3. Zero Hour: Time to Make a Break
On the evening on June 11, 1962, the most famous prison break in history began. The men went to their cells, put the dummies in their beds, and went through the air shafts and into the interior of the wall. At the last minute, though, Allen West had a problem: instead of using cardboard to cover his tracks, he had used cement. The entire area around the air shaft in his cell was cemented shut. After all those months of planning, all of the hard work that he had put into escaping from the Rock, he wouldn’t be able even to leave his cell.
West asked his buddies to help him, and Frank Morris came to the rescue. Unfortunately, by the time he was able to get into the utility corridor, from which he would climb to the roof and make his break, the other three men had long since left. West would be unable to survive the turgid bay waters on his own, so he returned to his cell. Instead of escaping, West got a good night’s sleep. In exchange for not being charged for his role in the escape, West cooperated fully with the investigation and proved key in helping detectives figure out how the exit had gone down.