The plan for the escape was quite simple, but the means to pull it off were nearly impossible. They would need the perfect coordination of the whole team to make it work. This was not a one-man’s job. This was not the first escape attempt of this kind, and there was no room for mistakes.
It had to work, and it had to work smoothly. Over 30 inmates had tried to escape Alcatraz island over the years, and none had succeeded. What would make this attempt any different? What guaranteed that this was the right time to make history?
The Family
John and Clarence Anglin were inseparable as children; some would say they were as thick as thieves, which they ironically became as they grew up. Every year when they were children, their family would head North for work picking cherries, sometimes even getting all the way to Michigan.
In those summers, the Anglin brothers would swim in the icy waters of Lake Michigan and were well known for their superior swimming skills. They had no idea how important being a good swimmer would be for them in the future. In their early 20s, the brothers started pulling off bank robberies together but were caught and arrested during a bank job in 1956. But that was just the beginning for them...
The Team
During their incarceration at the Atlanta Penitentiary, the Anglin brothers were caught trying to escape numerous times. All they wanted was to get out, and it didnt matter how. This led to them being sent to Alcatraz, which was a maximum-security prison. While there, they met Frank Lee Morris, the team leader.
The group of four, which also included fellow inmate Allen West, had plenty of personal experience on how to escape or try to escape from various prisons. They pooled their knowledge and started working on a plan to achieve the impossible – an escape from “The Rock.”
The Beginning
It is known that all four team members were jailed at the penitentiary in Atlanta at one time. There is a possibility that they knew each other from their time there. John and Clarence Anglin definitely met Frank Lee Morris while they were in Atlanta.
The four men also had adjoining cells while they were locked up in Alcatraz, and a long long time to think up their grand plan of escape. The plan they came up with would demand every ounce of their bravery and all the resources they could possibly collect. The escape program became the only thing they talked about or thought of. It became their existence.
Collecting the Materials
Alcatraz at that time was not just a prison but also a factory, which was great luck for the group. The inmates worked as part of their sentence, giving them access to the materials at hand. And there were a lot of them because Alcatraz worked for the US military making furniture, clothing, and shoes.
The four-man team had another advantage, making the plan even more likely to execute. They were non-violent offenders, something which was extremely rare in Alcatraz. This gave them the advantage of slightly less scrutiny from the guards, allowing them more freedom to operate.