The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (59 page)

The body spotted by the Norwegian freighter may well not have been any of the three men. A corpse, which may well have been the same one spotted by the crew, was washed up at Point Reyes a few months later; it was buried under the name “John Bones Doe”, and exhumed by Marshal Dyke. Although the pathology report on the corpse indicated that it was of a man of Morris’ height and approximate age, DNA testing on the remains against a member of his family proved negative.

There are reports that the Anglins masqueraded as women to attend a family funeral; there was another claim that they had been picked up, but then shot for their possessions. Neither of these can be substantiated.

Whatever the truth, the Marshal service will continue to hunt them – albeit not with the same urgency that they track sex offenders and current murderers. “I think there’s still a decent chance they made it,” Dyke told the
San Francisco Chronicle
around the fiftieth anniversary of the escape in June 2012. “I can’t prove it. Well, nothing I can tell you anyway.” And as US Marshal Don O’Keefe added, “The ongoing U.S. Marshals investigation of the 1962 escape from Alcatraz federal prison serves as a warning to fugitives that regardless of time, we will continue to look for you and bring you to justice.”

The final breakout from Alcatraz took place on Sunday 16 December 1962, twenty-five years to the day after Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe took their – probably fatal – swim and proved that, no matter what successive wardens and officials in the Justice Department had maintained during the Federal Penitentiary’s time on the Rock, it was possible to swim from Alcatraz to the mainland and live to tell the tale.

Bank robbers Darl Lee Parker and John Paul Scott took advantage of a long-brewing escape scheme that was centred around a storage room below the prison kitchens in which a twenty-eight-man detail worked. Although Scott would claim later that they had used a piece of string dipped in abrasive kitchen cleaner to saw through the bars of the window, Federal Director of Prisons James V. Bennett told reporters that prison officials found a spatula, suitably knicked to produce a sawtooth effect, hidden in a drainpipe inside the room after the escape.

The cutting had been started by a prisoner over a year earlier. The man surreptitiously began sawing at the double bars over the high window, and the project had been continued by at least four other prisoners, who would climb on a table, then clamber up the inner bars to reach the sawing point. If a guard was heard approaching, then they jumped back down: prisoners were often locked in the storeroom for periods to get on with their work, giving them ample time to work on the bars, and ensure that they would pass a cursory examination.

Bennett believed that Scott decided to make a break for it, because he knew the bars they were sawing through were due for inspection, and if he didn’t go at that point, then all the work would be wasted. He completed the work, then called out to Parker to join him. They then went up an outside drainpipe to the roof of the main cell block, crossed it, then used a fifty-foot length of electrical cable to lower themselves to the ground, fleeing to the cliffs at the island’s west side. Using stolen surgical gloves, inflated to act as flotation devices, the two hit the water. (The original theory was that they had simply climbed the cyclone fence, and slid down to the water.)

Their absence was spotted at 5.47 p.m., seventeen minutes after they had last been checked in a routine prisoner count. Parker only made it as far as Little Alcatraz, a hundred yards west of the prison island. The coastguard was notified and at 7.40 p.m. teenagers found what they thought was a body on the rocks at Fort Point. It was Scott, who had successfully swum to the mainland. “His condition is not too serious,” Colonel James Mackin of the Letterman Hospital Staff told the
San Francisco Chronicle.
“You might just say that he’s damn cold.” At 10.45 p.m., Scott was on his way back to Alcatraz. If he had only managed to go a few more feet, he would have reached a sandy beach – and quite possibly become the first absolutely certified escaper from the Federal Penitentiary.

Scott and Parker’s unorthodox departure from their workplace was the last time anyone fled from the Rock. By the time that they made their move, plans were already in action to close the prison down. Morris and the Anglins’ escape had highlighted the dreadful state of the buildings – figures of $5million were bandied around at the time to bring it up to a high standard of security – and the people of San Francisco were becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to the Rock being used this way. In December 1962, only 206 remained of the prison’s 336 capacity, the others having been “phased out”, leading Warden Blackwell to comment ironically, “Apparently we weren’t phasing out fast enough.” With the completion of the maximum-security prison at Marion, Illinois, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was closed down, its inhabitants shackled hand and foot and moved to other prisons (no matter what fanciful TV series might like to believe!).

Unlike many of the other former prisons that are featured in this book, you can still go to visit Alcatraz (a tour is shown at the start of the feature film
The Rock).
“Come experience the beauty, history and infamy of Alcatraz on the San Francisco Bay” says the cruise website. It may not have been escape-proof, but Alcatraz tested the mettle of all those who were there.

The visual attraction of a bleak prison stuck on a rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay has pulled film-makers over the last century. Burt Lancaster’s
Birdman of Alcatraz
was based on the life of Robert Stroud, although he was not the model of sweetness and light that the film makes him out to be. His role in the 1946 Battle of Alcatraz is considerably overplayed, according to those who knew Stroud.

The most famous escape film, of course, is Clint Eastwood’s 1979 movie
Escape from Alcatraz,
based on events in 1962. Eastwood plays Frank Morris, with Fred Ward and Jack Thibeau as the Anglin brothers. Veering away from the facts, Patrick McGoohan plays a (sensibly) unnamed warden, and the real Allen West became the fictional, cowardly Charlie Butts, played by Larry Hankin.

The 1995 film
Murder in the First
also maintains that it’s based on truth, but turns bank robber Henri Young into a thief forced by circumstance to steal $5 to feed himself and his sister. It plays fast and loose with the events of Young’s 1939 escape, and then claims he died on the Rock in the mid-1940s. He actually jumped parole in 1972.

Fictional escapes from Alcatraz form the basis of the shortlived US TV series
Alcatraz,
which claimed that the last inmates from the Federal Penitentiary were not sent to other prisons, but instead somehow disappeared before returning in 2011 to cause trouble. It lasted thirteen episodes before being cancelled.

Possibly the best fictional escape is seen in the Michael Bay 1996 movie
The Rock,
with Sean Connery as a forcibly retired British spy (sound familiar?) who was imprisoned there because he knew secrets that the American government didn’t want revealed. He was the only man who had ever escaped from the Rock, and the government (and more particularly Nicholas Cage’s chemical weapons specialist Dr Stanley Goodspeed) need to know how, so they can infiltrate the prison, where an armed force is holding hostages and threatening San Francisco with chemical weapons.

Sources:

Thompson, Erwin N., The Rock: A history of Alcatraz Island, 1847–1972, historic resource study, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California, Denver: National Park Service, 1972 (available at
www.alcatrazhistory.com
)

Johnston, James A.,
Alcatraz Island Prison and the Men Who Live There
(Scribner’s, 1949)

Karpis (Karpowicz), Alvin and Robert Livesey,
On the Rock: Twenty-five years in Alcatraz
(Beaufort Books, 1980)

San Francisco Chronicle,
assorted dates

Prison breaks are one of the staples of Hollywood movies. Think of films like
The Great Escape
or
The Shawshank Redemption:
although sometimes, as in the former case, they’re based on real events, the necessities of condensing a story into two hours or so running time means that many factors can be changed – sometimes removing what some would consider more “filmic” moments.

That happened in the case of one of the most famous prison films of all time: Alan Parker’s
Midnight Express,
which tells a version of the story of Billy Hayes, a young American drug smuggler, who was caught and thrown into prison in Turkey. A harsh, gritty film, it ends with Hayes escaping from jail by killing a cruel jailer who was about to rape him. Ironically – given that “Midnight Express” is the term given to an escape from prison within the film – Hayes’ escape was nothing like that at all. (When Hayes asked Alan Parker why it was changed, the director replied, “What forty-five minutes of this film do you want to cut out to put in your escape? They’d had enough, get the audience out of the bloody theatre.”) The film was based on Hayes’ own autobiography, written with William Hoffer in 1976; however, he had to bear in mind various considerations while writing that, so the full story of his escape had to wait until 2010.

Hayes was arrested at Yesikoy International Airport in Istanbul on 7 October 1970, literally as he was about to step on a plane, carrying four pounds of hashish. On his first night in prison, he learned the way of life in Turkish jails: he took a blanket from another cell, and was beaten up by the guards, including Hamid, a sadist who took great pleasure from making Hayes’ life a misery. (In the movie, Hamid is the guard that Hayes kills; in reality, Hamid was already dead by this point: a former prisoner recognized him outside the jail, and shot him eight times.) Hayes was sentenced to four years and two months in prison.

In Sağmalcilar prison, escaping was known as “taking the Midnight Express”, referring to the train that ran from Istanbul into Greece, from which escapees could jump off to freedom. Even though he had a comparatively light sentence, Hayes knew that he needed to escape, and learned that prisoners who were deemed to be criminally insane were moved to Bakirkoy Mental Hospital. Compared with Sağmalcilar, Bakirkoy was an easy place from which to escape. Being given an official “crazy report” might also assist with getting him freed legitimately. Hayes discussed his plan with a visiting friend, Patrick, who agreed to pick him up and drive to the border, providing false papers and a change of clothing. All Hayes had to do was convince the Turkish authorities that he was crazy.

Hayes succeeded in being sent to Bakirkoy for observation in 1972 – and discovered that he had swapped the frying pan for the fire. Bakirkoy only housed the criminally insane but Hayes was sure that he could survive while Patrick raised the necessary cash to arrange the papers. The plan fell apart when Patrick got on the wrong side of the wrong people; Hayes was informed in a telegram from his father that Patrick had been found dead in his hotel room with a bayonet in his chest. Hayes lost all hope at that stage, blaming himself for his friend’s death. Giving up on ideas of escape, he was returned to Sağmalcilar and resigned himself to serving out the remaining years of his sentence. (Hayes only revealed this part of his escape plans in recent times – his original account in
Midnight Express
only mentions his time in Bakirkoy, not the escape plan, or its unfortunate consequences. Patrick’s death is mentioned, but isn’t linked to the escape plan.)

With just fifty-four days left to go, Hayes received a visit from the American Consul and was horrified to learn that the High Court in Ankara had decided that they wanted to change the charge in his case. Instead of convicting him of possession of drugs, they were now convicting him of smuggling, an offence that carried a life sentence – or possibly just thirty years. Unsurprisingly, Hayes’ resolution to escape came back to life. A brief attempt to file his way out through the prison bars came to nothing when children spotted Hayes and a colleague at the window and reported them.

The US authorities tried, in vain, to persuade their Turkish counterparts to allow Hayes to be returned to America to serve out his sentence there. The Turks pointed out that the Americans couldn’t give the absolute guarantees that they required, so refused permission. The Foreign Minister suggested that the Americans try to make an appeal on the grounds that “Hayes’ health, physical and/or mental, was deteriorating as a result of his incarceration in a Turkish prison”. There was no guarantee that it would be successful, but privately, he indicated to the American Ambassador that he would do all he could to assist.

Billy Hayes refused to allow his countrymen to go down this route. According to the telegram from the American Ambassador to the State Department, “his experience in submitting to mental and physical examination at Bakirkoy mental hospital in 1972 was apparently highly traumatic for him. He does not like the hospital and based on this earlier experience there he does not believe that hospital staff will certify that state of his health warrants early release. (It will be recalled in this connection that in 1972 Turkish psychiatric authorities decided he was not psychotic and dismissed earlier efforts of his attorneys to play up Hayes’s psychological problems.)” He hoped to be transferred to a “half-open” prison, and that various amnesties that were being discussed might benefit his situation.

Hayes was moved to imrali Prison on 11 July 1975; three months later he was in Greece. imrali island lies seventeen miles off the coast of Turkey, and had been used as a prison since 1935. (A newly constructed building now houses terrorist Abdullah Ocalan, serving a life sentence for treason.) After the deprivations of Sağmalcilar and Bakirkoy hospital, this was like paradise for Hayes – but he was still locked in, working in a canning factory during the day.

The factory was served by boats which normally returned to the mainland overnight; however on 2 October, a storm whipped up so rapidly that the boats had to remain tied at anchor for the evening. And, as Hayes had noticed, all of them had little dinghies, complete with oars, tied to their side. If he could get out from the prison after bed check and swim out to the boats, he could relieve one of the owners of their dinghy, and row to the mainland. The prospect of the swim didn’t faze him: he had been a lifeguard and a surfer in his time.