Former FBI fugitive tracker claims staff involvement was necessary for the “impossible” large prison escape in New Orleans

According to a former FBI agent with a decade of experience hunting fugitives, it is highly likely that staff members at the Orleans Parish Jail were involved in or aware of the recent escape of 10 individuals. 

The ex-FBI agent, Scott Duffey, has 22 years of experience with the bureau, with a significant portion spent on fugitive tracking. Duffey retired from the FBI as a supervisory special agent and currently leads the Criminal Justice Institute at Wilmington University in Delaware. 

He emphasized that it is extremely challenging for a group of 10 prisoners to successfully flee from a correctional facility without assistance from insiders, or without the knowledge of individuals within the facility about the escape plan.

Scott Duffey spent 22 years in the FBI, including a decade hunting fugitives, before retiring as a supervisory special agent. (Fox News Digital)

“If 10 people did it, that means at least double that number knew about it,” he told Fox News Digital. “So that’s a big intel breach. And how can that happen without somebody on the inside not assisting?” 

Authorities said they are investigating whether the inmates, many of whom have been charged with heinous violent crimes, had help from jail staff. Three employees have been suspended pending the ongoing investigation. 

Guzman was recaptured by Mexican authorities in 2016, extradited to the U.S. the following year and found guilty in 2019 of numerous criminal charges related to his cartel activities. He was sentenced to life in prison in Colorado’s ADX Florence, a supermax facility in Colorado. 

Authorities escort Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman from a plane in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. (U.S. law enforcement via AP)

On Dec. 13, 2000, seven men, later dubbed the “Texas 7,” escaped from the John B. Connally Unit, a maximum-security prison near Kenedy, Texas, by overpowering the guards. They stole a cache of weapons on their way out of the facility and went on a vicious crime spree. 

Two of the men were serving life sentences for murder at the time of the escape. 

On Christmas Eve of that year, the men held up a sporting goods store and shot and killed responding Irving Police Officer Aubry Wright Hawkins. 

Between Jan. 22–24, 2001, after the airing of an episode of “America’s Most Wanted” that featured the men, six of them were captured. The seventh committed suicide before he could be taken into custody. 

This photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows death-row inmate Joseph Garcia, who died by lethal injection in 2018.

They were all tried and convicted of Hawkins’ murder and sentenced to death. 

Michael Anthony Rodriguez, one of the seven, waived his appeals after his conviction and was executed in 2008.

In 2012, the ringleader of the escaped prison gang, George Rivas, was put to death for the murder. Another escapee, Donald Newbury, was executed in 2015. A fourth, Joseph Garcia, was executed in 2018. 

In 2019, the executions of the last two escapees were stayed. 

Perhaps the most storied prison escape in American history occurred on June 11, 1962, from the infamous Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco.  

On that day, Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin, all convicted bank robbers, escaped from the prison through air ducts and an unguarded hallway after they placed papier-mâché model heads bearing their likenesses inside their own beds, tricking the guards. 

Low fog swirls around Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, Sept. 16, 2020, in Berkeley, Calif. (Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

They boarded a makeshift raft and paddled away from the island, never to be seen again. It is believed they drowned in San Francisco Bay. 

A fourth potential escapee, Allen West, did not make it off the island.

Alcatraz has recently been in the news as President Donald Trump floated the idea of reopening the island prison.