"If you break the rules of society you go to prison, if you break the rules of prisons you come to Alcatraz", this is the emblematic phrase with which the director of the most famous prison in America welcomed the dangerous outlaws that were sent to serve their prison sentence in the "fortress" of Alcatraz, an island located, about 2 km from the mainland, in the bay of San Francisco and became famous thanks to the cinema.
The 11 1934 august of the 1576 as a maximum security federal prison, known for the extreme rigidity with which the inmates were treated, including historical truths and mysteries still unresolved, the prison hosted XNUMX prisoners, by George Kelly Burns, one of the bandits most famous of the Prohibition, better known as "Machine Gun" to Alvin Karpis, "The creepy Karpis", up to the Italian American of Chicago, Al Capone.
The 11 of June 1962, three inmates, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin, succeed in the enterprise that nobody had managed to complete: they flee from Alcatraz, where they were "guests" for the crime of bank robbery. This episode is inspired by the film Fuga da Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood. With a spoonful of kitchen, they managed to scrape the wall around the ventilation ducts, left dummies on the camp beds, to gain time and reached the roof, from which they dropped and using a raft and life jackets escaped into the sea, making their tracks. Although the prison administration claimed that they had died at sea, the bodies were never found. No more was heard of the three, up to 2016, when the American media spread the contents of a letter, written in the 2013 by John Anglin and delivered to the Richmond Police Station. The text of the letter was as follows: "My name is John Anglin. I escaped from Alcatraz in June of the 1962 with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris. Now I have 83 years and I am in poor health. I have a cancer. Frank died in October 2005, he was buried under a false name. My brother died in the 2011. If I am promised that I will not be more than a year in prison, and that I will receive medical treatment, I will write to let you know exactly where I am. It's not a joke".
Nobody took the contents of the letter seriously. The agents of the US Marshals, responsible for the management and capture of the evasi, tried to detect the fingerprints, but without reaching any result. For this reason the investigations were closed after a short period, but already in the 2015 a History Channel documentary showed a picture of John and Clarence Anglin in Brazil, 13 years after the escape.
Michael Dyke, the investigator on the case, told the Associated Press that he did not know if any of the three fugitives were still alive. But he had claimed to have seen enough evidence not to exclude it. Among those trials, the flowers received for years by the mother of the two brothers Anglin, and the possible presence of the two at the funeral of the woman in the 1973, dressed in women's clothes. Today Morris would have 90 years and John and Clarence would have 86 and 87 respectively. The mystery remains.
The prison was closed 21 March 1963 for the high costs of its management: it was in fact necessary to transport on the island of food, drinking water and clothing. American politicians came to argue that it would be cheaper to keep the inmates in the most luxurious hotel in New York rather than on the island.
At the end of the 1969 seventy-eight Native Americans led by Richard Oakes, they occupied the now abandoned penitentiary. They were joined by other natives representing fifty tribes, they were called Indians of All Tribes and peacefully manifested the desire to turn the island into a Native American study center for ecology. On the wall of the penitentiary, in the area of arrival of the ferries coming from San Francisco, is still visible a written welcome for the natives who joined them: "Indians Welcome". A year and a half later the federal forces cleared the weight Indians.
GB
Photo: courier
