M.

Spencer Green / AP Photo

A rope dangles from a window on the back side of the Metropolitan
Correctional Center Tuesday, in Chicago. Two convicted bank robbers
used a knotted rope or bed sheets to escape from the federal prison
window high above downtown Chicago early Tuesday.

1 of 2 escaped Chicago inmates arrested, according to FBI
By The Associated Press
on December 21, 2012 at 10:15 AM, updated December 21, 2012 at 10:31 AM
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CHICAGO (AP) One of the two bank robbers
who made a daring escape from a high-rise federal
jail in Chicago was arrested after a dayslong
manhunt, an FBI spokeswoman said early Friday.
Special Agent Joan Hyde said Joseph "Jose" Banks
was captured without incident in Chicago. Agents
and officers from the Chicago FBI's Violent Crimes
Task Force, along with officers from the Chicago
Police Department, arrested Banks about 11:30
p.m. Thursday, Hyde told The Associated Press in
an email.
The search continued for Kenneth Conley, who fled
the jail with Banks early Tuesday.
Banks, 37, and Conley, 38, somehow broke a large
hole into the bottom of a 6-inch wide window of
the Metropolitan Correctional Center, dropped a makeshift rope made of bed sheets out and climbed down about 20
stories to the ground.
The escape went unnoticed for hours, with surveillance video from a nearby street showing the two hopping into a
cab shortly before 3 a.m. Tuesday. They had changed out of their orange jail-issued jumpsuits.
When the facility did discover the two men were gone around 7 a.m., what was found revealed a meticulously
planned escape, including clothing and sheets shaped to resemble a body under blankets on beds, bars inside a
mattress and even fake bars in the cells.
A massive manhunt involving state, federal and local law enforcement agencies was
launched, as SWAT teams stormed into the home of a relative of Conley only to learn
the two escapees had been there and left. The authorities searched other area homes
and businesses even a strip club where Conley once worked.
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AP Photo
This undated photo
provided by the FBI shows
, Kenneth Conley, left and
Jose Banks.

Law enforcement officials left a host of questions unanswered, including how the men
could collect about 200 feet of bed sheets and what they might have used to break
through the wall of the federal facility.
Banks, known as the Second-Hand Bandit because he wore used clothes during his
heists, was convicted last week of robbing two banks and attempting to rob two others. Authorities say he stole
almost $600,000, and most of that still is missing.
During trial, he had to be restrained because he threatened to walk out of the courtroom. He acted as his own
attorney and verbally sparred with the prosecutor, at times arguing that U.S. law didn't apply to him because he was
a sovereign citizen of a group that was above state and federal law.
Conley pleaded guilty last October to robbing a Homewood Bank last year of nearly $4,000. Conley, who worked at
the time at a suburban strip club, wore a coat and tie when he robbed the bank and had a gun stuffed in his
waistband.
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