ShortHand: Alcatraz – Escape from Devil's Island

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
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 US'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 in. 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.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:17)
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 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 home-made 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.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:16)
Considering the rogue's 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 Isla de los Alcatraes. Alcatraes 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.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:05)
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 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 flex it had been before.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:11)
So the government started to look at the fort's other strengths, namely isolation. Its high walls, barren rocks and milder freezing ocean separated it from the big city, making it the perfect prison.
Its first inmates were people captured during the Civil War, Confederate sympathisers, deserters and civilians accused of treason. But soon enough it was also full of all sorts of miscreants, the scapees, 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 had 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.

**SPEAKER_2** (5:10)