Unbelievable Escapes That Defied All Odds: 8 Prison Breaks You Have to See to Believe
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IRA prisoners Bobby Storey and Gerry Kelly were able to facilitate the smuggling of six firearms into the prison to aid in their escape. The guns were distributed among fellow their IRA prisoners, who used the weapons to overpower the prison officers, take them hostage, and seize control of the H7 prison block. They then commandeered a food delivery truck at gunpoint and loaded nearly 40 prisoners into the vehicle to be smuggled out.
When prison officers at the main gate stopped the truck, a fight between the guards and prisoners broke out, leading to the death of one officer and seriously injuring several others. Ultimately, 38 of the prisoners were able to make their way through the main gate and escape. Though 19 prisoners were recaptured within days, half of those who broke free were able to successfully decamp to Ireland, the United States, or mainland Europe.
The ordeal was a huge embarrassment for the British government and became an indispensable piece of propaganda for the IRA in their campaign against the British occupation of Ireland.
The 1962 Alcatraz Escape
On the evening of June 11, 1962, Clarence Englin, John Englin, and Frank Morris escaped from the notorious maximum security federal prison located on San Francisco Bay’s Alcatraz Island. They were well acquainted with one another through prior incarcerations.
Morris, the Englin brothers, and fellow inmate Allen West began formulating their plan to break free in late 1961. Under Morris’s leadership, the gang spent months widening the opening in the ventilation ducts within their cells; they concealed their progress from guards using pieces of cardboard. Eventually, the men were able to slip into the ventilation ducts to access an empty floor of their cellblock, where they set up an ad hoc shipyard.
They then assembled a raft using dozens of raincoats and other materials filched from across the prison (their creation was inspired by a design Morris had seen in an issue of Popular Mechanics). After placing cleverly assembled papier-mâché busts in their bunks to avoid detection by the guards, the group—with the exception of West, whose cell ventilation opening hardened, stopping his escape—convened on the prison’s roof before shimmying down a ventilation pipe, hopping a barbed wire fence, and setting sail on their improvised raft from the island’s northeast shore. They boarded the raft sometime around 10 p.m. on June 11, 1962, and set sail for Angel Island. But the trio was never seen again.
The group’s absence was not discovered until the following morning, by which time they were long gone. The FBI launched an investigation and authorities deemed the men almost certainly drowned. That didn’t stop the ordeal from becoming the subject of widespread conspiracy theories and speculation in the years to come. Alcatraz was officially closed as a federal penitentiary less than a year later, though it still remains open today as a museum and macabre tourist attraction.
El Chapo’s Escapes
Joaquín Guzmán, better known as El Chapo (a Spanish nickname meaning “shorty”), is an internationally notorious drug lord said to be responsible for the deaths of thousands while heading the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the largest global criminal enterprises. He’s currently serving a life sentence in ADX Florence, a federal maximum security prison in the Colorado Rockies. But before that, El Chapo managed two daring escapes from prison before his final arrest in 2016.
He pulled off his first escape in 2001 while serving a 20-year sentence in a maximum security prison near Guadalajara, Mexico. Though he’s said to have enjoyed an incredibly luxurious lifestyle while incarcerated in Mexico, his escape was prompted by a looming extradition to the United States on money laundering charges. El Chapo bribed dozens of the prison’s staff and was successfully smuggled out of the facility in a laundry cart. He then spent more than 13 years on the lam.
After more than a decade of murder and marauding, El Chapo was arrested again in 2014 at a beachfront hotel with his family. He was indicted on drug trafficking charges in Mexico, but was able to delay his extradition to the United States by filing numerous injunctions. He escaped incarceration once more while awaiting trial via a tunnel that led from the shower of his cell to a staged construction site nearly a mile away. When authorities finally discovered the tunnel, they found a meticulously constructed escape route complete with a complex ventilation system and modified railway to transport tools and earth.
The drug kingpin was caught again after he was arrested following a shootout with authorities on January 8, 2016. He spent another year in a Mexican prison before finally being extradited to the United States in early 2017. Following a months-long trial in New York, El Chapo was convicted of more than a dozen charges including murder, money laundering, and drug trafficking; he was given a lifelong prison sentence.
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