TOP 9 facts about the famous prison Alcatraz

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Perhaps no other prison in the world can boast of such popularity as the "Rock" located in the state of California: films about it were shot, and a series, and documentaries. Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood were in this prison. True, not for crimes, but for a decent fee.

Soviet intelligence agent sat in Alcatraz

In 1950, Morton Sobell was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was the Chief Radio Engineer for General Electric and led the research team on centimeter-band radars. From him came the first information about the creation by the Americans of a missile control system for carriers of atomic warheads. Sobell was released in 1969, after 17 years and 9 months in prison.

Al Capone played in a rock band in prison

The infamous gangster was one of the first prisoners to be sent to the new federal prison, Alcatraz, in August 1934. The once almighty mafia boss became so docile that he was allowed to play the banjo in Alcatraz's Rock Islanders prison group, which even gave regular Sunday concerts for other inmates.

There have been no confirmed successful escapes from Alcatraz …

In total, there were 14 escape attempts with the participation of 34 prisoners: two tried to escape twice, seven were shot, two drowned, the rest were captured and returned to jail. Some returned and surrendered on their own, unable to swim to the mainland. Two prisoners tried to sail away from the island, but were caught. The most desperate escape attempt, dubbed "The Battle of Alcatraz", was made in 1946. In it, three prisoners were killed, two guards, and two prisoners were later executed in the gas chamber for participating in the riot.

…but it is not exactly

Most interestingly, the five fugitives are officially missing and presumably drowned. This escape attempt in 1962 inspired the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood. Their belongings were found in the San Francisco Bay, but the authorities never found their bodies, which led some to assume that the escape was a success.

Once the prisoner swam across the bay

Federal officials initially doubted that the escaped prisoners would be able to survive as they tried to swim across the cold, fast-moving waters of San Francisco Bay. In 1962, prisoner John Paul Scott smeared himself with lard, squeezed through the window and swam to the opposite shore. Upon reaching the Golden Gate Bridge, he was so emaciated that the police found him lying unconscious with severe hypothermia. Today, hundreds of people annually take a one and a half mile swim during the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon.

Alcatraz is named after seabirds

When Spanish lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala became the first known European to sail through the Golden Gate in 1775, he christened the rocky shores of La Isla de los Alcatrases “Island of the Gannets”. According to ornithologists' reports, there are no colonies of pelicans or gannets anywhere on the island or nearby, but many different species of cormorants and other large waterfowl live here. After the prison was closed on March 21, 1961, birds again became the most numerous inhabitants of the island.

In the 1960s, the Indians tried to buy the island. For a handful of glass

In November 1969, a group of nearly a hundred Native American activists took over the island. Citing an 1868 treaty that gave Native Americans unoccupied federal lands, protesters demanded that Alcatraz be ceded to establish a university and cultural center. Their proposal included the purchase of an island for $ 24 in glass beads and red cloth. The Dutch settlers paid the same price for Manhattan in 1626. The federal authorities did not like the deal, and the protesters were expelled from the island.

Alcatraz was originally a lighthouse on the Pacific coast

When a small lighthouse was built on top of the rocky island in 1854, it became the first of its kind on the west coast of the United States. The lighthouse became obsolete in the early 1900s after the US Army built a prison building that obscured the view of the Golden Gate. In 1909 it was replaced by a new, taller lighthouse, which is still in use today.

Prisoners pleaded for transfer to Alcatraz

The prison's one-person, one-cell policy appealed to some inmates because it made them less vulnerable to attacks from other inmates. Alcatraz's first boss, James A. Johnston, knew that poor food was often the cause of prison riots, so he took pride in serving good food at his establishment, and inmates might even ask for more. The prisoners had excellent leisure activities: films were shown every month in the prison, there was a library with 15,000 books and 75 subscriptions to popular magazines.