9781422271018

escapes from the World War II Nazi prison castle Colditz and the three-tunnel outbreak of 76 prisoners from the Nazi prison Stalag Luft III, where only three survived the escape, and German soldiers killed 50 and recaptured 23 soldiers. The audacious plot became the basis for the movie The Great Escape . In the category of criminal escapes, an English Jesuit priest named Father John Gerard managed the most unlikely maneuver. Imprisoned in the Tower of London in the 1590s for spreading the beliefs of the Catholic Church, his fellow believers broke him out of prison on October 4, 1597, by rowing a boat across the Tower’s moat and throwing a rope up to him. Gerard nearly plummeted into the moat while sliding down the rope due to damage to his hands from torture, but he made it safely into the boat, which the other Catholics then rowed to safety. Joaquín Guzmán Loera, aka “El Chapo,” is a Mexican drug lord who was head of the Sinaloa cartel, the world’s most powerful drug-trafficking organization.

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El Chapo