Futility Closet - 131-Escape From Libby Prison

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from a womanless library to a misplaced Seattle. This is episode 131. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Libby Prison was one of the most infamous prison camps of the Civil War. Thousands of Union prisoners were packed together in a converted warehouse,

Starting point is 00:00:33 facing months or years of starvation and abuse. The Confederates considered the prison to be escape-proof, and in today's show, we'll tell of one prisoner's determined efforts to prove them wrong. We'll also duel with a barrel, and puzzle over why an admitted forger would be found innocent. Libby Prison was one of the largest and best-known Confederate prison camps of the Civil War, and also one of the most notorious. It was called the Bastille of the Confederacy, and its name was a household word in the north, equivalent to Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib today. The prison filled an entire city block in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital.

Starting point is 00:01:13 The building had originally been a warehouse, but was commandeered by the Confederacy, and when the owners departed, they left behind their sign. So there was a sign on the side of it that said, Libyan Sun Ship Chandlers and Grocers, and that's how it came to be known as Libby Prison. There were three floors, and the prisoners were kept in the top two. Each floor was divided into three rooms measuring 45 by 90 feet. The conditions were deplorable by any standard. The heat was stifling in the summer, and each floor was provided with only two stoves to keep warm in the winter.

Starting point is 00:01:42 The lighting and ventilation were poor, and the rooms contained no furniture. Prisoners who went near the windows for fresh air could be shot by the guards outside. And there was no effort to keep the rooms clean. The men slept on floors covered with filth and vermin, and the rations were low. In 1863, each prisoner was getting a daily ration of two ounces of meat, eight ounces of bread, and a cup of either beans or rice. Worst, though, was the overcrowding. In July 1862, the North and South had agreed systematically to exchange war prisoners. So in a war, each side accumulates, gradually accumulates prisoners, and if they exchange those, then they're each getting some of their soldiers back. But when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, this agreement broke down, and prisoners began to accumulate on both sides.

Starting point is 00:02:30 When the prison opened, it held just over 600 men, but when prison exchanges were suspended, this number had more than quadrupled, and at the peak, more than 4,000 men were packed into this prison. They slept like spoons with an elected leader who called out orders for everyone to roll over in unison. That's how crowded it was. And as you can imagine, scurvy, chronic diarrhea, pneumonia, and dysentery thrived. In October 1863, a 33-year-old Union colonel named Thomas Rose arrived at the prison, having been captured at Chickamauga, and he determined immediately to escape, and he began by exploring the building's cellar. The kitchen was on the main floor of this building, but as the population of the hungry prisoners grew, the Confederates eventually set up a second kitchen in the east cellar.

Starting point is 00:03:11 The cellars were awful even for this place, dark and stinking and infested with rats. The James River ran behind the prison, and when it flooded, it would sometimes, the floodwaters would invade the cellars and carry away hordes of rats from the cellars, and the prisoners would cheer from the windows as they watched them go. Prisoners were sometimes deliberately held in cells in the central cellar as punishment, and they described rats running constantly over their faces and hands. One once awoke with a rat sitting on his head. One of them wrote, if I possessed a pen of living fire, I could not paint the horrors of the week I spent in that Libby dungeon. The east cellar was the worst of all of them, so thickly

Starting point is 00:03:51 infested that the prisoners called it rat hell. But that was also, of the three cellars, the closest to the sewer, which led to a nearby canal, and Rose, this new colonel, was exploring it, looking for possibilities to engineer an escape. He was thinking if he could somehow reach this sewer, they could use that as a way to reach the canal and escape that way. In the darkness, as he was wandering around this rat-infested cellar, to his surprise, he stumbled into another prisoner there, Major A.G. Hamilton of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry, who was there for the same reason. He was also hoping to escape, and the two of them became friends. They decided that their best chance lay in digging their way out, and together they were looking for a place in the cellar to start a tunnel. Unfortunately, as they were making these plans, the Confederates finally

Starting point is 00:04:32 transferred some scores of prisoners out of the prison, which relieved the overcrowding somewhat, which was good, but it also removed the need for this auxiliary kitchen in the cellar, which was their only excuse to go down there and prowl around. So the rebels had this auxiliary kitchen removed and sealed up the stairway, and now Rose and Hamilton knew that they wanted to tunnel out from the east cellar but had no way to reach it. It had all been sealed up. After some thinking, they decided that the best way into this sealed room was to dig their way down, this is hard to believe, behind the stove in the main floor kitchen, taking a path that would resemble an inverted S. So the way they had to accomplish this was working at night, the two of them would steal down from the upper floors into this main floor kitchen.

Starting point is 00:05:14 And then they would remove the stoves from the fireplace and sweep all the ashes and soot into a rubber blanket just for safekeeping on the side. Then Hamilton would dig down inside the wall behind this stove into the chimney, working with a pocket knife and a chisel while Rose stood watch. And they do this for as many hours as they thought they could get away with. And then they'd replace everything, put in back all the ashes and smear the reassembled bricks with soot. So it all just looked like a regular oven again. He was digging with a pocket knife and a chisel. They accumulated more tools as they went along, but that's all pretty much,

Starting point is 00:05:49 that's about the standard of the tools they had to work with. They had to do all this work in darkness and in almost perfect silence because a sentinel was pacing back and forth only 10 feet away just outside the prison wall. It took them 11 days to do this, but eventually Hamilton broke through into the wall of the East Cellar. So now they were back down into the cellar, sort of square one where they

Starting point is 00:06:08 had begun, but they haven't even started digging and looking for a way out of the prison yet. They determined to dig a tunnel to this sewer, through which they hoped to walk to its outlet at the Lynchburg Canal, yards away. Rose went to the upper floors and eyed the layout from an upper story and thought that they might reach this sewer with a tunnel as short as 15 feet, which was encouraging. He did most of the digging. It turned out he was a prodigious digger and would pile the loose earth into a wooden spittoon that they'd taken for an upstairs room. So he would dig along in the tunnel, piling the earth into a spittoon. When it was full, he would yank on this clothesline that was attached to it, and Hamilton would draw out the spittoon and empty the earth and then pass it back to him a platoon isn't that big no I mean that's like the whole thing is ridiculous and

Starting point is 00:06:49 it took I'll tell you how much work it took to get all this done because there were several false starts everyone wants to know what they did with all this earth as they were digging it out apparently this east cellar was full of piles of straw discarded from hospital mattresses and relief boxes apparently that's one thing probably that attracted all these rats. But it gave them a lot of sort of covered ground where they could hide this earth that was being pulled out of the tunnel. One spittoon at a time?

Starting point is 00:07:14 Yeah. But they found as they went along, there was so little ventilation in the tunnel that the candles he was using to light his way went out when they'd gone just four feet. It was just airless in there. Which meant that a man also had to stand and fan air into the tunnel. So it was impossible both to empty this platoon and stand guard and fan air in.

Starting point is 00:07:33 So that your friend doesn't pass out from lack of oxygen. So this was just, they realized it was more work than two men could manage. So eventually they went back and chose 13 other prisoners whom they trusted and organized themselves into three squads of five men each. So each team would work one night and then have two nights off. And on each squad, each man had a dedicated task. He would either dig or keep watch or empty this platoon or fan air. That would be simpler, yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:01 Absolute secrecy was required as the Confederates would sometimes set spies among the Union prisoners to learn of escape attempts, so they had to keep it a closely guarded secret among those 15, but that seems to be working, and they were making steady progress. They advanced several yards each night until they hit the timbers of Libby's East Warehouse, which were a foot thick. They remade their knives into saws with little teeth and dug through that, hard as that is to believe. to saws with little teeth and dug through that, hard as that is to believe. But then disaster struck. The tunnel flooded when Rose was in it, and his life was saved only because they'd made the precaution of tying a rope to his foot so they could pull him out. They determined afterward that they tunneled below the level of this canal behind the prison, and the water had just invaded the tunnel. So there was no saving it now. There was no way to make the tunnel usable again, so Rose

Starting point is 00:08:44 reluctantly ordered it to be filled with dirt and abandoned. So they're back to the cellar again with no progress to show for all that work. They began again, this time aiming for a smaller sewer pipe that emptied into the larger one, but this tunnel collapsed. They got outside the wall and then unwittingly dug beneath a cast-off brick furnace that lay outside the prison wall, and the weight of that just collapsed the tunnel. The Confederates actually saw this happen, but attributed the cave-in to tunneling rats. There's so many rats about there, you could blame anything on them. So as far as that goes, that's good luck. In January 1864, they started a third tunnel and

Starting point is 00:09:16 dug day and night to support morale. People were getting discouraged and weary at this point, understandably. So they judged that it was worth the added risk to just hurry up and dig days as well as nights. That meant the Confederates would go upstairs and count the prisoners twice a day at nine and four just to make sure nobody was trying to escape, nobody was doing exactly this. So they had to come up with a scheme, they called it repeating, in order to mask the fact that some of these prisoners were downstairs digging when they should have been upstairs. And that was as simple as just they would get in line all the prisoners would get in line to be counted and when one at the head of the line was counted he would crouch

Starting point is 00:09:52 down and run back to the end of the line in order to be counted a second time which sounds like it wouldn't work but it did because that's a mark of the overcrowding that there were so many there that they could catch on to something but you would think some of the other prisoners they must have noticed that certain prisoners were disappearing or that this repeating was going on? They definitely knew the repeating was going on. They thought that was just a prank to confuse and irritate the Confederates. I don't honestly know.

Starting point is 00:10:17 If they were recognizing that certain people were disappearing every third day or how often it was. Or what to make of that. Yeah. I don't know. It was so hugely overcrowded that that wouldn't be immediately obvious. But certainly there'd be, you know, friendships and acquaintanceships among them. And someone would realize that his friend disappeared for at least a day at a time.

Starting point is 00:10:34 Yeah. But I don't know how they accounted for that. They finally finished this third tunnel and reached the small sewer pipe only to find that it was too narrow to accommodate a man. It had now been 39 days since they'd loosed the first brick in the kitchen fireplace, and they had nothing to show for it. They'd have to start all over again. That's three false starts. In January 1864, they started a fourth tunnel.

Starting point is 00:10:55 This time they'd given up digging toward the canal. Now they're digging from the northeast corner of this rat-infested cellar. Tunneling eastward would mean they'd tunnel directly below a broad dirt yard patrolled by rebel guards. They'd have to dig for 50 feet to reach a tall fence and a tobacco shed. And even this was still on Libby property. The tobacco shed stood next to a building where undistributed boxes were stored. If you were in the Union and you sent a package to one of these prisoners, it would get kept in this building. Eventually, there were 5,000 packages in there that just weren't given to the prisoners. And sometimes the Confederates would rifle through them and steal things.

Starting point is 00:11:30 Anyway, that's what that building was. Even if they reached this, it would still be dangerous to leave their premises with Confederate sentries patrolling the streets. They'd still be next door to the prison, even though they weren't right on the prison yard. But it's the best they could manage at that point. I'm not even describing how miserable all this digging was. Lieutenant Charles H. Moran wrote, no tongue can tell how the poor fellows passed among the squealing rats, enduring the sickening air, the deathly chill, the horrible interminable darkness. Rose himself wrote, the profound darkness caused some to become bewildered when they attempted to move about. I sometimes had to feel all over the cellar to gather up the men that were lost. This tunnel descended and then leveled out. Generally, it measured 24 by 18 inches,

Starting point is 00:12:10 which is very small, but at one point it narrowed to 16 inches. As they were digging, the prison commander cracked down on security, which meant that periodically a Confederate sergeant and several soldiers would actually enter the cellar by the south door while the men were working in the northeast, as if this wasn't harrowing enough, and the terrified Union prisoners would scatter and hide while the rebels' eyes were adjusting to the dark. Fortunately, the stench, the rats, and the darkness tended to drive off these Confederate inspectors pretty quickly. No one had much of a heart to look too deeply into this awful place, so they never did discover them there. As the tunnel progressed, they needed to know how far they had yet to go. It's easy to lose your bearings down there. Captain John

Starting point is 00:12:49 Gallagher volunteered to find out. He convinced the rebels to let him cross the yard and hunt among these undelivered boxes from the north for one that had supposedly been sent to him. He crossed the yard with a carefully measured stride and returned a report that the distance between the Libby warehouse and the tobacco shed was 52 to 53 feet. So advancing at five feet per night on average, the tunnelers reached a point where they thought they'd covered 53 feet. So at that point, Rose authorized a digger to tunnel upward, hoping they'd come up under the tobacco shed. But he returned in horror to report that he'd emerged on the wrong side of the fence. They'd stopped a little bit short of the goal, as it turned out. He came up on the near side, in fact, in plain sight of the prison. They stopped a little bit short of the goal, as it turned out. He came up on the

Starting point is 00:13:25 near side, in fact, in plain sight of the prison and the sentries. In fact, as he surfaced, a guard was standing nearby and heard a stone he dislodged. The guard leaned on the fence and peered out over it, but departed without seeing the man. So this man came back and said, all is lost. We've come up short of a target. But Rose crawled through the tunnel and said it was all right. The hole had appeared where the ground sloped downward, so the Confederates couldn't see it easily, and they finally found they could repair the hole and then dig the remaining five to ten feet to the shed. They covered an old pair of pants with dirt and used that to plug the hole so it wasn't immediately visible even from above it. It just looked like, you know, general earth there.

Starting point is 00:14:03 So from this point on, Rose was convinced that time was of the essence and did all the digging himself. Other prisoners scanned the grounds from upstairs windows for any sign of a surprise inspection. As I said, he was a prodigious digger, and so he covered the ground pretty quickly. On February 8th, the 17th day of digging in the new tunnel, Rose dug until midnight and then saw that he was passing a fence post. He began to angle upward toward the surface, finally flipped onto his back and began to pound on the roof of the tunnel. It gave way with a rush of fresh air and he heard a sentinel call

Starting point is 00:14:33 half past one and all is well. He was under the tobacco shed beyond the fence. So he got out into this yard beyond the prison fence, made his way to the gate, unlatched it, walked all the way around the prison, and returned, secured the gate, and re-entered the tunnel covering its entrance with an empty barrel. So he knows now it's possible to get out into the streets of Richmond undetected. There's a sentry who would walk right back and forth in front of that gate, but if you timed it right, and if they left at night, they could hope to just escape, just to filter out into the city and make their way through it to the Union lines. That was the plan. All the prisoners then met in the kitchen, or all these people who'd been involved in the project, at 3 a.m. that night, February 9th. It

Starting point is 00:15:15 had been 53 days since they'd started their first tunnel. Rose and Hamilton wanted to leave immediately, but the others persuaded them there was not enough darkness left, and taking one more day would permit everyone to get ready and to give them ten hours of darkness in which to escape. Rose announced that each escapee could tell one friend about the tunnel. At this point, there were still only 15 people in the prison who knew that this was even happening. At 7 p.m. the following evening, Tuesday evening, February 9, 1864, the tunnelers assembled in the kitchen.

Starting point is 00:15:43 Other prisoners covered for them by playing music and dancing. One by one, they climbed down the S-curve behind the stove. When the last man had descended, Colonel Harrison C. Hobart of the 21st Wisconsin replaced the bricks. Then Rose placed the men in order at the entrance to the tunnel, thanked them, shook hands, and bade them good luck. Hobart's instructions were to wait an hour for that group to get out, and then let in their 15 friends to follow them the same way out through the tunnel, and then to let in a further group each hour. They just gladly let the word out that there was a tunnel available and that they could go out in groups of 15, giving priority to the highest-ranking prisoners and allowing time for each group to disperse in the town before sending in the next group. The trip through the tunnel took just two to three minutes. It was so narrow that each man had to push his coat ahead of him. It was described as no light and airy opening, but a narrow, dark,

Starting point is 00:16:29 damp hole, just large enough for one to pull himself through. Moran wrote, at times we seemed descending, and again we seemed to rise. The earth was clammy cold, and the air foul and suffocating. The length of the tunnel seemed interminable. I was gasping for breath, and my shoulder was paining dreadfully. It seemed as if we were lost in some horrible grave. When they emerged into the yard, the prisoners passed along a wagonway through a building and to this gate where they dispersed into the

Starting point is 00:16:53 night in the middle of the night. Some Confederate soldiers said later they actually had seen the escapees emerging from the yard, but assumed they were fellow Confederates who had been robbing these boxes. Even more ironically, this prison was thought to be escape-proof, which meant that the guards were less vigilant than in other camps. So if they'd been a little less confident of their own powers of detection,

Starting point is 00:17:16 they might have actually caught these guys trying to filter their way out from the yard. Back at the prison, the senior officers put a stop to the flow of escapees before dawn. They replaced all the bricks of the fireplace and began their regular morning routine. The morning roll call came up a hundred men short, and the Confederates called it several times to be sure this wasn't just a trick or a prank. By the time they realized this was, in fact, a massive escape, the escapees had been gone nearly 12 hours. At first, they thought the prisoners had bribed the night sentinels,

Starting point is 00:17:43 who were placed under arrest in search for evidence, but eventually they discovered this tunnel and realized what had happened. But by then it was too late to do anything about it. Many of the escaping men had served in George McClellan's Peninsular Campaign, which meant they'd either been in this area before or had studied maps of it, so they sort of knew the lay of the land and knew how to get to the Union lines. Rose himself, who'd organized all this, traveled for several nights and was within sight of a squad of Union troops. He would hide in trees during the daytime and then creep along at night for days. Finally, he was within sight of his goal when he sort of relaxed his guard and allowed three soldiers to approach him and realized too late that they were Confederates. And they captured him. One said, hurry up, boys, the Yankees are right here. If he had waited just a few minutes longer, he would have made it. So they wrestled him all the way back to Liberty

Starting point is 00:18:28 Prison, which he spent all his effort to get out of, and placed him in solitary confinement there. But the Confederates now thought he represented a danger, since he was a known mastermind for these kind of escape stunts, and on April 30, 1864, they just traded him for a Confederate colonel, and he returned to his unit, the 77th Pennsylvania Infantry, and fought with them to the end of the war. Most of the escapees were luckier. Two of them drowned trying to swim across the river, and 48 were recaptured, but 59, or more than half of them, were able to reach Union lines, making this one of the most successful prison breaks of the Civil War. Libby Prison held prisoners until the end of the war. They kept

Starting point is 00:19:03 using it as a prison. Afterward, it became the Confederacy's most photographed building as photographers scrambled to record famous war sites. In 1890, the building was torn down and reassembled in Chicago as part of a Civil War museum there. Today, the only reminder in Richmond that Libby ever existed is a plaque mounted on the city's flood wall along the James Canal. It reads, On this site stood Libby Prison, CSA, 1861-1865,

Starting point is 00:19:28 Federal Prisoners of War. We are moving into that time of year when many people are trying to figure out what to give for gifts, and we'd like to suggest that you consider the Futility Closet books. The books are a little different than the podcast in that everything in them is very short. So both books are filled with hundreds of quirky oddities and curiosities, plus offbeat inventions, intriguing quotes, and brain-teasing puzzles. Perfect for anyone who would enjoy learning about an invisible student at Georgia Tech, or a proposal for using eagles as hot air balloon propellers.

Starting point is 00:20:07 Look for the books on Amazon, where they will even gift wrap and mail them for you. This item appeared in The American Lawyer in August 1906. It's called Five Accidents but Only One Indemnity. The soullessness of corporations is something to stun you, said the man with the heavy mustache and the bandage about his head. I am myself a victim, and instead of being a man of wealth and an honor to the community, I am now a relic of humanity just from the hands of a surgeon who made an earnest effort to restore me to the form in which I grew while reaching manhood's estate. Let me tell you about it. I carry an accident

Starting point is 00:20:41 insurance policy by the terms of which the company that insured me agreed to pay me $25 a week during such time as I was prevented from working because of an accident. One week ago, I run around on Sunday morning to a new house that is being built for me. I climbed the stairs, or rather the ladder that is where the stairs will be when the house is finished, and on the top floor I found a pile of bricks which were not needed there. Feeling industrious, I decided to remove the bricks. In the elevator shaft was a rope and a pulley, and on one end of the rope was a barrel. I pulled the barrel up to the top after walking down the ladder, and then fastened the rope firmly at the bottom. Then I climbed the ladder again and filled the barrel with brick. Down the ladder I climbed again, five stories, mind you, and untied the rope to let the barrel down. The barrel was heavier than I was,

Starting point is 00:21:22 and before I had time to study over the proposition, I was going up the elevator shaft with my speed increasing every second. I thought about letting go of the rope, but before I had decided to do so, I was so high that it seemed more dangerous to let go than to hold on, so I held on. Halfway up the elevator shaft, I met the barrel of bricks coming down. The encounter was brief but spirited. I got the worst of it and continued on my way toward the roof. That is, most of me went on, but much of my epidermis clung to the barrel and returned to earth. Then I struck the roof at the same time that the barrel struck the cellar. The shock knocked the breath out of me and the bottom out of the barrel. Then I was heavier than the empty barrel, and I started down while the barrel started up. We met in the middle of our journey,

Starting point is 00:22:01 and again the barrel uppercut me, pounded my solar plexus, barked my shins, bruised my body, and skinned my face. When we became untangled, I resumed my downward journey, and the barrel went higher. I was soon at the bottom. I stopped so suddenly that I lost my presence of mind and let go of the rope. This released the barrel, which was at the top of the elevator shaft, and it fell five stories and landed squarely on top of me, and it landed hard, too. Now here is where the heartlessness of the insurance companies comes in. I sustained five accidents within two minutes. Once my journey up the shaft when I met the barrel of bricks,

Starting point is 00:22:31 the second when I struck the roof, the third when I was descending and met the empty barrel, the fourth when I struck the bottom, and the fifth when the barrel struck me. One accident when it entitled me to $25 a week, and I figured that by staying in bed ten weeks, I would clean up a comfortable sum. But the insurance man says it was but one accident,

Starting point is 00:22:48 and he would pay but $25 a week. Argument was of no avail, and so I remained in bed four days, and I'm now expecting a check for $14.28. Now, isn't that a shame? No? Yes? It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle i am going to present him with a strange sounding situation and he has to try to figure out what's actually going on asking only yes or no questions this puzzle was sent in by adam baring a counterfeiter was arrested while in prison he requested materials to create a forgery and was released as innocent. What is going on?

Starting point is 00:23:27 Was released because he made that request? That's what it sounds like. Yeah, I mean, one followed from the other, causally. He asked for materials... To create a forgery. And was released... As innocent. Did this really happen? I guess it did. Yes, yes.

Starting point is 00:23:42 Is the time period important? No. Okay, you said he was in prison for forgery. Yes. Okay, do I need to know what specifically he had forged? Not specifically. I don't know. Well, whether it was currency or a document of some particular kind.

Starting point is 00:24:03 And it wasn't any of that. Artwork? Do I need to know this um maybe not i'm not sure um uh there's there are some i might be jumping too far here maybe not is he a painter no okay throw that out. There were some painters, I've written about this on the Futurally Classic blog, who were so good at photorealistic paintings that they got in trouble with the law

Starting point is 00:24:34 if they included money in the paintings. Oh. Because they didn't intend it as a forgery. Anyway, it's just an interesting story. But that's not this. Well, it might have made a different, really good puzzle. Yeah. A different one. But he's not this. Well, it might have made a different, really good puzzle. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:45 A different one. I'll give you that one. But he's not a painter. Okay. All right. So he was imprisoned for forgery. Yes. And it doesn't quite matter what he forged.

Starting point is 00:24:55 It doesn't involve money or documents. Requested materials. Yes. To create a forgery. To create a forgery of the same kind that he was imprisoned for. Yes. Okay. And then, so he requested materials. Did he go ahead and create a forgery. To create a forgery of the same kind that he was imprisoned for? Yes. Okay. And then, so he requested materials.

Starting point is 00:25:08 Did he go ahead and create the forgery he intended to do while in prison? Yes. And the nature of that forgery somehow showed that he was innocent of the crime he'd been in prison for? Correct. All right, fine. That doesn't actually explain anything. No, but you've got it. That's the setup.

Starting point is 00:25:19 Is that why he requested them? To demonstrate his innocence? Yes. But it's not to do, so you would think then that the reason they let him go is that he somehow showed that he was incapable of having committed the crime he was accused of. Right. That's not quite right. Like if I was in prison for counterfeiting U.S. currency. Right.

Starting point is 00:25:38 And I could somehow show I'm not good enough to do that. Yeah. That's not it. So that's not quite the right way of thinking about it. Okay, but that was his intent in asking for these materials. Yes. Because he wanted to create this forgery. Yes.

Starting point is 00:25:53 And succeeded in convincing them that. That he's innocent. So how could you do a second forgery of the same kind. Yes. That you were imprisoned for? Is the timing important? No. mind yes that you were imprisoned for is a timing important no i feel like i'm most of the way there he's in prison for forging something and then he forges forges the same thing again he forges the same thing again now i didn't say he was

Starting point is 00:26:20 imprisoned for forging something i said a counterfeiter was arrested. Ah. For something other than counterfeiting? Correct. Wow. Do I need to know what that crime was? Yeah, and it relates to his creating the forgery and what he was forging. But it's not money or documents or anything like that or paintings.

Starting point is 00:26:44 So you don't need to know it like really, really specifically, but... Okay, but just to be clear here, you're saying he was arrested for something unrelated. I wouldn't say unrelated. Okay, but not counterfeiting or forging? He was not arrested for forging or counterfeiting. Correct. Theft?

Starting point is 00:27:05 No. Like if he was accused of stealing an artwork. Oh, and then showed that he'd produced it himself. Yeah, that's actually, you know what? That's not far off, actually. I mean, I can sort of see that. Yeah. But you say it's not artwork or money.

Starting point is 00:27:24 I don't know if you'd call this artwork that he was creating. It's not exactly artwork, but it's in the ballpark. Okay. All right. I'm starting to. So in creating the forgery in the prison, he showed, he was demonstrating that he had created whatever this thing was. That he was in trouble for owning, for having, possessing? No, it's not.

Starting point is 00:27:46 Yes, yes. All right, so out in the real world, he had sold something. Yeah. And that's probably close enough because it might be hard to get it, but that's basically it. Adam says this happened to Brigido Lara.

Starting point is 00:27:59 He produced forgeries of Mayan and Aztec pottery that he would sell and was arrested as selling antiquities is illegal. In prison, he produced one of his forgeries to prove he wasn't selling antiquities, but forgeries instead, and was later released. And that's what Adam wrote, and I thought that was so interesting.

Starting point is 00:28:15 I looked it up, and apparently this guy, he's Mexican and is an extremely good forger of pre-Columbian Mexican pottery. He's created so many items, as many as 40,000 pieces, that it's possible that the majority of the artifacts that we have from some cultures may actually be his forgeries, because he sold them so widely, and he sold them to many museums and important collectors. In 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History presented a large exhibition of which Lara recognized many of the exhibits as being his own work.

Starting point is 00:28:46 Oh, my gosh. It's illegal to take antiquities out of Mexico. And I thought that might be hard for you to try to come up with that. But so in 1974, Mexican police arrested several people suspected of being antiquity smugglers, Lara among them. And while in prison, he requested some clay and created the very same items he'd been accused of smuggling and was released. Because?

Starting point is 00:29:07 Because he wasn't smuggling antiquities. And after his story came out in the 1980s, several museums realized that parts of their collections may actually have been Lara's forgeries. He was basically later hired by a museum as a restorer and to recognize forgeries. So that was a tricky puzzle, but it was a good story. That's a really good one, yeah. Thanks to Adam for sending that in, and if anyone else has a puzzle they'd like for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:29:36 If you would like to become one of our wonderful patrons who help support the show and get bonus materials such as extra discussions, outtakes, and peeks behind the scenes, then check out the support us section of the website or our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by leaving a review of the books or podcast on Amazon or iTunes. Thanks so much to those of you who have already been doing these things. We really appreciate your help. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Doug Ross.

Starting point is 00:30:13 Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 131-Escape From Libby Prison

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