The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (41 page)

At the time, the prison authorities suggested that the first they knew of the escape was when one of the other prisoners in the cannery told them that Wright and Boquete had disappeared, but whether that or the activation of pressure pads was the cause, within minutes the search dogs had been called out. For the next three hours, a helicopter, tracking dogs, sheriff`s deputies, Belle Glade police and the Florida Highway patrol all combed the area searching for the men.

By that point Boquete and Wright had separated. Both men had risked jumping into the alligator-infested canal, but while Boquete remained in the water as long as he dared, Wright had headed swiftly for the main road. The dogs were able to follow the scent as far as Highway 715, but the prison’s Assistant Superintendent Willie Floyd had to tell reporters that “somewhere along the highway, they lost their scent”. Wright may have been picked up by an accomplice; he refused to explain what happened to him when questioned later. He was on the run for about eighteen months, and was captured in the Pacific North West.

Boquete spent two nights hiding very close to the prison, attacked by ants but aware that the intensive search for him wouldn’t go on for too long. On the third morning, he crossed the sugar-cane fields and the canals until he reached the railroad tracks. He knew from the map he had purchased that there was a truck depot not far away. However, when he reached it he realized that he was too exhausted to go much further, and after an abortive attempt to get help from his family in Miami, he asked some Mexican labourers for assistance. He joined them, working in the fields, until they all pooled their earnings, bought a truck, and headed for Miami.

For the next ten years, Orlando Boquete lived an incredible life, adopting many different identities, and staying one step ahead of the law. He kept pieces of sandpaper in his wallet, so he could rub his fingertips and make his fingerprints just that little bit different. He trained himself not to respond to his original name if called by a stranger, which saved him from recapture on more than one occasion. His good looks and charm got him into and out of many dangerous situations, up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Using fake social security numbers, or adopting those of dead people whose decease hadn’t yet registered with the authorities, Boquete was able to work. Occasionally these people were wanted for something, and he’d serve brief terms for drunk and disorderly, or driving under the influence. He worked on a construction crew inside a prison, and took clothing and other items to a fellow Cuban refugee who had been arrested and was being held in a central Florida prison on drugs charges. He spent some time working in Illinois and Arizona, disappeared to North Carolina for a time when he was warned that he needed to get away from Florida. But he kept coming back to the Cuban community, known as Little Havana, in Miami.

He was arrested repeatedly for minor offences, but in March 1995, the charge was more serious. Boquete was using the name Hilberto Rodríguez and was found with an illegal firearm. He was sentenced to a year imprisonment, but soon absconded from a work party, gaining help from a drug-dealer friend, Ulises, who he had known since he first returned to Miami after breaking out of the GCI.

Boquete stayed with Ulises, but this proved to be a mistake. When the Florida Drugs Enforcement Agency took an interest in his friend, it was Boquete who ended up arrested for possession of two pounds of marijuana. And once in the police station, the increased computer networking between jurisdictions marked his downfall. Palm Beach County were after someone with those fingerprints, and the law enforcement officers realized that Hilberto Rodríguez and Orlando Boquete were one and the same.

Given an additional year and a day to his sentence for the escape (and the time on the original award starting to run once again), Boquete faced the prospect of many more decades in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. But he was to benefit from a change in the law covering DNA testing in the state of Florida, following the case of Frank Lee Smith, an innocent man on death row whose conviction was only overturned when he was terminally ill.

Boquete applied to the Innocence Project, set up in 1992 as “a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice”. On 23 May 2006, three years after his application, he was exonerated, his conviction fully vacated by the state of Florida. There was no way that Boquete could have produced the semen which was found on the victim’s underwear, and indeed the evidence that was available in 1983, which showed his blood type excluded him as a possible perpetrator, should have been made clearer to the original court. “No words spoken by this court today . . . would do justice to the penalty that you have been required to pay for offenses that now we know conclusively that you were not guilty of committing,” Judge Richard Payne said. “You are hereby ordered to be immediately released from the custody of Florida.”

The only problem was that Boquete didn’t have permanent residency status in the United States, so was detained by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency. Was he a danger to society? The crimes he had committed while escaping – and even the escape itself – were initially held against him, but eventually, after three months, he was released.

Even then, Boquete’s story wasn’t over. He eventually was granted full American residency status on 16 November 2010, but while this lifted a threat from over his head, it didn’t help him with other problems. He should have been eligible for compensation for the time he spent wrongly incarcerated, but a loophole in the 2008 Victims of Wrongful Incarceration Compensation Act meant that a convicted felon can’t receive the $50,000 a year recompense. In February 2011, Boquete told the
Orlando Sentinel,
in broken English, “That’s a terrible law . . . The people who wrote it, they’re tricking. They’re bad people . . . I had a clean record before I went to prison.” As at the time of writing, this situation has not yet been resolved, and a man who only committed crimes after being found guilty of a much greater one that he was not responsible for, lives on the poverty line, ironically in a much worse situation than he would have been had he remained inside jail.

Sources:

Twitpic: 16 November 2010:
http://twitpic.com/37fs14

New York Times,
11 February 2007: “Fugitive”

The Innocence Project: About Us:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/about/Mission-Statement.php

The Innocence Project of Florida:
http://floridainnocence.org/

The Innocence Project:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Orlando_Boquete.php

Orlando Sentinel,
12 February 2011: “Only two of 12 Florida inmates cleared by DNA have collected money from state”

The Innocence Project, Press Release 23 May 2006: “23 Years After Conviction Based on Eyewitness Misidentification, DNA Proves Orlando Boquete’s Innocence”

Florida Sun Sentinel,
8 February 1985: “Police Lose Track of Escapees Who Fled Glades Correctional”

At the end of his latest spree in Australia, which culminated in a siege that had officers fearing that he was planning “suicide by cop”, Christopher David Binse – who had given himself the nickname “Badness” some years earlier – had escaped, or tried to escape from Australian jails eight times. He had appeared in the
Real Prison Breaks
television series in interviews counterpointed with his nemesis in the police, making it clear that he didn’t regard escaping as anything other than something that he would do when the circumstances demanded it. At that point – in 2008 – the inference was that he had “gone straight”, and the leopard had changed his spots to a degree (a metaphor he used himself). Very obviously that wasn’t the case, and with Binse back inside, a close watch is being made to ensure that he doesn’t go for escape number nine.

Binse’s first major escape came from HM Prison Pentridge, a maximum-security facility in Melbourne which had been built in 1850 – and from which the first escapes (a party of fifteen convicts) were recorded the following year. It was infamous for being the last resting place of famous Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, after his remains were moved there in 1929 from Melbourne Gaol, where he had been hanged in 1880. It was also the site of the last hanging in Australia: Ronald Ryan was executed in 1967 for shooting a prison officer during an escape from Pentridge two years earlier (see
chapter 31
). Pentridge was closed down in May 1997.

Christopher Binse was in “the College of Knowledge”, as it was known to its inmates, in August 1992 as just part of a long criminal career. He had been declared uncontrollable nine years earlier, at the age of fourteen, and he was sent to a boys’ home in Turana. He knew Pentridge wasn’t going to be an easy place to get out of: 1,500 prisoners guarded by 250 officers, six guard towers, surrounded by razor-wire covered fences. He was there on remand for armed robbery, something for which he admitted he had a passion: after one of his arrests, he told Melbourne police he carried out raids “for the excitement, the rush. Lifestyle, you’d have to know what it feels like. It’s like you on a raid, you’re in control, your blood starts rushing, you feel grouse, you’re hyped up. F--k the money. It’s more than excitement, it’s an addiction. I don’t know what it is.”

He may not have seen it as such at the time, but Binse got lucky on the evening of 28 August. Taking a shower, he felt as if he had been punched a couple of times, but in fact he had been knifed with a shiv – an ordinary implement sharpened by prisoners to form a lethal weapon. He was rushed to the nearby St Vincent’s Hospital in a critical condition and kept in a locked ward under armed guard; even though there was a good chance that he wasn’t going to survive the incident, the Australian prison bosses weren’t taking any chances.

Binse was in the locked-down ward on the seventh floor of the hospital for ten days, but at some point on the evening of 8 September, he received a female visitor, who apparently gave him a gun which she had smuggled onto the ward inside her boot. (It has never been proved that this was the case, but the alternative – that one of the guards provided him with the firearm – is not one that the Australian authorities cared to contemplate). Once she had left, Binse waited until the guard’s back was turned, then slid out of bed, and pointed the gun at his captor. After a brief discussion, the guard elected to be cooperative, and opened the first deadlocked door. The threat to his colleague persuaded the guard in charge of the control room to open the other door, allowing Binse access to an elevator. From there it was easy to get to the ground floor, and then exit the hospital through the emergency department – even if he was only dressed in a hospital gown! He stole a van from a nearby car park and made his getaway.

While Victoria police searched for him, using dogs, helicopters, car and foot patrols, Binse had escaped to New South Wales, reaching Sydney the day after his flight from the hospital, despite still bleeding from his wounds. After a week of holing up, though, he turned to his only source of finance: armed robbery. He raided the Commonwealth Bank at Chatswood, firing his way out through a glass door, but he was betrayed by an informant, who tipped off the police. Binse was arrested and the process of extradition back to Victoria was begun. In the meantime, he was held at Parramatta Correctional Centre in Sydney, which had the distinction of being the longest-running and oldest jail in Australia, founded in 1798 (it closed in 2011 after some embarrassing escapes).

Binse had no intention of waiting around to be sent back to Pentridge, and within a week of arriving at Parramatta, he had worked out a way of escaping from the prison. As with his flight from St Vincent’s Hospital, he used outside help, this time arranging for a hacksaw blade to be thrown over the wall at a specific point where he could collect it without being noticed. He created a rope out of his bedsheets and then he patiently sawed through the bars of his cell window. On 25 October 1992, he let himself out through the window, down the rope and onto a roof, which was covered with razor wire at its edges. He leaped over that and a further twenty feet to another roof which he just managed to grab (he claimed in 2008 that his imprints on the tin roof were still visible at that point, over fifteen years later), then, despite being fired at by a prison guard, he swung his rope so that he could abseil over the inner perimeter fence. Unfortunately for him, his rope broke and he fell to the ground, breaking his wrist.

That wasn’t going to deter Badness. He was caught in the sterile zone between the inner and outer walls. There were guard towers to either side of him. From the catwalk between them, he made an easy target. But he was determined that he was going to get out, and so, even though there were bullets whizzing past him (and one has to assume that the guards were shooting to try to persuade him to stop, rather than actually shooting to kill), he climbed over the perimeter fence. His accomplices were waiting for him, and he disappeared once more.

He managed to stay hidden for six weeks, but on 5 December 1992, he was arrested in the aftermath of the shooting of notorious criminal Edward “Jockey” Smith. Disguised in a false moustache, sunglasses and a cap – clothing that he donned regularly during his bank raids – Binse had raided another branch of the Commonwealth Bank, this time in Doncaster, Victoria, on 23 November, stealing $160,000 and using his shotgun to blast open a glass door that prevented him from reaching the money, then escaping in a car driven, police believed, by his girlfriend, Laura Skellington. By 3 December, he and Skellington had teamed up with Jockey Smith – who was on the run once more, following various incidents in November in New South Wales. They rented a room in a farmhouse which was being looked after by Guiseppe Corso and were planning an armed robbery on an Armaguard security truck somewhere in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. The police tracked Binse to Corso’s farm, and they took up surveillance on the property.