The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks Read online

  Paul Simpson is the author and co-author of over a dozen non-fiction books including the recently released A Brief History of the Spy. He has edited and contributed to numerous international entertainment magazines and currently oversees the news and reviews website SciFiBulletin.com.

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  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

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  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

  Copyright © Paul Simpson, 2013

  The right of Paul Simpson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  UK ISBN: 978-1-47210-023-8 (paperback)

  UK ISBN: 978-1-47210-024-5 (ebook)

  First published in the United States in 2013 by Running Press Book Publishers,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

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  US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4940-8

  US Library of Congress Control Number: 2012944636

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  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

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  “The best-run prison in the world is going to have an occasional escape. We’ve had escapes and will have them again. I am sure, as long as there are prisoners. To ask that a prison have no escapes is like expecting a police department to prevent robberies altogether.”

  Fred T. Wilkinson, assistant Federal Director of Prisons, 13

  June 1962, after the Great Escape from Alcatraz,

  quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  For Sophie, who is developing a keen interest in history, particularly the Horrible parts!

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  BETWEEN THE LINES

  1

  Food Truck to Freedom: The Maze 1983

  2

  Breaking the Heart of Midlothian: The Edinburgh Tollbooth

  3

  The Book Smuggler: Hans de Groot 1621

  4

  The Prince and the Pauper: Napoleon III 1846

  5

  The Outlaw’s Last Escape: Billy the Kid 1881

  6

  Getting Even With the Bankers: John Dillinger 1934

  7

  The Unknown Great Escape: San Cristobal 1938

  8

  Cheating the Death Camp: Treblinka 1942

  9

  Getting the Axe: Frank Mitchell 1966

  10

  Caught Because They Could: Frank Abagnale 1971

  11

  The World’s Most Impregnable Prison?: Tim Jenkin 1979

  12

  A Monument to Failure: The Mecklenburg Six 1984

  13

  Checking Out of Hotel K 1990

  14

  Sealed with a Kiss: Christopher Glover 1995

  15

  Hide and Seek: Daniel Mitchem 1995

  16

  A Trucking Great Escape: Jay Junior Sigler 1998

  17

  Love on the Run: Terry Banks & Lynnette Barnett 1999

  18

  Caught in the Net: William Davis & Douglas Gray 2001

  19

  A Final Smell of the Grass: Charles Thompson 2005

  20

  Escaping a Dog’s Life: John Manard 2006

  21

  Nursing a Grudge: Billy Jack Fitzmorris 2007

  UP, UP AND AWAY

  22

  A Towering Achievement: The Tower of London 1100 onwards

  23

  A Heavenly Breakout: St John of the Cross 1578

  24

  Tunnelling Out of the Attic: Casanova 1624

  25

  The Prison Breaker: Jack Sheppard 1724

  26

  Anchoring the Giant: William Perry 1892

  27

  Bringing Out the Big Guns: Roger Tuohy 1935

  28

  Escape from Scotland’s Gulag: Johnny Ramensky 1938

  29

  Making Dummies in Internment: Joe O’Hagan 1955

  30

  The Real-Life Fugitive?: Alfie Hinds 1959

  31

  The Escape That Changed the Law: Ronald Ryan 1965

  32

  Their Mission, Should They Choose to Accept It . . . : The Great Train Robbers 1965

  33

  The Camper Escape: George Blake 1966

  34

  Nothing to Lose: John McVicar 1968

  35

  Swooping Down to Freedom: Joel Kaplan 1971

  36

  The Longest Hunt: Linda Darby 1972

  37

  Bird in the Sky: Seamus Twomey et al 1973
>
  38

  Hearing the Foxes Bark: Dale Remling 1975

  39

  American as Apple Pie: Garrett Brock Trapnell 1978

  40

  Checking Out of the Hilton: David McMillan 1983

  41

  Escaping into Prison: Orlando Boquete 1985

  42

  Back to Badness: Christopher Binse 1992

  43

  The Lucky Escaper: Tony Artrip 1997

  44

  The King of Escapers Takes Off: Pascal Payet 1998

  45

  Florida Getaway: Steven Whitsett 2000

  46

  Knoch-out Blow: Lee John Knoch 2001

  47

  Slipping the Supermax: James Robert Thomas 2001

  48

  A Rubbish Escape: Ted Maher 2003

  49

  Shawshank Redux: Otis Blunt & Jose Espinosa 2007

  THE BERLIN WALL

  50

  My City, My Prison: The Story of the Berlin Wall (1961–1989)

  GETTING OFF THE ISLAND

  51

  The Hour of Need: Mary Queen of Scots 1584

  52

  Escaping the Gentlest Jail: Napoleon 1815

  53

  The Real Papillons: Devil’s Island 1890–1945

  54

  Farewell to the Rock: Alcatraz 1935–1962

  55

  Catching the Midnight Express: Billy Hayes 1975

  PRISONERS OF WAR

  56

  Where the Wind Blows: André Devigny 1942

  57

  The Greatest Escapes?: POW Escapes in Germany & England 1943

  58

  Free as a Bird: Colditz 1944

  59

  A Christian Helper: Ward Millar 1951

  60

  So Near And Yet So Far: Bud Day 1964

  TUNNELLING FOR FREEDOM

  61

  Like Rats From a Trap: The Yankees in Libby Prison 1864

  62

  This Room For Rent: The Tupamaros 1971

  63

  The Darkest Day: Claude Eugene Dennis 1978

  64

  Containing the Taliban: 2004 to date

  Afterword

  Appendix

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  If we’re honest with ourselves, no one wants to be caged up. The thought that our entire lives are at the dictate of others, and that we’ve lost control of our day-to-day existence, is horrifying. But most members of society agree that there are elements who need to be kept away from the general populace. This isn’t the place for a discussion about whether a propensity for criminal actions is a form of mental illness, or what defines a crime: people are put behind bars, and others are charged with keeping them there. And the ones who are inside often want to get out – preferably much earlier than the due process of law will allow.

  The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks was inspired, in part, by the TV series Prison Break, which starred Wentworth Miller as Michael Scofield, a young man whose brother, Lincoln Burrows, was incarcerated because he had been framed for murder. In order to help free Linc, Michael committed a crime so he could be sent to the same prison, Fox River Penitentiary, but before he did so, he had a complete blueprint of the facility tattooed onto his body. Although Prison Break got progressively sillier as the seasons passed, the first year, which followed the attempts to break out of Fox River, showed the many possibilities and problems with such an escape.

  Prison escapes have formed the core of a number of classic movies – from Papillon to The Shawshank Redemption – and there’s a whole subgenre of prisoner-of-war films such as The Great Escape and The Colditz Story. Some of these are based on real incidents, magnified for the purposes of a good story; others are completely fictitious (not that that has prevented them from inspiring real-life escapes, as we will see later on.) Television has presented ‘real-life’ dramatizations of such exploits: two series of I Escaped: Real Prison Breaks have aired around the world, and many broadcasters have looked to their own country’s history for source material. Some of these stories are retold in this book, although all of the assertions made in these documentaries have been re-examined and quite often found to be overly generalised.

  Some of these escapes are well known, others much less so, and have often been found when a news report on one story makes a casual comment about a previous escapade. The first helicopter escape from an American jail, masterminded by conman Dale Remling, is an example of this: overlooked by compilers of such escapes, probably because it’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia listing, it’s a lovely story of a man revelling in temporary freedom.

  As well as looking at escapes from the last hundred years, we’ve delved back into history: the first escapes from the Tower of London; the flight of Mary Queen of Scots from Lochleven Castle; the miraculous acrobatics of a young monk later beatified as St John of the Cross; the tunnel dug by Yankee prisoners during the American Civil War.

  Each entry has been cross-checked with as many primary sources as possible: the Newspaper Archive website and Google News both have scans of newspapers from around the globe, and it’s been interesting reading how five different papers have treated the same core information. Many escapees have written their own accounts of their exploits, and these have been matched with the contemporary reports where possible (and the occasional piece of ‘unreliable narration’ commented on). Some of the breakouts have given rise to urban myths that have eventually been presented as gospel; where possible, we have identified these. What follows aren’t definitive accounts, of course, but hopefully present a wide perspective.

  Inevitably there are a few stories that didn’t make the cut for this volume, sometimes eliminated because it was simply impossible to find any form of corroborating evidence. An escape from a Mexican jail in which the participants managed to tunnel their way up into the courtroom in which they had been sentenced is a great tale, and worthy of inclusion in Steven Pile’s Book of Heroic Failures, but as it isn’t referenced elsewhere, it isn’t expanded upon here. (Equally, trying to find those references led to a detailed account of another escape from a Mexican jail that we’d not heard of previously, which does feature.)

  The book is divided into three main sections. Prisoners can go over the fences that pen them in – whether it’s a fifteen-feet-high metal obstacle with barbed wire on the top, or the full might of the Berlin Wall – or they can tunnel beneath them (although there aren’t that many of those outside of prisoner-of-war tales). The third alternative, which often leads to the most daring exploits, sees prisoners trying to go out through the gates that have been slammed shut behind them – hiding inside a dog basket, perhaps, or within a food lorry, or, as in the case of Frank Abagnale, persuading the jailors to open the doors themselves.

  Each escape is different, and in this book we don’t judge those who are doing the escaping. Details of the crimes (if crimes they were) are given, as well as a brief note of what happened to the escapees after the end of the hunt for them. But the focus is on getting from point A (inside the prison) to point B (outside).

  We start with one of the most daring escapes of modern times, when, in 1983, nearly forty members of the Irish Republican Army broke out of the highest security prison in Western Europe . . .

  Paul Simpson

  January 2013

  PART I: BETWEEN THE LINES

  Food Truck to Freedom

  Prisoners – particularly those who feel that they have nothing left to lose, such as those serving life sentences – will take advantage of any chink that they find in the security of the establishment in which they are being held. It usually doesn’t matter to them whether the escape happens tomorrow, next week or next year, just so long as they can finally get away over, through, or under the walls that are keeping them away from the life they want to lead.

  Political prisoners often regard themselves as prisoners-of-war with the same concomitant duty to escape, and during the years of
the struggle in Northern Ireland, those who were held by the British considered it an absolute imperative to get free in order to continue the fight. Equally, those holding them were resolutely trying to ensure that they didn’t have that opportunity.

  When the Maze prison was designed, with its many high-security features, no one would have guessed that the weak point would be a lorry that carried food and other items around the camp. But on 25 September 1983, thirty-eight highly dangerous members of the Irish Republican Army used that lorry to break out – and had it not been for a slight delay in its schedule for the day, they would probably have been able to drive out through the gates. As it was, it got them as far as the “airlock” before the final gate, from where they were able to escape mostly over the fence.

  The Maze prison had grown into a huge maximum-security prison on the site of the Long Kesh internment camp, a set of Nissen huts on a disused RAF airfield about nine miles southwest of Belfast in Northern Ireland. The British government’s reaction to the problems with holding IRA prisoners following the introduction of interment in 1971 had been the creation of eight H-Blocks, which were designed as the ultimate in prisoner control. Named after their shape of a capital H, each “leg” of the H was a “wing”, a self-contained prison unit, with the “bar” of the H forming the “circle”, the nerve centre of the unit. Prisoners were not meant to be able to move between wings except under guard, and there were barriers between the wings and the circle to prevent movement. Within the circle were the areas for the prison guards, as well as the Emergency Control Room (ECR) which housed the alarms, a telephone and a radio.