Tunnels, buildings discovered beneath Alcatraz prison

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Clarence Anglin refused to open his eyes for his mugshot as he arrived at Alcatraz in 1961. The night after he, his brother Clarence, and fellow inmate Frank Morris escaped, during the early morning routine bed check, it was discovered the men were gone and an intensive search began. The FBI, the Coast Guard and the Bureau of Prison authorities intensively looked for the men, but weren't successful. Their whereabouts post-escape, despite multiple theories and claims over the years, remain unknown.
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John Paul Chase was a bank robber and a member of Alvin Karpis' and Ma Barker's criminal gang before he landed at Alcatraz; he later ran with the Dillinger Gang thanks to an introduction by gangster and fellow bank robber Baby Face Nelson. Chase robbed banks for roughly a year before being sentenced to life in prison on March 31, 1935, for the deaths of federal agents Sam Cowley and Herman Hollis, who were, in reality, killed by Nelson. Chase was one of Alcatraz's longest serving inmates, racking up 19 years behind their bars.
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Pictured here in the 1970s, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary and the island it stands on can be seen from above. The infamous prison closed on March 21, 1963, after 29 years of operation.
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A view of Alcatraz island and penitentiary circa the 1930s in the San Francisco Bay. From the mid-1930s until the mid-1960s, Alcatraz ("the Rock") was America's premier maximum-security prison, the final stop for the nation's most incorrigible inmates, including Al Capone.
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John Anglin, along with his brother Clarence and Frank Morris, was one of three inmates who escaped Alcatraz grounds in 1962. The three convicts built papier-mache dummy heads and placed them in their beds to throw guards off. They then used an unused ventilator to break out and get on the roof, where they allegedly shimmied down the bakery smoke stack and snuck to the northeast short of the island.
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The main cell block that once housed the most infamous gangsters in American history is pictured on March 13, 1956.
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Archaeologists have confirmed a long-time suspicion of historians: the famed Alcatraz prison was built over a Civil War-era military fortification and researchers have found a series of buildings and tunnels under the prison yard.

By Jami Ganz | jganz@nydailynews.com | New York Daily News

PUBLISHED: March 7, 2019 at 4:15 p.m. | UPDATED: March 7, 2019 at 11:15 p.m.

Escaping from Alcatraz may have been easier than we thought.

Near Surface Geophysics published a study which utilized non-invasive tools such as terrestrial scans and ground-penetrating radar to unearth a complex under the prison yard, complete with tunnels and ammunition magazines.

Binghamton University archaeologist Timothy de Smet, who co-authored the study, spoke to PBS, saying, “These remains are so well preserved, and so close to the surface.”

The discovery of these tunnels isn’t entirely surprising to historians, which fellow Alcatraz historian and study author, John Martini, says has “long [been] suspected.”

Located on San Francisco’s Alcatraz island, the federal penitentiary, which closed in 1963, had a reputation for housing some of America’s nastiest felons, including Al Capone and Whitey Bulger. The island was initially used by the U.S. military, with Fort Alcatraz serving as “the official military prison of the West Coast” in the midst of the Civil War. PBS points out that the latter half of the 19^th century rendered Alcatraz’s defenses near obsolete.

“On a small island,” adds Martini, “There’s only so many places you can build. And it’s unlikely they went to the trouble of demolishing all this stuff.”

This breakthrough has given researchers the go-ahead to plan further testing on the island, also known as “The Rock.”