They Escaped a 17-Story Prison Using Dental Floss

Dec 11, 2025
At 3 AM on a freezing December night in 2012, two convicted bank robbers climb out of a 17th-floor window of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago, trusting their lives to a 200-foot rope made of stolen bedsheets and braided dental floss. This supposedly “escape-proof” triangular skyscraper prison was built with window slits too narrow for a human head, yet Jose Banks—better known to the FBI as the “Second-Hand Bandit”—and fellow inmate Kenneth Conley somehow manage to smash through concrete, remove steel bars, and vanish into the darkness above the Chicago streets, with more than half a million dollars in stolen bank money still missing. This video unpacks how an ordinary cell on a high-rise tier turned into the launchpad for one of the most audacious Chicago prison escapes in modern true crime history, and how two desperate men tried to beat a system designed so they would never walk free again.

Inside, guards think Banks and Conley are sleeping: the beds are filled with decoys, the real bars have been swapped for convincing fakes, and a malfunctioning camera leaves the outside wall unwatched until a bedsheet rope is spotted flapping against the glass hours too late. From there, our true crime documentary follows the fallout—an FBI manhunt racing through Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs, a federal judge who has already been threatened from the defense table, and a prison system forced to admit that its “escape-proof” design isn’t nearly as secure as it believed. What really drove Jose Banks and Kenneth Conley to risk a 17-story fall: fear of an 80-year sentence, the lure of the missing $540,000, or something darker? And how did this skyscraper jailbreak change federal prison security, the FBI’s hunt for fugitives, and the lives of everyone pulled into this unbelievable prison break story?

If you found this escape story compelling, subscribe to PLAN: ESCAPE for more investigations into real-life breakouts—from maximum-security prisons to escapes from captivity, cults, and war zones—mapping the planning, execution, manhunts, and aftermath.

DISCLAIMER: Great effort is made to ensure all materials in PLAN: ESCAPE videos fall within the guidelines of fair use. No copyright infringement is intended. If you are or represent the copyright owner of any materials inadvertently used in this video and have an issue with its use, please contact me at [email protected]
, and I will respond as soon as possible.