The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (46 page)

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal,
17 January 2001: “Two escapees from maximum security prison caught”

Real Prison Breaks:
Discovery Channel, 2008: Judy Adams interview

Some escapers work out well in advance what they’re going to do once they get to the other side of the bars which are preventing them from experiencing freedom. They make sure that they have a change of clothing to put their pursuers off the scent, or a vehicle waiting to whisk them far away from the prison. Usually, of course, they are imprisoned in their own country, so there isn’t a language barrier. For former Green Beret and nurse Ted Maher, getting out of Monaco’s luxury prison was simply the start of his problems, since, by his own admission, he hardly spoke a word of French – not exactly the best way in which to blend into his environs.

Maher’s case raised a lot of questions, as the evidence that convicted him of the arson deaths of his employer and a nurse was far from clear-cut – not helped by a claim that the court in the principality had already made up its mind to convict him before a single word of evidence was heard. According to Maher’s version of events, he had been hired to work for Edmond Safra, the founder and principal stock owner of the Republic National Bank of New York, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease and needed round-the-clock care. Maher’s background, both within the army and as a nurse, made him an attractive prospect to the Safras, and they offered him a wellpaid job, on condition he immediately moved to Monaco, where the Safras were based. Needing the money, Maher moved to the principality.

Three months after Maher arrived, Safra and one of Maher’s fellow nurses, Vivian Torrente, were dead. On the morning of 3 December 1999, a fire alarm went off in the building; ten minutes later, at 5 a.m., Torrente called the head nurse from inside Safra’s secure dressing room to ask her to call the police, and told her that Maher had been injured. Maher was taken to the Princess Grace hospital twenty minutes later, and five minutes after that a blaze was noticed by many residents in the building. By the time that fire fighters made their way to Safra’s dressing room, he and Torrente had succumbed to the smoke.

Maher claimed that he had been attacked by two intruders in the apartment who were intent on assassinating Safra. He had nobly fought them off, receiving stab wounds to the stomach in the process. He had given his cell phone to Torrente and told her to take Safra into his dressing room, and to call for help from there. Meanwhile he had set fire to some toilet paper in a waste bin to set the fire alarms off. He had then gone down to the lobby of the building to get help, where he was found and taken to hospital.

There is no doubt that Maher set the blaze that indirectly caused the deaths of Safra and Torrente; he has never denied it. The motives behind it, though, continue to be debated. Was it, as was claimed at his trial, a mad attempt to curry favour with his boss by being seen as the hero of the hour? Did the intruders ever exist, or were they simply part of his cover story? Had he just stabbed himself in the thigh and the stomach for it all to look more realistic? Was his confession, that he subsequently repudiated, forced out of him? Given his lack of knowledge of French, did he even understand everything that was going on? Did the police really threaten Maher’s third wife, Heidi, when she rushed over to Monaco after his arrest?

The debate, and subsequent trial – which took over two years to come to court – were a sensation in Monaco and around the world. But at the end of the proceedings, at which Maher’s own lawyer, Michael Griffith (the same man who had represented
Midnight Express
writer Billy Hayes on occasion), was not allowed to address the court, Maher was found guilty, and in December 2002, he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.

Many prisoners found guilty of a crime in Monaco are sent to French prisons under an agreement signed in 1963; however the principality maintains the right to keep certain criminals within its jurisdiction. Its prison, the fifty-cell House of Arrest, high on a promontory overlooking the sea, wouldn’t ever be included in a list of Top Ten Hellholes. Compared with most, it is more like a holiday destination than a penitentiary, but there are still bars on the windows, and locks on the outside of the doors. “The place is like a luxury hotel,” Michael Griffith commented shortly after Maher’s abortive escape. “They were eating avocado and vinaigrette for lunch. He had a TV in his cell and an en suite bathroom.” The prison was believed to be totally secure – it had been fifty years since the last escape. Faced with up to a decade in total within its walls (he had already spent over two years in the prison before coming to trial), and after learning that his wife would not be allowed to visit him with their children, Maher decided to escape, even though there was a fighting chance that if he kept his record clean, he might be released on parole within a couple of years.

He was imprisoned with Luigi Ciardelli, whom he would later try to claim was the instigator of the escape bid. The forty-five-year-old Italian had already served three sentences in a French prison, and was being held in Monaco following an armed robbery at a pharmacy in 1994. Initially Maher had been in his own cell, but the plan he had in mind needed two people, so between them they persuaded the prison director that Maher was a suicide risk, and Ciardelli would be able to keep an eye on him if they were in the same cell.

The view of the sea provided an ever-present reminder of the freedom both men craved. The plan was as simple as removing the bars from the windows, climbing through and letting themselves down to ground level. Maher wrote to his sister in America explaining his situation, and she sent four small hacksaw blades to him inside a copy of the Bible which was brought in by a priest who visited Maher regularly: the House of Correction had no prison workshop that the men could use to create any form of tool, and because of recent heart surgery, the priest wasn’t allowed to go through a metal detector.

Maher didn’t underestimate the work ahead of the two men: they had to get through six steel bars, and two wire meshes that lay between them and the outside. It was a painstaking task, since they had to work as quietly as possible; this meant they had to use small strokes of the blade against the initial steel mesh to avoid making too much noise. Two blades were quickly rendered smooth by the cutting. Each night they would glue the pieces back together, and paint them over, using materials that Ciardelli was able to obtain from his work in the prison library, then hide the blades inside the refrigerator so they wouldn’t register on metal detectors.

It took three weeks to cut through the steel mesh, but, to Maher’s delight, he discovered that the bars behind them were an easier target. Once he had cut through the top, he was able to bend the bars back, creating a gap that would be tight around his six-foot-three frame, but achievable. Knowing that there was no chance that they would simply be able to remove all the bars and create a gap the size of the window, Maher practised manoeuvring his body through the rungs of the ladder on the bunk bed in his room, and kept himself fit by running in small circles in a basement area. Two weeks after starting work on the bars, he had reached the outer mesh, and could see the grass beneath the prison walls.

The next obstacle was the drop to ground level, which was over twenty-five feet. Maher therefore created a rope out of forty-six rubbish bags, which he secured with Scotch tape and braided together. The area was also overlooked by a highly effective panoramic security camera. He and Ciardelli monitored its movement, and realized that they would have half of its forty-five second arc in which to make their move.

On the night of 22 January 2003, Maher and Ciardelli made their escape. After making dummies in their beds that would fool the hourly inspection by the guards, they removed the wire mesh and the bars, and tied the rope to one of the bent bars. Ciardelli went out of the window first, quickly followed by Maher, who was horrified when the Italian decided to strike out on his own. As soon as he let go of the rope, Ciardelli raced away, heading eventually for San Remo in Italy.

Maher had banked on Ciardelli’s assistance to get out of Monaco, and was now in trouble. His face had been all over the Monaco papers only two months earlier during his trial and sentencing, so he knew he had to try to avoid attention. He used a sleeve from the sweater he was wearing to create a hat, and put on a pair of Ciardelli’s reading glasses to add to the disguise. Managing to use the little French he had to say good evening to a passing policeman, but realizing that he needed to get out of the principality as quickly as possible, he started to walk to Nice, twelve or so miles away over the border in France.

Four hours later, around 3 a.m., Maher arrived in Nice. Desperate for somewhere to stay to get out of the freezing conditions, he knocked on the door of a cheap hotel and spun a yarn about his car breaking down. The manager agreed to allow him to make a collect call so he could arrange for some money, but Maher then received his second major setback of the night.

When his wife Heidi answered the phone from her home in New York state, she told him point-blank that she wasn’t going to aid and abet him with his escape, and was not going to give him her credit card number. Even though he and his wife had been starting to discuss divorce, Maher couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t help him after standing by him right the way through the trial, and angrily slammed the phone down. He then tried to ring Father Ball, who had unwittingly brought the hacksaw blades into the prison for him, telling him that he was free, and wanted access to the money that his family had been sending the priest to buy items for Maher while in jail. Ball agreed, and told Maher to ring back at 10.30 that morning. Relieved that things were starting to go his way, and reassuring the manager that money would be forthcoming later that day, Maher took a long bath and went to bed.

As agreed, Maher called the priest at 10.30 on the morning of 23 January, and couldn’t believe it when Father Ball announced, “The man you want is on the phone”. He hung up, realizing that the Monaco police would have liaised with their French counterparts. He got dressed quickly, but by the time he reached the lobby of the hotel, the police were waiting for him. Without making a fuss, Maher surrendered into their custody.

His calls had been his undoing. His estranged wife, who had apparently decided after hearing the evidence at his trial that he was guilty, had got in touch with the producer of a CBS documentary on the case, who had then spoken to the segment producer in Monaco. When they got in touch with the prison authorities, they were told that there had been no escape. However, when Father Ball then confirmed that he had spoken with Maher in Nice, the escape was taken seriously.

Maher was eventually extradited from France to Monaco, and a further nine months was added to his sentence for the escape. He tried to claim that Ciardelli – who had been apprehended in Pisa, Italy, after two months on the run – was the instigator of the escape, and that he hadn’t taken an active role. The court didn’t accept another version of Maher’s earlier trial defence (which can be summed up as “It’s not my fault!”), even on appeal.

The director of the Monaco House of Arrest was suspended, and the authorities announced that improvements would be made. Maher was unable to get out of the House of Arrest a second time. He was released in 2007 and returned to America, where he still maintains his story about the intruders.

Probably the best epitaph on Maher’s escapade came from Billy Hayes. When they learned the connection between Maher and Hayes, the American press got in touch with the former drug smuggler. “I feel bad for the guy,” he said on the day Maher was recaptured. “Everyone talks about escaping, but there is a vast space and fear between thinking and talking about it and actually doing it. It sounded like he got real stupid.”

The
Real Prison Breaks
account of Maher’s escape makes the Monaco House of Arrest look like a medieval prison, its only nods to modernity an old refrigerator and standard-issue jail beds. In fact, as contemporary news reports show, the cell looked more like a basic American motel room!

Sources:

Court TV, 23 January 2003: “Daring Monaco escape ends in France”

Vanity Fair,
1 September 2005: “Did Someone Say Safra? Some cases just don’t get cold, and the mysterious death of billionaire Edmond Safra is one. (Obituary)”

Tru TV, 20 March 2010:
Dominick Dunne: Power, Privilege & Justice – Mystery in Monaco

La Liberation,
23 January 2003: “L’infirmier pyromane brûle la politesse à ses gardiens”

Riviera Gazette,
30 January 2003: “The Not So Great Escape”

Monaco Times,
12 July 2006: “Ted Maher gets nine months”

Monaco Times,
28 November 2006: “Ted Maher in court to reduce sentence”

Vanity Fair,
December 2000: “Death in Monaco”

New York Post,
31 July 2007: “New Claim in Safra Death”

Dateline NBC, 23 March 2008:
The Mystery of the Billionaire Banker

Real Prison Breaks,
Discovery Channel, 2008

The warders in charge of the new buildings at Union County Jail, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, were able to maintain a proud boast for eighteen years: no felon managed to escape from their grasp. In that sense, it was rather like Stephen King’s fictional prison in his novella
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,
which became the basis for one of the best prison escape movies of all time,
The Shawshank Redemption.
And prisoners Otis Blunt and Jose Espinosa looked to that film for inspiration for their escape in December 2007.

There has been a prison on the site of Union County Jail since 1811 – forty-seven years before there even was a Union County. New buildings completed in 1989 serve the community that lies adjacent to Newark International Airport. The jail is an ugly, large concrete building surrounded by barbed wire, filled with over a thousand prisoners in for everything from parking tickets to murder charges, watched over by armed guards.