Did you think it was incredible that two escaped prisoners, armed with just the clothes on their back and the lingering love of a married prison guard (and possibly weapons), managed to evade thousands of police officers for more than three weeks? It was. And, according to the New York Times, probably unintentionally aided by law enforcement.

The Times has a long report on the law enforcement response, which was apparently marred by poor communication, ego, and wholly unnecessary screw-ups that began the moment the men were discovered missing.

Here are the most egregious reported screw-ups:

1. The town sheriff drove off to a random mountain with visions of capturing the prisoners single-handedly.

Without clear orders, Sheriff Favro acted on his own hunches. He drove to Lyon Mountain, about 10 miles from the prison, after he learned of the escape, thinking it might offer the kind of rural, out-of-the-way route the men might take.

He said he imagined himself bringing them in. “Local hero comes in with two guys in the back of his truck would have been nice,” he said. “Never saw anything.”

2. Cops initially thought the inmates were still inside the prison.

In the dawn hours of June 6, after Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat’s cell beds were found to be holding dummies fashioned out of sweatshirts, investigators initially believed the inmates were stuck in the prison’s system of tunnels.

3. It took them three hours to find the open manhole through which the prisoners emerged into free society.

Only after they discovered an open manhole about 400 feet outside the prison did the police understand the killers had emerged from it, David Favro, the sheriff of Clinton County, said. Mr. Favro was informed of the open manhole at 8:30 a.m., three hours after the men were found missing, he said.

4. Governor Andrew Cuomo immediately kicked all the local cops out of the investigation.

Sheriff Favro’s frustration was compounded when Mr. Cuomo arrived at the command center and told him and all the other non-state employees to leave, said a close friend of the sheriff’s, David Andrews, the director of the local radio station WIRY. Mr. Andrews said Mr. Favro was angered at being notified of the escape so late, and was astonished that Mr. Cuomo had asked him to leave.

“At first they were asked to leave, and he said, ‘But I’m the sheriff,’ ” Mr. Andrews recalled. “Then they were told they had to leave. He was furious and went home.”

5. With no clear directives, local cops “hoped to get lucky.”

Sheriff Favro declined to discuss the governor’s arrival in detail, but he said after that, he and his team of deputies got little guidance from the State Police officials who were directing the investigation. The deputies “just kind of roved around hoping to get lucky,” he said.

6. Investigators unintentionally confused and terrified residents.

Residents kept in the dark about search plans were sometimes startled by officers climbing into their garages or homes. Beth Schiller, of Willsboro, came home to her 100-acre property, where she rarely locked the doors, to find her .22-caliber rifle missing from the corner of her sunroom. There was no note saying officers had entered the home, and a group of troopers who went inside with her said they had no idea why it was missing. They told her to call her husband, a physician, to see if he had it with him at work.

Only later was she able to determine that officers had found it during a search and taken it for safety. That night, after several rounds of paperwork, the State Police gave it back to her and her husband.

7. Investigators didn’t have accurate maps.

In Willsboro, N.Y., 35 miles southeast of the prison, Shaun Gillilland, the town supervisor, said he drove to the local command center after a friend told him, “My yard is full of cops.” There had been a sighting of two men on foot near a rural road. He found several state and federal officials gathered around the back of a pickup truck, scrutinizing a map whose scale he said was too small to show the uneven geography.

And still, somehow, Cuomo says the manhunt was a victory, which it was, technically, in that both prisoners are now off the street, three weeks after they escaped.

“The state police right now on this manhunt did better than they’ve ever done,” Cuomo said Monday after Sweat was captured. Which makes one wonder—how bad was it before?

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.