Ex-FBI Agent Claims Staff Involvement Essential in New Orleans Jail Break

A former FBI agent, with a decade-long experience in tracking down fugitives, believes that staff members at the Orleans Parish Jail were likely aware of and aided the large-scale escape of 10 individuals last Friday.

Scott Duffey, who dedicated 22 years of his life to the FBI and spent ten of those years focusing on fugitive cases, concluded his career as a supervisory special agent. He currently serves as the director of the Wilmington University Criminal Justice Institute in Delaware.

According to Duffey, it would be nearly impossible for 10 people to break out of a jail without assistance from insiders or without insiders being aware of any plans for an escape.

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.