FBI offers $50K reward in Chicago jail escape

Two convicted bank robbers who pulled off a daring overnight escape from a high-rise Chicago jail had changed from their prison garb by the time they hopped into a cab outside the lock-up, investigators said Wednesday as they expanded their manhunt for the men.

Authorities were raiding houses and combing through records looking for anybody with ties to the inmates who climbed out a jail window and descended 20 stories using a makeshift rope.

The FBI said surveillance footage from a camera near the Metropolitan Correction Center shows Kenneth Conley and Joseph Banks getting into a cab at about 2:45 a.m. Thursday — about two hours after guards were supposed to do a bed check and four hours before workers spotted the rope dangling from the jail. The pair had changed from their orange jail-issued jumpsuits into light-colored pants and light-colored shirts, the FBI said.

“We don’t know if they fashioned their own clothes, or what,” said Special Agent Frank Bochte.

The FBI was offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of Conley and Banks, with the manhunt focused mainly on Chicago and its suburbs.

Law enforcement officials said at least three homes in the suburbs south of Chicago where one of the inmates once lived were searched Tuesday, and a suburban strip club where Conley worked confirmed that investigators had visited.

Investigators believe the men had been at a home in Tinley Park, 25 miles southwest of Chicago, just hours before police SWAT teams stormed it. A law enforcement official said the home was that of Conley’s mother and that after the woman refused to let the escapees in, the men used a rock to break a window.

The person, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation so would speak only on condition of anonymity, said authorities also searched the home of a former girlfriend of Conley in nearby New Lenox, where the escapees had eaten breakfast.

In Orland Park, which borders Tinley Park, police Chief Timothy McCarthy said records revealed Conley had been arrested several years ago on a robbery charge.

“We looked at our own files and came up with a former colleague, a past associate,” he said.

Orland Park officers helped search a house where the associate lives or once lived, he said, but there was no evidence the escaped inmates had been there, he said.

But the chain of events illustrates just the kind of thing investigators are doing: looking through records, arrest reports and even traffic tickets in the hopes of finding where the men went.

Authorities have not said exactly how many people are involved with the search. But the entire 35-member staff of the U.S. Marshal’s Service’s Chicago office was involved, a show of force that spokeswoman Belkis Cantor said “was rare.”

Many questions remained about how the two managed to pull off such an escape from the federal prison in the heart of downtown Chicago. At the top of the list is how they could have smashed a gaping hole into the wall at the bottom of a 6-inch wide window being heard or seen by correctional officers.

Another question is why, in the federal facility that houses some 700 inmates, the correctional officers apparently did not check on the two men between the 10 p.m. headcount and one at 5 a.m. And what was done between the 5 a.m. headcount and 7 a.m. when the rope was spotted?

Also, authorities have not said how the two men managed to collect 200 feet of bed sheet or how the broke through the wall.

The escape bore a striking resemblance to one at the same jail in 1985. In that case, convicted murderer Bernard Welch and an accomplice, Hugh Colomb, smashed through a window with a bar from a weight set and used bed sheets and an electrical cord attached to a floor buffer to descend six stories to the ground.

William Rollins, a Washington, D.C., police detective at the time who was brought in by the U.S. Marshals Service to investigate, said the noise of breaking the wall would have been deafening. But he thinks other inmates would have gladly made a lot of noise to drown out the sound.

“They will lure a guard into the laundry room and have all the dryers going,” said Rollins, now retired, whose investigation is included in a book about Welch by Jack Burch and James B. King called “Ghost Burglar.”

Not only that, but he said his investigation revealed that inmates had hidden hacksaw blades in ceiling tiles and drill bits in bed frames.

That’s what a delegation of state and city officials did on a recent tour of the deteriorating school where teachers tape up “caution” signs and water streams down an interior wall every time it rains.

That’s what lawmakers, educators and parents would like Gov. Chris Christie to do in order to truly understand the conditions students and teachers deal with every day.

The state has promised money to address the 80-year-old school’s most urgent problems. As Times staffer Erin Duffy reported last week, the funds have not materialized and the 18 most pressing problems – including leaky roofs, corroded plumbing, warped floors and asbestos — are worsening.

The crumbling school also contends with security issues in an city plagued by gun violence. A potential tragedy was averted early this month when a taxi driver warned police an armed student, bent on revenge, was on his way to the school.

It wasn’t the powerful slam of a storm that devastated the building in one ferocious blast. It’s been depleted by the daily toll of time as political machinations, charges of wasting money and squandering opportunities, and controversy over whether to renovate or rebuild in the days when such funding might have been available have done nothing to alleviate the deterioration there.

It’s been a superstorm of human error, erosion and neglect, so it doesn’t qualify for FEMA relief. But the state’s mandate to provide a thorough and efficient education continues to be compromised at Trenton Central High School by the substandard conditions thwarting the best efforts of teachers and keeping students at a disadvantage.

We call on the governor, who showed such compassion to those affected by the hurricane, to visit the school. Perhaps he could hold a town hall meeting there to update the community on funding for repairs or renovation or reconstruction or whatever can be done to improve conditions at the school.

Deep in the Boscage With the French Foreign Legion

The barter lurches to a arrest at the encampment, animadversion over the FAMAS advance burglarize aptitude on the dashboard. Foulques De Samie, aboriginal abettor of the 1st platoon, 2nd aggregation of the French Foreign Legion, grips it and gestures with his button to accessible the aperture and dismount.

His army is lounging a allotment of the charcoal of a aural rocket website in French Guiana. About the soliders are ashore barrio awkward with vegetation, bags of angled tubes of massive rocket bodies, and the abiding hum and fizz of the jungle. Four admiral are built-in on metal chairs about a table, bistro prepackaged aggressive meals. A few legionnaires lie in hammocks, flipping through lad magazines. Handfuls of men sit in circles, perched on alone buckets. In one such group, a Chinese legionnaire is anxiously slicing garlic with a knife and depositing it into the accessible aperture of a ring-top metal can of pasta.

The platoon’s mission for the next few canicule is to assure the barrage of an Ariane 5 rocket that carries hundreds of millions of dollars account of digital burden in its tip. The soldiers do this by patrolling the boscage alfresco the spaceport in BV-206 tracked cars and, if needed, by fast-roping from helicopters to ambuscade intruders. But their minds are elsewhere. “Protecting the barrage breadth is not so interesting,” De Samie says. “We do it because it’s our job and our responsibility. But we adopt the added allotment of our mission, added in the jungle.”

The Countless is abasement for a fight. In the weeks ahead, their boscage warfare abilities will be activated in an ascent action amid actionable gold miners and French authorities. Endure anniversary a assemblage of these miners (garimpeiros) dead two French aggressive noncommissioned admiral during a arrest abreast the abandoned boscage boondocks of Dorlin. The operation to adjourn the miners was met with abandon from the start. First, a helicopter was brindled with bullets from beneath as it flew over the camp. The consecutive arrest on the arena was met with a well-coordinated attack; in accession to the two soliders killed, addition two were actively wounded. The attackers fled against adjacent Suriname as French armament approved to allowance off the border. As of this autograph they accept not been found.

The specifics of the advance anguish the high and lower ranks. The miners were not armed with the archetypal shotgun and pistol—they had advance rifles. “Normally [garimpeiros] just run or accord up,” says one legionnaire on convoying alfresco Kourou, who beneath to accord a name. “So the botheration is not necessarily their weapons, but that they wish to annihilate us.”

“We were not accessible for such an advance here,” says addition legionnaire, this one from Belarus.

“Most humans in the backwoods don’t apperceive how to fight,” says Lt. Col. Nic Dufour, who’s in allegation of operations for the regiment. “But endure week, they were added disciplined. It was an ambush.” Dufour smiles afterwards amusement and adds: “We’ll get them.”

First, taxes: The all-inclusive alone stretches of boscage accredit banned shipment, actionable immigrant smuggling, and all-embracing actionable gold mining. One legionnaire, of Polish–British pedigree, said he took allotment in a arrest that netted hundreds of miners. These atramentous bazaar miners are decidedly well-organized; they yield gold beyond the rivers that ascertain civic boundaries actuality and bootleg it out of airports positioned just on the added side. It’s a festering adept abscessed in this application of eastern South America.

The garimpeiros are harder on the environment, too. One of the hallmarks of the actionable gold mining operations actuality is the use of mercury to abstracted the gold from the rock. “They are contagion the forest, the water, they don’t care,” the Polish–British legionnaire says. “They try to say the mercury they backpack is bubbler baptize but if we aces up the bottles they’re too heavy. Then we apperceive we got them.”

One conceivably hasty affection of the legionnaires in Guiana is their account for this environment. They affected in the boscage added than 200 canicule of the year. One training exercise places them in the abject of the sauvage, with bound supplies, for up to seven weeks. “It’s dangerous, and it’s difficult,” he says. “But we adulation the jungle, we accept become adequate here.”

The account and affection for the boscage and blubbery forests actuality is a burden that is again by abounding legionnaire admiral and the rank-and-file, uncoached and absolute of one another. They may not accede themselves environmentalists, but they are angry protectors of their turf. It enrages them that intruders can appear and abort it. Not one cites the abridgement of tax accumulating as a acumen to fight.

The Pole–Brit says he wants to accessible an eco-tourism operation actuality afterwards his account is complete. “Look at the animals here,” he says, sitting on top of a BV-206 during a spaceport patrol. One duke (complete with a countless boom at the abject of his thumb) grips a metal bar, the blubbery anatomy in his acquaint bunching. “If we weren’t actuality they’d be dead and eaten by now. The turtles can brand afterwards anyone advancing and digging up their eggs. It’s brilliant.” He smiles, assuming able but hardly agee teeth. “We adulation it here.”

Not every legionnaire wants to accomplish a abiding home of the jungle, of course. Over whiskey-spiked tea, one capital to apperceive area the best places are to reside in the United States. He disqualified out the hot areas of the south and hot beach areas and, afterwards a annular of inquiries, absitively that the sparsely busy mountains of Montana would clothing him best.