Marshals say that they don't think they survived and went on to lead lives of solitude because they're like, these guys are career criminals. They would have done something again.

They would have gotten caught again. That's a good point. Arguments four is that, and they don't know if they planned this that way or not, but when they went, on the day they went and during the hours they went, they actually had a few good hours of pretty calm bay currents. It could be so bad that they're going to pull you out to sea or so bad that they take you in the wrong direction completely away from land. They said that whether it was just Providence or whether they planned it this way, they

had a cloudy night, so there wasn't much light from the moon and they had a really calm bay. In theory, they might could have done this. They could have, but the winds were really terrible that night too. I think they were gusts up to like 21 miles an hour, sustained winds of like 10 miles an hour. In which direction though? That's tough to row. Who knows?

If it was lucky, then yeah, if it was blowing them toward Angel Island, that was in their favor. It was blowing in any other direction. That would make it very, very tough. Maybe bloom to Brazil. And then maybe so. They're like, well, that was fortunate. Didn't even have to steal a car.

The other problem is the water. The water temperature is like 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is very, very cold and you get very numb and then eventually sent into shock and then exhaustion pretty quickly after being in this water for 30 minutes or less. But people swim in that thing and it's happened before. They have triathlons in that water and people do it. So it's not to say that these guys could not have done it. It wasn't so frigid that science would say, oh no, you would die inside five minutes in

this water. Exactly. I mean, especially if they were operating on the adrenaline that they surely would have had from the escape, shimmying 50 feet down a drain pipe alone will pump you full of some pretty decent adrenaline. So who knows what they were capable of at the time. I have a theory. Let's hear it.

Is that the Anglans killed Frank Morris out there on that raft and that was the body they saw floating and that's why they made it to Brazil and we never heard from Frank Morris again. Oh, I don't like your theory. You don't like turning on them at the last minute? No. No, my theory is that that body was actually Seymour Webb, that he was wearing denim jeans under pants that got taken off of his other pants and that he wasn't actually dead but

he met a mermaid or merman who he fell in love with and spent the rest of his life under the sea with. Well, that's lovely. I like that theory. All right. But the cherry on top here is that those prisoners who wanted to help them escape because they thought the prison would close were right. The prison was shut down the following March and the Bureau of Prisons said, you know what,

maybe we're going to shut this thing down anyway because Alcatraz is just too much to keep up. Yeah. This big concrete block on a rocky island is too expensive to keep up with very few guards. So who knows? But in the movie, they definitely sort of portray it as that's the reason why. Yeah. And the warden never had a happy day again.

That's right. Pretty satisfying film. Pretty satisfying film and Chuck, I guess we said all this to say this, we have a book coming out that we would love for you to pre-order. Yeah, that's right. Stuff you should know. Is that jarring? An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting thing.

And guys, one of our lifelong dreams is to be on the New York Times bestseller list. And they give you a t-shirt. We really want to get on that list. And if that list came out today, we wouldn't be on it. So we would love for you to step up and help our dreams come true. Sure. How's that for a plea? I think that's a great plea.

A plea and a plug all together. It's a pleague. What does this thing cost, 20 bucks? I think so. And it's worth every penny I can tell you because we wrote it. That's right. So that's it. If you want to go order our book, you can pre-order it anywhere you get books.

Thank you in advance. And I think that's it for Escape from Alcatraz too, right? That's it. If you want to know more about escaping from Alcatraz, there are some really great articles and books and all sorts of stuff out there on the internet for you to dig into. So get digging. As I said, get digging. It's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this Delaware response. We kind of poked fun at Delaware a little bit. Oh, we now? I guess it was me. But Delawareans, Delawareans, Delawareans, Delawareans. Delawareanites. They are lovely people, as it seems, because we've gotten quite a few emails. They don't have good humor about their lovely little state.

Hey, guys, our Delaware family had to laugh at your Pirate Radio podcast. Delawareans, oh yeah, it's right there, would be proud to be known as the Luxembourg of the United States. Most people drive through our state on I-95 in less than 30 minutes. But if you do stop by, our state is rich in history and agriculture, and we have a few nice beaches. What you should know is the ark on the top of our state, I guess it's an arch, is made by a 12-mile radius from Newcastle, an historic town.

What many people do not know is the bottom of the ark formed a wedge betwixt Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. The ownership of that land was in dispute between Delaware and Pennsylvania for decades, only to be resolved in 1921. Rumor has it that the disputed land was a haven for unsavory types who capitalized on the uncertain jurisdiction. Thanks for the show, it informs and entertains my family, and we wish you well from Delaware, the first state to ratify the Constitution.

That is from Doug Wasgatt and family. Nice, Doug, thank you. I would have led with the first state to ratify the Constitution, thank you. I bet they tout that a lot, that's a good thing to tout. If you want to be like Doug and defend your state, whether it's Delaware or not, we want to hear from you and you can send it in an email to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. From the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.