Frank Lee Morris knew that a good prison break could not be handled alone. He needed a team and found them when he got to “The Rock,” a common nickname for Alcatraz. The team was made up of Morris, two brothers named John and Clarence Anglin, and another convict named Allen West.
The Anglin brothers were born in Georgia and grew up in Florida. Their parents were seasonal farm workers, and the family traveled the country searching for farming jobs. The Anglin family, two parents, and 13 children, would go North and pick cherries every June.
Frank Lee Morris
Frank Lee Morris was known for his great mind and ability to plan. He was cunning, highly skilled, and extremely intelligent. When he was 11, Morris became an orphan, after which he was moved from foster home to foster home. Those years taught him self-reliance and independence.
But Morris was also drawn to trouble. At the tender age of 13, he was convicted for his first crime. He was set to make his mark on the world in a most unexpected way. Frank Morris will forever be known as the man who orchestrated the great escape from Alcatraz.
A Repeat Offender
As he got older, Frank Lee Morris kept up his criminal activities and served time in prisons in a variety of states, eventually ending up in the state penitentiary of Louisiana, known as “Alcatraz of the South.” This sounds quite intimidating, but Morris was planning a big surprise.
Frank Lee Morris was serving ten years for bank robbery when the unthinkable happened – he managed to escape! Morris successfully evaded the authorities for almost a year before he was captured during another robbery. He was arrested and put away, but this time, he was sent to the notorious Alcatraz.
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.”