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The Men Who Fooled Alcatraz.
#1
This story keeps appearing every couple of years and it intrigues me because of the ingenuity used to
beat the lore about a so-called fact. Alcatraz was the place where no man could escape and yet the
failing was it was man-made.

The human spirit is a bitch and it can think. In this instance, it can float too.

Quote:A man claims three Alcatraz prisoners ‘barely’ survived a 1962 escape -and that he’s one of them.

'The questions have stymied law enforcement agencies, haunted family members and intrigued the
public for more than half a century.

[Image: attachment.php?aid=3752]


Did the three men who escaped in 1962 from Alcatraz  -then known as the world’s most impenetrable
island prison, a place for only the most hardened of criminals — survive their brazen attempt?
And, if so, are they still alive, nearly 56 years later?

[Image: attachment.php?aid=3753]
Prison mug shots of convicts Frank Morris, from left, Clarence and John Anglin.


To this day, Frank Morris, Clarence Anglin and John Anglin remain the only people who have escaped
Alcatraz and never been found -a disappearance that is one of the country’s most notorious unsolved
mysteries. The prevailing theory is that Morris and the Anglin brothers drowned after leaving Alcatraz
Island and attempting to cross the frigid San Francisco Bay.

But in a newly surfaced letter sent to San Francisco police in 2013 and obtained by CBS affiliate KPIX,
a man claiming to be one of the escapees said that all three of the prisoners survived the attempt
-but that he was the only one still living.

“My name is John Anglin,” the handwritten letter began. “I escape [sic] from Alcatraz in June
1962 with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris. I’m 83 years old and in bad shape.
I have cancer. Yes we all made it that night but barely!”

The letter claimed that Morris died in 2008 and that Clarence Anglin died in 2011.

The note continued: “If you announce on TV that I will be promised to first go to jail for no more
than a year and get medical attention, I will write back to let you know exactly where I am.
This is no joke.”

That was nearly five years ago.

A U.S. Marshals Service representative told The Washington Post that the agency believes the letter is without
merit. According to the agency, the letter was submitted to an FBI lab for forensic handwriting analysis, comparing
it to samples from all three escapees, and the results were “inconclusive.”

“At this time, there are no leads stemming from the 2013 anonymous letter,” the Marshals Service said in a statement.

It’s unclear why it took nearly five years for the letter to surface. FBI officials did not immediately respond to requests
for additional details Wednesday morning. Whatever the fate of the escapees, the bold prison break from a maximum
-security facility nicknamed “The Rock” has become the stuff of legend, immortalized in the 1979 movie “Escape from
Alcatraz,” which starred Clint Eastwood.

According to the FBI, this much is known: About six months before the escape attempt, four Alcatraz prisoners
began plotting their jailbreak, using found and stolen materials (including a broken vacuum cleaner motor) to
fashion a makeshift drill.

Slowly, each of the men drilled tiny holes around the air vents in the back of their cells, then punched out a portion
of the wall large enough to wiggle through. For weeks, the FBI stated, the prisoners used the air vents to access an
empty corridor they used as a “secret workshop” to build their escape equipment, which attested to the men’s ingenuity:

More than 50 raincoats that they stole or gathered were turned into makeshift life preservers and a 6×14 foot rubber raft,
the seams carefully stitched together and “vulcanized” by the hot steam pipes in the prison (the idea came from magazines
that were found in the prisoners’ cells).
They also built wooden paddles and converted a musical instrument into a tool to inflate the raft.

At the same time, they were looking for a way out of the building. The ceiling was a good 30 feet high, but using a network
of pipes they climbed up and eventually pried open the ventilator at the top of the shaft. They kept it in place temporarily
by fashioning a fake bolt out of soap.

At last, sometime between the evening of June 11 and the morning of June 12 in 1962, Morris and the Anglin brothers
made their escape, slipping out through the air vents in their cells one last time, grabbing the equipment from their secret
workshop and climbing up to the ventilator onto the prison roof.
They were able to trick night guards into thinking they were still sleeping by tucking dummy heads into their beds before
they left.
They were never seen again.

According to the FBI, Allen West, one of the four men originally in on the plan, wasn’t ready in time and was left behind.
West died in 1978.

The agency used interviews with him to glean most of the details about the plans leading up to the escape -but evidence
after the escape remained scant, save for pieces of homemade paddles and a life vest that washed ashore nearby.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary on June 12, 1962, shortly after three prisoners escaped. They were never found. (AP)
For decades, questions have persisted: Did the men successfully make it north toward Angel Island, either in their makeshift
raft or by swimming? Or were they overcome by the bay’s rough waters, their bodies long lost to the Pacific Ocean?
The unsolved case has spawned everything from television specials to interactive modeling of current conditions the night
of the escape.

Alcatraz closed as a prison in March 1963, less than a year after the infamous escape, but the island facility remains one of
the San Francisco Bay area’s best-known tourist attractions -and the starting point for the grueling “Escape from Alcatraz”
triathlon.
The FBI officially closed its case on the Alcatraz escapees in 1979.

“For the 17 years we worked on the case, no credible evidence emerged to suggest the men were still alive, either in the
U.S. or overseas,” the FBI stated. However, the Marshals Service has continued to investigate leads and said it will do so
until the men are proven deceased, or until they turn 99.

“The ongoing U.S. Marshals investigation of the 1962 escape from Alcatraz federal prison serves as a warning to fugitives
that regardless of time, we will continue to look for you and bring you to justice,” Marshal Don O’Keefe of the Northern District
of California said in a statement in 2012, the 50th anniversary of the escape.

Relatives of John and Clarence Anglin firmly believe they survived their escape: At least four members of the Anglin family,
including two nephews and a sister, spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2013, furnishing what they said was evidence
the men were alive -including a Christmas card the family received in 1962 that read: “To Mother, from John. Merry Christmas.”

“If they are not alive,” a nephew, Dave Widner, told the newspaper, “then why is the government still looking for them?”...'
SOURCE:


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Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 
#2
My husband says that he heard the three men more than likely survived. 
But my husband said that he would think that they'd return to their only way of making a living,,, Criminal,,, and be caught again.
Once A Rogue, Always A Rogue!
[Image: attachment.php?aid=936]
#3
(05-19-2018, 03:56 AM)guohua Wrote: My husband says that he heard the three men more than likely survived. 
But my husband said that he would think that they'd return to their only way of making a living,,, Criminal,,, and be caught again.

I'd tend to agree, but with law enforcement inter-communication not being like it is today, I'd suspect
that they could well have been arrested under another name in a different State.

But I'd also suggest that since this escape also brought the boast that Alcatraz was inescapable into
dispute and a focus would be on killing them to support the notion, a survivor would know that the best
thing would be to stay off the radar and become a regular citizen.

By the way, if the FBI wished to maintain the narrative of the island-prison being escape-proof, a full-throated
investigation would have to be diluted in a manner of speaking.

Personally, I'd like to think they got  away with it because Clint Eastwood portrayed Frank Morris.
That should be enough of a reason for a happy ending!
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 
#4
Quote:The Real Story Behind The Great Escape From Alcatraz
So a letter was received by the San Francisco Police Department in 2013.  tinysurprised 

Quote:Contact From John Anglin
Quote:It was a workday like any other the day that the San Francisco Police Department received one of its most shocking letters ever. The letter read “My name is John Anglin. I escaped from Alcatraz in June 1962 with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris.”
 Yes this gets interesting.




Quote:The case of the escape from Alcatraz is one of the most notorious unsolved mysteries in American history. Officials at the time said that all three of the men died in the icy waters the night of the escape. But was that all a lie? Was this letter the real deal? Was there an ulterior motive for it all?

The case of the Alcatraz escapees left all levels of law enforcement stumped for decades. But suddenly, the letter writer was claiming he could finally reveal what really happened that fateful night. Could this really be trusted?
Could the letter be REAL!?

Quote:The letter in question was received by the San Francisco Police Department in 2013 but had been kept under wraps for years.
The reason it stayed a secret for so long is unknown but apparently, it had enough information to cause the the Federal Bureau of Investigations to re-open its investigation in January 2018.
What was so special about this?



Do I have your Attention Now? Want the Whole story of their life with pictures?
Go here: Source  and read the story and see the letter and pictures of the three has they grew up and from where they came.
Once A Rogue, Always A Rogue!
[Image: attachment.php?aid=936]
#5
Quote:Do I have your Attention Now? Want the Whole story of their life with pictures?

Go here: Source  and read the story and see the letter and pictures of the three has they grew up and from where they came.

Wow!  YES, you have my attention! Case just reopened this year?  tinyhuh I'm wide awake and ready to dive into this one.   minusculethumbsup
#6
Living in Brazil?
[Image: TELEMMGLPICT000152269310_trans_NvBQzQNjv...width=1240]
Quote:A photo provided by the Anglins' relatives allegedly showing the brothers in Brazil in 1975 CREDIT: HISTORY CHANNEL
Quote:The descendants of the Anglin brothers have long maintained that they survived and sporadically made contact with their family over the intervening decades.

In 2015 two nephews of John and Clarence, Ken and David Widner, went public saying they thought their uncles were still possibly alive and in their 80s living in Brazil.
Quote:They said for three years John and Clarence’s mother received a Christmas card, signed by her sons. The handwriting was analysed and believed to be theirs – although the date of the cards could never be proven.
The family gave permission for the elder brother of John and Clarence, Alfred, to be exhumed and his DNA tested against that of the bones found on the bay coast - and they were found not to match.


Ken Wilder also said Whitey Bulger, who was in Alcatraz as the same time as the Anglins, wrote to him in 2014 saying he had coached them on how to avoid recapture if they ever escaped.
“He taught them that when you disappear, you have to cut all ties,” said Ken Widner. “He told me in a letter, ‘This is the mistake that I made.’
Source
AND!
Quote:In his letter, the man claiming to be Anglin says Morris died in 2008 and his brother Clarence passed away in 2011. “John” says he’s living in southern California, which, if it’s true, would mean the cops have done a pretty crappy job of finding him.

Quote:In the 55 years since the escape, all kinds of leads, rumors and stories have emerged about the men’s whereabouts. In 2011, an 89-year-old guy in Georgia, Bud Morris, told a local news station that he was a cousin of Frank Morris, that he’d personally delivered envelopes of cash to a prison guard at Alcatraz and that he’d met with Frank in a park near San Diego after the escape.

In 2016, the Anglin family showed a photo to 11 Alive, a news outlet in Atlanta, that they claimed was of John and Clarence in Brazil. The family had been given the photo by an international drug smuggler named Fred Brizzi, who’d known the Anglins as a kid.

Source
Once A Rogue, Always A Rogue!
[Image: attachment.php?aid=936]


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