RedHanded - ShortHand: Alcatraz – Escape from Devil's Island

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

When the night guards passed Frank Morris’s cell, in San Francisco’s “inescapable” island super-prison, Alcatraz, he seemed to be sleeping soundly. But what they saw was a dummy head made of plaster, soap and real human hair. And Morris was already making his way to the shore – and his homemade raft, stitched together using 50 prison raincoats.This week we look at the history of the US’s big bad citadel in the war on crime; its most infamous inmates; and find out if anyone ever really escaped The Rock.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

On the night of the 12th of June, 1962, just like every other night, the Alcatraz night guards hit their patrol. They shone their torches into every one of the prison's 300 cells to check that nothing untoward was happening. This was Alcatraz, after all. The Rock, Devil's Island. Its name struck fear into the hearts of the nation's worst criminals. Previously a military fort, it had become a kind of symbol in the U.S.'s war on crime. It was home to the worst of the worst. gangsters, murderers and problem inmates from across the country,

including John Anglin, Clarence Anglin, Alan West and Frank Morris. They'd been sent to Alcatraz because, well, they wouldn't stop trying to escape from all the other prisons they'd been put him. So these four perpetual prison breakers found themselves on this barren island, separated from the San Francisco shoreline by a mile of freezing, fast-moving ocean water. Escape was said to be impossible. But to these four, that was just too much of a challenge to pass up. That night, everything appeared to be in order.

Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers seemed to be sleeping soundly in their cells, but in the morning, they were gone. In their place were dummy heads made of plaster, soap, dust, toilet paper, toothpaste, and most disgustingly of all, real human hair collected from the prison barbershop. They'd been touched up using paint from the main main. maintenance workshop. Pillows and clothes had been arranged under the covers to look like their bodies. The prison was locked down. Over the next few days, more fragments of clues washed up on the shore. In the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, those clues included homemade wooden

paddles and a raft made from more than 50 stolen and sewn together raincoats. More and more ingeniously crafted items washed up too, but the men were nowhere to be found. This is the shorthand. Considering the rogues gallery of hardened criminals that called this island home, its first residents were a little less intimidating. In 1775, a Spanish naval officer named it La Eila de los Alcatraeus, Alcatraeus being the old Spanish word for pelicans. But the birds would eventually have to give up their prized rock.

First a lighthouse was built to guide ships coming into San Francisco Bay. Even then, it was still considered a bit of a random outcrop. Its nearest settlement, San Francisco, was at the time just a sleepy little village. But then, in 1848, someone saw something shiny in a river in northern California. And, well, the fate of the entire region was forever changed. The gold rush brought people and ships flooding in from all over the world into the San Francisco Bay. The village of 300 boomed into a state. city of more than 30,000, and suddenly the whole region was very, very valuable indeed.

The state of California had only just become US property, and they wanted to keep it that way. So the president signed an executive order, claiming Alcatraz Island. He ordered the construction of a giant fort on it to keep a lookout for interlopers. It had a high central citadel, complete with actual drawbridge and moat, and dozens of cannons were placed on the outside. Any ships heading into San Francisco would come within a mile of the most powerful fort west of the Mississippi. And when the Civil War kicked in in 1861, 10,000 muskets and 150,000 cartridges of ammunition were sent to the island to defend it from those pesky confederates.

But mainly, the fort sat, manned, but totally inactive for decades. And by the end of the Civil War, with weapons technology getting more and more advanced, having a big citadel surrounded by cannons wasn't the first. flex it had been before. So, the government started to look at the fort's other strengths, namely isolation. Its high walls, barren rocks and mile of freezing ocean separated it from the big city, making it the perfect prison. Its first inmates were people captured during the Civil War, Confederate sympathizers, deserters and civilians accused of treason. But soon enough, it was also full of all sorts of miscreants, the scapeies, thieves and drunkards. It was expanded

to fit all these new lost souls. The prison that stands there today was literally built on top of the original citadel. And back then, despite the poetic distance from the shore, conditions weren't so bad. It was actually a minimum security facility, and many prisoners were relatively content doing the various jobs that they'd been trained up to do. But then, in 1934, the prison was made a federal penitentiary, which marked the real beginning of its villain origin story. 1934 was a real ban a year for crime. It was the tail end of the Prohibition era, a heady time of underground clubs,

bootlegger and seedy gangs, which is also the reason we have cocktails to make bathtub gin palatable, and I'm not mad. It brought with it a new breed of organised criminal. What's more, the Great Depression was also well underway. The state of general desperation led to a surge in theft, robbery and violent crimes.

And it introduced a new kind of high-profile outlaw, like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, figures who became folk heroes to a beaten down public, which led the FBI to up the ransoms and crack down further, which only served to make these outlaws even more infamous. A major and very public war on crime had reached its absolute peak, and the government was keen to be seen to be doing something about it.

And that context is important, because Alcatraz's infamy, didn't just come naturally. It wasn't developed over years through horrifying stories from the inside. It was baked in from the start. In a way, it was a kind of PR stunt, a marketing scheme. The government had set out for a place with zero linked to the outside world. Originally, they were actually eyeing up a better land in Alaska.

But then, Alcatraz became available and it was perfect. So they said about turning Alcatraz, this citadel on this rock, into a national island of exile and a new tough as nails prison for the worst of the worst one with new tougher iron bars and an unforgiving daily schedule and I've actually been to Alcatraz

and I have to say I was kind of disappointed were you? I don't think I... No I haven't been around it I've seen it from afar. Yeah see I went and I was kind of disappointed because I was just like they don't Don't tell you they're like fun grizzly stuff. They kind of like, the PR continues.

They kind of soft soap it. And they're like, oh, this was where all the prisoners sat and ate together. And, you know, it was all come by art. And I was like, what? I want to hear about all the fucking mental shit that went down. And they were just like, none of that ever happened here. What are you talking about? So, yeah, I don't know.

I was like, oh, she just felt like a whitewash. The prisoners were checked on a dozen times a day. and most days weren't even allowed to talk to each other. It was a monotonous and highly structured daily routine. Alcatrazis prisoners had four rights, food, clothing, shelter and medical care. Everything else was a privilege that had to be earned. That included correspondence with family members, access to the library, work and recreational activities like painting and music.

The prison was soon filled with the kind of prisoners that fit that narrative. anyone who was deemed too difficult or violent or couldn't stop trying to escape were shipped off to Sean Connery's The Rock. And for the government's high-profile solution, they needed some high-profile residence. Just a year after it opened, they welcomed Scarface himself, Mr. Al Capone.

Alphonse Gabriel Capone, to give him his full name, rose to infamy during the Prohibition era. He ran wide-scale gambling prostitution and bootlegging rackets in Chicago and tightened his grip, by massacring enemy gangs. He was the FBI's first public enemy number one. And his arrival at Alcatraz was big news.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Capone sagged at his first glimpse of the prison. If anyone ever described me as Hanna-McGuire sagged, I think that's all the prison sentence I mean. Fuck it out. I mean, come on, could we not have thought of a better one? Capone, withered, as he saw the first clip, sagged. Come on now. But anyway, true to form, at other prisons, Al Capone had been big on bribery and special treatment,

but he had no such luck at Alcatraz. So deprived of any opportunity for some Machiavellian string pulling, he got another hobby, pulling another kind of string. He starts to band called the Rock Islanders. This is the kind of bullshit they were telling me on the fucking tour. I was like, I don't believe you. Maybe it's true. So yeah, they had a fucking band and apparently Mr. Al Capone himself was on banjo.

He boasted in a letter to his son that he'd learned more than 500 songs. I went to a music store this morning to replace my broken boom arm and like try and get a roadcaster that's surprise, doesn't work. And there was a poster in that was like restring your axe and then it had like prices for each type of guitar. It also had banjo and ukulele. I don't know if you can call those axes. I don't know if they could be on the same list as like mega fuck rock guitar. Like, you know, but I mean, maybe they need to feel they need to feel heavy too, you know. Yeah, I feel like it's more of like a Swiss army knife compared to a guitar.

Other high profile inmates followed from Machine Gun Kelly, Prohibitionera gangster, not Fuck Boy Rapper. And then there's The Rock's most famous. prisoner of all, Robert Stroud, the so-called Birdman of Alcatraz. And I have been sucked in by Birdman, and I follow this statement with my whole heart. There's a lot to say about the Birdman, a lot of it's quite boring. He's not actually as interesting as he may seem. Just like the fucking prison. He was a violent prisoner who became an expert on Canaries and he kept them in his cell,

and that is kind of it. I really feel like they branded this whole prison so well that we're all still obsessed with it. And please do keep listening. Please don't listen to me, keep telling you that this is incredibly boring. Our episode is interesting. And this is more interesting than the one-hour tour I did there.

But yeah, I don't know. Don't know. He's not called Birdman because he tried to escape on homemade wings like Icarus. It's just because he liked birds. Oh, just because of the canaries. Got it. The punishing side of Alcatraz is easy to romanticise. Some of the country's most feared criminals are out there on the bay, isolated from civilization.

And across the country, it was used as a deterrent to keep other prisoners in line. The main headline was Alcatraz is, like Ascaban, inescapable. And obviously, the idea of that PR was to strike fear into the inmates. But also, they'd just gathered all. of the nation's prisoners together who were the most obsessed with escaping. And gave them a challenge. Exactly. They gave them a challenge and nothing else to do and repeatedly told them that they would

never ever escape. Art and crafts is a privilege. Thinking about escaping is a privilege. But Al Capone on the banjo, off you go. So yes, it's a mile of freezing. cold ocean water. That can have very, very, very strong currents. But the swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco is far from impossible. In fact, in 1934, just before the prison opened, a 17-year-old girl swam from Alcatraz to the mainland in just 47 minutes, just to prove

that it was possible. It's not fun, but you can do it. She did it. Now the FBI probably went thrilled about this little stunt right before they opened their big bad inescapable prison. Still, that swim was done with the benefits of lots of swimming practice, a decent diet and knowledge of the types. It's a lot harder in the dead of night after months of prison rations. During Alcatraz's time as a federal prison, the number of successful escape attempts is officially none. Now we'll come back to those plasterheads very soon. But interestingly, Back when it was a minimum security military prison, as many as 28 prisoners may have successfully escaped.

In 1903, four prisoners forged fake release papers and left through the front door. And in 1901 prisoner floated on a wooden board for eight hours before he finally reached the shore. In 1921, two prisoners literally set off into the bay in a kitchen sink. And guess what? They made it. And then three years later in 1924, the prison put on a play for San Franciscans from the mainland. And three prisoners stole costumes

and left with the audience like they were in some sort of fucking Wes Anderson film. But the real challenge was escaping from the maximum security civilian prison. And from 1934 until the prison was closed in 1963, 36 men attempted 14 separate escapes. Of these, 23 were caught, six were shot and killed and two drowned, and five went missing. Some bent or soared through the bars before climbing through and attempting the swim.

One took advantage of his job working in the laundry. He stole an entire army uniform and calmly walked out onto a boat which left without missing a beat. He thought he had smashed it, but unfortunately the boat was not headed to the mainland. It went straight to nearby Angel Island, where correctional officers recognised him and returned him to the rock. Bummer. Bummer, you'd be so pissed. In 1946, six prisoners overpowered a group of officers and took them hostage. They got access to guns and keys and took control of the cellhouse.

More guards arrived, and the prisoners decided to take them on, starting what became known as the Battle of Alcatraz. Over the next few hours there were a series of shootouts. They shot their hostages and even freed more than a dozen other inmates. There was just one more door between them and the boat that would take them to freedom, the want-the-recreation yard. But they didn't have the key. All the escaped prisoners were recaptured and two of the perpetrators were sentenced to death. All of which leaves just one almost unbelievable story of daring,

and ingenuity. And it's the escape, the one featured in the 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood as Frank Morris. The real Frank Morris arrived in Alcatraz in January 1960. He hadn't really had much of a chance in life abandoned by his parents at 11. He got his first criminal conviction at 13 and his life from that point on was a string of armed robberies and home burglaries. He was in and out to prison and had a reputation for constantly trying to escape. so he was sent to the rob. Later that year, two brothers called John and Clarence and Glenn were put in the cell next door to him.

They'd grown up dirt poor and also got the robbing age pretty young. And similarly to Morris, once they started being sent into prisons, the brothers couldn't stop trying to prize their way out. Same story for the next cell mate down, Alan West. The four of them had gotten to know each other in previous prisons, and now they were neighbours. had nothing to do, apart from Chase the biggest prize in the Escapie Handbook, Alcatraz.

One freezing cold December, one of them came across some old saw blades, stuffed them into his pocket. Another stole the motor out of an old vacuum cleaner. Using the blades and the motor in some old spoons, they fashioned themselves a drill. They took it in turns to use that drill to loosen the air vents at the back of their cells. Not by undoing screws, just by drilling loads of. small holes until a whole section of the wall could be removed. To mask the noise, they just waited for music hour, when Morris would play his accordion over the music pumped into the cells. Then they covered the vents with painted cardboard. Those vents opened onto an unguarded corridor, which led them

up to the top level of their cell block, and every night they'd pop a plaster head on their pillow, head upstairs, and get to work. They used more than 50 stolen range. cones to build a sizable rubber raft and four life vests. These were stitched together and then sealed on hot steam pipes in the loft. They modified Morris's accordion into an air pump to inflate the raft. That's incredible. Thank God he played the accordion and not the ukulele. The spoon of the guitar world.

The accordion's really fucking hard. It's a really difficult instrument. Yeah. Yeah, there was a girl I went to school with that played the accordion. And I was like, very niche. Yeah. But yeah. They made paddles out of some wood that they swiped,

and by the evening of June the 11th, 1962, everything was ready. And the four of them readied their plaster heads as well. But there was one hitch. Alan West had used cement to temporarily reattach his vent. Turned out that cement wasn't exactly temporary. He scrambled to use the drill to remove the vent again from scrambling. but it was too late. So he just went back to bed

and left his co-conspirators to it. The other three, Morris and the Anglin brothers, went on through a ventilation shaft and onto the roof. From there they climbed 50 feet down a series of kitchen pipes to the ground. They vaulted over a 12-foot barbed wire fence and headed down to the northeast shore. They used their accordion pump

to inflate their raincoat raft and set off. And they were never seen again. Once the morning check revealed them to be gone, the prison was locked down. The FBI immediately got to work interviewing relatives and searching the shore. Two days after the escape, they found a packet of letters in the bay sealed in rubber. Then some paddles and a life vest washed up too. But it wasn't until they got Alan West to fess up that they pieced together the full story we've just told you.

Officially, there have been no successful escapes from Alcatraz. But that's only because the FBI concluded that the three men didn't make it. They reasoned that firstly the odds were against the prisoners already with freezing water and strong currents. Plus, their plan had been to steal clothes and a car, but no matching thefts had been reported on the shore. And after 17 years of investigation, with no sign of the men, they officially closed the case on December 31st, 1979. But, luckily for us, there are many people who disagree with that official report. As early as December 1962, the year of the escape, the Anglin family reported having received Christmas cards from the brothers. Their mother says that she received anonymous flowers on her birthday every year until she died in 1973.

Two tall men in heavy makeup are even said to have attended her funeral. And there are plenty of other reported sightings too, including in men. who said that they had helped. One even said that he arranged to pick them up and then he murdered them so he could keep the money that their families had given him to pass on. And then there's a photo, which I'm looking at. It's of two men who look like two men. It's like if you drew a picture of two men, that's what it would be.

One blonde, one, one, one brunette, two men standing next to a rock and a tree. That's what you've got. This photo comes from a family friend who says that he, He met the brothers in Brazil in 1975. It's blurry and they're wearing shades, but it does kind of maybe look like a picture of two men. And of course it's possible that these stories are inflated, or just people wanting to be attached to the legend,

but I don't care. I want to believe. Accordian inflate me. Give it to me. Now, despite Alcatraz's infamy, just over 1,500 people were ever imprisoned there in the 29 years that it was a federal prison. There was never more than 260 prisoners there at any one time. And eventually the PR effects of the prison's island location

started to be outweighed by, well, the sheer enormous cost of having a facility in the middle of a bay. Because of its location, it was three times more expensive to operate than any other prison. Everything had to be brought in by boat, including a million gallons of fresh water every week by barge. In 1963, the prison was ordered closed. As for what to do with it next, there were plenty of ideas. Hotels, malls, and even a West Coast version of the Statue of Liberty. But as you probably know, it eventually became a tourist attraction,

which welcomes more than a million of visitors every year. If you hadn't told me that it was really boring, I would want to go. Don't go. Sorry, Alcatraz tourism board, but I was bored. Source it up a bit. I want to hear about, you know, like put a guy in a hand. and say there's ghosts. That's what people want to hear. Fucking out. So tepid. And that is where we're going to have to leave it. So for anyone who came into today's episode hoping that we'd cover the takeover of the island in the early 70s by Native American activists,

so it's not this time, maybe another day, because it is far too cool to gloss over and another shorthand will be coming down the line. So come back for that, the story of their 19-month occupation, which caused massive changes in federal policy, and kick-started the red power movement. movement. For now we're going to leave you with a quote from the last prisoner to leave Alcatraz. As he stepped onto his boat, in front of a crowd of reporters and photographers, he looked up and told them, Alcatraz was never no good for nobody. Apart from the tourism board, apparently. Yeah, because they're fucking dining out on that boring shit. I'm sure. Anyway, that's it, guys. We hope you learn something. And you should go watch The Rock instead of going to do a tour of Alcatraz.

And we'll see you next time. Goodbye. Goodbye.